Tony Judt, a well-known historian, has written an engaging essay called “Girls! Girls! Girls!” for NYRBlog, The New York Review of Books blog, about how our stance towards sexual behavior on (and, by implication, off) campus has changed over the years. I don’t agree with everything he says – and he would probably say it’s because I am a product of my (and his) times – but what he says is thought-provoking. Here are some snippets, which, taken out of context, may lose some of the irony that informs them in the original:
Shortly after I took office [in 1992 as chair of NYU’s History Department], a second-year graduate student came by. A former professional ballerina interested in Eastern Europe, she had been encouraged to work with me. I was not teaching that semester, so could have advised her to return another time. Instead, I invited her in. After a closed-door discussion of Hungarian economic reforms, I suggested a course of independent study — beginning the following evening at a local restaurant. A few sessions later, in a fit of bravado, I invited her to the première of Oleanna—David Mamet’s lame dramatization of sexual harassment on a college campus.
How to explain such self-destructive behavior? What delusional universe was mine, to suppose that I alone could pass untouched by the punitive prudery of the hour — that the bell of sexual correctness would not toll for me? I knew my Foucault as well as anyone and was familiar with Firestone, Millett, Brownmiller, Faludi, e tutte quante. To say that the girl had irresistible eyes and that my intentions were…unclear would avail me nothing. My excuse? Please Sir, I’m from the ’60s.
***
[T]he anxieties of contemporary sexual relations offer occasional comic relief. When I was Humanities dean at NYU, a promising young professor was accused of improper advances by a graduate student in his department. He had apparently followed her into a supply closet and declared his feelings. Confronted, the professor confessed all, begging me not to tell his wife. My sympathies were divided: the young man had behaved foolishly, but there was no question of intimidation nor had he offered to trade grades for favors. All the same, he was censured. Indeed, his career was ruined — the department later denied him tenure because no women would take his courses. Meanwhile, his “victim” was offered the usual counseling.
Some years later, I was called to the Office of the University Lawyer. Would I serve as a witness for the defense in a case against NYU being brought by that same young woman? Note, the lawyer warned me: “she” is really a “he” and is suing the university for failing to take seriously “her” needs as a transvestite. We shall fight the case but must not be thought insensitive.
So I appeared in Manhattan Supreme Court to explain the complexities of academic harassment to a bemused jury of plumbers and housewives. The student’s lawyer pressed hard: “Were you not prejudiced against my client because of her transgendered identity preference?” “I don’t see how I could have been,” I replied. “I thought she was a woman — isn’t that what she wanted me to think?” The university won the case.
***
Here as in so many other arenas, we have taken the ’60s altogether too seriously. Sexuality (or gender) is just as distorting when we fixate upon it as when we deny it. Substituting gender (or “race” or “ethnicity” or “me”) for social class or income category could only have occurred to people for whom politics was a recreational avocation, a projection of self onto the world at large.
Why should everything be about “me”? Are my fixations of significance to the Republic? Do my particular needs by definition speak to broader concerns? What on earth does it mean to say that “the personal is political”? If everything is “political,” then nothing is. I am reminded of Gertrude Stein’s Oxford lecture on contemporary literature. “What about the woman question?” someone asked. Stein’s reply should be emblazoned on every college notice board from Boston to Berkeley: “Not everything can be about everything.”
Full disclosure: One reason this piece engages me as much as it does, is that I have the same response as Judt to the question he poses at the end of his post:
So how did I elude the harassment police, who surely were on my tail as I surreptitiously dated my bright-eyed ballerina?
Except in my case she was a dark-haired and compellingly dark-eyed woman from Iran. And I have made the answer my title.
[…] Cross-posted on It’s All Connected. […]
Well, over at Alas, where I cross posted this (as I often cross post over there), I have, deservedly, received quite a drubbing here for posting something I should have filed for myself as “notes to a post.” I am copying here a comment I made there:
As if my reasons for choosing them were of course so obvious that they needed neither exposition nor explanation, I allowed to speak for themselves excerpts that should have been framed very differently and made the object of serious scrutiny, and so – while I still disagree with some of the points people in this thread have argued – what I wrote certainly sounded like I was sympathetic to Judt’s nostalgia and apologia in ways that I most decidely am not. It serves no purpose, therefore, to continue to respond to people’s critiques, either of the original post or of the comments I have made in the context of that post – except to apologize more explicitly for not having caught the transphobia – because I think it will only devolve into a self-defensiveness that will, in the end, prove nothing. The post is as bad as the post is, and no amount of arguing “what I really meant” or of responding to people’s accusations of my own insensitivity towards women, or people who have been harassed, etc. to “prove my credentials,” so to speak, will change that.
I do, however, want to say something very brief in response to this, written by CassandraSays:
The business of teaching and learning is often far more emotionally, psychologically and erotically messy than we like to admit – on both sides of the professional lines that we all agree professors, male or female, should not cross. I teach at a community college. I am married to a former student, so is one of my male colleagues; two of my female colleagues are married to their former students; a gay male colleague is “married” – which I put in scare quotes only because it is, unfortunately, not a legal marriage – to a former student aide. Two of my former male colleagues were forced into retirement because they were known to sleep with their students and one, at least, if the information I have is correct, did so for grades; I know of one female colleague who was falsely accused of sexual harassment; one female colleague who slept with a student while he was still in her class, and I know of at least two other colleagues, one male and one female, who have slept with former students.
Of the instances I have just listed, there are some which clearly cross the line; in other cases, I know personally that they did not; and in others, I just don’t know. In fact, for the purposes of what I am interested in, what Judt’s piece made me think of, whether or not the line was crossed is sort of irrelevant. Not because it doesn’t matter to the people involved – obviously, there need to be consequences if a professor sexually harasses a student–but because in both kinds of situation, those where the ethics are unimpeachable and those where the unethical nature is clear, the desire that is at stake arose in the context of teaching and learning. Judt’s piece, with all its flaws, brought me back to that as an issue worth taking on, both for what thinking deeply about it might reveal about desire and for what it might reveal about teaching and learning.
My own haste and laziness resulted in a post that was about something entirely different.