Has Tenure Become an Instrument of Intimidation?

Among the challenges to the future of the humanities in this moment — and there are many — the most insidious is a growing lack of trust between senior faculty members and younger scholars. The cause of this unnecessary breakdown in collegiality is not merely or exclusively an uncertain job market. Rather, it is the result of a longtime culture of intimidation and harassment, in which veteran academics treat students and junior faculty members in discourteous, exploitative, and threatening ways.

The top-down bullying can show itself in sometimes unexpected manners. Consider a fall-2019 comp-lit offering in New York University’s course catalog. “Unsettled Scores: Theories of Grievance, Stuckness, and Boundary Troubles” promises to analyze, critically, those “confined within a grievance culture.” The course seems to argue that it is individuals’ secret internalization of institutional structures — for instance, those of the prison system — that causes the scapegoating of other persons, particularly those who are inclined to go against the grain by speaking and acting freely. All of this takes on a more sinister hue considering that the course is to be taught by Avital Ronell.

I received my Ph.D. from New York University’s department of comparative literature, and although I avoided Ronell while a student there, I watched with a mixture of nausea and recognition as the details of her behavior toward one of her former graduate students came to light last summer.

One has the unsettling sense that those who enroll in Ronell’s course this fall will be instructed that their boundaries should be discarded, lest they hamper anyone’s freedom, academic or otherwise. I can’t say for certain that it will also serve as a series of self-lionizing speaking engagements. But as Andrea Long Chu has pointed out in a tweet, the texts listed are the same texts Ronell has taught for years. Indeed, it is hard to keep from reading a theme of revenge into the title of a course that purports to be about “unsettled scores.” “Prepare to be blown away!” the course catalog promises — or perhaps warns. Some things you just can’t make up.

Over the summer, a letter written in support of Ronell appeared online. It referred to her “grace,” “keen wit,” and “intellectual commitment,” while threatening a coup by professors sympathetic to Ronell, should she face disciplinary action. “If she were to be terminated or relieved of her duties, the injustice would be widely recognized and opposed,” the writers cautioned. I had studied with two of its signers — Emily Apter and John Hamilton — and was disturbed to realize, in reading the language there, that they were capable of viewing graduate students as potential liabilities, “malicious” actors who would knowingly attempt to do harm to their instructors. The letter’s best-known signatory, Judith Butler, has since issued an apology, in which she lists, with accuracy if without enthusiasm, this document’s ethical flaws.

Apter, chair of the department in the fall of 2018, has, as far as I can tell, issued no such apology, nor, for that matter, a public response of any kind. The letter was thoughtless and cavalier, but, more important, it has given graduate students a view into their instructors’ true regard. It shows that claims of harassment are not taken seriously within the academy, especially not by departments and administrations. Claims of harassment are, in fact, seen as grounds for coordinated reprisal. I can’t imagine that anyone who has read this letter will feel it possible, for example, to report an incident of harassment or assault at NYU to its signatories.

Intimidation and harrassment are not mere matters of semantics, even when words are involved. In the beginning, I was lucky. As an undergraduate at Harvard University, I had only once what I will term “an unusual exchange” with a professor, and it occurred, of all times and all places, during class. We were at the seminar table, and, coming to a point he wished to emphasize, the professor reached over and squeezed the top of my shoulder, near my neck. I can remember the shirt I was wearing: pink, with what I believe is called a boat neck. The professor had taken hold of a handful of my skin, which he proceeded to knead. A weird, shrill voice emerged: “Don’t touch me!”

“What?” yelped the professor.

“Please don’t touch me,” I repeated, somewhat more evenly. Other members of the class were studiously attempting to find something else to look at.

“Jesus, Lucy!” the professor exclaimed, laughing.

Of course, things were different once I became a graduate student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, an institution hardly noted for its friendliness to women. There was the professor who, in a close reading of a poem I had written about going for a walk near a construction site, interpreted a mention of scaffolding — elaborately, I might add — as an allegory for a sex act. This occurred during office hours, behind a closed door.

There was the professor who asked if I knew anyone he might “date,” after explaining, in a booth at a bar, that he regularly “dated” his students.

At NYU, there was the professor who enjoyed dropping the V-word (not “victory”) during his office hours. There were also the two professors who suggested that I drop out of the doctoral program when I went to them to ask for help. “I can’t believe how tough it still is for women in the academy!” one of them mused, after I related my story, as if he were watching a televised melodrama. (This was still years before the #MeToo movement.)

There was the distinguished professor who had pushed a friend of mine into a corner during a party and forced her to kiss him, whose actions I then described to the two professors urging me to drop out.

“This department has a problem,” I told them.

“Oh, everyone knows about [the distinguished professor]!” cried one of my two interlocutors, as if my remark was beyond naïve.

“Does The New York Times know about [the distinguished professor]?” I asked.

After this, no one spoke again about the possibility of my leaving the program.

I struggled to write a dissertation and handed in a draft-like document in order to exit the program with a degree by any means possible. I no longer communicate with anyone in the department other than my dissertation adviser because I have faced so much hostility there. Despite having published a well-received novel with a major press and having won a prestigious grant for my writing, I have made few attempts to obtain full-time employment at a university. Although I love teaching, what I saw in my professors’ behavior while a graduate student has resulted in a genuine fear of the profession. I am intimidated. For whatever such a statement can be worth, this is the truth.

Tenure, originally designed to ensure academics freedom of inquiry and expression, now serves an additional purpose: as a blunt political and economic instrument, wielded to intimidate students and evade administrative censure. We can infer that Ronell’s continued presence at NYU is due in part to her colleagues’ reluctance to see the spell of tenure dissolve under popular scrutiny, and perhaps in part to the university’s reluctance to expend resources in a potential legal battle resulting from a decision to fire her. But these are shortsighted reasons for ignoring Ronell’s actions, along with those of numerous other professors who mistreat students and colleagues.

The cynical thinking of bullying or harassing professors (and of the powerful senior professors who defend them) may go something like this: Given the troubled job market, the loss of a few current students to psychological and sexual intimidation is no big deal. It might even save them a few instances of having to confront their advisees’ joblessness after graduation.

Perhaps the cynical instructors I mention, some of whom are inheritors of critical traditions that have enshrined relativism in their interpretive strategies in ways that are coming to be seen as increasingly politically problematic, do believe that their lack of care is a matter of little importance. Camille Paglia’s recent contentions about sexual assault are yet another example of intimidation being handed down from a position of institutional power, disguised as an expert opinion.

Younger professors who have recently participated in the job-application process and graduate students in the humanities should organize to address these matters. This is a question of labor, and it is a question of fairness within institutions. It also concerns the future of the humanities. Look at the evidence. Do you believe that university administrations will do much to address the problems caused by growing inequalities and an increasingly out-of-touch generation of older scholars who seem — tragically and unaccountably — to have little interest in making the spaces in which they teach more just? I do not.

Lucy Ives is a novelist and critic. She holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from New York University and an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is most recently the author of Loudermilk: Or, the Real Poet; Or, the Origin of the World, a novel.