XPost: school.teachers, ny.syr, alt.politics.obama
XPost: soc.women

Eminent intellectuals, including Judith Butler, have signed a
letter defending Avital Ronell, a renowned NYU professor accused
of sexually harassing a student. Critics say Ronell's supporters
are victim-blaming hypocrites

An unusual sexual-harassment case at New York University
involving two former Israelis is causing stormy debate in the
world of the humanities.

The uniqueness of the complaint – aside from the fact that both
principals are Israelis – lies in the gender-role reversal at
its center: The complainant is a man, a 30-year-old Ph.D.
student, and the person against whom he has filed his complaint
is a woman: Avital Ronell, 66, a world-renowned professor of
German and comparative literature at NYU.

However, the real twist in the story – which has magnified it
from a topic of departmental gossip into a huge controversy that
could have major repercussions in the academic world – is the
list of character witnesses for Ronell, about 50 eminent
intellectuals, among them some of today’s leading feminist
theoreticians. Their cries about a “witch hunt,” the call to
avoid a “kangaroo court” and the emphasis on the achievements of
the person said to be “the real victim in the story” are in many
ways identical to the automatic reactions sometime heard to the
accusations against men who are suspected of sexual harassment.
However, when the signers of a statement in support of the
accused are superstars like Judith Butler, the current high
priestess of gender studies, and Slavoj Zizek, the moral
conscience of international human rights and perhaps the world’s
most famous living philosopher – the shock waves are far more
powerful.

The complaint was filed in September at NYU’s Title IX office
(the name refers to the federal civil rights law that prohibits
discrimination on the basis of gender in federally funded
educational institutions), the university department that deals
with sexual harassment complaints. Insofar as is known, the
philosophy doctoral student designated as M. and Ronell had an
adviser-advisee relationship over a period of about five years.
M. was an admirer of Ronell and according to the complaint, for
her part she had a special affection for him, so much so that
the boundaries between the professional and the personal became
blurred.

It is known, for example, that Ronell hosted M. in Paris and
introduced him to writer Pierre Alféri, son of Ronell’s mentor
Jacques Derrida. The circumstances of the souring of the
relationship aren’t clear, nor is it known if it was gradual
process or if a single incident led to the rupture. People close
to Ronell have said the filing of the complaint came as a “total
shock” to her as there had been no hints that M. was about to
“turn on her.” They noted that Ronell was appalled to discover
that the complainant had accused her of “psychological abuse.”


Avital Ronell in 2014. From Deutsches Haus' Youtube Channel
Who’s the victim here?

It’s quite possible that the investigation of the complaint
would have remained confidential had it not been the
extraordinary letter colleagues of Ronell sent to the NYU
administration. In the May 11 missive addressed to university
president Andrew Hamilton and its provost, Katharine Fleming,
they wrote: “We have all seen her relationship with students,
and some of us know the individual who has waged this malicious
campaign against her We deplore the damage that this legal
proceeding causes her, and seek to register in clear terms our
objection to any judgment against her. We hold that the
allegations against her do not constitute actual evidence, but
rather support the view that malicious intention has animated
and sustained this legal nightmare.”

In the letter, Ronell is described as someone whose “influence
is felt throughout the humanities.” Her colleagues praised her
“intellectual power and fierce commitment to students and
colleagues,” calling her the perhaps the most “important figure
in literary studies at New York University.” Her colleagues also
warned: “If she were to be terminated or relieved of her duties,
the injustice would be widely recognized and opposed. The
ensuing loss for the humanities, for New York University, and
for intellectual life during these times would be no less than
enormous and would rightly invite widespread and intense public
scrutiny.”



Therefore, the group urged the administration to “approach this
material with a clear understanding of the long history of her
thoughtful and successive mentorship, the singular brilliance of
this intellectual, [and] the international reputation she has
rightly earned as a stellar scholar in her field.”

The letter was dated May 11. Two weeks ago, Brian Leiter, a
professor of philosophy and law at the University of Chicago Law
School, published the text of the letter in his blog, “Leiter
Reports.” He made his opinion of the intellectual giants’ rally
to Ronell’s side perfectly clear: “Blaming the victim is
apparently OK when the accused in a Title IX proceeding is a
feminist literary theorist,” was the headline of his post.
Alongside liberal critical voices that echo the values of the
#MeToo movement, rightist-conservative writers have swooped down
on the letter and a strange alliance has developed between the
two extremes.

At the ultra-right wing site Breitbart, they had a field day:
“It’s important to note that these scholars are the architects
behind most of the major women’s movements in America today.
These are the same movements that advocate for ‘always believing
victims’ of sexual assault. It seems, however, that they can not
consistently apply the principles they espouse when the person
on the receiving end is a colleague that they feel has been
wrongfully accused of misconduct.”



However, even without going into the specifics of the complaint,
it is impossible to ignore the irony of the way the letter
subverts the basic and accepted principles for handling
accusations of sexual harassment: Its authors vilify the
complainant, give great weight to the record of the individual
who is the subject of the complaint, and express their belief –
without providing any evidence for this – that the charge is a
false one.

Writer, translator and illustrator Shlomzion Kenan, who has
maintained a close friendship with Ronell ever since the latter
was her teacher many years ago at the European Graduate School,
takes a different view. She believes that the attempt to expose
the supposed hypocrisy of Butler and her feminist colleagues,
reveals the true motivation of those who are censuring them.

“To the best of my understanding,” said Kenan this week in a
telephone interview, “in this investigation [of Ronell], there
is no more than a disgusting perversion of the law, which occurs
in all revolutions when the dogmatists [the opponents of Butler,
et al] take matters into their own hands. There is no more
successful example of this than a targeted assassination of an
important feminist deconstructionist to dress an old pursuit in
new garb – once again they are hunting down the women and the
queers and this time on behalf of the new sexual McCarthyism.



“Leiter and his ilk say that this law [Title IX] is exactly the
same law the feminists have applied to the world. ‘By what right
do the feminists, of all people, aspire to be superior to it?
Now they are kicking the ball into their own goal and the #MeToo
movement is imploding.’ But that isn’t so. This is a kind of
persecution that reflects nothing but good old misogyny. Avital
is precluded from discussing the matter, and therefore she
cannot defend herself. It’s only natural that anyone who values
her intellectual integrity and her moral stance will devote
herself to her defense in this case. There is no privilege here
and no ‘field of power.’ Those who have always been in the field
of power remain there,” she says.

Dr. Ilan Safit, a visiting comparative literature scholar at NYU
and a friend of Ronell’s for two decades, also believes that
“there’s no intellectual hypocrisy here.” However, he
acknowledges that “the letter has not done a good service
because it implied the statement: ‘We know she is all right,
leave her alone,’ while the essential true statement at its base
was that on the basis of their long-standing personal
acquaintanceship with Avital, the accusations against her are
simply inconceivable.”


Slavoj Žižek, left, and Judth Butler. Getty Images / University
of California, Berkeley
There is now an initiative underway to send another letter to
NYU, this time from “the field.” The signatories of the second
letter will be students who have studied with Ronell over the
years and other academics whose names may not have the aura of
celebrity. Kenan says she is “in contact with former students of
Ronell’s, among them Ph.D. students at NYU, and all of them are
absolutely shocked by this story and are defending her. It isn’t
only intellectuals in power positions who are coming to her
defense, but also ‘ordinary’ students.”

Kenan prefers not to comment on the details of the complaint,
but she is convinced that Ronell did nothing wrong. She says: “I
am not familiar with the details but the sensible deduction is
that she is a good, warm and collegial person. It is untenable
that it is impossible to have friendly relations.”

“Avital is exceptional in her approach,” adds Safit, “and tends
to rebel against received opinions. She says things that are
supposedly not uttered in academia, like ‘You’re so wonderful’
and ‘I’ve missed you’ and ‘I love you.’ Her relationships are
always warm. And to people who don’t know her, this could appear
to be over the top. In any case, I’ve never had the impression
that she had crossed a line. Attributing sexual exploitation to
her sounds ridiculous to me.”

Another close associate of Ronell’s who is a partner to the
second letter initiative is Raphael Zagury-Orly, a philosopher
and the curator of the “Night of Philosophy” sponsored by the
French Institute and the Goethe Institut in Tel Aviv last month.
Zagury-Orly invited Ronell to participate in the event. When
asked this week about his impression of her state of mind during
her visit to Israel, he replied: “She is feeling terrible,
really terrible. This looks to me like quite a dirty story.
Apparently there’s some effort here to destroy her. In my
opinion, they are conducting a targeted assassination of someone
who built up the [German and comparative literature]
departments, devoting herself entirely for 30 years to bringing
the best scholars from Europe to New York.”

This automatic defense is disturbing.

“It’s not automatic. There are things we can’t talk about and
Avital herself can’t publish because of the legal prohibition.”

But even Ronell’s most devoted fans have a hard time coming up
with a more straightforward alternate explanation for the Ph.D.
student’s complaint. Nonetheless, they also perceive as
suspicious the thorough investigation the university is
conducting, the prolongation of which does not bode well for
Ronell.

One person who is close to her has offered what appears to be a
weak hypothesis to the effect that the university’s great zeal
in investigating the complaint stems from personnel changes at
the top of the institution. In this version, the current
administration is controlled by elements that have no great
sympathy for the humanities and would be glad to see the funding
for Ronell’s appointment cut and her salary omitted from the
payroll.

Her colleague and friend Safit suggests a more fundamental
explanation. “It has to do,” he says, “with the cultural
background of these times. Everything is in any case very
fragile in the United States and the general spirit is to accept
a complainant’s version as is. At NYU, they want to be ‘holier
than the pope.’ That is, to show that even though the
complainant here is a man and the complaint is about a woman,
and moreover one of our superstars – we will see to it that
justice is done.”

‘Eccentric relationships’

Avital Ronell is the only child of Evelyn and Paul Ronell, a
musician and a diplomat, respectively, who lived in Tel Aviv
until 1952. For her father, who immigrated from Germany, this
was a second marriage, after the death of his first wife when he
was a young father. Ronell has a half-brother and a nephew who
live in Israel and she spends lot of time with them on her
frequent visits to Israel. She spent her early childhood in
Prague, where her father was posted. After four years there, the
family moved to New York. The experience of immigration left a
deep mark on Ronell, who as a young girl was already taking part
in public protests against anti-Semitism and xenophobia. She
completed her bachelor’s degree at Middlebury College in
Vermont, and earned her doctorate in philosophy at Princeton.
She became close to French philosopher Jacques Derrida and
feminist theorist Hélène Cixous and studied with them in Paris.
From there she went on to the comparative literature department
at the University of California, Berkeley, where she lectured
alongside Jean-Luc Nancy and Judith Butler. She has been at New
York University since 1986. Among her fields of expertise are
continental philosophy, moral theory and feminist thought.

Some of her former students describe her as “an academic
lighthouse” and an “intellectual giant,” a combination of
endless erudition, mesmerizing rhetoric and charisma.


New York University. BLOOMBERG NEWS
“Her classes, even the big lecture courses, had a mystical
dimension and the feeling that you were part of some spiritual
apprenticeship experience,” said one of them this week. Ronell’s
unusual appearance – a prickly hairdo, a tendency to wear dark
colors and her fondness for using yoga terminology – have added
another exceptional dimension and the intimate seminars she gave
often brought to mind a religious convocation of sorts. She
gathered around her a coterie of admirers, with some of whom she
conducted “eccentric relationships,” as the former student said.
These were manifested, for example, in small dinners to which
her favorite students were invited.

Thus, notwithstanding the powerful demonstration of support that
Butler, Zizek and others organized to express shock at the
attempt to besmirch Ronell, not everyone in the small world of
academic German studies in Europe and the United States was
surprised by the publication of her name in such contexts. On a
number of Facebook pages where the affair is being discussed,
there are those who say that the mixing of the professional and
the personal is a known tendency of hers, and has been evident
for years. A well-known professor of humanities who remembers
Ronell from the early days of her university career, though he
was not in her class, relates: “The talk was always about very
non-standard relationships, but not of a sexual hue or
inappropriate contexts. I’m talking about phoning at very
strange times of day, asking for unusual things and creating
some sort of dependency relationship.

“We know the typecasting of men taking advantage of this
closeness for an affair or a sexual connection, but in academia
there is also a female version of this and its manifestations
are sometimes different,” adds the professor. “She would bring
into her orbit certain male and female students, nurture them
and sometimes this would end in bitter disappointment. There was
a pattern there of becoming close and then an explosion.’”

The narrative of becoming close followed by an explosion is a
good description of the case of M. Five years ago, when he began
to send out feelers about working with Ronell, there were those
who warned him of the unconventional relationships she tended to
develop with her students. These warnings quickly turned out to
be prescient. “The relationship was very intense from the get-
go,” says one of M.’s friends. “At first she complimented him
and he sought this closeness, until at some point it became
oppressive and he began to suffer.”

Though the internal investigation at NYU is continuing, at least
officially, in recent weeks Ronell has been telling people close
to her that she thinks the university is leaning toward a
decision to sack her.

“She’s had very uncomfortable meetings with [university]
lawyers, who implied a very clear message of ‘We’re coming to
get you,’” relates Safit. In any case, he notes, despite the
feeling that the deal is done, Ronell is determined to fight to
the very end. “She doesn’t have any alternative because even if
NYU comes along and tells her, ‘You’ve ended your career here,’
there is her reputation. It is untenable that 40 years of a
career go down the drain. For what? What they are doing to her
is real violence.”

Avital Ronell has told Haaretz: “In response to your inquiry
regarding my involvement in a Title IX inquiry at NYU, suffice
it to say that this has been an isolated, difficult, draining
and exhausting experience for me. Although it raises a host of
issues, legal, ethical, political, gender and identity among
them, it is not an experience I want to revisit.”

The complainant, M., has said that he is precluded from
responding in the matter, as the inquiry process is still
underway. Slavoj Zizek and Judith Butler did not respond to
queries from Haaretz. John Beckman, a spokesman for NYU, did not
respond to detailed questions and confined him to a general
statement: “We cannot comment specifically; generally, I can say
that NYU is committed – as it carries out its responsibilities
to prevent, reduce and respond to sexual misconduct – to
respecting the rights and dignity of all involved and to
ensuring the fairness of the process.”

Fire the lesbian.

Any heterosexual would be fired by now.

https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-when-top- feminists-defend-a-scholar-accused-of-sexual-harassment-1.6221047
 

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