In the 1980s, my father, a political science professor, had a colleague who used to ask her students to tell her which communist country they would most like to live in. To their credit, many of them answered “Yugoslavia” because it had the reputation for being the most open in the Eastern bloc. No, corrected the teacher, the answer should have been Albania, “because it had the purest form of communism.”
The fact that the country was also the most impoverished and oppressive mattered little to her because, in principle anyway, it was a regime that divided its resources evenly and ensured that everyone was treated equally. Which makes Albania just a little bit like American universities. There are few institutions whose leaders talk more about championing the rights of the downtrodden and yet practice it less.
Take the recent story of a New York University professor of German and comparative literature named Avital Ronnell, who has been accused of sexually harassing a former graduate student, Nimrod Reitman. According to the New York Times, Reitman, who is gay, said that when he studied with Ronnell, she “required him to lie in her bed, held his hand, texted, emailed and called him constantly, and refused to work with him if he did not reciprocate.”
Last week, another of Ronnell’s students, Andrea Long Chu, wrote an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education describing how Avital—“she always went by that one name, “Avital,” like Plato, or Cher”—acted like a petty tyrant and that in the academy her behavior is not at all aberrant. Chu recounts:
Ronnell’s need for adulation makes her sound like a Team America parody of Kim Jong-il. Chu describes “how she reprimanded her teaching assistants when they did not congratulate her for being invited to speak at a conference; how she requires that her students be available 24/7; how her preferred term for any graduate student who has fallen out of favor is ‘the skunk.’”
Ronnell is hardly alone among leftist academics who mistreat their underlings. Take Michael Kimmel, a prominent gender sociologist at Stonybrook, who has allegedly been harassing students, telling them which kind of porn he likes, having them drive more than two hours to deliver his mail from his office on Long Island to his apartment in Brooklyn, and taking credit for their research. Or there’s Jorge Dominguez, a Castro-defending professor of Latin American politics at Harvard, who was recently forced to retire after decades of harassment accusations by his underlings. While walking through campus one day, he allegedly told a junior professor: “This would be a nice place for a rape.” Even the great Marxist professor Jacques Derrida forced UC-Irvine to drop a harassment investigation of one of his friends who was teaching there. Derrida threatened to donate his papers to another school if they didn’t leave the professor alone.
While more than 50 of Ronnell’s prominent colleagues at universities across the country have signed a letter defending her abusive behavior, Chu writes, “People I know are afraid to make any public comment, even on Facebook, where they are friends with older, richer scholars who might one day control their fates.”
If someone dares to criticize these senior scholars, they are accused of violating the latest orthodoxy. Chu writes: “There is a whole dissertation to be written on intellectuals using the word neoliberal to mean ‘rules I shouldn’t have to follow.’”
It is not news that being a graduate student, particularly in the humanities, means working for a pittance, often with no job security, let alone benefits. Even at the most prominent institutions, the salary of a teaching assistant does not cover the basic cost of living—a full graduate student salary at Duke doesn’t even pay a “living wage” in Durham, N.C.
But the fact that one is no institutional check on the whims of senior professors who think of themselves as rock stars in need of an entourage (more Cher than Plato) makes life much worse. There are so few jobs for young academics—even the ones who are coming out of elite universities—that a single bad word from an adviser can mean the end of a career. Just as in the communist and socialist regimes that academics so admire, the universities all have an elite class at the top (permanently installed thanks to tenure), while the masses scurry around trying their best not to upset the rulers, lest they lose their livelihood. Maybe capitalist bosses are pigs too, but at least one isn’t subject to their moral preening as well as their abusive behavior.
