The Unsexy Truth About the Avital Ronell Scandal

In the early months of #MeToo, Melissa Gira Grant wrote one of the best pieces to come out of the movement. She described being sexually harassed by her boss, an editor at a magazine, who’d send her late-night texts expressing his desire for her. The most terrible part of the harassment, she said, was not the sexting. It was the exhaustion she felt, the sense of depletion, as she tried and tried, and tried again, to manage this man’s attention and demands. How to respond to late-night texts in a way that would rebuff him without jeopardizing her position at the magazine? How to be available for the work without making herself available to the harassment? How to do all of this with some semblance of grace and repose, without losing all confidence that his interests in her had at least something to do with the quality of her work?

I’ve thought about that article as I’ve followed the Avital Ronell story. Particularly once I read the 56-page lawsuit that Nimrod Reitman has filed against Ronell and New York University. None of the accounts I have read thus far — not pieces in The New York Times or The Chronicle, Ronell’s response to Reitman’s charges, or the multiple commentaries on the story — gets at what I think is the substance of the issue.

The question of sex, of Ronell’s work and stature in academe, of literary theory or critical theory or the academic left, of the supposed hypocrisy of the scholars who rallied to her side, of the fact that the alleged harasser is a woman and gay while the alleged victim is a man and gay — all of this, if one reads Reitman’s complaint, seems a little beside the point. And has, I think, clouded the fundamental issue. Or issues.

What’s clear from the complaint is just how much energy and attention — both related and unrelated to academic matters — Ronell demanded of Reitman, her student. At all hours of the night, across three continents, on email, phone, Skype, in person, on campus, on other campuses (Ronell berates Reitman when he does not accompany her to the weekly lectures she is giving at Princeton that semester; according to Reitman, she even punishes him for this act of desertion, removing him from a conference she was organizing and at which he had been slated to present), in apartments, classrooms, hallways, offices, subway stations (there are multiple scenes at the Astor Place stop, with Ronell either insisting on walking Reitman to the train or keeping him on the phone until he gets on the train), and elsewhere. It’s almost as if Reitman could have no life apart from her. Indeed, according to the complaint, when Reitman had visitors — a member of his family, a friend — Ronell protested their presence, seemingly annoyed that Reitman should attend to other people in his life, that he had other people in his life. That really is the harassment: the claims she thought she could make on him simply because he was her advisee.

Depending on whom you believe, Ronell’s claims on Reitman may or may not have been for sex, but the sex was only one part of the harassment. Ronell’s largest claims were on his time, on his life, on his attention and energy, well beyond the legitimate demands of an adviser on an advisee.

The issue of sex always clouds these discussions. One side focuses on the special violation that is supposed to be sexual harassment; the other side (including many feminists) accuses the first of puritanism and sex panic. Try as they might, neither side ever gets beyond the sex.

The power of Gira Grant’s piece is that she does. There’s a danger in downplaying the sexual element of harassment: Harassers choose sex as the instrument of their power for a reason, which we would be foolish to overlook. But the value of Gira Grant’s move is that it connects sexual harassment to other forms of harassment and to broader issues of domination, which are pervasive in the academy and in the workplace. It also shows how, on even a fully emancipatory account of sex, the harm of the harassment remains. As Gira Grant writes:

Try for a moment to forget the sexual or erotic elements of what Reitman is claiming Ronell did to him. Think instead of the proverbial professor who has his graduate student pick up his dry cleaning or the boss who has his secretary buy a gift for his wife’s birthday. Even though Ronell never did any of those things — her alleged demands were more personal, and perhaps for that reason, more unsettling — those types of stories give us a better sense of what Reitman is claiming to have endured.

Reitman’s is a complaint from the alleged victim, so it’s only one side of the story. It is a lawsuit, a set of allegations, which have yet to be proven in court. We can’t take them as definitively true. But there are multiple emails quoted in it, not just from Ronell, but also from Reitman to other people at the time (the sort of evidence we look for in these cases), over a period of many years, documenting what he claims to have occurred. And Ronell’s strongest counter-claim — that she can cite emails from Reitman showing him using the same type of erotically charged language that she uses, so this was all consensual and shared and welcome — is undermined by the fact that Reitman cites emails from her where she demands that he use that language, and reprimands him when he fails to do so.

Hanging over all of these exchanges, unmentioned, is the question of power. This is a grad student trying to make his way in an institution where everything depends on the good (or bad) word of his adviser.

The precinct of the academy in which this story occurs prides itself on its understanding of power. Unfortunately, that understanding is often not extended to the faculty’s dealings with graduate students, where power can be tediously, almost comically, simple. Cross your adviser in any way, and that can be the end of your career.

At various points Reitman tried to get out of Ronell’s thrall. When it became clear what her mentorship would require of him, he tried in vain to contact Yale, to see if they would allow him to enroll despite his earlier rejection of their offer. Alas, the head of admissions in the German department was Ronell’s close friend, so Reitman couldn’t pursue that avenue further without risking her finding out and sabotaging his plans. When Reitman reached out to the vice provost at NYU, several times, he came up against the fact that the administrator had come from Ronell’s department. Rather than reporting the incident, as he was legally required to do, the vice provost encouraged Reitman to stay away from Ronell: She was “like a halogen light,” the complaint has the vice provost telling Reitman; get too close and you might find yourself “seriously burned.”

Unable to escape his adviser, whose reach — like that of many illustrious scholars — extended everywhere, Reitman did what a lot of people do in this situation: He made the best of it. He sucked up, he tried to carve out some space for himself whenever and wherever he could, he tried to preserve the relationship on terms she would find acceptable and he could live with, hoping for the day when he would no longer need her. And through it all, it seems, he continued to believe in her value as an adviser and scholar, and said so. Despite the harassment, in other words, he felt ambivalent about her, not always hostile, sometimes affectionate and well-disposed to her — again, not unlike many people who have been in these positions.

In her various responses to the case, Ronell implies that people on the outside of these relationships don’t understand the shared language, the common assumptions, the culture of queer and camp (and of being Israeli, which both she and Reitman are). As soon as she went there, my antenna went up. It reminded me of communitarians in the 1980s and 1990s, who made similar arguments about local cultures, that people outside of them don’t understand the internal meanings of the specific codes and customs, particularly when those codes and customs are oppressive toward women or gays and lesbians or people of color, that people on the outside don’t understand how differently that oppressiveness might read to someone on the inside. And it also reminded me of Judith Shklar’s admonition to the communitarians: Before you buy the story of shared codes and customs, make sure to hear from the people on the lower rungs, when they are far away from the higher rungs, to see how shared that code truly is.

I have no doubt that Ronell believed, at times, that the language she used was shared. People in positions of power, abusing that power, often believe that. (Reitman cites emails from Ronell suggesting she knew how unwelcome her attention and demands were, but rather than backing off, it only seemed to inspire her to double down on her behavior.) But there is enough evidence cited in his complaint — not post-hoc, manufactured after the fact to justify Reitman’s position now, but emails and voice messages apparently sent at the time — to suggest that it was not shared, that Reitman tried to make that clear, both to Ronell and to others in power, and that, once he discovered that he was on his own, he did what other people in his position often do.

For all of Ronell’s talk of shared codes and such, there is one experience, one code, in this story that every academic — gay, straight, male, female, black, white, brown, trans, queer — has shared: being a graduate student. I’ve never suffered the harassment Reitman claims to have suffered, yet I can well remember that experience of having to navigate the demands of some professors, those who were mercurial, volatile, whose reactions you could never anticipate or predict, and doing my best to preserve and protect myself while keeping the relationship intact. Inevitably, it involved compromises, compromises I’m not proud of, but ones that all of us, or at least many of us, have had to make to ensure our position, to preserve our place.

If even one-quarter of what Reitman describes here is true, it suggests a more intense, more extreme, more abusive instance of a pervasive imbalance of power in academe. One that many graduate students have had to negotiate. And should not have to negotiate. For all the revelations of sexual harassment within academe that we’ve seen in the past few years, we continue to leave that imbalance of power to graduate students, as individuals, to figure out. Thinking, as always, that sex is somehow different, more peculiar, more idiosyncratic, than what, in the end, as Gira Grant made clear, is the most boring and familiar story of all.