What Do We Do With Monstrous Mentors?

One of my Ph.D. students has a question: “How will I know when I’m ready to publish?” She is eager and hardworking, and I recognize the drive along with the mingling of confidence and trepidation. To be in her position is to have achieved at every level of schooling only to pursue a career laced with uncertainty. One that depends, at least in part, on the support of one’s mentors.

I assure her that I will guide her. I tell her that this is what happened for me in graduate school as I earned my Ph.D. in French literature. One of my professors, I’ll call her J, told me that my paper for her graduate seminar on women writers could be published with some simple revisions, and directed me toward Joan Kelly-Gadol’s essay “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” Not long after, I submitted my paper to the Romanic Review, where it appeared within a few months: “Did Women Have an Enlightenment? Graffigny’s Zilia as Female Philosophe.” It was my first publication.

But I don’t tell my student the whole story — how not long after that, I went to the dean of my university to issue a complaint against J. I don’t tell my student that J seemed to have a taste for humiliating students, with a knack for targeting the most vulnerable; that she took delight in posing impossible questions in class, then grinning as the unfortunate victim’s face burned with shame; that she was known to sabotage graduate-student funding and even a tenure case. I certainly don’t tell my student how J failed me at my comprehensive exams, asking oblique questions about punctuation and plot points, or how she then required me to study for three months to prepare for a private retake with her alone.

When J passed away a few months ago, after a brief illness, I received numerous messages from grad-school friends. “Ding dong the witch is dead,” wrote one. “What?!” I answered in surprise. “I wasn’t done hating her yet,” I wrote back, a strange sadness settling in. Normally when a scholar of renown dies, there are myriad tributes from former students. Last I scoured the internet, there had not been a single one.

“What do we do with the art of monstrous men?” Claire Dederer asked in a 2017 Paris Review essay:

J’s feminist historical approach shaped me as a scholar. Her straightforward advice set me on a path toward scholarly success. The editor who accepted my article was on the hiring committee for my first job — a big reason why I ended up getting it. And yet her bullying still sneaks up on me in ways that I’m embarrassed to admit.

What do we do with monstrous mentors in academe? What do we do with the fact that their books still sit on our shelves, and that we may have learned something from them despite it all?

Stories like mine are as common in our field as they are difficult to convey. “Some of what I will say below may seem petty or even absurd without first setting the scene,” wrote Lee Vinsel in a 2022 essay about emotional abuse and academic bullying at Harvard. The tactics he describes — which include humiliation, intimidation, and middle-school-style dynamics of ostracism and inclusion — tend to lose something in translation. It’s tricky to explain how the air shifts in the room when a certain professor enters, simply because they have so aggressively wielded their power. It can be even trickier to convey the threat such behavior presents to those at the start of their careers.

Academe lends itself to abuse because it invests individuals with unmediated power borne of their unique expertise. To the person whose tenure she jeopardized, J whispered in the hallway — like a cartoon villain! — “I will destroy you.” She could say this because it was true: One negative departmental vote, one bad letter of recommendation, even one choicely worded criticism in an otherwise fine letter, has the potential to upend someone’s career. What’s more, abusers tend to choose their victims judiciously. They compensate for their sadistic pleasure at one student’s expense by treating others more generously, and thus lay the groundwork for plausible deniability. J’s male students, for example, did not suffer such humiliations.

While there has been a smattering of articles and tweets about academic bullying and bad mentors over the years, these accounts have yet to reach the critical threshold of #MeToo, even though the behavior is surely as widespread. Perhaps this is because it is terrifying to share what happened to you in the often close-knit field in which you wish to continue to work. In the well-known case of Avital Ronell, whose tactics closely resemble those of J, scandal only erupted when she was accused of crossing a sexual line. At that point, several of the most well-respected scholars of sexuality famously defended her, just as dozens of Harvard luminaries rose to defend John Comaroff following allegations of sexual harrassment in 2022. The closing of ranks is nearly as reliable an expression of institutional power as is abuse by mentors.

I should know.

At my comprehensive exams, the three other faculty members on my committee looked down in embarrassment as J announced — with a smile on her face! — that I had failed “abominably.” The other faculty had passed me on the sections pertaining to their areas of expertise but had not been able (or willing?) to persuade her. One of them sent me a message afterward with the subject line “Condoléances!” — the French expression meant to assure me that all would be fine. Another told me I should go apologize for the way in which I responded to her announcement of my failure. (In shock, I inquired if J might ask me a few more questions so that I could prove that I really was prepared. She had only asked me two or three, lasting all of five minutes.) The third member did not have tenure, and thus could not say anything.

My dissertation adviser told me to go speak to J in person, to try to “patch things up.” I showed up at her office, a notebook in hand. To my surprise, she responded angrily when I asked her to explain what she meant by a question that had stumped me (“How are the dates written in Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses?”). “I don’t have the book in front of me,” she hissed, refusing to clarify. Something very wrong is going on here, I remember thinking, blinking back tears. After all, I hadn’t had the book in front of me at the exam. “You should consider therapy,” she told me, her face flushed with rage. I wrote down, therapy!! And then — a little gallows humor — pot calling kettle black, over and over down the page. If this doesn’t work out, I thought at the time, I’ll write about it. An academic tell-all.

Reader, I did not write about it. I was too consumed with rage and confusion. For the three months I was meant to prepare the materials I had already studied, I stormed around my apartment, replaying my entire academic career in my head. I retold the story a thousand times to my friends, but could never quite capture the lunacy of it, the injustice. How could the other faculty members let her do this, when they so clearly saw it was wrong? How absurd to make me spend another three months studying texts that were not even related to my dissertation. Underneath it all, though, lay the fear: What did she have in store for me when I went to retake the exam with her alone? What did she have in store for my future?

The retake was barely an exam. She smiled with what seemed almost genuine warmth, and said, “Oh, this will just take a minute.” She asked me one softball question, and then shook my hand, offering her congratulations. And that was that. I had studied night and day for three months to master the material that I had supposedly misunderstood. But that was never the point. The point was a show of power, an invocation of cruelty.

It has been more than 25 years since J turned her hostility on me unexpectedly. I am now a full professor with three books under my belt and graduate students of my own. But the humiliation and memory of three months spent in academic purgatory takes a toll on a person. J came for my self-confidence, and she pocketed some of it. Year by year, article by article, book by book, job by job, I earned it back.

“If we focus on this one case, these details, this accuser and accused, we will miss the opportunity to think about the structural issues,” Lisa Duggan wrote in defense of Avital Ronell, criticizing the emphasis on “bad individuals, rather than structures of power.” But why should those two things be pitted against each other when they are so often mutually reinforcing? “Philosopher’s Downfall, From Star to ‘Ruin,’ Divides a Discipline” reads a 2013 Chronicle headline about how Colin McGinn’s alleged sexual misconduct forced those in his field to take sides. Must a field take sides? Are there only two sides?

For those who have been on the receiving end of academic abuse, these are false choices.

As stories like mine trickle out, there is a part of the story that we tend to leave out — what we learned from these people. Above all, it’s their scholarly contributions that end up dividing a discipline; it’s their successes that sometimes lead scholars who should know better to stand up for them. We may be able to cancel people, but we can’t — and shouldn’t — cancel knowledge. (In fairness, it’s possible the knowledge itself is tainted by a scholar’s behavior, but even that is murky territory).

So what do we do with abusive mentors? The ones who taught us feminism in their classrooms and tore us down in their offices? J’s books still line my shelves. She edited a reprint of a French novel that I regularly assign to my students, along with her lucid introduction. Claire Dederer did not resolve the problem of the art monster, but she created space for our complex feelings around what they left behind.

Can we find a way to punish abusive academics without erasing their scholarly contributions or — depending on the nature of the infraction — requiring that they leave the academy? Might we do so by avoiding an either/or philosophy? Could a more nuanced approach — perhaps some version of the more localized restorative justice proposed by Duggan — enable academics with power to support the victims of abuse without feeling like they had betrayed the perpetrators, who might be their peers? And would such a path forward make it easier for people like me to speak out?

In the privacy of J’s office, as she told me that I would never be able to handle an academic career, I somehow sensed her own vulnerability. I thought of all the cruel things I could say back to her, if I wanted to blow the whole thing up. What held me back was how miserable she seemed. I knew that women of her generation had to fight different kinds of battles to get ahead, and also that she had been through a painful divorce. Seeing her humanity did not alleviate my rage, but it probably kept me from writing about it all these years. Some part of me is still afraid to write about it, and I’m not sure if that fear comes from wanting to protect her or to protect myself. Why can’t we acknowledge that it can be both?

J published nine books and probably prevented as many from being written. She served as a faculty member at an Ivy League institution and taught hundreds (thousands?) of students, celebrating many of them and punishing many of them (and celebrating and punishing some of them at the same time).

She was brilliant. She was damaged. She did a lot of damage. It’s time we found a way to talk about all of it.