Professor Laura Kipnis complained about Title IX and then became the subject of Title IX complaints.

Brock Read of the Chronicle of Higher Education reported.

Laura Kipnis Is Cleared of Wrongdoing in Title IX Complaints

Laura Kipnis, the Northwestern University professor who became the subject of two Title IX complaints after publishing an essay in The Chronicle Review, has been cleared of wrongdoing by the university under the federal civil-rights law, which requires colleges to respond to reports of sexual misconduct.

Ms. Kipnis said in an interview on Sunday that she received two letters Friday night from the law firm Northwestern had hired to investigate both complaints. In each case, the firm judged that the ”preponderance of evidence does not support the complaint allegations.”

In the Review essay, published in February, Ms. Kipnis decried a prevailing “sexual paranoia” on college campuses. She alluded to Peter Ludlow, a professor of philosophy at Northwestern who has been accused of sexual misconduct by students in two separate instances. Shortly thereafter, two graduate students filed complaints against Ms. Kipnis with Northwestern’s Title IX coordinator, arguing that the professor’s piece had misrepresented and impugned one of Mr. Ludlow’s accusers and had had a “chilling effect” on students’ ability to report sexual misconduct.

Ms. Kipnis, a professor in the department of radio, television, and film, detailed the investigation that followed in another Review essay, published on Friday. “What I very much wanted to know,” she wrote, “was whether this was the first instance of Title IX charges filed over a publication.”

The complainants have 10 days to appeal the Title IX decisions, and Northwestern has yet to rule on whether Ms. Kipnis’s first Review essay violated a nonretaliation provision of the faculty handbook. (Ms. Kipnis declined to discuss other details of the law firm’s findings, saying she was free to disclose only the overall outcomes of the complaints.)