To the Editor:
I grew up in Canarsie, Brooklyn with a fairly typical immigrant household, figuring out the nuances of Chinglish, getting used to hotdogs with white rice and also the very particular flavor of American racialization. I never thought I would now be a fourth year Ph.D. student at NYU, let alone a student in a German department of all things. To be fair, I still don’t know how I’ve gotten here. To try to explain this, I would have to write about a number of chance encounters and the help of a number of extraordinarily kind people. For the sake of this piece, however, I would like to mostly write on Avital Ronell, one of these extraordinarily kind people.
I want to be clear here: I have no desire to comment on the particulars of her on-going case, nor engage in polemics for or against her many detractors and supporters. I want to underscore that I am not in the least bit in a “cult.” I am also not in the business of scandal or the romanticization of graduate student life. I recognize how brutal, isolating, and alienating graduate student life can be. As an apprentice Germanist, I am one of a tiny number of graduate students of color in my field, and two of us are at NYU German. Neither of us would be in the department, let alone in the field without Avital’s mentorship.
As one might imagine, German as a field is dominated by old white guy faculty, the supplemental old white guy authors, and the soon-to-be old white guy graduate students. The German department at NYU, built in large part by Avital Ronell, is an exception to the vapid, homogenizing rule — an exception that needs defending.
I thought I could refuse to weaponize language and battle the media blitz, but in the current state of siege — here I am responding to Andrea Long Chu’s “I Worked With Avital Ronell. I Believe Her Accuser.” (The Chronicle Review, August 30) — I feel compelled to feebly attempt self-defense.
Here is a report from the battlefield. As it stands now 1) our precarious German department, filled with marginal characters, is being likened to Weinstein corporation by the media; 2) theory is being subsumed under deconstruction and relitigated as some bogeyman art, as if Brian Leiter’s strain of analytic philosophy were anything but self-serving indignation; 3) feminism and prominent feminists are being outright attacked by a legal team steeped in the rhetoric of men’s rights, arguing with reactionary notions of “discrimination”; 4) tropes are being exploited that problematically paint our minoritarian style of humanities research as perverse, sectarian, hypocritical, and even worthless.
Allow me to archive what is being laid to waste.
Here at NYU German, graduate students share work, food, and anxieties. We get group piercings after slogging through a seminar on Johann Georg Hamann, cry about our breakups at the Cozy Soup & Burger diner, make plans to take the ferry to Rockaway beach, correct each other’s work deep into the night. Sometimes we steal wine from department-hosted events and self-medicate against the stress of writing in light of the non-existent job market. Our faculty are there for us, try their hardest to read our work, and treat us as more than ways to enhance their own prestige.
We care and are cared for. The circumstances that have brought us together are largely Avital’s doing, and the circumstances that have struck her down strike at us all. Most of us graduate students in German are supportive of her, and just about all of us signed a May petition attesting to the superb quality of her mentorship, a petition with 129 student signatories. Imagine my horror then when reading Andrea Long Chu’s piece. Though I deeply respect Andrea and her scholarship, this particular piece is utter tabloid clickbait posing as investigative journalism. In the spirit of defense, I will try to rebut some of her claims.
1) Andrea recounts how Avital once said during office hours, “I just wanted to make sure you and I are OK.” Avital does this sometimes, and it is not because it is some cult initiation. It is just because she wants to make sure we are doing okay as students in a high-pressure environment. It is not a sleight that Avital tries to establish a working relationship with students, and not every utterance is a sign of hidden abuse.
2) Andrea claims Avital’s course included mostly men authors as readings. To start, we ought not to mix women into a syllabus and simply stir. But even that particular course began with Elfriede Jelinek, then moved to Melanie Klein, then Silvia Plath, then Valerie Solanas. In other classes Avital regularly lists women in her syllabus, including but not limited to, in her last course, Marguerite Duras, Cathy Caruth, Hannah Arendt, and Barbara Johnson. Even when reading through Heinrich von Kleist’s (oh no, he’s a man!) 1808 novella, The Marquise von O, in class Avital zeroes in on the feminine subtext, even when that subtext is actively being put under erasure.
3) Andrea writes that Avital once took a 15-minute break in class. But this surely cannot amount to an argument. Yes, Avital’s classes can be intense, the readings can be difficult, and the long, nearly three-hour class can sap us of energy. But please keep in mind that Avital is teaching about a hundred students at once, some of which (myself included) sometimes doze off or haven’t caught up with the reading. I taught three semesters of German language and seven years of high school debate, I understand how taxing pedagogy can be for both parties. Avital, however, is a veritable soldier (this is someone who often tells us to “woman up” instead of man up). She refuses to allow us to passively receive knowledge and tries very hard to make us engage her and the material each class. Avital owes no one an apology for wanting a break, or for even being flustered or tired at times.
Finally, rather than attempt to divine the intentions of Andrea’s psychologizing of Avital, I will only highlight Avital’s legacy in advocating for the marginalized. Avital was one of the first to write on the AIDS crisis and Rodney King. She also, yes, wrote incessantly on feminist topics as a foremost scholar of Valerie Solanas, Hélène Cixous, Kathy Acker, and others. Many of her texts deal directly with feminist issues, including “Breaking Down ‘Man,’” her feminist critiques of Heidegger and technology, and her recasting of German studies in a radical, anti-patriarchal way. She has also turned her feminism into praxis — one of the reasons she was honored by the French ministry was for her work in providing women, who could not attend class during the week, Sunday seminars in philosophy.
With all this being said, it is important that we have discussions about the power of institutions, the lines between student and mentor, and the precariousness of graduate student life. Character assassination, however, is not the way we should be doing this.
William Cheung
Ph.D. Candidate in German
New York University