… jump to the New York Times, so UD now feels comfortable passing them along to you. (She saw them yesterday in the New York Post, but…) Unlike routine professor-mischief allegations, these are so lurid and extensive as to paint – in the words of the NYT – an entire “academic underworld” of sex and drugs, operating out of the offices of lots of professors.
A sample of office etiquette, John Jay College-style:
[One student said a professor there] poured her straight whiskey during a meeting in his office, locked the door and performed oral sex on her.
Without wanting to sound a prude, I will say that this seems pretty irregular to ol’ UD…
And the silver lining in the long tragicomic thing the NYU sexual harassment mess is turning out to be is that it directs us again to the final two sections of Camille Paglia’s hilarious 1992 essay about people like Avital Ronnel, “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders.” Camille, it’s been too long.
I flashed onto Paglia’s classic when I read these sentences, written today in the Chronicle of Higher Ed by a woman who, very unhappily, worked as a grad student at NYU with Ronnel:
Structural problems are problems because real people hurt real people. You cannot have a cycle of abuse without actually existing abusers. That sounds simple, which is why so many academics hate it.
Her point is that deconstructive method has given academics sympathetic to Ronnel a way to sidestep the obvious abuse she doled out to the complainant – by theorizing and complexifying and performatizing human behavior. Derrida showed everyone the way when he denied his friend Paul de Man’s fascism by fogging it up so thoroughly that nothing meant anything.
This is the Paglia excerpt that came back to me:
Hey, fellas: there’s something out there that electrocutes people on beaches, collapses buildings like cardboard, and drowns ships and villages. It’s called nature. The next time the western horizon flames with crimson, remember that this is what Foucault never saw.
Richard Rorty, too, came to mind:
When one of today’s academic leftists says that some topic has been ‘inadequately theorized,’ you can be pretty certain that he or she is going to drag in either philosophy of language, or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neo-Marxist version of economic determinism. Theorists of the Left think that dissolving political agents into plays of differential subjectivity, or political initiatives into pursuits of Lacan’s impossible object of desire, helps to subvert the established order. Such subversion, they say, is accomplished by ‘problematizing familiar concepts.’
Recent attempts to subvert social institutions by problematizing concepts have produced a few very good books. They have also produced many thousands of books which represent scholastic philosophizing at its worst. The authors of these purportedly ‘subversive’ books honestly believe that they are serving human liberty. But it is almost impossible to clamber back down from their books to a level of abstraction on which one might discuss the merits of a law, a treaty, a candidate, or a political strategy. Even though what these authors ‘theorize’ is often something very concrete and near at hand – a current TV show, a media celebrity, a recent scandal – they offer the most abstract and barren explanations imaginable.
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The clear and present realities the letter-writers in this case theorized away were, UD thinks, two:
1. Some human beings are very cruel.
2. Human collectives have a perennial tendency to degenerate into gangs that punish outsiders.
[Avital] Ronell’s work strikes me as a big bowl of word salad. But I understand that the general project of deconstruction is the analysis and dismantling of conscious and unconscious structures of power. How odd, then, that these professors could see domination operating everywhere except the one place they could actually do something about it: in their own relations with students.
A second complaint of sexual misconduct against opera star, University of Michigan professor, David Daniels.
I thought things were quieting down (see this post), but Cornell University student journalists, taking note of the sexual harassment case that has “garnered widespread attention in academia and elsewhere,” have now attempted to ask three Cornell professors why they signed the now-notorious letter (“a terrible letter,” writes Masha Gessen in the New Yorker) defending the harasser.
Two of the professors responded like Donald Trump when asked by reporters about John McCain.
[Cathy] Caruth and [Cynthia] Chase declined to be interviewed by The Sun… Caruth said she understands “the general interest in this letter, but I feel it is too complex to be handled adequately through an interview for an article.”
The familiar too complex move – with its evasion, condescension, and self-aggrandizement – puts Caruth solidly in the Slytherin camp among the now-squabbling letter signers.
(Update: Here’s a whole analysis of the way the too complex bit has been used in this case.)
Slytherin because of what David Lehman memorably called the “slithering elusiveness” of the deconstructive analytical/argumentative method.
Rather than deal forthrightly with moral questions, you slither away by talking about complexity, or enigmatic gay coding, or the instability of signifiers. (The model here is Derrida’s 62-page dance around the obviousness of his friend Paul de Man’s wartime – lifetime, as it would turn out – degeneracy. “Borrowing Derrida’s logic, one could deconstruct Mein Kampf to reveal that its author was conflicted on the subject of the Jews,” as Lehman wrote.)
The Ravenclaws among the letter writers go the other way, seemingly forgetting everything they’ve learned and taught about a world of indeterminacy/performativity, and instead going right in for the linguistically transparent kill. “If any of the sexual contact alleged by the complainant had taken place,” writes Jonathan Culler to the Cornell reporter, “there would doubtless have been references to it in the emails,” and he doesn’t find any, so case closed. “If he effectively felt oppressed and harassed, there were ways of signalling this, which would have definitely not hurt his position,” announces Slavoj Zizek, taking up an astonishingly naive univocal position on the matter of language, not to mention cause and effect.
People seem to have tired of talking both about the Derrida Professor’s having been found guilty by NYU of sexual harassment, and the lawsuit the grad student she harassed has filed against her and the school. But Ronell’s animating intellectual commitment – deconstruction – is worth revisiting, and here are two comments on it, from very different political positions.
First: Martin Jay, reviewing, in 2011, a book of interviews with Ronell.
[Ronell] depends … heavily on mobilizing the tired rhetoric of combat that animated the “theory wars” of the 1980s. AR herself seems frozen in that moment, a bit like one of those Japanese soldiers on a remote Pacific island still fighting for the emperor long after he surrendered. There are, after all, just so many times you can act out Zéro de conduite before the audience gets tired of adolescent rebelliousness as a mode of critique. Intellectual mooning grows as tedious as the real thing. It is fair to say that the ranks of her regiment are in fact getting thinner and thinner as the scandal and provocation of deconstruction recede further into the past.
Second, Francis Fukuyama, in an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Q. You have an unusual background for a political scientist. You majored in classics at Cornell, then did graduate work in comparative literature at Yale, where you studied with Paul de Man. Later you spent time in Paris sitting in on classes with Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. Any memories from this journey through deconstruction?
A. I decided it was total bullshit. They were espousing a kind of Nietzschean relativism that said there is no truth, there is no argument that’s superior to any other argument. Yet most of them were committed to a basically Marxist agenda. That seemed completely contradictory. If you really are a moral relativist, there is no reason why you shouldn’t affirm National Socialism or the racial superiority of Europeans, because nothing is more true than anything else. I thought it was a bankrupt way of proceeding and decided to shift gears and go into political science.
The superannuated subversion both men evoke suggests a reading of Ronell’s recent troubles in which, perversely, she rather got what she wanted: A new lease on academic deviancy.
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Which, Jay notes, Ronell believes Derrida invented.
“One cannot imagine how whited-out the academic corridor was when Derrida arrived on the American scene. There was really no room for deviancy, not even for a quaint aberration or psychoanalysis,” she asserts, blithely erasing Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse, Noam Chomsky, C. Wright Mills, Hannah Arendt, Natalie Zemon Davis, Hayden White, Florence Howe, etc., from memory.
That’s a contemptible statement. It’s like saying Uriagereka supports American democracy and occasionally votes. Now he wonders if he and his fellow Americans – engrossed in their daily lives – perhaps naively took a smooth running executive branch for granted.
No professor who teaches at a Big Ten university can avoid noticing the sickening corruption that runs their school. It’s precisely because it’s so disgusting that almost all professors eagerly look the other way (the exceptions, as you know, are econ professors, who can’t help running the numbers) — until the coaches are caught fucking little boys in the athletic department showers, or they run a player to death one hot summer afternoon. Oh then! We were so naive; after all, university athletic departments are notorious for being run so smoothly…
A University of Michigan voice professor is accused of rape.
And she says it well. Excerpts:
[Avital] Ronell’s [background here] supporters have swarmed to defend her. But rather than expose a hypocrisy or invalidate the #MeToo movement, this has only underscored the point that #MeToo feminists have been making along — about the nature of power and the way it fosters abuse.
… [Avital’s defenders admit] they have had no access to the dossier of claims against Ronell. But they called [her accuser’s] allegations “malicious,” while emphasizing Ronell’s seniority and prestige — precisely what the allegations accuse her of exploiting. The signatories said they have “collectively years of experience to support our view of her capacity as teacher and a scholar, but also as someone who has served as Chair of both the Departments of German and Comparative Literature at New York University.” Later in the letter the group noted, “As you know, [Ronell] is the Jacques Derrida Chair of Philosophy at the European Graduate School and she was recently given the award of Chevalier of Arts and Letters by the French government.”
In the last few days, further defenses of Ronell have appeared online from well-known figures in cultural studies and literature like Chris Kraus, Lisa Duggan, and Jack Halberstam. Duggan … dressed up harassment in the guise of sophisticated theory. The language of Ronell’s emails must have baffled the investigators, she asserted, because they could not understand the sexualized language that passes between queers (Ronell and Reitman are both gay). “The nature of the email exchange resonates with many queer academics, whose practices of queer intimacy are often baffling to outsiders,” she wrote. This reasoning echoed the philosopher Colin McGinn’s denial that he sent sexual overtures to one of his graduate students, saying he referred to masturbation in an email only to teach her the difference between “logical implication and conversational implicature.”
Yes, I know it’s getting funny. That’s why, in an earlier post about this scandal, I used the term “tragicomic.” Another Ronell defender, Slavoj Zizek — a person in all ways indistinguishable from Chauncey Gardiner — believes he has disposed of the power-corrupts essence of the case in this way:
To explain the accuser’s participation in the game with Avital through her position of power is ridiculous. If he effectively felt oppressed and harassed, there were ways of signalling this, which would have definitely not hurt his position.
This is the vacuously oracular Chauncey Gardiner with Lady Augusta Bracknell thrown in – the comedy lying in the clueless conviction that anything asserted by a person of … magnitude? … becomes true.
Livingstone again:
Furthermore, other former students have accused Ronell of abusive behavior, with one anonymous student accusing her of a variety of unethical practices on Facebook, including breaking her students’ self-esteem, humiliating them in front of others, then using the newly malleable student to do menial tasks for her, like folding her laundry. Andrea Long Chu, who was at one time Ronell’s teaching assistant, wrote on Twitter that the accusations track “100%” with Ronell’s “behavior and personality.”
So how surprised can we be by the obvious parallel with the brutal coaches also in the news lately? Same hierarchy, same closed ranks, same self-pleasuring abuse of subordinates. As I said in an earlier post, whether it comes from the most reactionary or the most revolutionary arm of the university, abuse of power would seem to be the constant, the name of the game. On the field of corrupt behavior, the coach, the Continental, and the cheering squad meet.
“If even one-quarter of what [Ronell’s accuser] describes … is true, it suggests a more intense, more extreme, more abusive instance of a pervasive imbalance of power in academe,” concludes Corey Robin.
Both – to their despair – find themselves headline news this week. And why? Because no matter how much divides us, sexual strangeness, and a kind of desperate emotional lostness/loneliness, unites us.
We all have access to these things – I mean, being sexually strange; and feeling, in a restless, panicky way, lost and alone – though if we’re lucky in life and love we may seldom experience them.
Smith – until recently a powerful, highly paid coach at Ohio State; and Ronell – a powerful, highly paid professor at NYU, seem to have experienced these things more acutely than most other people; more importantly, their sense of their invulnerability to punishment seems to have allowed them to behave with total abandon. Ronell is tenured; Smith and the famed OSU head coach, Urban Meyer, have a very close personal relationship. Ronell was found guilty of sexually harassing one of her graduate students; she had, with unaccountable stupidity, written down everything culpable she had done in emails. Smith took dick pics of himself in the White House and on the OSU campus and sent them to friends; he ordered large numbers of sex toys to be delivered to his university office, and openly boasted of sexual encounters in the same office with various subordinates.
In both cases as well, powerful friends of these powerful people protected and defended them, which is another whole scandal. In a just-filed lawsuit, Ronell’s graduate student has credibly claimed that Ronell’s associates
launched a widespread disinformation campaign against [Nimrod] Reitman, falsely accused him of, among other things, having waged a ‘malicious campaign’ against Ronell and having a ‘malicious intent,’ thereby further ruining his hopes for any future career in academia.
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Of course there are differences between these two. Zach Smith appears to be a complete mess: Along with what I have already described, he has been arrested for drunk driving; and his ex-wife accuses him of extensive and extreme domestic violence. Ronell is far from a mess; what she is, rather, despite her revolutionary self-presentation, is that saddest of traditional figures: An older woman whose self-regard convinces her she remains attractive to men. Ronell was helped along by countercultural ideology; Smith was helped along by a hypermasculine, alcoholic, risk-taking sports culture.
But under these two current tragicomic figures from the American university lies the same old same old: self-destruction.
It’s a perennial problem, most significant at our weaker colleges and universities, and one UD has covered for years. How does a school hire, let alone retain, let alone tenure, a dolt-maniac whose convictions – often shared in the classroom – are extraordinarily stupid as well as morally vile?
From the lot of them, UD looks back most vividly on Florida Atlantic University’s James Tracy (though Ward Churchill will always be a favorite with many), who decided that the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax, and that he was therefore free to harass the parents of the dead children for having taken part in it.
The answer to how a university could tenure an ostentatious degenerate is simple: Doesn’t care, doesn’t know, doesn’t read, doesn’t review, doesn’t. Mark of a bad school. No idea who the hell is teaching classes, and big deal.
Even worse: William Paterson University has known for decades about Mad Dog Magarelli (the moon landing was a hoax; the Germans not only didn’t kill Jews but saved many of their lives, etc.) and done virtually nothing.
It took an 18-year-old freshman to get things going on the guy. Recognizing both that he was a kook and that her university refused to do anything about him, she simply kept her head down, stayed in the course, videotaped him, and made the videos public. The resulting attention has embarrassed the university.
I guess. Maybe they’re beyond embarrassment and really truly forever do not care.
In which case, there’s only one thing to say. Let the buyer beware.
Once again, students must instruct professors on the gross negligence of failing to restrict/outlaw laptop use in their classes. This Northwestern University student nicely rehearses the by-now almost universally accepted arguments against laptop use in the classroom; he goes on to note that plenty of professors still don’t give a shit.
… has been murdered in his Brooklyn home, during what police think was a botched robbery.