In 2015, students at Northwestern University responded to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education with a protest march. Some carried mattresses. The author of the article, Laura Kipnis, a tenured faculty member at Northwestern, had gleefully denounced the state of campus sexual politics. Kipnis’s immediate target was a university policy, introduced the year before, that prohibited all romantic or sexual relationships between students and university staff or faculty members. In the piece, titled “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe,” she critiqued a “new paradigm” of trigger warnings and trauma, in which students had become “committed to their own vulnerability, conditioned to imagine they have no agency, and protected from unequal power arrangements in romantic life.” Kipnis, who has written books including “Against Love” and “Men: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation,” often voices controversial or contrarian views; here, as always, she took pleasure in stirring up a hornets’ nest. In a telling anecdote, she related that, a decade earlier, she had voluntarily attended a harassment workshop on campus (“Hoping my good citizenship might be noticed,” she wrote). The first guideline issued by the workshop leader was “Do not make unwanted sexual advances.” Kipnis couldn’t help herself. From the back of the room she called, “But how do you know they’re unwanted until you try?”

Kipnis is proud of her sense of humor. She says she is “after a certain insouciance of tone,” but she can be feverish, and even a little histrionic. She mixes cultural criticism with hyperbole, and doesn’t alter her style just because her material is sensitive. She knows that this can rankle. In the Chronicle article, alongside jokes about the children of professor-student relationships and confessions about her own student days (“We partied together, drank and got high together”), she described the wave of “sexual panic” that had resulted since 2011, when the Department of Education notified universities that under Title IX, the rule that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in institutions of higher education, they could lose federal funding if they were found to take insufficient measures against sexual harassment and violence. She may not be the first feminist to wind up on the wrong side of a generational divide, but few others have had Title IX complaints filed against them for their writing.

“I thought they were fucking with me,” Kipnis told me recently; she was sitting in a low leather chair in her apartment in Manhattan, where she lives when not teaching. She was wearing a button-down shirt and a pair of red velour pants. The decor was at once modern and cozy; a glass door separated the bedroom from the living room. “They felt at liberty to take this incredibly aggressive, overreaching move toward a professor—a feminist professor—on their campus.” In her article, Kipnis had cited a Title IX complaint filed against Northwestern regarding a philosophy professor, Peter Ludlow. The complaint charged that Ludlow had forced an undergraduate to drink alcohol and that he had groped her; Kipnis also made reference to Ludlow having “dated” a graduate student (she named neither student). The same graduate—who contested the word “dated”—claimed Kipnis’s essay contributed to a hostile educational environment.

In response, Kipnis wrote another article for the Chronicle, “My Title IX Inquisition,” about her “Midwestern Torquemadas” and the “kangaroo court.” (The article was published on the morning of May 29, 2015; later the same day, a university investigation cleared her of wrongdoing.) Writing begat writing. One of Ludlow’s lawyers asked Kipnis if she would be his faculty support person during the dismissal hearings against him. (Kipnis later wrote that it “was like watching someone being burned at the stake in slow motion, except this execution was catered.”) Ludlow resigned before the hearings concluded, but without signing a non-disclosure agreement. He gave Kipnis thousands of pages of documents, including background material, reports from the university’s Title IX investigator, e-mails, and the text messages between him and the graduate student.

A close reading of the Ludlow cases is the centerpiece of Kipnis’s new book, “Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus,” in which she puts forward her argument for what she calls “grown-up feminism.” Kipnis quips that “bona fide harassers should be chemically castrated.” Similarly, she thinks professors guilty of quid-pro-quo harassment, in which sexual favors are demanded in exchange for something like a good grade or a promotion, should be fired, as should gropers and rapists. (“In cases where somebody’s directly supervising someone, that should be off-limits,” she told me, admitting that she could have been clearer about that in her first Chronicle article.) But she believes that the “leakiness” and “idiocy” of sexual desire cannot be contained by regulation; people need to learn to deal with it themselves. She disagrees with the idea, popular among some younger feminists, that true consent is impossible within a framework of asymmetric power. For Kipnis, it is precisely the dynamics of power—of status, money, appearance, age, talent—that create desire.

Kipnis had always wanted to write about a trial—she admires Janet Malcolm’s work and Diana Trilling’s true-crime book “Mrs. Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor.” For ninety pages, Kipnis parses every line of Ludlow’s file, cross-examining the parties’ motives. She came to believe that he had been wronged. One of his accusers, she decided, was loose with the facts; the other had been a full and willing participant in the romance. At one point, she writes, as if playing a trial lawyer herself, “What would it mean to not consent to sending a thousand text messages?” She leaves the question hanging.

I had met Kipnis a few times before, most recently two years ago, when she attended a presentation I gave on literary criticism and affect. I recall her asking, during the Q. & A., “What’s so bad about aggression?” When we met in mid-March, she had just returned from Wellesley College, where she had participated in “Censorship Awareness Week.” Before she arrived, student activists had posted a video protesting her appearance; a week later, faculty members proposed new standards for bringing visiting speakers to campus. Since being investigated by Northwestern, Kipnis has become a mascot for free speech, occasionally asked to talk at libertarian or right-wing events. “The politics of this is still something I’m trying to figure out,” she said. We were drinking espresso from white cups decorated with clocks. “More people on the left should stand up and say that the stuff that’s happening on campus is not so unlike what’s going on off campus in terms of the anti-democratic tendencies, the authoritarian tendencies, the ease about suspending due process.”

Kipnis has attended a protest or two, but has never been much of an activist. She considers herself between worlds: a critic at art school, a writer of mainstream books in academia. The product of “free-range parenting,” she came of age as cultural studies was taking over American universities. She enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute in the nineteen-eighties, when her peers were interested in what she described as the “confrontational body work” of artists like Chris Burden and Vito Acconci and “that German guy who cut his penis off or something.” (Kipnis was probably referring to Rudolph Schwarzkogler, an Austrian artist who simulated the castration of a friend). She quickly abandoned painting to pursue photography and audio pieces.