Your Tax Dollars at Work
Jacques Derrida "enjoyed the same status as Aristotle among the ancients," a professor at NYU tells a reporter from the LA Times.
Reading the reporter's article, you can see him struggling to make sense of this assertion. You can see him struggling to make sense of a certain subculture of humanities departments in American universities... trying to understand why a professor demoted by his university for sexual harassment, and then forced to settle out of court with the object of his harassment, left the University of California, Irvine an Associate Professor and resurfaced at the University of Florida a Professor and department chair.
The professor at issue, a friend of Derrida's in the last years of Derrida's life, has much to offer the University of Florida beyond a rather determined sexuality in regard to his graduate students. Four students at Rate My Professors describe his teaching:
there was no work. while that was a good thing, the class was utterly boring and pointless. vampire stories sounded interesting. it should have been called bad vampire videos. don't buy the books, there is no reading. the ta's do all the grading.
An utter waste of time. Disorganized and failed to comment on papers in a meaningful fashion
took several of his courses, posters are right he doesn't pay attention to your work, i don't think he even reads it. But, if you need a class to boost your gpa and you don't need the pressure but you still want smart discussions and little structure - give him a try.
love vampire literature, and I thought this class would be intense and deep. There was no reading for the class, and the lectures were repetative and pointless. There were no assignments, and I would be surprised if anyone received below an A-.
These reviews are from the professor's Irvine days, so the citizens of California were paying his salary. Now it's the turn of Florida's taxpayers to subsidize courses with no reading, no assignments, no comments on student papers, A's all around, and bad vampire videos.
All this and sexual harassment too! No wonder the University of Florida made him a department chair.
B-b-but... What's all of this got to do with Derrida, and with a news story worthy of the LA Times' attention?
When a vampire expert allegedly seduced a tipsy UC Irvine student four years ago, he inadvertently set off a chain of events that now jeopardizes the school's control of a dead philosopher's prized archives.
The story came to light after UCI announced last week that it would drop a lawsuit against the widow and sons of philosopher Jacques Derrida, the acclaimed founder of deconstruction, an influential but bewildering theory that questions the concept of absolute truth.
In 1990, Derrida signed an agreement to donate his scholarly papers to UCI, where he taught part time. But after his death in 2004, Derrida's heirs began questioning the pact. The university tried to negotiate, then sued three months ago, a maneuver that outraged professors in California and beyond.
Buried in the news that UCI would resume negotiations with Derrida's family was a mysterious footnote: The feud over his archives was sparked by a letter Derrida sent to UCI shortly before his death.
In it, the pipe-puffing Frenchman threatened to pull the plug on the archives because he was furious about "some things the university was doing," said Peggy Kamuf, a USC professor and Derrida friend.
Kamuf wouldn't elaborate, but details have slowly emerged. According to multiple sources, Derrida wanted UCI to halt its investigation of a Russian studies professor, Dragan Kujundzic, who was accused of sexually harassing a 25-year-old female doctoral student. So he tried to use his archives as leverage to derail the case, they said.
UCI officials declined to comment on Derrida's letter or Kujundzic last week. But court records from a lawsuit filed by the doctoral student might fill in some of the gaps.
The 2004 sexual harassment lawsuit contends that Kujundzic, who taught a popular class on vampires and signed his e-mails with a colon to symbolize Dracula bite marks, used his position as the student's advisor to manipulate her into a series of sexual encounters.
Thirty minutes after they met at a reception for new students in September 2003, Kujundzic invited the woman to his apartment to view photos of Moscow, court records said.
There, he plied the student with Transylvanian wine and opera music, then kissed and groped her, according to the lawsuit. The woman said she fended off the married professor's entreaties to have intercourse but performed oral sex on him that night and again the following evening.
They rendezvoused twice more before she filed a formal complaint with school officials. She admitted initiating one of the trysts.
Kujundzic, 47, who left Irvine in 2005 for a job at the University of Florida, told campus investigators the fling was "voluntary and consensual."
The student said she felt coerced to engage in sex or risk having her academic career ruined.
UCI's probe of the affair sided with neither party. Investigator Gwen Thompson concluded the relationship was consensual but said Kujundzic violated a university policy that barred professors from dating students they supervised.
Kujundzic argued that he wasn't the student's advisor, an assertion UCI rejected. In mid-2004, university officials began weighing penalties for the Serbian-born professor.
Derrida, who at the time was dying from pancreatic cancer, tried to intervene.
"Toward the end of his life, he enjoyed the same status as Aristotle among the ancients, and every perception of injustice was routed to his desk," said Avital Ronell, a Derrida protege who teaches at New York University. "Even as he was crawling with fatigue, he put himself in the service of those seeking his help and needing the strength of his prestigious signature."
UCI was apparently unmoved. On Aug. 31, school officials demoted Kujundzic, reduced his salary, banned him from campus without pay for two quarters and ordered him into sexual-harassment counseling, according to court records.
Kujundzic and the University of California were later sued in Orange County Superior Court by the student, a case that was settled out of court this month for an undisclosed amount.
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