Why Creative-Writing Programs Have Been Havens for Harassment

When Emma C. Eisenberg, a writer in Philadelphia, heard the stories about the comedian Louis C.K., they reminded her of an experience she’d had. It wasn’t his actual behavior — women told The New York Times, and he later admitted, that he had masturbated in front of them — that was familiar. It was the fact that he had targeted up-and-coming female comedians who deeply admired his work.

Eisenberg recognized the dynamic. While the behavior was different, it brought to mind interactions she’d had with John Casey, an English professor at the University of Virginia, while she was earning her M.F.A.

“C.K. used the artistic respect these women had for his work and their dreams of becoming exceptional artists themselves as weapons to serve his own ego and sexual gratification,” she wrote in an email. “Reading their accounts made me realize that John Casey had also done this to me and many other women, which is a violation of our trust as his students and also as artists he was supposed to nurture.”

In November, Eisenberg filed a complaint with UVa’s Title IX office in which she said Casey had referred to women as “cunts,” commented on the sexual attractiveness of female writers, and often touched his female students. At least one other student has also filed a complaint. Casey, an award-winning writer, declined to comment on the allegations.

“Professor Casey repeatedly touched me and other M.F.A. fiction female students at departmental social functions on our shoulders, lower backs, and butts, as well as making routine comments on our appearance in class, such as when female students looked particularly attractive, remarking that one female student was wearing a low-cut top, and remarking that another female student ‘looked like a streetwalker,’” Eisenberg wrote in her complaint. She graduated in 2014.

People in almost every industry have been speaking out about sexual harassment and assault in the workplace as part of the #MeToo movement. Academe, with its high barriers to entry, hierarchical structure, and emphasis on mentor-mentee relationships, has yielded many of those stories. While the issue seems to exist in almost every discipline, one comes up again and again: creative writing.

Women say the field, long dominated by men, is populated by stars who are minor celebrities both on campus and off. Their endorsement is seen as necessary for aspiring writers to succeed. The nature of the writing workshop, a space in which personal and emotional details about writers’ lives are often discussed, can make students especially vulnerable. Add those factors together, many veterans of creative-writing programs say, and you’ve got an environment that’s easy for star writers to exploit.

‘Stories About Men’

The Chronicle spoke to several graduates of writing programs who said they had either experienced or witnessed sexual misconduct. They shared their analyses of why the behavior has persisted in the programs.

“What attracted me to an M.F.A. were stories — stories about men,” said Metta Sáma, an assistant professor and director of creative writing at Salem College, in North Carolina. “They were always alcoholics. They were coming to class drunk. They were larger than life. It was exciting to think that I could be in a classroom that was so sterile and be in a space with these rulebreaking men who would give me an excuse to break rules.”

That dynamic — in which idolized male writers are expected to break rules — may be changing. Even before the #MeToo movement, women had started to name male writers who they said had behaved inappropriately. Many of the women who experienced inequity, if not outright harassment, in their writing classes are now professors themselves. Some now watch out for that behavior in their peers.

A 2016 article in Jezebel described “the important, inappropriate literary man” as a common persona that institutions perceive as valuable, one whom women warn one another about. “The cultural landscape is set up ideally right now for women to speak out about this,” the article said.

Sáma said that as both a professor and a former student, she sees young artists as particularly sensitive and vulnerable.

“That vulnerability gets tapped into,” she said. “That’s what I see in creative-writing programs. It’s a space where a lot of male egos become predatorial and that women are prey.”

An Unscrupulous Professor

Some stories of harassment shared with The Chronicle date back many years, even decades. Often the women who described misconduct said they had not reported it as students because they feared being ostracized by a prominent writer. In a field where the support of a mentor is important to vie for an academic job, be introduced to a book agent, or compete for a fellowship or prize, accusing a mentor of sexual harassment can imperil a career.

“We come to our programs leaving jobs, moving hundreds of miles to become a writer, to improve our game, to learn the craft, to belong, even for a short while, to a community,” said Sejal Shah, a writer who earned her M.F.A. at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Shah has taught at Marymount Manhattan College and the University of Rochester. “An unscrupulous professor preys on the need for mentorship,” she said. “He knows that we need to take his class. He knows that we need his recommendation.”

Anna Sutton, who earned her M.F.A. at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, said professors sometimes take advantage of students who are enamored of them. Consensual relationships at times develop, but it’s the student who loses most — a mentor and a teacher — if the relationship ends badly. Students also may feel uncomfortable turning down a professor who could help them advance their career.

“It’s a world where you really need established writers to help you get your first publications and the fellowships that will lead to the teaching positions,” Sutton said. “Because of that, students are willing to do whatever their professors want from them, and the professors seem to know that and take advantage of it.”

Former creative-writing students described often meeting with their advisers off campus — at a coffee shop, a restaurant, or the professor’s house. They said it was not uncommon for people to drink at those meetings or at larger gatherings of writers at conferences. The conversations can be personal, they said, and the rules about what constitutes professional behavior and appropriate conversation topics are blurry.

Seeing ‘Into Your Psyche’

Sutton said that the nature of workshops also sets creative writing apart from other disciplines. A good writing professor can help a student tap into and share her experiences. That vulnerability is sometimes seen as the key to making good work. “You’re putting a lot of elements of interior life into the public realm,” she said. “They get to see into your psyche a little bit.”

“You mine from what you know,” added Yael Massen, a writer. She studied creative writing for one year at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before transferring to Indiana University at Bloomington. Another dynamic in workshops, she said, is that professors are free to make personal comments about students’ work that can feel more like comments about them personally.

“You’re allowed to make these comments where it’s not about you, it’s about your work, right?” she said. Massen said one professor called the speaker in one of her poems “nasty,” “cruel,” and a “tease” for saying she would make someone wait before getting romantically involved.

“There are no rules,” Massen said. “It’s like the Wild West.”

Some students described an environment that was generally uncomfortable for women. One Ph.D. candidate at a university in the South said she had to critique story after story in which female characters existed only to arouse a male protagonist. She said she had spent an entire workshop debating marital rape.

“If we’re going to change the entire rape culture that we see, then we have to stop normalizing rape in our stories by having a male character rape someone and then see him redeemed by the end of the story,” said the Ph.D. candidate, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she worried about repercussions from her university. The ideas that are perpetuated in literature seep into popular culture, she said. “These are the stories that Harvey Weinstein is reading at the end of the day.”

Sutton said that since so many writers whose work is taught in M.F.A. programs are straight white men, the stories of young writers who fit that profile seem to be taken more seriously.

“The culture was pretty dismissive of women and women’s perspectives in general,” she said. “In workshop, if you wrote something that was highly female, it would be torn to shreds. If it was about a man fishing and thinking about his relationship to his father, we’d talk about it for two hours.”

Nell Gluckman writes about faculty issues and other topics in higher education. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.