Scholars’ Defense of an Accused Colleague Feels Eerily Familiar Except for One Thing: Her Gender

When Lisa Anderson read the letter describing a “malicious campaign” by an alleged sexual-harassment victim against an esteemed literary theorist at New York University, it brought her back to a time she says she’d rather forget.

It was 2004, and she was a 25-year-old graduate student whose accusations against a prominent professor had earned her the wrath of his colleagues.

The allegation — that Dragan Kujundzic, a professor of Russian studies, had raped her just days after she started as his advisee at the University of California at Irvine — rocked the critical-theory world.

A university investigator would eventually conclude that their sexual encounters were consensual but that Kujundzic had violated a recently enacted systemwide policy banning intimate relationships between faculty members and students they supervised.

Kujundzic was demoted and banned from campus without pay for two semesters. The punishment was meted out despite the intervention of a famous French philosopher whose rock-star reputation had drawn Anderson to Irvine. Jacques Derrida wrote a scathing letter shortly before his death on behalf of his friend and colleague in which he questioned Anderson’s presumed “innocence” (the word was in quotes in his letter to Irvine’s then-chancellor) and asked what right she had to initiate proceedings against such a well-respected scholar.

“It’s like being respected in the field is mutually exclusive with sexual assault, and it’s not true,” says Anderson, who dropped out of graduate school amid the swirl of questions and recriminations and became a lawyer. She’s now the executive director of Atlanta Women for Equality, which offers free legal advice to low-income women and girls facing sex discrimination.

The case that brought the past tumbling back into view involved a letter written last month on behalf of Avital Ronell, a professor of German and comparative literature at New York University. The scholar is under investigation by NYU’s Title IX office, according to the letter, a version of which was leaked to Brian Leiter, a professor of law at the University of Chicago who posted a link to it on his widely read blog about philosophy,

“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 states. It also says “some of us know the individual who has waged this malicious campaign against her.”

Ronell told The Chronicle that she was bound by confidentiality rules not to discuss the specifics of any complaint against her.

Anderson has contacted NYU, offering to represent Ronell’s accuser at no cost. “I’m worried about the complainant in this case because I know what it’s like,” Anderson says. “Despite #MeToo and all the progress that’s been made, these people will still circle around their friends and try to silence survivors.”

The first signatory on the letter defending Ronell was a name familiar to Anderson. Back in 2004, Judith Butler, a professor of critical theory and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley also wrote a letter outlining what she said was widespread opposition to the sexual-harassment policy used to discipline Kujundzic. The opposition, Butler wrote, was based on concerns that “draconian punishments” could be meted out against professors based on ambiguous encounters between consenting adults.

To Anderson, whose case Butler appeared to be referencing, the message Butler was sending in her letter and a petition she signed was clear: The university should back off from disciplining a rapist. Anderson wrote as much in a message Leiter posted on his blog.

Kujundzic is now a professor of Jewish, Germanic, and Slavic Studies at the University of Florida. Danuta Tuszynska, who represented him during the investigation of Anderson’s accusation, wrote in an email on Tuesday that “their extremely brief relationship was consensual, not rape” and that Anderson had testified as such.

Anderson disputes that account, saying her adviser used his authority over her to coerce her into engaging in sex acts with him. It began, she says, right after he met her at a reception for new students in September 2003 and invited her back to his apartment to view photos of Moscow. According to court records, he kissed and groped her after pressuring her to share three bottles of Transylvanian wine.

Threat by Derrida

The controversy exploded onto the national scene after the Los Angeles Times reported that Derrida had threatened to withhold the remainder of his scholarly papers he had promised the university if it sanctioned Kujundzic, who he said was already suffering from dramatic weight loss and depression over the investigation.

“When there has been neither any coercion or violence brought to bear on her, nor any attack (moreover very improbable!) on the presumed ‘innocence’” of someone in her mid-20s, “where does she find the grounds, how can she claim to have the right to initiate such a serious procedure and to put in motion such a weighty juridico-academic bureaucracy against a respectable and universally respected professor?” Derrida wrote.

He added that “if a sanction of whatever sort were allowed to sully both his honor and the honor of the university, I would sadly be obliged to put an end, immediately, to all my relations with UCI.”

The way Anderson read the resulting backlash, much of which was splashed across a publicly available website: “It was like Derrida was fighting injustice from this hysterical woman who was making things up and jeopardizing the archives.”

A close friend and classmate of hers at the time, Brook Haley, wrote in an email that Anderson called him after her first encounter with her adviser, describing “what sounded as if she had tried to find a way to comply with his advances without having sex with him.” Haley says he told her that wasn’t normal — it was sexual harassment. He says he noticed her “disillusionment in watching professors she had respected close ranks to defend Dragan or at least quash the fallout.”

Some have suggested that the scholars’ intervention at both Irvine and NYU are based on the assumption that certain people are above reproach based on their prestige or reputation. Butler, who defended both accused professors, says she doesn’t think that scholars should be protected from complaints based on their accomplishments or reputations but that everyone deserves due-process protections.

“Like many others right now, I worry that allegations are quickly accepted as proof of guilt prior to any process that allows for evidence to be presented and considered,” she wrote in an email to The Chronicle. “Sexual harassment is real and pervasive, and so it is all the more important that we know what we mean by that term, and that we have fair ways to adjudicate allegations and guarantee due process so that we can all have confidence in the procedures.”

Cases should be handled in a way that respect the dignity of everyone involved, wrote Butler, who is slated to become president of the Modern Language Association in 2020. Talking or writing about these cases can be hard when investigations require confidentiality and speculation is rampant.

Her concerns are widely shared. In 2016, the American Association of University Professors issued a report warning about the potential for Title IX abuses.

But what some view as a reasonable plea to treat a scholar fairly in the face of potentially career-damaging allegations strikes others as bullying.

In an email on Tuesday, Leiter said he was struck by the similarity between the Derrida letter and the one on behalf of Ronell. “What’s really striking here is that, when these folks think they are operating out of the public eye, they do not hesitate ‘to pull rank’ as a defense to allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct, nor do they hesitate to belittle, or in the case of the Butler letter, directly attack the complainant,” he wrote. “I suppose what has generated so much interest and shock here is that so many of those involved profess to be feminists, but at the same time are doing exactly what every ‘high status’ male has tried to do when facing accusations of misconduct.” Butler declined to respond.

Leiter’s biting critiques of those in his profession, including a disparaging reference to theory scholars in his most recent blog posts, have made him a polarizing figure. In ruminating about his recent posts, Jennifer Doyle, a professor of English at the University of California at Riverside, calls his blog unreliable. She says that it’s not uncommon for scholars to be asked to write statements on behalf of colleagues who are under investigation but that publishing the document was “hurtful” to everyone involved in the case.

Correction (6/20/2018, 12:29 p.m.): This article originally misspelled the surname of a professor at the University of California at Irvine 14 years ago who is now a professor at the University of Florida. He is Dragan Kujundzic, not Kujundrzic. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.

Update (6/20/2018, 11:05 a.m.): A response by Avital Ronell has been added to this article.

Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.