Yet free speech, for better or worse, is not Kipnis’s primary preoccupation. Sexual politics is. (Her last book was “Men: Notes From an Ongoing Investigation.”) The case that most transfixes her is that of Peter Ludlow, a philosophy professor at Northwestern who’d been drummed off campus following allegations of sexual misconduct with two students, one a graduate and one an undergraduate. She devotes roughly half the book to readjudicating it, going through each of his accusers’ stories frame by frame, trying to determine if there’s another way to read them. She decides there is — and that it is inseparable from the way universities now think about women and sex.

Once upon a time, explains Kipnis, female students celebrated their sexual freedom and agency. Today, students and faculty alike focus on their vulnerability. This, in her view, is a criminally retrograde story line, one that recasts women as pitiful creatures who cannot think and act for themselves — and it’s a story they seem to have internalized. Armed with Title IX and a new, academically fashionable definition of “consent” — which insists that sex is never truly consensual between adults unless they both have equal power — women can now retroactively declare they never truly agreed to specific sexual acts, even whole relationships.

“We seem to be breeding a generation of students, mostly female students, deploying Title IX to remedy sexual ambivalences or awkward sexual experiences,” Kipnis writes, “and to adjudicate relationship disputes post-breakup — and campus administrators are allowing it.”

This, in her view, was the case with Ludlow’s accusers, whose stories were full of inconsistencies and improbabilities.

Now: I certainly appreciate Kipnis’s forensics. And the story she tells is psychologically complex. But one of the women in Ludlow’s case comes across as genuinely troubled. That wouldn’t be unusual. As Kipnis herself points out, college and grad school is precisely the time that mental illness tends to first rear its head, which makes professors “sitting ducks for accusations.” But if that’s the case, isn’t that an argument in favor of forbidding relations between faculty and students? Because some students might not be able to handle them?

Kipnis never minimizes the devastating consequences of sexual violence. And she’s on to something, really on to something, when she rails against the “neo-sentimentality about female vulnerability.” But the most powerful and provocative part of her book, its final chapter, suggests that today’s young college women really do suffer from a crisis of agency. The pressure to drink themselves senseless and then hook up is so pervasive that they seem to have trouble saying no.

She knows that this assessment looks suspiciously like victim blaming. But there’s no evidence, she writes, that targeting male behaviors alone has worked in curbing sexual assault. If she were queen, she’d call for mandatory self-defense classes for freshmen women. Call it sexual realpolitik. “There’s an excess of masculine power in the world,” Kipnis writes, “and women have to be educated to contest it in real time, instead of waiting around for men to reach some new stage of heightened consciousness — just in case that day never comes.”

Partially shifting the onus to women to protect themselves will surely earn Kipnis an inbox of hate mail. It will come without trigger warnings. But after all she’s been through, I’m guessing she can handle it.