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CHE article on Peter Ludlow and the Northwestern graduate student

Brian Leiter

Behind a paywall, alas, but very detailed, with extensive quotes from Ludlow and the student.

UPDATE:  A philosopher elsewhere writes: "Why don’t you open comments?  Much of what has been posted has been shown to be wrong.  People should face up to that.  FP hasn’t linked to it and Justin W is trying to bury it."  I haven't really followed coverage on other blogs (though it would not be surprising if my correspondent's allegation were accurate), but I will open comments.  No naming names of students and I will edit for relevance.

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50 responses to “CHE article on Peter Ludlow and the Northwestern graduate student”

  1. Me

    Can someone copy and paste some of the key passages here?

    BL COMMENT: Readers may post short excerpts on which they would like to comment.

    Reply
  2. Ned Block

    Something puzzling about this article: Wilson says Ludlow says he and the grad student had a relationship that involved consensual sex. But Wilson says nothing about what the grad student says about this–and does not say that the grad student would not answer this question. Could it be that Wilson did not ask it?

    Reply
  3. anon 4:20

    The question about "consensual sex" was tacitly addressed by the grad student. From the article: "But the graduate student says Mr. Ludlow used his position to take advantage of her — praising her work, offering to help launch her career, telling her she was a 'rock star,' then pushing her to make their relationship romantic…. The graduate student says she did not consider their relationship romantic, nor did she consider them to be dating…. She kept the precarious relationship going, she says, because she benefited from the professional connection."

    In other words, the graduate believes that the imbalance of "power" between her and the professor, particularly given her professional ambitions, means that ostensibly "consensual" sexual relations between them weren't and couldn't be truly consensual.

    Reply
  4. anon 4:20

    By "the graduate," I meant "the grad student," of course. A correction would be appreciated.

    Reply
  5. Philippe Lemoine

    I was left with exactly the same puzzlement as Prof. Block after I was done reading the article. Despite what anon 4:20 claims, I don't think there is anything in the article which implies that, according to the graduate student, Ludlow had consensual sex with her before or after the alleged rape. But, as Prof. Block noted, there is also nothing which implies that she denies it or even that Wilson asked the question. Yet, given what is being discussed in the article, it's hard to believe that she didn't ask it.

    Reply
  6. anon 4:56

    The article implies that the student denies ever having sex with him apart from the alleged rape. It doesn't exactly say so, however; so I think Block is right. There's some unclarity in the reporting. Here are the crucial paragraphs:

    "The graduate student says she did not consider their relationship
    romantic, nor did she consider them to be dating.
    One time, she says, when they were sitting on the balcony, Mr.
    Ludlow kissed her and she remembers saying: "‘Peter, I have a
    boyfriend. I can’t reciprocate.’" In retrospect, she says, "I should
    have gotten up and left, but I thought, OK, let’s just act like that
    didn’t happen." (Mr. Ludlow says the graduate student kissed him
    first.)

    She kept the precarious relationship going, she says, because she
    benefited from the professional connection. She and Mr. Ludlow
    were planning to publish their academic paper. But she says she
    always walked a tightrope between the philosophical work she
    enjoyed and the physical relationship he was pushing for."

    Elsewhere the student admits to sleeping over at his apartment numerous time, sharing a bed and spooning. The texts and the G-chat indicate an extremely complicated situation, fraught with intimacy as well as power differentials. At the very least, they vindicate (it seems to me) Kipnis's statement that they had a "relationship."

    Reply
  7. Philippe Lemoine

    This passage about the incident on the balcony is precisely one of things I found really puzzling about this article. Strictly speaking, it doesn't even imply that Ludlow was never allowed to kiss the graduate student, only that *on this occasion* she told him that she couldn't reciprocate. Of course, this passage clearly *suggests* that she never wanted him to kiss her and, therefore, it's natural to conclude that, according to her, she never had consensual sex with him. But, strictly speaking, nothing in the article *implies* that. What I find really puzzling is that, at the same time, the article *explicitly* says that, according to Ludlow, they had consensual sex. So, if Wilson asked the graduate student whether she denies it and if she told her that she does, it's difficult to understand why she didn't explicitly report that in the article and instead chose to vaguely suggest it by writing about this incident on the balcony.

    Reply
  8. anon 4:56

    Correction, the disputed word in Kipnis's article was "dated" (later changed to "allegedly dated"). So I guess much turns on what we take that word to mean. Both Ludlow and the student describe multiple dinners and late night sleep overs, which sure sounds like dating. At the same time, she makes it seem like that was done under duress and with a sense of obligation to placate him (and her account sounds plausible to me, for what its worth). In any case, I'd say Kipnis is vindicated but not Ludlow.

    Reply
  9. Colleen

    It's not mentioned in the CHE piece, but let's not forget Heidi Howkins Lockwood's role in this–submitting, and then reporting the existence to the Daily Nous of, an affadavit that reports many rumors and names the students involved. It appears Lockwood did this as a gesture of frustration, but it's had profound effects on the participants.

    http://dailynous.com/2015/01/08/new-motion-in-ludlow-case-faculty-respond/

    Reply
  10. anon 4:20

    I did not claim or imply that the grad student acknowledges having had consensual sex with the professor. To the contrary, I claimed that the grad student seems to believe that (apart from the alleged rape) any "sexual relations between them weren't and couldn't be truly consensual," given the "power" differential. I'm at a loss as to how what I wrote could be so hard to understand.

    Presumably, the reason the grad student gives no straightforward answer about whether she and the professor ever had "consensual" sex is that there is no uncontroversially straightforward answer: there is supposed to be a gray area between not truly consensual sex (viz., professor "used his position to take advantage of her," which surely isn't about a kiss between grown people in the Western world) and plain rape (e.g., of the kind she alleges happened on one occasion).

    Reply
  11. Anonymous

    In response to Ned Block's question, if I were the graduate student, I wouldn't answer that question given that denying his account that they had consensual sex might provoke another lawsuit. Regarding the affidavit, the link to Daily Nous regards primarily a faculty response to the affidavit, and then includes statements from others, including Lockwood, as updates. It's unclear that Lockwood is the one who did anything more than pass it on to the attorneys. Once it began public record, of course, other parties would have had access to it.

    Reply
  12. Philippe Lemoine

    Anon 4:20, since we seem to be talking past each other, let me put it another, clearer way. I think anyone who read your original comment but not Wilson's article would have concluded that, in that article, the graduate student admits that she had sex with Ludlow before or after the alleged rape. I just wanted to make clear that she did not, but that she also didn't deny it and that there is no indication that Wilson even asked her the question, even though the article explicitly says that Ludlow claimed that his relationship with her involved consensual sex. (And, since he apparently denied that he was even with the graduate student on the night when he allegedly raped her, he must be talking about something else.) This is what I, and I gather Prof. Block, found really puzzling about the article. That being said, I agree with you that a plausible interpretation of this puzzling fact about the article is that, in addition to the alleged rape, Ludlow had sexual relations with the graduate student which, while she doesn't think qualify as rape, she nevertheless doesn't regard as really consensual either for the reasons you mention.

    Reply
  13. Philippe Lemoine

    Anonymous, even if your hypothesis was correct, it wouldn't explain why Wilson didn't mention that she asked the question to the graduate student and that she refused to reply. But, perhaps more importantly, this hypothesis strikes me as rather implausible. In Wilson's article, the graduate student contradicts Ludlow's account of her relationship with him on several other points, so we'd have to assume that although she wasn't afraid to contradict his account on those points she feared a lawsuit if she denied this particular claim. But it's really not clear to me why this would be the case.

    Reply
  14. Outside Observer

    I am steadfastly trying to remain as agnostic as I can on the underlying charges and counter charges in this case.

    But I do find the "conversation" below rather striking. I take it to suggest that neither the graduate student and nor Ludlow is fully owning up to her/his own agency in this sordid and ugly affair. Each seems now to be telling a somewhat self-serving version of events for public consumption. I would be unwilling to believe either of them or take their statements at face value now without extensive "cross-examination," as it were. (Though why either is choosing to speak, leaves me somewhat mystified. A basic human hunger to be heard, I guess.)

    First the "conversation."
    "Over the next several weeks, he and the graduate student continued to exchange text messages. He shared some of them with The Chronicle. "I thought I could choose," she wrote in one conversation. "… Instead I just felt like I was flipping back and forth. I wish it was really obvious and easy. But it’s not. And I don’t want to hurt anybody. I just don’t know what I want."

    After that, their relationship slowly unraveled, ending for good in January 2012.

    Just before that, in late December, the two had a prophetic exchange over Google Chat in which they discussed their fears over how their relationship might be viewed by others. The conversation began because the student believed that Mr. Ludlow might have confided in a prominent philosopher.

    Student: "Do you understand how devastating rumors about me having an unprofessional relationship with one of my advisers could be? Did you give [him] a reason to think that our relationship was anything more than professional?"

    Mr. Ludlow: "I lied to him and said we don’t have a romantic relationship. I have as much to lose as you do."

    Student: "You already have a career. Mine could be over before it even begins if my credibility is shot at this point. You can’t lose your job."

    Mr. Ludlow: "Watch it happen if you go to the admin."

    Student: "You know I don’t have a dishonest bone in my body. I could never do that to anybody."

    Mr. Ludlow says the exchange validates his assertion that the two had a romantic relationship.

    The graduate student says she simply decided not to challenge him on his interpretation of their relationship. What she was most concerned with, she says, was what he was telling others.

    "I wasn't trying to go to war with Peter Ludlow. I just wanted it to be over. I wanted out," she says. "I let an impossible situation get out of hand.""

    Without choosing sides, I will say that they each seem to me to have exercised extraordinarily bad judgments — like monumentally bad.

    First her. One gets the impression from this conversation that the graduate student was deeply torn — that she both wanted and didn't some sort of a relationship with Ludlow. And whether they regularly had consensual sexual intercourse as he asserts and she denies, she does at least seem to have both invited and resisted a certain degree of intimacy with him. Her motives seem partly related to her career ambitions, perhaps partly related to self-doubts and uncertainty about her standing in this admittedly difficult to find your way in profession of ours. Perhaps she was to some extent "intoxicated" by the combination of his standing and attention and power. But even if intoxicated, she does indeed seem to have been troubled — perhaps deeply so — by the fact that she somehow got herself into this mess. She could not bring herself to whole-heartedly endorse her own actions. It certainly makes sense to me that under those circumstances, she wouldn't want to be open about their fraught relationship. That seems an authentic and perfectly comprehensible concern. She was not insane or paranoid to worry that if known it might affect her credibility and standing. And she definitely was not, in my mind, insane to want out of it. Why exactly she felt powerless, if she did, to get out of it, is not entirely clear from reading this. This is the part where she most seems to me to not be fully owning up to her own agency.

    Now him. Ludlow, for his part, seems to me to be sort of willfully and conveniently blind to the potentially intoxicating effect of his position and power and prestige. I'm sure he greatly enjoyed the benefits of that intoxicating effect, even if he could not fully acknowledge to himself that it was merely a form of intoxication that probably drew her to him in the first place. How debilitating that would be, no? I guess I don't really know that his blindness was fully willful at the time, though, He could just be in deep psychic denial about that matter after the fact — a sort of late coming defense mechanism. But something caused him not to fully appreciate or acknowledge that any graduate student in her position would feel such a swirling welter of emotions and motives and be deeply torn. Despite saying that he understands what she has to lose, he clearly did not fully empathize with the plight he had helped her to get in. Indeed, he seems to have been deeply frustrated by her indecision. He has a very self-regarding reaction, it seems, that again, betraying a certain blindness to his part in all this, and also to the deeply problematic nature of it all for her.

    Does that make him a sexual predator in this situation? That's a somewhat complicated question, I think. But it sure is not something to admire in him, whatever exactly he deserves to be called. (And again, without a lot of cross-examination of both of them, I'd be unwilling to call either of them anything except foolish, at the moment.)

    I have to said that both their judgments strike me as so monumentally bad, so clouded by power, prestige, self-doubt and sex, that they help make the case for me that Universities that ban these sort of relationships are perhaps doing the right thing after all. (I have to admit that my first reaction, when my university did this, was a little bit along the lines of Laura Kipnis — not quite extreme as hers, since I think that University's have an obligation to make themselves safe places for students – places where students are relatively shielded from some of the forces that operate in the real world — places where the allure of tempting but monumentally bad choices is greatly lessened.) This kind of case shows that even fully grown up adults may need to be protected from their own propensities to let their judgment be clouded by the very powerful mix of sexuality and power. And it's not just about protecting the potential participants to these acts from themselves — it's about protecting the broader community. I acknowledge that in the real world the tempting allure of really bad choices remains as strong as ever. But universities aren't the real world. They are mere training grounds for the real world. And that's an important difference. But enough of that.

    Reply
  15. Ned Block

    Both Ludlow and the grad student must have put conditions on being interviewed since they are both involved in the legal cloud that surrounds this case. Robin Wilson is a competent journalist, and those two facts together suggest that Robin Wilson was not allowed by the grad student to report any response on the part of the grad student to the question of whether she had consensual sex with Ludlow. And that prohibition suggests that anon 4:20 and Philippe Lemoine are right that as Lemoine said, “in addition to the alleged rape, Ludlow had sexual relations with the graduate student which, while she doesn't think qualify as rape, she nevertheless doesn't regard as really consensual either” because of the power imbalance.

    Reply
  16. Derek Bowman

    I have not had a chance to read the paywalled article, but I would encourage the participants in (and host of) this conversation to reconsider the wisdom of trying to publicly adjudicate the precise nature of Ludlow's relationship with the grad student based on the quotes from the CHE. Does the article really give enough information to allow you to reliably make such a determination? Who benefits from this kind of armchair analysis? Setting aside your views of this particular case – what message do you think this discussion sends to victims of sexual assault or sexual harassment?

    Reply
  17. rihanna

    and whats your opinion regarding teachers having sex with students, as romantic as the teachers always claim it is?
    I am interested.

    Reply
  18. Elizabeth Harman

    I read the article as saying that the graduate student claims there was sex on exactly one occasion, the occasion on which she says she was raped. I'm really puzzled by the conversation above.

    Reply
  19. Anonymous

    Elizabeth, I'm puzzled too (in no small smart because I expect some of the philosophers above to be better at knowing when, and when not, one is in a position to make inferences). I want to second Derek Bowman's comment.

    Reply
  20. moveon

    Really? Are we still trying to figure out the whole Ludlow affair?

    I'm sorry–well, no I'm not–but I find it distressing that people as smart as philosophers are so clueless about human nature that they think they can read these articles and reliably conclude much of anything substantive regarding what happened or what the feelings involved were. Don't you know how people stretch the truth and lie about matters like this–even to themselves? That they inevitably omit crucial details–and don't realize that they are doing it even upon reflection? And don't you know how much easier it is to do all this when one is highly intelligent and creative, as the parties involved certainly are? Have you been living under a rock your whole adult life?

    Perhaps you have talked one-on-one with some of the parties involved. Nope: that still doesn't give you much reliability. Just embrace your ignorance here and move on to do more important things regarding the issues involved.

    Reply
  21. Response to Elizabeth Harman

    Elizabeth Harman,

    I'm trying to read the story your way, but it's just not gelling. On your reading, if I'm getting you, the two of them struck up an intense relationship that involved kissing and spooning and sleeping in the same bed but never involved having sex until the fateful night when she says he had sex with her when she was passed out (and he says he went to a hotel and left her there). So far, so good. People can agree to sleep together chastely.

    But if I had been in her position as you envision it, and then realized one morning that the man I had been chastely sleeping with in a no-sex relationship had grossly violated my consent and helplessness while I was blacked out, I would have freaked. I might have reported it immediately, I might have just started screaming at him, I might have made a hasty exit from the apartment, my mind racing, and then felt a cold numbness and confusion at what had just been done to me. But I would definitely see it as an immense betrayal of my trust and the relationship (and yes, she calls it a relationship). This wasn't, on your story, even someone I had been having sex with, and the fact (on your account) that I had been sleeping with this person regularly for months after "late late late nights" together would seem to entail a clear 'no sex' understanding, making the violation all the more serious.

    But this interpretation of her words doesn't match the detail that the relationship "slowly unravelled, ending for good in January" after the incident in November. And how does this reading square with what she wrote to him in a text message after the night in question:

    "'I thought I could choose,' she wrote in one conversation. '… Instead I just felt like I was flipping back and forth. I wish it was really obvious and easy. But it’s not. And I don’t want to hurt anybody. I just don’t know what I want.'"

    If they had been having an agreed-upon nonsexual relationship and he suddenly took advantage of her passed-out body without her awareness, presumably her messages to him, if any, would have said "What the hell is wrong with you? How can you have done such a thing? You monster!". But instead, she explains the ending of the relationship as one of her own crisis of deciding between him and her boyfriend.

    Perhaps the idea is that she was so terrified of him for some reason that she hid or suppressed her true feelings of outrage and presented to him a masking rationalization for the breakup in order to avoid his wrath. But this doesn't work as an interpretation. She says this to the journalist:

    "'I just wanted it to be over. I wanted out,' she says. 'I let an impossible situation get out of hand.'"

    Maybe she means that she had started having a flirtation with him and it had progressed to a full-blown relationship that she was carrying on while being involved in another relationship with her official boyfriend in another city, which got more and more difficult to deal with. But could she mean that they had been having a sex-free relationship and that he had out of the blue violated her consent by raping her passed out body? How is that a case of her letting an impossible situation get out of hand? Wouldn't she have then just told the reporter something like, "I felt horribly violated by what he had done, and couldn't believe that a man I had respected would betray my trust like that?" At the time she's talking to the reporter, Ludlow has no power over her at all, and certainly no ability to help advance her career. He's lost his job and reputation over this. She has no reason to disguise her true feelings out of fear of losing his professional support.

    So if your interpretation of the story is correct, Elizabeth, then she's saying things it just doesn't make sense for her to say. That's why it seems way more plausible to take from this that they had had a consensual sexual relationship up to whatever crisis occurred in November.

    Reply
  22. JDB

    Like Elizabeth Harman, I'm puzzled by the content of the conversation above. And like Derek Bowman, I'm morally repulsed by the existence of most of the conversation above. Perhaps this is a minority position here and doesn't accommodate the proclivities of philosophers like Ned Block and Philippe Lemoine, but my list of things professional and morally decent people spend their time doing does not include publicly speculating and hypothesizing about alleged sexual relationships between two real people in my profession, especially when one of them claims to have been deeply harmed both by this relationship and public discussion of it within her profession. (Is this irrelevant to the actual claim of rape? Perhaps it's just as irrelevant as Block's, Lemoine's, and others' public speculations about consensual sex.)

    BL COMMENT: This shall be the last of the expressions of moral indignation that a discussion about something that has been widely discussed, usually to the detriment of the accused, is being discussed yet again with an eye to whether the accusations were fair.

    Reply
  23. anon

    Let us all please do our best to exercise some epistemic humility here. What is like to be a first year graduate student courted intensely by an older male authority in your own department? What is like to feel completely in over your head? And powerless even to understand exactly your own agency? So then: "But if I had been in her position as you envision it, and then realized one morning that the man I had been chastely sleeping with in a no-sex relationship had grossly violated my consent and helplessness while I was blacked out, I would have freaked …." Yes, you might. But then again, you might not. Do you really know what goes on in the mind of a woman involved in a relationship she can't extricate herself from, that she feels trapped by? I doubt it. So stop with the hypotheticals.

    Reply
  24. Anonymous

    The person who wrote comment #21 would do well to familiarize themselves with the huge amount of research already available on reactions to trauma, with narrative accounts from victims of sexual assault, and the general inability of persons to predict in advance how they would react to events not previously experienced. This kind of comment is the kind of reaction that victims of sexual assault (and, indeed, other kinds of trauma as well) having been struggling with for decades. When someone is sexually assaulted, very often they do not react as one would imagine they would if you have not experienced it yourself.

    Reply
  25. Anon K

    The implication in the following passage is the sort of sexist thing that is often said in discussions over accusations of rape that occur within a relationship or between friends.

    But if I had been in her position as you envision it, and then realized one morning that the man I had been chastely sleeping with in a no-sex relationship had grossly violated my consent and helplessness while I was blacked out, I would have freaked. I might have reported it immediately, I might have just started screaming at him, I might have made a hasty exit from the apartment, my mind racing, and then felt a cold numbness and confusion at what had just been done to me. But I would definitely see it as an immense betrayal of my trust and the relationship (and yes, she calls it a relationship). This wasn't, on your story, even someone I had been having sex with, and the fact (on your account) that I had been sleeping with this person regularly for months after "late late late nights" together would seem to entail a clear 'no sex' understanding, making the violation all the more serious.

    But this interpretation of her words doesn't match the detail that the relationship "slowly unravelled, ending for good in January" after the incident in November. And how does this reading square with what she wrote to him in a text message after the night in question:

    No, no, no.

    When someone is raped, they sometimes stay in the relationship, especially if the person has power over the rape victim. And the victim may still continue to act in loving ways, expressing concern and love. Heck, they may even continue to feel some love for their attacker. They might even be wrestling with questions about whether they deserved the rape. Thus, a victim's behavior in the relationship after a rape is not evidence of any weight that the rape did not occur. It is a deeply sexist idea to think that X never freaked out or never did such and such, so it is unlikely that X was raped.

    Reply
  26. anon 4:20

    The student explicitly specifies sex only on the one occasion of the alleged rape. But this is not what she implies — and the long article contains more than enough information, unfortunately, to reasonably draw this conclusion. Indeed, given the rape claim, the student would have every reason to state explicitly that the only sex that ever occurred was the alleged rape.

    What's puzzling is that people with common sense are expected not to recognize a transparent attempt to create some mystery about whether there was a complicated (and unprofessional) sexual relationship — that we're supposed to suspend belief until the fairly obvious is explicitly confirmed by both parties.

    Reply
  27. Anonymous

    Derek Bowman, I agree that it would be better if none of us tried to adjudicate what was going on in the Ludlow/grad student situation and let it be the confidential process that the whole thing was set up to be.

    But it's too late for that now precisely because people already started that adjudication on the other side the minute the matter was publicized and people started giving their opinion that Ludlow was guilty and judging him. To make that judgment is precisely to conclude, on the basis of the evidence we have, what did and didn't happen in the case. And to make a public judgment that he is guilty or even likely guilty is to invite a fair response that he is not guilty or unlikely to be guilty, if people sincerely read the evidence some other way.

    It seems we have three options for dealing with these situations.

    The first option is for none of us to discuss these cases at all and to leave them in the hands of the confidential process most universities already have in place, keeping our discreet silence except to the extent that we are legitimately involved in those processes.

    The second option is for us to discuss and make judgments based on the official rulings on these cases, and nothing else. If we learn that someone is found responsible of sexual harassment, we can blame the person but not speculate on the background; and if we learn that someone is found not responsible, we remove the person from suspicion. But we discuss it no further.

    The third option is what we're doing now: we hash out all the details on blogs and elsewhere in the mass media. I think this is the worst option. But if someone starts off the process with an interpretation of what happens and a judgment of an individual or of the whole discipline, then fairness demands that the other side be made as well.

    What we can't have is people spreading reports, stories and documents accusing named people of impropriety, encouraging others to protest, and defaming the person in all sorts of ways while nobody is free to respond to this. Not only is it grossly unjust, but it's completely unreasonable to expect anyone else to play by those rules.

    My preference is for the first or second option. Let's do our jobs, report misdeeds to the proper authorities, abide by the principles of confidentiality that make life easier for all involved, and otherwise keep ourselves out of other people's business and stop making philosophy into a public soap opera (which is doing terrible things for our reputation and prospects as a publicly supported discipline).

    But if people put up articles saying that X is likely to be a sexual harasser and we should all protest X, and providing details and quotes about what X allegedly did, then all this tawdry stuff follows pretty quickly. It's the choice we make when we publish stuff like that and the rest of us don't tell the publishers to take it down and mind their own business.

    Reply
  28. Anonymous

    "What we can't have is people spreading reports, stories and documents accusing named people of impropriety, encouraging others to protest, and defaming the person in all sorts of ways while nobody is free to respond to this. Not only is it grossly unjust, but it's completely unreasonable to expect anyone else to play by those rules."

    It may be worth remembering that the allegation of rape was not public until Ludlow himself filed suit. It was his legal complaint that made the existence of that internal complaint publicly known.

    Reply
  29. AN

    I don't pretend to know what happened in this case.

    But I second Derek Bowman's comment that dissecting this in this way on a major professional blog is not sending a good message to women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted by colleagues or superiors. There's a reason people already don't report this stuff when it does happen. It won't help, to have a norm of extensive hyper-skeptical public examinations (exactly how much sex did they have and under what circumstances? did she say the right things afterward? why is she being so evasive? etc.) in major professional venues. Yes, as philosophers we're meticulous people and want to nose out every detail or possible contradiction… but it's a bad model to apply in our profession's public discourse about sexual assault allegations.

    Contrary to many people's hypothetical guesswork about how they would act if they were raped by an acquaintance or partner (or supervisor!), rape victims frequently try to maintain a semblance of normalcy and will often continue a relationship or make a show of being friendly with their attacker after the fact. "Pretending that everything is fine" is one of the recognized stages of a typical course after a rape. How much more so if the attacker were someone who held professional power over you?

    ( Just out of interest, here's a presentation by the psychologist Rebecca Campbell at Michigan State, talking to law enforcement about how misconceptions similar to these about how rape victims "should" act contribute heavily to victims not reporting to police, and to police not believing them and declining to pursue cases. Suffice it to say, armchair quarterbacking what a victim "should" do isn't likely to help us get at the truth of a given case, it's much more likely to mislead us into unwarranted skepticism.
    http://nij.gov/multimedia/presenter/presenter-campbell/Pages/presenter-campbell-transcript.aspx )

    We should keep in mind that these conversations are sending messages — to prospective students, to junior people and senior people, to rape/harassment victims at all levels, and to rapists or harassers at all levels — about how the profession treats allegations like this.

    BL COMMENT: What is being discussed is an article in CHE about this case, for which both the accuser and the accused were interviewed at length, thus putting the entire matter into the public realm. Fortunately, most such allegations of wrongdoing do not end up in CHE or the Huffington Post.

    Reply
  30. Anonymous

    "It may be worth remembering that the allegation of rape was not public until Ludlow himself filed suit. It was his legal complaint that made the existence of that internal complaint publicly known."

    That's incorrect. It was not Ludlow, but the undergraduate student who brought this to the public's attention.

    The undergraduate first complained about Ludlow to Joan Slavin at Northwestern. Ludlow was stripped of his chair as a consequence, but he kept silent about it.

    Then, in February 2014, the undergraduate became unhappy that Northwestern had not done much worse than that to Ludlow. She sued him, and she sued Northwestern.

    Later, in June 2014, Ludlow sued the student.

    Quoting from the Chicago Tribune article: "The allegations against Ludlow first surfaced earlier this year when an undergraduate student sued him." (http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2014-06-19/news/chi-northwestern-professor-lawsuit-20140619_1_peter-ludlow-joan-slavin-sexual-harassment-policy)

    Reply
  31. Anonymous

    Another point in the Chicago Tribune article that deserves attention but seems to have been lost in the shuffle:

    'According to the suit, Ludlow provided the investigator a receipt showing he had stayed at a hotel on the night of the alleged “non-consensual encounter”'

    http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2014-06-19/news/chi-northwestern-professor-lawsuit-20140619_1_peter-ludlow-joan-slavin-sexual-harassment-policy

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  32. anonymouse

    This entire discussion is baffling; I thought it was obvious, upon reading the CHE article, that the two definitely had a sexual relationship of some kind, and whether or not said relationship can accurately be described as 'romantic' or 'truly consenual' is up for debate (Ludlow saying yes, grad student saying no) as well as the single alleged instance of rape. When I was a grad student long ago, I know I had conversations with other grad students about which professors, if any, we found attractive. Same thing as an undergrad. Obviously the professor has some kind of responsibility to not allow anything to happen and clearly this is where Ludlow failed, repeatedly.

    This just seems like an average relationship gone wrong (as happens to MOST relationships), where one party has the power to accuse another and the other doesn't have the adequate channels of telling their side of the story. Thus the importance of DUE PROCESS — which various people have been shouting from the rooftops all along, but has been suppressed due to the heavy handed moderation of most philosophy blogs.

    This really just goes to show the perils of GOSSIP, which this entire blogosphere situation has been from the start. Frankly it's laughable that many of the same channels are shouting 'NO GOSSIP' now because the information coming out vindicates Ludlow rather than the grad student. Hence the silence on DN and FP and NewApps.

    It's obvious that Ludlow made some pretty terrible choices, many of which show that he didn't consider the grad student's well being. But it seems like the grad student made some pretty terrible choices (it's possible to both make terrible choices AND not be responsible for your own rape). Just people making terrible decisions across the board, as people often do. Let's not continue to peddle the hyperbolic predator-prey narrative, at least in this instance. There are some known chronic sexual predators, but that's another story.

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  33. Jan Dowell

    I'm puzzled by Ned Block's remark above, which seems to suggest that the sexual history of Ludlow's accuser is in some way relevant to her accusation against him. I would have hoped that by now most folks recognize that an accuser's sexual history is never relevant to the assessment of a rape accusation.

    Given how misguided the question's apparent presupposition is, I'm loathe to address it. But the victim is a close friend of mine and I am also loathe to leave completely unanswered grotesque speculation about her very personal history in a very public forum for all who share a profession with her to read.

    I invite the prurient among you to remember that Ludlow's accuser is trying to maintain her privacy about a story that is hers to tell or not tell. I would also remind you that Ludlow has already sued her for defamation. His suit was dismissed, as would be any further suit, I'm confident. But even clearly winnable lawsuits are expensive and time-consuming. It's not hard to see why a graduate student might especially want to avoid one filed by a professor in her own field.

    Given the high cost to her of rebutting his claims, I wonder why so many are assuming that her silence indicates affirmation. I also wonder why so many are taking at face value the word of a man whose university has found against him and in favor his accuser. Ludlow has a lot to lose. So far, she has been vindicated. So, why the rush to judge her?

    BL COMMENT: Even as a matter of law, an accuser's sexual history is sometimes relevant to defending against an accusation of rape. It is also not correct that her accusation of rape has been vindicated, though, according to the CHE report, Ludlow was found guilty by the University of sexual harassment of the graduate student. I am taking a heavier hand with moderation, as some individuals are engaging in too much speculation about the parties involved.

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  34. Anonymous

    In response to Anonymous at comment #30, note that I said the allegation of *rape* became public through Ludlow's own suit. That is true and what you cite does not contradict it. There are two separate students who made allegations, and what you cite is how the other students allegations became public.

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  35. Jan Dowell

    I did not say that the rape accusation has been vindicated. I said that the university found against him in favor of her.

    And I was not addressing the issue of the legal relevance of an accuser's sexual history, but it's actual evidential relevance. My claim is that reasonable people recognize that an accuser's sexual history is evidentially irrelevant to the question of whether or not they have been sexually harassed or assaulted.

    BL COMMENT: You said the student had been vindicated, and Ludlow had not been, but this was not entirely accurate in the respect noted, which you now concede. Because of due process concerns, evidence law recognizes that sometimes an accuser's sexual history can be relevant and must be admissible in adjudicated an allegation of rape. In doing so, the law is quite reasonable as well.

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  36. Brian

    Those curious about the legal relevance of past sexual history of an accuser with the accused may see (412)(B)(1)(b):

    https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/fre/rule_412

    The premise behind this reasonable exception is that past sexual relations between an accused and accuser can be probative of consent.

    There are additional, though relatively rare, circumstances in which the rape shield rules that ordinarily prevent admission of evidence of the accuser's sexual history are waived for due process reasons.

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  37. Anonymous

    Many people seem to believe that the graduate student complained that Ludlow committed rape by having sex with her against her wishes while she was passed out drunk, and that Northwestern, in finding that Ludlow had violated Northwestern's sexual harassment policy, vindicated her claim that she had been raped.

    But we can see from the CHE article that this is not what happened. Quoting from the article: "Northwestern determined that [Ludlow] hadn’t violated its policy prohibiting professors from dating students they supervise. The graduate student had not taken any classes with him, nor had the annual review of graduate students by the department occurred, so Mr. Ludlow hadn’t offered any formal opinions of her work. Northwestern did find that Mr. Ludlow had violated its policy on sexual harassment. By virtue of his position as a professor, it said, he had taken advantage of the unequal relationship between him and the student and had courted her by offering her expensive dinners and other social benefits she would otherwise not have had. In doing so, the university found, Mr. Ludlow had used his position as a faculty member to exert pressure on the student to engage in an intimate relationship that had negatively affected her academic performance."

    So the finding against Ludlow, it seems, had nothing to do with any allegation of rape. It had to do with an apparent violation of the Northwestern policies on sexual harassment that came about because Ludlow, in courting her, offered her expensive dinners and other social benefits, and because this relationship had negatively affected her academic performance.

    Perhaps it's a good thing for universities to have sexual harassment codes that prohibit that. But that's a very different thing than rape. If these were sufficient conditions for rape, all sorts of absurd consequences would follow. It's very common for relationships to involve unique opportunities for the participants. Having a relationship with P might give me a unique opportunity to hang around with P's family, stay in P's apartment, and have sex with P. If my being in that relationship leads in some way to my getting distracted or depressed and doing worse at school, that wouldn't make it rape.

    I'm trying not to be too restrictive in using the term. I acknowledge that force or the threat of direct physical force might not be necessary for a sex act to count as rape. If someone claims or implies that something terrible will happen to Q or someone Q cares about if Q does not have sex with that person, then I'm happy to count that as an instance of rape. Maybe we could even stretch the term to cover a few cases in which Q has sex with R, knowing that not having sex with R would leave Q in a comparatively undesirable position that is in no way R's doing. But even here we need to be careful. If S, who earns a low but decent amount of money, marries T, who has more money, and they have sex within that marriage, then it doesn't follow that T has thereby raped S.

    But this case is beyond even that. I have no idea who the grad student is, but by the sounds of it she's a promising philosophy student. There's no indication here that Ludlow suggested, or that she believe, that having sex or romance with Ludlow would be her only way to have a decent or even a good life. To call a situation like that rape is madness.

    Let's keep that separate from the very different accusation that Ludlow had non-consensual sex with the student while she was passed out in his bed. That's obviously a much more serious accusation, but two things are noteworthy. First, it seems that Ludlow produced a hotel receipt indicating that he stayed at a hotel that night, not at his home. And second, the finding of Northwestern does not say anything about that accusation.

    So there are two things we have to keep separate. There's the charge of sexual harassment, but not rape, that Northwestern found he was responsible for because he had a relationship with a non-student who was thereby afforded unique dining and social opportunities, but which caused her grades to falter. And there's also an accusation of rape, which doesn't seem to be substantiated and which Ludlow seems to have evidence against.

    BL COMMENT: Just to be clear, I did not read anyone as claiming that the scenarios you describe should or could constitute "rape."

    Reply
  38. Philippe Lemoine

    I don't see where I, Prof. Block or anyone else for that matter have claimed or even suggested that, if Ludlow and the graduate student who accused him of rape (let's call her 'G') had consensual sex before or after the alleged rape, then he couldn't have raped her. As far as I'm concerned, if I wanted to discuss that aspect of the case, it's not because I want to speculate about whether it's true that Ludlow raped G, which indeed I have never done. The reason why I wanted to discuss this point is because I think it's relevant to the way in which the complaint against Kipnis was justified by the students who filed it and the people who supported what they did.

    Indeed, the students who filed the complaint against Kipnis claimed that it was because her article contained factual mistakes, the most important of which being that she wrote that Ludlow and G used to date. The only support that was offered for the claim that Kipnis made factual mistakes in her article was the letter sent to her by Pogin. In this letter, Pogin didn't say that Ludlow and G never dated or even that G denied that she had previously been dating him, but only that she had never confirmed or denied it in a court of law.

    I think Wilson's article makes clear that, unless one accepts a highly controversial notion of consent, Ludlow and G had indeed been dating at some point. The fact that, as I have argued, it seems likely that Ludlow and G had sexual relations before or after the alleged rape is clearly relevant to that point. Now, I have argued elsewhere that, based on Ludlow's complaint, Kipnis had very good reasons to think so even at the time when she wrote her original piece. Moreover, the highly controversial notion of consent which might allow one to deny that Ludlow and G were dating is precisely one of the things she was rejecting in her article, so it seems totally unfair to claim that what she wrote was inaccurate.

    But what I want to point out here is that, regardless of whether I'm right about that last point, Pogin and the graduate student who filed a complaint against Kipnis must have known that, when Kipnis wrote that Ludlow and G used to date, what she was saying is something that most people would regard as true based on the information that are revealed in Wilson's article. In fact, it seems highly plausible to me that, if Pogin didn't say that G never dated Ludlow but only that she never confirmed or denied it, it's precisely because she knew that.

    This strikes me as rather disingenuous, to say the least, so I'm getting tired of receiving moral lessons from people who don't seem to be bothered by that or, for that matter, by the way in which so many people are more or less explicitly assuming that Ludlow is guilty when they have no way of knowing that. I don't hear a lot of indignation when Ludlow is being dragged in the mud despite the fact that, for all we know, he might be innocent. I'm not the one who brought up the issue of whether Ludlow used to date G, it's Pogin and the student who defended his/her complaint against Kipnis on Daily Nous who did. If you think my arguments aren't good, then please explain why or don't say anything. And stop talking as if you had the moral high ground here, because you clearly don't.

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  39. History Prof

    The reason the details of the relationship between the grad student and Ludlow are relevant–and yes, this would include the question of whether or not they had consensual sex–is because an accuser’s credibility, judgment, and the accuracy of her self-reporting are relevant. Since filing the complaint against Ludlow–two years after the events in question; after apparently being strongarmed into it by her advisor– the grad student has filed four other increasingly specious Title IX complaints: against Kipnis, Northwestern President Morton Schapiro, Kipnis’s faculty support person (for discussing the Title IX complaints at a Faculty Senate meeting), and finally, yet another round of charges against Kipnis for possibly having supporting her faculty support person. (Kipnis revealed this on Facebook when announcing she’d been cleared of the first set of charges.) When a complainant is this cavalier about filing charges against others, and deploying the Title IX process as a personal cudgel, then raising questions about her history and motives is indeed warranted.

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  40. Anonymous

    Has it occurred to you that it's possible Pogin was careful in how she phrased things because she herself might have been concerned with being threatened with a lawsuit given how many have already taken place? If you wonder if she was being disingenuous, have you contacted her to ask about it?

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  41. Anonymous

    40, are you suggesting that if you suspect someone is being dishonest, you should just contact the person and say, "Hi! Listen, are you being honest?" and then you'll have your answer?

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  42. Anonymous

    The article describes one physical interaction of a sexual nature that took place before the alleged rape. That was not consensual sex, but rather a kiss, which according to the article, the student responded to by telling him that she could not reciprocate. Whether or not past sexual history can be probative of consent, it is not at all clear that the circumstances under which it would be so are at play here.

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  43. Anonymous

    41, no — but I would suggest that if you want to say you're tired of others trying to claim the moral high ground it might be a start before you question students publicly on a prominent blog within their profession regarding matters which there is a fair chance they cannot respond to publicly in full without potentially being sued by someone who has already sued several parties and sent out even more notices of intent.

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  44. Onionymous

    42, "The article describes one physical interaction of a sexual nature that took place before the alleged rape."

    The article states, "Mr. Ludlow denies that accusation, saying they regularly had consensual sex and had even discussed marriage."

    42, "That was not consensual sex, but rather a kiss, which according to the article, the student responded to by telling him that she could not reciprocate."

    The article states, "… she says … Mr. Ludlow kissed her" and "Mr Ludlow says the graduate student kissed him first".

    Reply
  45. Philippe Lemoine

    Anonymous, it has indeed occurred to me, but I find the idea that Pogin chose to phrase her letter in that way because she was afraid that Ludlow might sue utterly implausible. However, I don't even want to press that point (although, if you insist, I can), so let's grant, for the sake of the argument, that it's why she didn't say that G denied that she used to date Ludlow even though, in fact, she did.

    I think it's clear that, after reading Wilson's argument, the immense majority of speakers of English – who don't have the unusual notion of consent that G seems to have – would agree that G and Ludlow used to date. (Again, if you really insist, I can go into details here, but I really don't think that we need to do that.) It is also clear, for anyone who has read Kipnis's original piece, that she rejects what seems to be G's notion of consent. Moreover, it's hard to believe that, when she wrote her letter, Pogin didn't know all that.

    So, even if you were right that Pogin phrased her letter in the way she did because she was afraid that Ludlow might sue her (which again I find extremely implausible), I really don't see how it would be any less disingenuous of her to suggest that Kipnis made a factual mistake by saying that Ludlow used to date G when she must have known that it was true, at least by the reading of any normal – in the statistical sense – speaker of English.

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  46. Anonymous

    42, No, the article does not describe "one physical interaction of a sexual nature that took place before the alleged rape." From the article:

    "Over the next couple of months, the graduate student and Mr. Ludlow agree, they grew close. They ate out together almost every night when they were both in town, and then spent the rest of most evenings at his apartment. He says they had pet names for each other: He called her "Spoon" because the first night she spent at his place, she asked if he could "spoon" her while they slept, he says. She called him "1,000 Angels," in reference to Tina Fey’s character in 30 Rock, who said she was so happy she was "high-fiving a million angels." (The graduate student says the term was a joke and didn’t mean anything to her.)"

    I don't know about you, but even if you want to assume they didn't have intercourse, their relationship was highly physical for the duration. The grad student and professor interactions that I know about most certainly don't involve cuddling. You're grasping at straws.

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  47. Philippe Lemoine

    Also, just to be clear, I don't know Pogin and, except for the fact that I strongly disagree with her about what happened to Kipnis, I have no beef with her. In fact, I have more respect for her, who at least had the courage to publish something under her own name, than for the anonymous commenters who dragged Ludlow – or G for that matter – in the mud even though they don't know what really happened and are surprised when someone takes their selective moral indignation and throws it back at their face.

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  48. Anonymous

    42, please note that Ludlow claims she initiated the kiss. He said, she said.

    Reply
  49. Anonymous

    @comments 24 and 25:

    You say the case for Ludlow having commuted rape is not at all weakened by the facts that the grad student continued to interact with him on good terms, neglected to say anything at the time to him that indicated she felt she had been raped, etc. You imply that to suggest these and other signs raise doubts about the alleged event is a sign of backward ignorance.

    I'm curious: is there ANY possible evidence that you think can rightly lower one's credence in such an allegation? If so, then what?

    If you can't think of anything, then you appear committed to both these propositions:

    1. If any woman claims any man raped her, we should defeasibly believe her.

    2. There are no possible legitimate defeaters for such claims.

    I leave the reductio as an exercise for the reader.

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  50. Onionymous

    25 (Anon K), "When someone is raped, they sometimes stay in the relationship, especially if the person has power over the rape victim. And the victim may still continue to act in loving ways, expressing concern and love. Heck, they may even continue to feel some love for their attacker. They might even be wrestling with questions about whether they deserved the rape. Thus, a victim's behavior in the relationship after a rape is not evidence of any weight that the rape did not occur. It is a deeply sexist idea to think that X never freaked out or never did such and such, so it is unlikely that X was raped."

    Can you explain carefully why is this "sexist"? What if the victim was male? What if a male victim was accused of being a liar, because he continued minimal contact with the attacker for a short period afterwards?

    Reply

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