<p>I'm not a parent, but I found this article interesting:</p>
<p>Sex</a> and Silence at Yale</p>
<p>Tenure is an interesting concept, to say the least, and I suspect that it isn't that unusual for college administrations to attempt to smooth over student claims against famous professors. However, what happened to Naomi is pretty appalling, and I really hope that the situation isn't this extreme at other universities.</p>
<p>I remember reading about this a few months ago and being appalled too. It’s also a wonder that she kept publicly silent about this for so long, it must have made her feel ashamed.</p>
<p>All those books of literary criticism by him, all his works are suspect. Clearly the products of a terribly flawed mind.</p>
<p>how can he be a flawed mind? people pay $50k/year to hear his wisdom!!</p>
<p>Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen only at Yale. Yale is just one of the more prominent names.</p>
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<p>I’ve never heard of Harold Bloom before the cited article, but I don’t think that virtue and talent are necessarily intertwined. That concept reminds me of le morte’ de arthur, the tale of the knights of the Round Table. Virtue was wedded to fighting ability. The most virtuous of all, Galahad, was untouchable on the battlefield and was able to find the Holy Grail. In contrast, due to his sin Launcelot was not able to find the Holy Grail. And Galahad was the only man to defeat Launcelot in a joust. </p>
<p>However, in the real world, I don’t think merit and virtue are necessarily wedded.</p>
<p>This is a little flip, but at least she was able to deflect some of the blame to the Masons in the first paragraph. </p>
<p>And wind up blaming Yale instead of the creep, assuming this happened as written.</p>
<p>I respect her coming forward to reveal what happened to her. I don’t think she is blaming Yale instead of Bloom, she clearly was now attempting to determine if Yale in 2012 has a grievance procedure in place so that other students would have a transparent process in place to use to deal with incidents of sexual harassment. </p>
<p>I hold Bloom 100% responsible for his sexual misconduct, and understand how his inappropriate behavior impacted her. At the same time I think if my d told me she was planning to have a professor over her apartment for dinner and wine, with her roommate and roommate’s boyfriend, I’d be quick to advise against it. I am not blaming Naomi for Bloom’s behavior by any means, but think there was some naivete involved.</p>
<p>Apparently this article is from 2004 - does anyone have any info on whether this situation was ever resolved?</p>
<p>This is a thread from last year.
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1136884-sexual-harassment-college-teachers.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1136884-sexual-harassment-college-teachers.html</a></p>
<p>Personally, I would consider someone touching your clothed inner thigh uninvited, as a first world problem, and not worthy of mention.
I’m assuming he stopped, when rebuffed, and left the apt when asked.
If this was anyone else would we be hearing about it?</p>
<p>It doesn’t seem to be known what Yales policy was in 1983, except for the statute of limitations on filing sexual harassment charges of two years.
[Wolf</a>, Bloom vilifications ignore larger issue | Yale Daily News](<a href=“http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2004/mar/01/wolf-bloom-vilifications-ignore-larger-issue/]Wolf”>http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2004/mar/01/wolf-bloom-vilifications-ignore-larger-issue/)</p>
<p>Her criticism isn’t about the incident itself, it’s about the way that the administration handled it.</p>
<p>I suppose if you want to write this off as a “first world problem” you’re entitled to do so, but when you have over 9,000 posts on a college prep forum, it seems like you’re at least relatively interested in discussing first world problems. </p>
<p>At the very least, any student who attends a university will have to deal with its administration, and I think that considering how that administration deals with sexual harassment claims is an important thing to do. While you may write it off, it was clearly a traumatic event for the author, and the way that the Yale administration handled the situation reflects poorly on the institution.</p>
<p>The situation was “resolved” long before she ever started complaining. In 1983, when she was there, Yale didn’t have any policies about student/faculty relationships – they adopted their first policy in the mid-80’s. See: [Yale</a> Alumni Magazine: banninng romance between profs & students (Apr 98)](<a href=“http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/98_04/romance.html]Yale”>http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/98_04/romance.html) </p>
<p>Over the years since the policy has only been strengthened and made more restrictive; see [Yale</a> University Faculty Handbook](<a href=“Office of the Provost |”>Office of the Provost |) for the current policy.</p>
<p>According to Wolf, in 1983 she was a sexually active college senior who idolized the professor & was frustrated that he wouldn’t meet with her. So she pestered him until he finally agreed to have dinner at her home, she lit candles at the table, shared a bottle of sherry with him, waited until her roommates left… and then was shocked, shocked! that he put his hand on her thigh. She immediately recoiled, and he promptly left and avoided all future contact with her.</p>
<p>Then (she claims) her grades took a nosedive but she kept the incident secret for 20 years, only to start badgering Yale officials to answer questions about their grievance policy when she got irked about being donation requests years down the line. </p>
<p>So maybe the guy got the wrong idea about the dinner invitation. Sounds to me like he acted appropriately before and after the incident, and maybe just misread signals at a time when his college had not yet adopted policies against that sort of thing. It’s not as if this took place in a classroom setting, or in his campus office. Believe it or not, there once was a far less sexually-prudish time when people thought nothing of faculty/student dating… certainly it went on quite openly when I was a student in the 70’s. The issue of whether or not such contact was ethical was still being debate in the 90’s – see: [url=<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/1993/05/09/nyregion/student-faculty-dating-it-s-not-in-the-rule-book.html]Student-Faculty”>Student-Faculty Dating: It's Not in the Rule Book - The New York Times]Student-Faculty</a> Dating - It’s Not in the Rule Book - NYTimes.com<a href=“1993”>/url</a>.</p>
<p>Sounds to me like the author has a problem that has nothing to do with the incident that happened to her. Some of the other incidents she describes, involving other students at other campuses, are indeed very serious and a cause for concern – but it seems to me that as to her own case, she magnified things all out of proportion and has demonized both a professor and an institution over a misunderstanding that she very well may have instigated by her own conduct. </p>
<p>I mean, I assume that the prof had an office on campus — if it was so important for the student to meet with the prof to discuss her poetry, why didn’t she insist on meeting with him during office hours?</p>
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They did’t know about it, because she didn’t report it for 20 years. </p>
<p>By the time she did start registering a complaint, they had long since debate and discussed and implemented appropriate policies. </p>
<p>There is a statute of limitations on these things, for good reason.</p>
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<p>Susan Hockfield, Yale University, in 2004 statement to YDN</p>
<p>[Sexual</a> harrasment is affront to Yale’s values | Yale Daily News](<a href=“http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2004/feb/24/sexual-harrasment-is-affront-to-yales-values/]Sexual”>http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2004/feb/24/sexual-harrasment-is-affront-to-yales-values/)</p>
<p>[Wolf’s</a> article must be viewed within historical context | Yale Daily News](<a href=“http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2004/mar/02/wolfs-article-must-be-viewed-within-historical/]Wolf’s”>http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2004/mar/02/wolfs-article-must-be-viewed-within-historical/)</p>
<p>K4–</p>
<p>I’m glad to see young women asking these questions. we have travelled some distance since the 1980’s, but we still have a ways to go and it is good you are paying attention. Yale, in fact, is pretty bad on this issue of sexual harrassment, but they have been under fire recently.</p>
<p>[Yale</a> investigated after 52 counts of sexual harassment revealed | Sexual Harassment Lawyers](<a href=“http://sexual-harassment.org/yale-investigated-after-52-counts-of-sexual-harassment-revealed/]Yale”>http://sexual-harassment.org/yale-investigated-after-52-counts-of-sexual-harassment-revealed/)</p>
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<p>calmom, she didn’t report it because she understood the power imbalance. He was a famous professor, adored by students, protected by his colleagues; she was a lowly undergrad. It doesn’t usually go well for young women who dare to expose powerful men. Bloom himself fired the first shot across the bow on the night of the incident: “You are a deeply troubled girl.”</p>
<p>By her own account, she was “deeply troubled.” She claims that " I was spiraling downward; I had gotten a C-, a D, and an F, and was put on academic probation." That response was totally disproportionate to the incident that she claims took place (he put his hand on her thigh, she freaked out, he left). </p>
<p>Again, this wasn’t a situation where the prof made overtures to her in a classroom. She invited him to dinner at her home, lit candles, drank with him. We know from her own account that she had been trying to get his attention for weeks. It was 1983. She was probably 22 years old. There were no policies in place to prevent consensual relationships between faculty and students. </p>
<p>She didn’t “complain” because she had nothing to complain about. He didn’t bother in class; he didn’t ask for sexual favors in exchange for a grade; he didn’t make lewd comments. He left her house immediately. </p>
<p>She wasn’t raped, she wasn’t threatened. She said she eventually got a B in his class, which apparently was a better grade than she got in any of her other classes, so there is no indication that the incident played any part.</p>
<p>I mean, to me, reading her own account of what happened, she comes off as a real nut case. And that’s taking it at face value. Given her totally disproportionate response, both at the time and two decades down the line, who knows what really happened? Maybe there’s more to the incident that she still was unwilling to write about two decades later, or maybe she made the whole thing up.</p>
<p>See: <a href=“http://www.ethicsscoreboard.com/list/wolf.html[/url]”>http://www.ethicsscoreboard.com/list/wolf.html</a></p>
<p>If her grades were spiraling out of control, why did Bloom write her a recommendation for a Rhodes, and how did she spend two years after her graduation from Yale in 1984, at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar?</p>
<p>I don’t suppose she was giving off mixed signals :rolleyes:</p>
<p>Harold Bloom was one of Yale’s most illustrious professors. Most of my friends in the Literature department were his acolytes, clustering around him at office hours for his bon mots about Pater and Wilde. He called students, male and female both, “my dear” and “my child.” Beautiful, brilliant students surrounded him. He was a vortex of power and intellectual charisma.
I, personally, was at once drawn to him intellectually and slightly scared of him. I had audited a famous course he taught, and he had reached out to me then and invited me to talk with him. Since he was so intellectually selective, I was “sick with excitement” at the prospect…</p>
<p>According to an account of the incident in her book “promiscuities”, she & Bloom were alone drinking together in her apt. According to other sources, she had dropped off erotic poetry at Blooms house for him to read.(she says, she dropped it off at his office, but in any case, it was after the incident at her home)</p>
<p>She was a college senior, who was alone drinking and dining with her prof, he shouldn’t have put his hand on her leg, but was that really such a traumatic incident that she couldn’t bear to report it, or was it not worthy of mention considering the circumstances?</p>
<p>If what she really wanted to learn was Yales current sexual harrasment policy, this was the response from the dean.</p>
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<p>Still looking for a follow up article by Wolf.</p>
<p>Naomi Wolf’s case, which is old news in every respect, has a ton of context.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>As early as 1976 undergraduate women sued Yale over the lack of a sexual harassment policy and inadequate administrative procedures for handling complaints. The suit was settled a year or two later with the adoption of detailed policies, which were certainly in place in 1983 when Wolf was harassed.</p></li>
<li><p>Harold Bloom was (and maybe still is) sui generis in this field. At the time, he was almost certainly the most famous professor at Yale in the humanities, a towering intellect, prolific scholar, and the brightest star on an English faculty then universally regarded as the best in the world. He had also been the first Jew to get tenure in the Yale English Department. He was also (a) one of the most neurotic, screwed-up people one could ever hope to meet – think an extreme version of Woody Allen’s own self-hating caricatures, (b) phenomenally ugly, obese, decrepit, chronically ill, physically disgusting, and (c) a known serial sexual harasser, but one who absolutely and universally took “no” for an answer (as he did with Wolf). Bloom’s advances were the opposite of a powerful man using coercion; they were the pathetic whining of a sick man.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Yes, people throughout the university were protective of Bloom. Not just shielding him from discipline . . . other professors drove him around (he couldn’t drive), bandaged him when he burned himself because he was upset over this or that, helped him cope in dozens of every-day ways. And not just his colleagues: graduate and undergraduate students were the same way. No one thought what he did was OK, but no one wanted him to leave, or wanted their access to him restricted, and people feared that some sort of witch-hunt would push him over the edge psychologically.</p>
<p>This included me, obviously. I remember sitting around with women involved in the sexual harassment case, some of whom were (and remain) friends, and saying things like, “All of that’s great, but how do you build a system that doesn’t fire Harold Bloom? And why would you want to fire the top literature scholar in the world just because he can’t stop propositioning girls and then backing off when they turn him down?” Of course, it was easy for me to say things like that – Bloom wasn’t hitting on me.</p>
<p>He was, however, hitting on a huge percentage of the women I knew in English lit. I never heard even a rumor that any of them said yes to him, including graduate students whose careers he could make or break. Including women whose careers he absolutely supported. There can be little question, however, that turning Bloom down wasn’t fun or comfortable for these women. But Wolf would have had to be living in a bubble not to know what to expect when she invited Bloom to dinner tete-a-tete. (He didn’t need to be invited to dinner to hit on women anyway. He was perfectly capable of looking them up in the phone book and calling them in the middle of the night.)</p>
<p>Anyway, the point is that I have never heard of anyone who harassed women as systematically as Bloom did, or with so little real coercion, and certainly not anyone whose scholarly reputation and output was as valuable as Bloom’s. He was a bizarre, special case all around. He shouldn’t have harassed Wolf, and she isn’t credible when she suggests it surprised her. She could certainly have complained, and received a great deal of sympathy, counseling, and probably little or no action. If she had complained, however, she might have felt a little less special.</p>
<ol>
<li> Bloom is savagely, and accurately, caricatured a clef in Rebecca Goldstein’s novel 36 Arguments For The Existence Of God.</li>
</ol>
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<p>In the “Sex and Silence” article, she wrote:</p>
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<p>You are correct, she did indeed win a Rhodes Scholarship, apparently after re-applying a year later… but the “Sex and Silence” article is worded in a misleading way; the clear implication is that the encounter with Bloom was ruinous to her, when clearly she successfully reapplied for the Rhodes in a subsequent year. </p>
<p>To JHS: Thank you for the insight. </p>
<p>I want to clarify my post. I did not write that Yale did not have a “sexual harassment” policy in place in 1983 (I assume, as you say, that it did) – I wrote that it apparently had not yet adopted a policy discouraging or prohibiting “consensual relationships between faculty and students.” There’s a difference between “harassment” and “consensual relationships”. I do not see how Bloom’s conduct as described by Wolf could be taken as “harassment” given the context and Bloom’s response.</p>
<p>I don’t care how brilliant this guy might be. There is no excuse for this kind of behavior towards a student or for Yale (or any school) covering it up and allowing it to continue. Year after year. Young college students do tend to be naive. Does that make sexual harassment ok? I think this is sickening.</p>