<p>The overarching point remains the same. She had an experience that was suspect and inappropriate. What our modern daughters may or may not have done in her shoes is immaterial. Yale wants something from her. She felt uncomfortable with their institutional solicitations based on an ongoing feeling that issues around a safe and transparent enviroment for female students remained unresolved. She attempted to broach the subject with her former department and with higher administration and was stonewalled. It appeared that the behavior in question was fairly commonly known but the professor and his reputation and stability was more valuable than that of the coeds involved over the years. Her story is about an ongoing institutional culture not about how much sherry anyone had to drink on that given night.</p>
<p>See, that’s what I think too. And not just about Yale. I think it’s about our world.</p>
<p>Interesting that she apparently didn’t think to investigate their sexual harrasment policies until they contacted her.</p>
<p>Shouldn’t sexual harrasment always be bad?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Bloom is a known predator. Whether the exact specifics, over two decades later, are completely accurate is neither here nor there. Memory has been researched quite extensively in the past little while. How it works is that each time we recall an event we have a “memory” of a “memory” not of an actual event. Memories we visit often have deeper grooves, but they are memories of the last time we recalled the event, not of the even itself.</p>
<p>All that aside, what we expected and our naivite in 1983 was much different than what young women expect and “know” today. You, for example, may have been wildly savvy, while I, at that same point in time, may have been completely obtuse to these things. No young woman today goes to school without being drilled on date rape and ruffies and sexual harrassment and whatnot. The first I ever heard of date-rape was when it happened to a freind, and it wasn’t called “date rape” then. It wasn’t called anything at all. Nobody talked about it.</p>
<p>Nobody talked about most of this stuff back then.</p>
<p>What is much more troubling, to me, is the more recent history at Yale of tacitly allowing sexual harrassment to continue, uninvestigated, on its campus.</p>
<p>I usually have a strong appreciation of your positions Calmom, but in this case, I must respectfully disagree. What my daughter would think a professor wanted from her and what I would have thought at the same age are very different things, largely because I have “told” her these things repeatedly. We were not educated about this back then, and continuing to insist she “should have known,” or “it was her fault,” is just the same as what would have been said back then, and, I’m sure, why she didn’t feel free to come forward, at all.</p>
<p>
“Stonewalled” is her characterization. Yale did respond to her, but she didn’t like the way they responded.</p>
<p>And I, with only a son, would never have thought to tell him that he might be a victim of sexual harassment by a prof. I don’t think he was, but I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have told me if he had been. A reserved sort of guy, but why should any student, male or female, need to be prepared for something like this? And the power of the college over their future if they do disclose…</p>
<p>calmom–it sounds like the way Yale responded was, “We’ll get back to you.” and then they didn’t. Am I missing something?</p>
<p>Even if the events described here were only hypothetically true, would they be ok with you? They wouldn’t be ok with me.</p>
<p>I had the same experience with an even more famous critic, Jan Kott. He was so inappropriate that a conductor on the railroad came to ask him to behave. (we accidentally found ourselves on the same train.). I was up for a Fulbright. Perhaps some think it wrong to be ambitious. It is not a question of “sleeping one’s way to the top.” I just didn’t want to offend my main recommendor. I didn’t get the Fulbrightbecause Kott refused t
I submit the recommendation. I wasn’t receptive enough. A male professor tried to block my PhD and it had to be sorted out by a female dean. It then win best in the country in 1987 but the damage was done. I never have had a strong presence in academia though I do have a job. When power, admiration, sex, ambition and self-esteem are mixed together people can get terribly hurt in all sorts of ways.</p>
<p>I support Naomi Wolf’s courage in going against the institutiinalized, patriarchal power of Yale. I think she has a social justice not a personal agenda. She made herself vulnerable to some of the comments on this board just as I now have.</p>
<p>I think bethievt is right.</p>
<p>And by the way, my D attended the same institution as calmom’s D and never experienced any harassment either, but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t, Naomi Wolf didn’t and other young women don’t.</p>
<p>It wasn’t that long ago that Larry Summers said women couldn’t do science. They finally removed him as pres of Harvard.</p>
<p>She didn’t come forward in her words, because she was up for a scholarship, and she didn’t want to be associated with anything negative.
But she doesn’t know if that would have made a difference, because she didnt say anything to anyone for twenty years.</p>
<p>This is the sort of thing I grew up with, starting when I was in junior high. ( i also expect, i was much more naive. I just learned how children were concieved when i was in 6th grade) Somebody’s hand on my leg wouldn’t be enough to brood over for two decades. But I grew up in the suburbs of Seattle & am five years older than Ms Wolf was growing up in Haight Ashbury, which must have been a kinder, gentler place.
<a href=“Widespread Sexual Harassment in Grades 7 to 12 Found in Study - The New York Times”>Widespread Sexual Harassment in Grades 7 to 12 Found in Study - The New York Times;
<p>Look - when I was in 6th grade walking to school a man flashed me on the pathway from the neighborhood to the playground - he was just waiting there. I wash shocked and just passed by and went to school. I have never said a word about it to anyone until this moment. Does that mean that it never happened and I can’t picture it clearly like it was yesterday? Not telling is a measure of powerlessness not a measure of validity of experience.</p>
<p>Poetgrl, 1983 isn’t ancient history. It happens to be the year my son was born – I was 29 years old. I went to college at age 16. At age 20 had an apartment of my own. I knew in those days – (the 70’s) that inviting a man to my apartment could be interpreted as a signal of romantic intentions. I don’t think the rules have changed. The phrase “date rape” wasn’t used when I was a kid, but women knew about the concept of men making unwanted advances. In any case, hand-on-thigh isn’t rape – it’s an exploratory gesture. I think most women know how to make their intentions clear when men do things like that. </p>
<p>I’d also note that people tend to act inappropriately when they get drunk. That’s something else I also knew back as a teenager, growing up in the stone age before any one else had noticed any relationship between sex and drinking. </p>
<p>I agree with your comments about memory – that is why I give very little credence to a writer’s account of an event that happened 21 years previously. Even if she believes her account to be true, it is likely to have been transmogrified in her mind to something very different from what actually happened. </p>
<p>Yale has a procedure for grievances, and they also have an internal statute of limitations - 2 years. There is a good reason for that, because of the fallibility of memory that you describe, as well as the near impossibility for an individual to defend against a false or fanciful allegation years after the event.</p>
<p>^^ good thing that she is not making formal accusation, complaints or trying to press charge of any kind then. Her stated goal was to vet the process before agreeing to be an institutional poster child for female Yale success.</p>
<p>I graduated high school a year later. You may not think 83 is ancient history, but I do. :)</p>
<p>As for two years, I sincerely believe it is too short a statute of limitations. But, I think we will have to agree to disagree, given the vocabulary you are using, words like “fanciful allegations,” etc… I fear we simply don’t see eye-to-eye on this.</p>
<p>Reasonable people can certainly disagree on this issue. At this point, I think we are just currently coming to some settled understanding of what constitutes sexual harrassment and what to do about it. Certainly it was not a settled issue in 83, by any stretch of the imagination. </p>
<p>When was ERA settled on as “no?” When did title IX come into effect?</p>
<p>This kind of thinking is much newer than it seems.</p>
<p><a href=“http://titleix.info/History/History-Overview.aspx[/url]”>http://titleix.info/History/History-Overview.aspx</a></p>
<p><a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Rights_Amendment[/url]”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Rights_Amendment</a></p>
<p>apparently ERA failed in 1982.</p>
<p>I’ve for years had the greatest respect for calmom and emeraldkity. I still do. We disagree on this particular issue. I don’t back down and I don’t expect either of you to either. I know you have daughters you love and respect. I hope none of them are ever in this position, whether or not you believe this particular writer is telling the truth. We don’t want to believe that bad things can happen to our good children, but they can and even great schools can let their students down. I guess that’s all I can say.</p>
<p>Thanks mythmom and I never had a bad experience with a prof either (as far as sexual behavior goes). I don’t think it is the norm and I don’t think it should be tolerated.</p>
<p>People who are the victim of accusations have rights & interests that are just as important as people who make the accusations. It’s also pretty difficult for a neutral 3rd party to make a proper investigation even after the passage of months, much less years. </p>
<p>The incident that Wolf described would not have been deemed “sexual harassment” in 1983, and it would not be deemed “sexual harassment” now, because of the context. Here’s the legal definition:</p>
<p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>Note that “unwelcome sexual advances” are not by themselves “sexual harassment” – it requires an additional circumstance.</p>
<p>I don’t think you have to put up with anyone groping you either.
What I have a problem with, is Ms wolf painting herself as such a delicate plant that she gave up writing poetry after the incident.
But was it because he grabbed her, or because he didn’t read the poetry she gave him later?</p>
<p>Well, I still say I would not wish this on myself, my son or anyone I care about.</p>
<p>saintfan–there was an exhibitionist in our neighborhood in suburban Chicago back when I was a kid and my Mom had to tell us about it. It was clearly traumatizing to her to even bring it up.</p>
<p>The thing is, calmom, trauma is trauma. I hope your kids never experience any. No matter what the legal definition might be.</p>
<p>Larry Summers did not say women couldn’t do science. That’s a gross misrepresentation of what he said, which in context, I thought was perfectly reasonable.</p>
<p>calmom: Wolf quite specifically states that she does not consider her experience to fall under the legal banner of harassment. This is why she refers to it throughout at sexual “encroachment” and a “transgression”.</p>
<p>I can assure you that my kids have each already experienced far worse than what Ms Wolf described. </p>
<p>A subjective experience of “trauma” does not change the character of an objective set of facts. </p>
<p>Legally, determinations as to what is appropriate tend to rely on standard of reasonableness – that is, would it be reasonable for a young woman to be traumatized under the circumstances? </p>
<p>I can certainly see her getting ticked off. But “trauma”? Because the professor she drank with in her home acted like a lout when inebriated – and left her home immediately when she telegraphed her displeasure?</p>