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

Updated (8/16/2018, 10:50 a.m.) with comment from Diane Davis
and students. Updated (8/15/2018, 8:57 p.m.) with comment from
Judith Butler.

When word broke that Avital Ronell, a professor of German and
comparative literature at New York University, had been
suspended for sexually harassing a male graduate student,
skeptics of the #MeToo movement pounced.

Here, they argued, was a case of feminist hypocrisy: a female
scholar, influential in her field, whose sexually charged
behavior with her student, 30 years her junior, was spelled out
in cringeworthy detail in a leaked Title IX report. A set of
allies, many associated with feminist theory, who had drafted a
letter in her defense that questioned the motives of her
accuser. A woman found responsible for verbally and physically
harassing a graduate student advisee over three years being held
up in that letter as beyond reproach.

But as details of Ronell’s relationship with her advisee, Nimrod
Reitman, emerged this week, some pushed back against the
narrative that feminist scholars were circling the wagons to
protect one of their own.

Even scholars who have made a career out of analyzing power and
its corrosive effects will circle the wagons when one of their
own are implicated. Disappointed in the lack of consistency.
#AvitalRonell https://t.co/UEV4DRe5tk

— Dillon Sampson (@Dillon_sampson) August 14, 2018

Rebecca Schuman ??
?
@pankisseskafka
The Avital Ronell scandal has no winners. Intellectual-haters
will crow over the hypocrisy and use it to further demean Title
IX. But defending her is indefensible.

3:26 AM - Aug 14, 2018
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In social-media posts and heated discussions, many scholars and
observers seemed to agree that the Ronell case is somehow
telling. But they disagreed over what it means: Were Title IX
and the #MeToo movement being hijacked in a way that hurt women?
Or was the incident just another illustration that anyone who
has been victimized, regardless of their gender or sexual
orientation, deserves the protection that gender-equity law and
anti-harassment campaigns afford?

Even after Ronell’s sanction was confirmed this week, it was
that draft letter written on her behalf, which first circulated
in June, that remained at the center of the discussion. The
note, signed by dozens of prominent scholars, was dated May 11
and addressed to NYU’s president and provost. It urged that
Ronell be given a "fair hearing," cited her academic
credentials, and said she might have already been damaged by the
proceedings. The backlash was swift: Critics accused the
signatories of creating a double standard for a woman accused of
sexual harassment and of unfairly maligning the victim.

"Feminists aren’t a monolith," tweeted Dana Bolger, a founder of
Know Your IX, an organization that advocates for victims of
gender-based violence, on Tuesday.


Dana Bolger
@danabolger
A few thoughts on this piece. First, it should go without
saying that the quality of somebody's scholarship has absolutely
nothing to do with whether they harass their students. Period. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/13/nyregion/sexual-harassment- nyu-female-professor.html …

7:11 AM - Aug 14, 2018
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The views of the scholars who wrote the letter on Ronell’s
behalf "shouldn’t be attributed to every feminist everywhere,
many of whom vehemently disagree with them," she wrote.

Beatrice Louis, an international lawyer, went further, writing
that "the scholars who have signed a letter supporting Professor
Ronell are sabotaging the plight of victims and the #metoo
movement in ways that are truly reprehensible."

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"There is nothing in feminist thought, activism, or belief that
justifies this terrible overture of support to an accused person
who seems to have been afforded due process," she wrote.

‘Blaming the Victim’
The case exploded into the news this week when word broke that
Ronell, 66, had been suspended for a year without pay after
being found responsible for sexually harassing her former
advisee. Reitman, who is now 34, is a visiting fellow at Harvard
University. He filed a Title IX complaint against Ronell two
years after graduating from NYU with a Ph.D.

Excerpts from the Title IX report obtained by The New York Times
and later by The Chronicle described Ronell repeatedly kissing
and touching him and calling him pet names like "baby love
angel," "cock-er spaniel," and "awesome warrior angel."

Reitman said she demanded that he use equally over-the-top
language in addressing her. When he refused to go along with her
requests, he said, she retaliated against him by refusing to
return his emails or review his work.

He said the advances, which he described as unwanted, started in
her Paris apartment in 2012, before she became his doctoral
adviser, and continued over the next three years — in his
apartment, in private work sessions, and at public conferences.
He said she pressured him to sleep in the same bed, pressing
against him, and at one point put his hand on her breasts.
Complicating the situation is that Reitman identifies as gay and
Ronell as queer.

In May, NYU found Ronell responsible for sexual harassment and
suspended her for the coming year. The monthslong probe found
that her conduct was "sufficiently pervasive to alter the terms
and conditions of Mr. Reitman’s learning environment."

The Title IX investigation cleared her of other charges,
including sexual assault and stalking.

The punishment wasn’t publicly announced at the time, and it
might have gone largely unnoticed if it weren’t for the letter
written on her behalf, which was obtained and published by a
philosophy blog.

"We testify to the grace, the keen wit, and the intellectual
commitment of Professor Ronell and ask that she be accorded the
dignity rightly deserved by someone of her international
standing and reputation," the letter stated. It also appeared to
impugn Reitman, though without naming him: "Some of us know the
individual who has waged this malicious campaign against her."

Brian Leiter, a professor at the University of Chicago’s law
school, published the letter on his blog in a sharply critical
post.

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"Blaming the victim is apparently OK when the accused in a Title
IX proceeding is a feminist literary theorist," he wrote.

The first signatory of the letter was Judith Butler, a
nationally renowned professor of critical theory and comparative
literature at the University of California at Berkeley who is
president-elect of the Modern Language Association. In an email
late Wednesday, she said she had some regrets about the wording
of the letter, which she said had been written in haste by a
group of authors.

"We ought not to have attributed motives to the complainant,
even though some signatories had strong views on this matter,"
Butler wrote. "And we should not have used language that implied
that Ronell’s status and reputation earn her differential
treatment of any kind."

When the letter was written, Butler said, the group understood
that the Title IX investigation had been completed and that
Ronell had been cleared of the most serious charges against her.

"When we learned that termination of employment was under
consideration, we were bewildered by the severity of this
possible sanction," Butler wrote. "It seemed incommensurate with
what we understood at that time to be the investigation’s
outcome. We did not have access to the file or the findings, nor
were we fully apprised of the facts of the case."

With the new revelations from the leaked Title IX report, others
who viewed the controversy as evidence of feminist hypocrisy
weighed in. Among them was Christina Hoff Sommers, a scholar
with the American Enterprise Institute, who tweeted that the
letter "echoed the defenses of male harassers."


Christina Sommers
?
@CHSommers
Oh no! Mr. Reitman accused his former N.Y.U. grad school
adviser, Avital Ronell, of sexually harassing him, & NYU found
her responsible. But some leading feminist scholars have
supported her in ways that echo the defenses of male harassers.
#metoo https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/13/nyregion/sexual- harassment-nyu-female-professor.html …

8:18 PM - Aug 13, 2018
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‘Eccentricities’ or Worse?
In The New York Times, Reitman’s lawyer, Donald Kravet, said
that he had drafted, but not yet decided whether to file, a
lawsuit against both Ronell and NYU. In a written statement on
Tuesday, John Beckman, an NYU spokesman, defended the
university’s handling of the matter.

"When Nimrod Reitman first came to NYU’s Title IX office — two
years after he graduated — the staff there took his reports of
sexual misconduct very seriously and conducted a thorough
investigation that concluded that he was, in fact, the victim of
sexual harassment," the statement reads.

As a result, Ronell has been suspended from the university, and
any future meetings she has with students must be supervised, he
says. The university is also examining Reitman’s subsequent
claims of retaliation, and any violations found could result in
extra sanctions.

The statement goes on to say that the threatened lawsuit
Reitman’s lawyer has drawn up is unwarranted.

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"We have tried to work with Mr. Reitman to help him put this
unfortunate chapter behind him, and we are sympathetic to what
he has been through. However, given the promptness, seriousness,
and thoroughness with which we responded to his charges, we do
not believe that his filing a multi-million dollar lawsuit
against the university would be warranted or just."

RELATED CONTENT
Scholars’ Defense of Ronell Feels Eerily Familiar PREMIUM
Letter Defending Ronell Draws Criticism
Ronell did not respond to a request for comment; she has said in
the past that she is bound by a confidentiality agreement with
the university not to discuss her case. However, in an email to
The New York Times, she denied harassing her former student.

"Our communications — which Reitman now claims constituted
sexual harassment — were between two adults, a gay man and a
queer woman, who share an Israeli heritage, as well as a
penchant for florid and campy communications arising from our
common academic backgrounds and sensibilities," she wrote.
"These communications were repeatedly invited, responded to, and
encouraged by him over a period of three years."

Emails sent by The Chronicle to more than a dozen of the pro-
Ronell letter’s signatories went unanswered or were met this
week with no comment. But in June, one of the highest-profile
signatories publicly defended his support of Ronell, writing
that he knew what she was being accused of and found the charges
"utterly ridiculous."

"Avital definitely is a type of her own," Slavoj Žižek, a
Slovenian philosopher, wrote. "In short, she is a walking
provocation for a stiff Politically Correct inhabitant of our
academia, a ticking bomb just waiting to explode."

He argued that the professor’s "eccentricities" are all on the
surface. "There is nothing sleazy hidden beneath her affected
behaviour, in contrast to quite a few professors that I know who
obey all the Politically Correct rules while merrily screwing
students or playing obscene power games with all the dirty moves
such games involve."

To many scholars, and some detractors outside academe, Ronell’s
behavior can’t be explained away as eccentricities. A close
friend of Reitman’s lawyer lambasted Ronell and her defenders in
a blog post.

Scott H. Greenfield, a lawyer, wrote that if Ronell had been a
male professor who sexually abused a female student, "he would
have been immediately fired and his career obliterated to the
deafening cheers of feminist academia."

"Forget the jargonized rhetoric about power dynamics and
oppression," Greenfield wrote. "To these feminist scholars,
Title IX is just a bludgeon to beat men into submission, and
they fought to protect one of their own from facing the
consequences of her sexual abuse."

Among those who signed the letter defending Ronell was Joan W.
Scott, a professor emerita in the School of Social Science at
the Institute for Advanced Study. She told The Chronicle in June
that the investigation was "an example of a kind of misuse or
abuse of Title IX."

On Tuesday, she bemoaned the fact that the Title IX report had
been leaked. "My only comment is that the leak really taints any
future Title IX process," she wrote in an email. "No one can be
confident that confidentiality will be respected — at NYU and
anywhere else."

Another signatory, Diane Davis, chair of the department of
rhetoric at the University of Texas at Austin, echoed Scott’s
concerns about the case in an email to the The New York Times.

"I am of course very supportive of what Title IX and the #MeToo
movement are trying to do, of their efforts to confront and to
prevent abuses, for which they also seek some sort of justice,"
the newspaper quoted her as writing. "But it’s for that very
reason that it’s so disappointing when this incredible energy
for justice is twisted and turned against itself, which is what
many of us believe is happening in this case."

In an email to The Chronicle on Thursday, Davis wrote that the
truncated version of her statement about Title IX that had
appeared in the Times gave a misleading impression of her views.
In between the two sentences that were quoted, she had written
the following, which makes it clear, she said, that she feels
Title IX protections should apply to anyone who is abused.

"I stand with — I mean, obviously — every male, female,
transgender, and nonbinary victim of abuse, sexual or otherwise,
inside or outside of the academy," her statement read. "I’m
relieved, and we should all be relieved that cultures of abuse
are finally being aggressively exposed and challenged
everywhere."

The letter she signed wasn’t the only one written on Ronell’s
behalf. In May, 130 of Ronell’s current and former students
submitted a petition to the university’s president and provost
praising her as a "kind, thoughtful, and caring" teacher and
mentor. Losing her, the statement said, would be "an absolute
calamity for our scholarship and for the humanities at large."

Fuck the bitch. Fire her ass.

https://www.chronicle.com/article/New-Disclosures-About-an-
NYU/244278
 

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