[This is excerpted from a longer post here and edited a bit too]
I want to expand on the above description of witch-hunting, vigilantism, bullying, “vindictive internet mobs” and institutional cover up by describing several other witch hunts against innocent people in the academic philosophy profession. In the final section [omitted; see here], I shall discuss witch hunts and vigilantism that have occurred further afield in academia and elsewhere and how they relate to the social justice craze, a religious cult hardly different from the lunacy of the Salem witch hunters in 1693.
Some of what I mention below is recounted in Professor Laura Kipnis’s new book Unwanted Advances (2017), including the saga of both Prof Barnett and Prof Ludlow, as well as her own saga, of course.
It is no coincidence that the main three witch hunts described in Prof Kipnis’s book came from inside the academic philosophy profession, for it is saturated with aggressive, vicious, dishonest, ruthless, dangerous feminist lunatics. The witch hunt against me in 2013-14 took place against a backdrop of witch hunts in the academic philosophy profession during 2012-2015, driven by an agenda originating from a feminist militant Professor Jennifer Saul, at the University of Sheffield, and few other powerful figures, who used their status and power to harass and witch hunt the innocent, hounding them out of their jobs and ruining their careers and lives.
This hysterical witch hunting frenzy in the academic philosophy profession now (December 2017) seems to have calmed down. I assume that those running these lynch mobs perhaps realise that their ruthless behaviour resembles the random terror-bombing of Afghan civilian villages, hoping to root out the allegedly wicked Muslims, and not giving one damn about the colossal collateral damage they inflict to the innocents’ ruined lives.
During their height, these witch hunts swept up multiple innocent people, with attempts to publicly crucify them or with successful, often public, lynchings. The main examples I’ll mention are myself (Oxford), along with
- Prof David Barnett (Colorado),
- Prof Peter Ludlow (Northwestern),
- Prof Brian Leiter (Chicago),
- and Prof Laura Kipnis (Northwestern).
First, Prof Barnett. His saga is recorded in Kipnis’s UA. In brief, a graduate student of his was falsely accused by a female student of “sexual assault”. This claim was risibly false, as established by multiple witnesses. The false accuser was, as per usual, aided in this by local third-party feminist agitators. However, Colorado’s secret Title IX kangaroo court found in her favour and expelled the student, his sin being that he is male. Perturbed by the injustice of this, Prof Barnett then assembled a dossier of witness accounts and sent it to the panel, hoping they would reconsider. Instead, they punished him for non-existent “retaliation” and paid the false accuser female student a cool $850,000 for having made outrageous false accusations. (“Retaliation” is Title IX terminology for telling the truth.) He was then put through a complicated Title IX process in 2014 and eventually he was pushed out of Colorado, being given a settlement.
Myself: I was pursued and stalked for years by a violent sexual harasser, a woman whom I had rejected years earlier when she assaulted me in 2010, and whom I told to leave me alone when she continued stalking me at my seminars over two years later in 2013, which had nothing to do with her. I notified others of my serious worries and concerns about her behaviour, which I found terrifying, given her prior violence and abuse. I was ignored. This was negligence. As a result of that negligence, and of her being cajoled by feminist activists around her, she was not given emergency psychiatric help and died when her boyfriend dumped her in June 2013. Then I was lynched by a feminist lynch mob, framed with lies, my family driven out of Oxford and fired in March 2014; and then reinstated in August 2014 after a long and very, very painful fight, for more than a year, recounted above and which had devastating consequences for us.
Next, the pathetic and almost comical hunting of Prof Brian Leiter. Prof Leiter is a well-respected scholar, writing on legal philosophy, Nietzsche and Continental Philosophy, including Marx. He has for around fifteen years run a widely read professional blog, “Leiter Reports”, read by pretty much all in the academic philosophy profession who pay attention to online news. In addition, he has for around twenty years edited a report “The Philosophical Gourmet Report” (PGR), using experts in the various field to assess the quality of academic philosophy graduate programmes, a report which has been considered very valuable to a generation of undergads planning to apply for philosophy graduate programmes. Many of these, it should be added, from working-class backgrounds, and not inside the fancy network of the privileged and elite academic schools in the US. Prof Leiter’s Marxist politics are hardly compatible with my English classical liberalism/centrism. However, his own class-consciousness is incompatible with the current Identity Politics craze, a kind of obsessive compulsive disorder permeating academia and much of American and British cultural life. Despite being rather robust in argument and adamant in his political views, he is generally a force for good in the academic profession; he supports academic freedom, even for political opponents and for unpopular opinions; and he generally will stand up for the little guy against both institutional abuse and against social mobbing abuse; and friends of his have often told me he’s quite a sweet little puppy in reality.
Around June and July 2014, Prof Leiter had been involved in some rather inconsequential spats and fights online about stastistics concerning job hiring and placement in the philosophy profession, initially based on some statistics collected by a philosophy/psychology academic Carolyn Dicey Jennings. A few months earlier, in February 2014, Prof Leiter had spoken out in fairly moderate terms but critically about the “vigilante justice” in operation against Ludlow at Northwestern. He had also published my short statement in March 2014, describing the unhinged lynch mob against me and my being fired.
These largely inconsequential spats about placement and prestige of academic programmes involved Prof Leiter making his case in his well-known robust manner, but led to a philosophy academic in Canada, Prof Carrie Jenkins, making a public announcement that she wouldn’t treat certain people as “normal members of the profession”. This was a reference to Leiter. He then emailed her a sarcastic reply, suggesting she might chase him around philosophy conferences with a baseball bat. A sane person would consider that reply from Leiter to be amusing, and perhaps reply with an equivalent joke, maybe something like “Yes, I’m going to hit you with a baseball bat”. Her response was to collapse into a puddle of self-pity and victimhood, at the horrific experience of an actual reply from this demonic male academic, to her very public provocation of him. And so, yes: she did indeed retaliate, and thumped him publicly with a figurative baseball bat.
Behind the scenes, she recruited a mob of social justice activists to attack him, culminating, in September 2014, with the online publication of an epically childish “September Statement”, signed by hundreds of virtue-signalling social justice warriors, expressing horror – horror! – at Prof Leiter’s temerity in … writing a sarcastic email in reply to public provocation and threats. Naturally, this being social justice outrage war, it made demands for action! Namely, that this dreadful human being be removed from editorship of the “Philosophical Gourmet Report”, So, as per normal, yet another piece of hysterical drivel, from privileged upper-class twits, demanding “action”, on something that is none of their business. Prof Leiter subsequently took some kind of defamation action against Prof Jenkins; I am unsure how that turned out. Prof Leiter has written a precis of events from 2014 on his blog here.
Next, Prof Ludlow, the main character in Prof Kipnis’s book. Until late 2015, he had been a philosophy professor at Northwestern University in Chicago. He had dated multiple students. Such dating is hardly unusual in academia and is the basis for thousands of marriages in academia. It is normal and, quite rightly, there are no rules forbidding it, with the exception of one being a direct supervisor of the other. In Prof Ludlow’s case, there had been a brief one-night stand in February 2012 with a student, which she had certainly initiated with an email invitation, but which led to a complaint against him later, of “sexual assault”. This complaint of “sexual assault” was almost certainly without foundation. Additionally, a few months earlier, in late 2011, he had had a relationship for a month or two with a philosophy graduate student at Northwestern. It was consensual and didn’t break any rules. They shared his bed in his apartment and she repeatedly told him in text messages that she loved him. She also once referred to him as her “boyfriend” (despite the fact that she also had another boyfriend elsewhere). However, about two years later, in February 2014, the first compainant brought a legal case against Northwestern for not having properly addressed her original 2012 complaint. This is an absurd claim, since he was punished, demoted and his pay docked, and she was given significant amounts of institutional support.
But when this story made the news, the second philosophy graduate student in question from 2011 then filed a new Title IX complaint against Ludlow, accusing him of both sexual assault and a sexual harassing relationship. She seems to have admitted and then later denied they had a romantic relationship; but, as Kipnis showed, very detailed and substantial evidence points the other way. It later also transpired that this graduate student had had a romantic relationship with a professor at a previous university, when she was an undergraduate. Ludlow was then subjected to vigilantism and protests from student activists at Northwestern and removed from teaching. A further internal investigation found no evidence of a sexual assault, and he was able to prove he was not even present in the apartment at the time, but was in a hotel; even so, it concluded he was guilty of some new, abstract from of “sexual harassment”, which requires acquaintance with the American religious cult of Gender Studies to comprehend. Having been libelled as a “rapist”, there then followed a number of defamation suits, in which he tried to exonerate himself, but all fell at the dismissal stage.
This Northwestern witch hunt lingered along until late November 2015, when he resigned. But before that happened, Prof Kipnis, herself a strongly self-identifying feminist but of a rather different mindset — interested in Marxism and Freud; one that emphasizes empowerment, agency and freedom — intervened. Kipnis had begun to pay attention to the new cultural climate of hysteria, female fragility and “sexual paranoia” on campus. In March 2015, she published an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education on this topic, largely social, political and cultural analysis, but it included several anecdotes, two being a few lines on the cases concerning Prof Ludlow (whom she didn’t at that time know). Her comments were fairly anodyne, primarily surrounding issues of agency, responsibility and institutional power, that were her main focus then and since. Astonishingly, Kipnis was then subjected to student protests and to a Title IX complaint from the philosophy graduate student who had made the complaint against Ludlow and also from another philosophy student, a third party feminist activist.
Digression: Third-party involvement: Third party involement and cajolement is often present in these cases, particularly the most outrageous and egregious ones. It is widespread in cases of false accusations of a sexual nature. Since 2014, and not out of personal desire of mine — I am a respected professional logician and a good teacher whom my students like, and would prefer to do that, rather than to respond to vicious, unhinged feminist drivel, lying, fabrication and abuse — I have become well-read on this phenomenon. I belong to a group where victims of false accusations, many of whom experience horrific suffering, inflicted by typically mentally unstable false accusers with third party enablers, receive help and support.
This group includes Mark Pearson, a man who walked past a woman through a busy London train station, carrying a rucksack and a newspaper; the woman, a well-known actress in her 60s, bizarrely accused him of “sexual assault”, an allegations that was impossible, as CCTV footage definitely proved. However, Alison Saunders, the feminist director of the UK Crown Prosecution Service demanded that he be prosecuted; so he was pushed through a nonsensical trial and acquitted by the jury, after a few minutes’ deliberation. There are many, many others in similar situations of being pushed through nonsensical prosecutions, on the basis of nothing more the delusions and hallucinations of mentally disturbed accusers, and often these are accompanied by third party encouragement. In the US too, many “Title IX” false accusation cases are driven by third party feminist cajolement. In Oxford, this is exactly what happened to me. And this feminist militancy, unable to process facts, evidence, empirical reality and moral responsibility, had lethal consequences.
Many false accusation cases that reach investigation level, or that go to court, are also driven by third party cajolement. In Oxford in 2014, an undergraduate student, Ben Sullivan, was subjected to a false accusation of “rape” from a fellow student he had had a one-night stand with. He was arrested by the police; his name plastered all over the press; and the Oxford feminist vigilante mob demanded his punishment. The case was dropped by the police (this is called “No Further Action”, or NFA for short). As it turned out, his accuser had admitted in Facebook messages, which he had kept, that “she knew her accusation was false”, adding that she had been cajoled into complaining by third parties.
As I have repeatedly noted, the conduct of such third parties can have ruinous, even lethal, consequences. An unstable woman died in Oxford in June 2013 because feminist philosophers are not capable of understanding the difference between truth and falsity or the ethical difference between right and wrong. If you do not know what has happened, don’t assume. And do not act on assumptions that may turn out to be spectacularly false. It could be a life and death matter. This is a striking refutation of the feminist “believe the accuser” slogan, which is reaping havoc throughout society. Believing the accuser could be the worst possible thing in the world to do if the accuser is not telling the truth.
Back to the Title IX complaints against Professor Kipnis in March 2015. After an investigation, these were not upheld. After all, they were ridiculous. She then reported on her own experience in a separate article, in May 2015, “My Title IX Inquisition”. Naturally enough, after that, she became very interested in how the American college kangaroo court system (Title IX) functions; or, more exactly, dysfunctions. And how these secret kangaroo tribunals work in a new world of hysteria, hypersensitivity, infantilism and paranoia, where a single pointed finger is enough to see someone thrown to the mob and ruined. In the following few months, she participated in what remained of Northwestern’s secret hearings to terminate Professor Ludlow’s position. He himself threw in the towl and resigned in, I believe, November 2015. After that, he moved to Mexico, now doubt traumatized about the whole thing. He did, however, pass on to Kipnis all the relevant documents pertaining to the witch hunt against him, and these formed the basis of her investigative reporting on his case.
Since the publication of her book in April 2017, the graduate student has filed yet another Title IX complaint against Kipnis (again, not upheld) and has also initiated defamation action against Kipnis and her publisher, Harper-Collins.
In addition to the false accusation witch hunts described above, feminist activists have successfully campaigned against two other professional philosophers to my knowledge. Prof Colin McGinn was persuaded to resign from his job Miami in 2012 after accusations were made against him. Later, activists distributed stories about him online, on 4 June 2013 to be exact, describing various sexual emails he had sent to a graduate student he had been supervising. Since she seemed quite happy to respond to these, McGinn is probably guilty of nothing more than foolishness and naivety. But the public humiliation he was subsequently subjected to was very disturbing and unethical. I am reasonably certain that Coursier, in Oxford, would have seen these stories, since her housemate, Brooke Berndtson is an American militant feminist (Coursier, incidentally, was a quite adamant conservative who gently and intelligently mocked the left-wing views of her friends) and they would have terrified her (Coursier actually sent me provocative sexual messages in 2010, but they had been deleted by 2013), and played a non-trivial role in her death six days later on 10 June 2013.
Prof Thomas Pogge at Yale has been subjected to a number of prominent public accusations against him for several relationships he has had with students. He, however, remains at Yale University. Most recently, Professor John Searle has been subjected to prominent accusations. I have no idea if these are true or false.
On the more positive side, so far as I am aware, the feminist philosophy vigilantes have not initiated any new witch hunts, or killed anyone, in 2016 and 2017. This is clearly an improvement on the prior conduct of these murderous zealots. One can only hope to see further improvement.
Critica 