When I was the same age as my current crop of first-year students, I was raped by a Roman Catholic priest who was also a serial sex offender. At the time and place the attack occurred, the rape of a man existed neither as a crime nor even — with the possible exception of offenses occurring in prisons — as a concept. It wasn’t surprising, then, that my efforts in the immediate aftermath to report what happened went nowhere, and that thereafter I was constrained to keep silent about an event that neither I nor anyone else possessed a vocabulary to describe.
In a curious manner, though, the episode seemed to follow me throughout my subsequent academic career. Around the time I was beginning my own undergraduate studies, my rapist was sent out of the country by his archdiocese, mainly for the purpose of allowing the complaints that were beginning to build around him to die down. While I was completing my freshman year, he returned from abroad and, almost immediately, orally and anally raped another young man. As I was submitting my Ph.D. dissertation, having by then emigrated to the United States, the police at home notified me that they were opening an investigation into his activities. But it wasn’t until the year I was granted tenure, more than two decades after the original assault, that he was finally convicted for some of his crimes, although not the one he perpetrated against me.
Other than the usual array of rape-related PTSD symptoms, which I believe I was successful in concealing from colleagues and students alike, my experience of trauma had little obvious impact on my life as a professor. While trigger warnings might perhaps be appropriate for students, I believed that their instructors ought to be made of sterner stuff. Specializing as I do in the history of Europe’s disastrous 20th century, it fell to me to teach — and occasionally to write — about sexual violence during the Holocaust, or the break-up of Yugoslavia, or the enormous wave of forced migrations that followed the Second World War. It seemed to me that I did not have a right to overlook or neglect these distressing topics simply because they possessed associations for me that others did not.
By dint of practice, I developed ways of discussing them that replicated the cool, analytically dispassionate tone I routinely brought to bear on other themes, or at least were close enough to pass muster. If the material I presented in the classroom was sometimes particularly difficult for me, any slight awkwardness I may have manifested was doubtless put down to the discomfort a male professor might be expected to display when discussing a topic that is generally considered to affect women and girls alone.
My ability to maintain, or feign, this stance of professional detachment is, however, coming to an end. This spring, accompanied by my family, I’m on research leave in France. I’m also publishing a short book that takes my own encounter with rape as the starting-point of a reflection on the meaning and impact of sexual assault when the victim is male.
The timing of the two events is not coincidental. Being an ocean away when the book comes out will, I hope, provide me with a measure of psychological as well as geographical distance at the moment when my sense of personal exposure can be expected to be most acute. I don’t think it would have been possible for me to go ahead with this book if I’d had to remain at home when it appeared.
Still, the fact remains that when I next stand before a classroom in the autumn, the students facing me will know deeply personal things about me that, until 18 months ago, my wife didn’t. I don’t expect that many of them will have actually read my book. But at the small, rural university in upstate New York at which I teach, word travels fast. The versions of my story that will be passed along in the fraternity and sorority basements will, I’m sure, lose nothing in the telling. Whether the accounts that circulate around the student body are better than the truth or not, though, they are likely to create pedagogical problems for all of us.
My professorial persona, like that of nearly all academics I know, is based on a standpoint of critical separation from the things I teach and study. In their encounters with the records and controversies of the past, my students look to me, on the basis of my disciplinary and scholarly qualifications, to keep them on the right track.
What happens when that separation can no longer be taken for granted? Knowing what they know, what kind of unspoken messages might they be taking in when, in my “War and Holocaust in Europe” course, we discuss Marta Hillers’s A Woman in Berlin, an account of the author’s experience of brutal sexual victimization at the hands of Soviet soldiers after V-E Day? Or, when teaching on the Bosnian War of 1992-95, I arrange a screening of Juanita Wilson’s brilliant and almost unbearably harrowing dramatization of Slavenka Drakulic’s novel As If I Am Not There?
Nor is the difficulty likely to be confined to those aspects of history that most closely overlap with my own experience. Rather, it is something that has the power to inflect — or infect — the entire pedagogical relationship. The classroom is not a safe haven from the gamut of prejudicial attitudes harbored by society with respect to rape victims. This no doubt helps to explain why so few academics have written about their own personal encounters with sexual violence. Susan Brison of Dartmouth, Karyn Freedman of the University of Guelph, Laura Gray-Rosendale of Northern Arizona, Donna Potts of Washington State University, and Jessica Stern of Harvard Law are the most prominent names on what remains an extremely short list of those who have publicly described their assaults. Yet there is no reason to suppose that professors are any more immune to this form of crime than the rest of the population. To look no further for an example, if national patterns hold good at my own small university with its roughly 315 full-time faculty members, when my book appears at least 30 of my female colleagues, and around half a dozen of my male ones, will already know, in the most literal of senses, precisely what I am talking about.
So, almost certainly, will an equivalent proportion of my students. After decades of neglect, the subject of campus rape has finally become a front-page issue. Absent from the discussion thus far, however, has been any analysis of the dynamic that arises in the classroom when the people having personal experience of sexual violence are to be found on both sides of the lecturer’s podium. Throughout my career, I have been aware that any time I speak on the subject in a course whose enrollment exceeds single digits, it’s a racing certainty that one or more of my listeners will be hearing the things I have to say at a register that is starkly and painfully different from the rest of her or his classmates. I hope that my teaching over the years has been appropriately sensitive to that reality.
Again, though, the ramifications extend further. The academy prioritizes scholarly over experiential understanding, and in many respects it is right to do so. Scholarship aims at the identification and analysis of secular trends and patterns, not isolated incidents. That being so, what place is there for a kind of knowledge the most important elements of which may not even be expressible in words? Am I to treat this aspect of my past and present life as being on a par with my existing areas of expertise, like some kind of grad-school field belatedly awarded on the basis of “life experience” (20th-century Europe; cultural and intellectual; male rape)?
What justification could there be for doing so, when any of my students may have credentials in this area that are both more recent and more relevant than my own? In such circumstances, can my personal exposure to sexual violence be other than a distraction from whatever it is we are seeking to accomplish in the classroom? On the other hand, however difficult it may be to deal with, this knowledge and the fact of my possessing it nonetheless exist. Ought my students and I establish and preserve a polite fiction through the remainder of our respective tenures at university, carefully avoiding any mention of something that, sometimes at least, is likely to be prominent in all our minds?
I don’t yet know the answers to these questions. In the next academic year, though, I’m going to have to find out. While I’m unable to predict the result, it seems doubtful that my existing mode of engagement with the students I teach will go unaffected. Much of what I do in the classroom need not, and will not, change. But for better in some respects and, it seems inevitable, worse in others, the public erosion of the wall of separation between the two kinds of knowledge embodied in me can hardly fail to affect the ways in which I’ll perform my professorial role, as well as the ways in which that performance will be received.
