This academia of the Ronell saga is not at all mine, any more. All the unchecked ego, the pretentiousness, the warmed-over Derridean and Freudian theory, the cult of personality, the in-group feeling, the peculiar rhetoric of it all.
The tone of all this takes me back to the 80s and 90, when I came up in the field. We might call it a particular "structure of feeling," a way of being in the world peculiar to that period. People getting away with crap because of their supposed brilliance. The sheer number of assholes in the field, horrible, horrible people.
I guess this modus operandi still applies to the Ivies and places like NYU, though the people I know in Spanish at NYU, Jo Labanyi and Jim Fernández, are the polar opposite of that. They are brilliant and unpretentious people.
I have never been as glad to be in a state school, far from this kind of attitude. I'm sure we have assholes here too, or arrogant people, etc... But at a good flagship state university this is not the way people think that they ought to act. People wouldn't be overtly proud to act like that, or to defend bad behavior in others.
So no, it isn't the bureaucratic, managerial university of Neo-liberalism that produces sexual harassment. This is an older pattern, left over from the 50s, when you could get someone a job by calling up your buddy on the phone, and sexually harass with impunity. This 1950s pattern gets refracted through the 1980s academic culture of theory stardom, and the results are toxic. It is especially toxic when wrapped up in "queer exceptionalism," the idea that sexual harassment is only a problem if it is the classic case of the middle-aged white guy hitting on the female grad student.
The academic having control over doctoral students with the power to make or break them is not a bureaucratic problem, but one of charisma--to go back to Max Weber. It is people who think the ordinary bureaucratic rules don't apply to them. Those rules are for the mediocre types in the state schools, maybe.
4 comments:
So who besides Ronell (who was doing this then, too) was acting this way in the 80s and 90s? I think I missed it. There were sexual harassers, yes, but there had been before and have been since. The Ronell thing seems different, always did, she was known for complete destruction of the psyche and it was all so dramatic and flamboyant, and took up so much time that would otherwise have been free.
Also, is it French? I've had 2 colleagues in French dismissed for sexual harassment, one asked to retire after an incident that made at least municipal news, and one who killed his wife.
...and that doesn't even count the one who slept with his dissertation student and brought romantic flowers to her defense, and other incidents that didn't end in crises, at least not that I know of. All of this has been in the last 20 years or so, maybe less
If she has been known for this for a long time then the defenders look even worse. She sounds like a complete Sadist.
It's since the 80s. Butler didn't get to Berkeley until the 90s, about 10 years after Ronell. Ronell is disturbed. I'm betting a lot of people may not have seen her in action but people like Butler, from working at the same dept. and institution, must have heard
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