<p>One of the CC posters posted this in a discussion thread and I feel that many parents here would benefit from reading this - especially parents of daughters as this is more likely to happen to females.</p>
<p>Sex</a> and Silence at Yale</p>
<p>^^^^^Yes, read it. Also read this one:</p>
<p>[Re-examining</a> the professor-student love affair. - By Laura Kipnis - Slate Magazine](<a href=“http://www.slate.com/id/2093351/]Re-examining”>Re-examining the professor-student love affair.)</p>
<p>Frankly, when I was in college, if a guy who looked like Howard Bloom had put his hand on my inner thigh, I’d have told him that if those fingers came near me again, they wouldn’t be the only digits I would be cutting off at the base.</p>
<p>Not to excuse the behavior of any of these jerks, but moms, let’s teach our daughters that it’s perfectly okay to be really rude and nasty to these a**holes if that’s what’s required to push them away. Politeness should not be a part of it. Then go after them in the proper channels.</p>
<p>Many college age women have seen the movie “Legally Blonde.” In the movie the main character gets hit on by the big law school prof. She rebuffs him strongly and eventually comes out great. It does show a strong female reaction, some immediate negative consequences for the woman and an eventual good overall outcome. </p>
<p>It could lead to a discussion with your own daughters on what would they do if something like this happened to them.</p>
<p><<<frankly, when=“” i=“” was=“” in=“” college,=“” if=“” a=“” guy=“” who=“” looked=“” like=“” howard=“” bloom=“” had=“” put=“” his=“” hand=“” on=“” my=“” inner=“” thigh,=“”>>></frankly,></p>
<p>Handsome or physically repellant, no professor should be putting his hand on anyone’s inner thigh.</p>
<p>Just for the record, Harold Bloom was several years younger than his picture in the article shows him. The picture in the article is recent and this event happened a few decades earlier.</p>
<p>And her reaction was pretty negative. I mean throwing up does get the message across pretty clearly. Even Harold Bloom understood that to mean no and not maybe.</p>
<p>Sax,
I am not criticizing you in saying this, but let’s please remember that “Legally Blonde” is a movie and a piece of fiction.</p>
<p>What I found very disturbing is that when Naomi Wolf tried to discuss her experience with Yale, all she got was stonewalling. She tried many times and with many different people from different departments, but the response was the same. There was no positive outcome in her case.</p>
<p>So that article gives some context to the current Title IX complaint filed by sixteen students and alums, claiming “hostile educational environment” for women.</p>
<p>[Ahn:</a> Why we filed the Title IX complaint | Yale Daily News](<a href=“http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2011/apr/01/why-we-filed-title-ix-complain/]Ahn:”>http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2011/apr/01/why-we-filed-title-ix-complain/)</p>
<p>It’s all about the way grievances are handled and the tendency, certainly not unique to Yale, of universities to prioritize protection against negative publicity over addressing the underlying problem.</p>
<p>Yes, bookreader, I agree. I found it very disturbing that in the process of attempting to get her to do fundraising and basically advertising for the school, Yale was unwilling to meet with her to discuss their current policy, or should I say “non-policy.”</p>
<p>Of course, given the recent news about Yale, one would begin to see a pattern.</p>
<p>I was particularly interested in her “take” on positioning these issues as institutional civil rights issues rather than “personal” issues. I think that is clearly a big problem with these institutions.</p>
<p>I’ve actually, over the course of the past year, been horrified to hear how often Universities feel free to exclude student representation (legal and otherwise) from these situations, be they drug and alcohol related, academic infraction related, and now, even this. Students in the University system are apparently not even “allowed” legal representation, while the university consulte with a battery of attorneys.</p>
<p>I tend to think THIS lack of representation has something to do with the abysmal results the students get in any of these circumstances.</p>
<p>Do people here really believe that students should be forced to go into these situations without an attorney? I don’t.</p>
<p>bookreader. My point was that this movie would be an easy jumping off point to have this discussion with a new college student. Often times kids have no interest in discussing something this serious if you just bring it up out of the blue.“oh, mom…”</p>
<p>A little bit of context about Naomi Wolf and Harold Bloom:</p>
<p>Harold Bloom was as ugly and disgusting looking in 1983 as he was a few years ago. He was probably only in his mid-50s then, but he looked 80.</p>
<p>He did stuff like that a lot. All the time. It wasn’t much of a secret – anyone who spent any time around the English Department knew about it. I can practically guarantee that Naomi Wolf knew his reputation before he touched her. I have no idea why she kept her encounter a secret for 20 years; other people discussed similar things openly. I graduated from Yale five years before she did, in the midst of the first sexual harassment lawsuit against Yale, and people would openly discuss Bloom when we were sitting around in a college common room talking about the lawsuit.</p>
<p>Harold Bloom always took no for an answer (and was invariably answered no, at least I think so). I would be shocked and stunned if anyone came forward to say that Bloom retaliated against her for spurning his advances. Of course, that didn’t make it OK. The mere fact that this famous, much-admired senior professor – one of the top English professors in the world, then, perhaps THE top – was coming on to you created a lot of pressure. And women who didn’t feel comfortable being propositioned by him – which is to say 99% of undergraduate women, and probably 80% of female grad students – couldn’t spend much time around him, which of course limited their ability to learn from him outside of class. His behavior certainly had a discriminatory effect, but it wasn’t an effect he intended at all.</p>
<p>Harold Bloom was also a complete mess, in many more ways than this – just a gigantic mass of neuroses and illnesses (and medical appointments). There was nothing healthy about him. He didn’t come off as a predator at all – more like a drowning person frantically grasping at anything that looked like it might float, including smart young women. I think, also, that there was a near-universal sense that his outrageous flaws were organically connected to his genius. He was hungry all the time, for food, for love, for money, for regard, and that generated his unique, really valuable scholarship at the same time it led to his making outrageous demands on everyone around him. So of course that generated the equivalent of a conspiracy around him – not of silence exactly (because everyone acknowledged the problem, except apparently Ms. Wolf), but of inaction, because people doubted there was any way to affect his behavior, so the choice was between having him be on the faculty and tolerating him or telling him to leave, and hardly anyone wanted to tell him to leave (including the women he harassed, including obviously Ms. Wolf).</p>
<p>I’m sure this incident was traumatic for Ms. Wolf, but it’s hard to see the permanent damage it caused. Let’s remember that immediately thereafter she became a Rhodes Scholar, and that she was a famous author and commentator long before she turned 30. (One might also remember that, as anyone who has seen her knows, she is someone who trades on her own considerable physical beauty enthusiastically. That doesn’t excuse Bloom for harassing her – and he harassed plenty of women who felt insecure about how they looked – but it makes me grumpy to hear about how it destroyed her self-confidence, and I would bet that she had plenty of experience deflecting men who were hitting on her.)</p>
<p>I don’t have anything like a scientific sample, but I knew a few women whom Bloom harassed while he was harassing them, and they were upset and confused by it but none of them suffered horrible long-term damage either. (I knew them because I also was attracted to smart English literature students – Bloom and I had the same dating pool, so to speak. If I liked someone, there was a good chance he did, too. I was not famous at all, or powerful, but I was the right age, unmarried, and much cuter than he, and I had a lot more success in this regard.)</p>
<p>Here’s my point: Harold Bloom harassing Naomi Wolf, or any other student, was unfair, and traumatic. Like lots of things in life. And like lots of things in life that are unfair, it didn’t have a simple, acceptable solution, and it didn’t necessarily cry out for a radical solution.</p>
<p>I think there would be an easy, simple, moderate solution. First time: counseling, and a letter in your employment file. Based on preponderance of evidence (51%), as would be the case for students. No attorneys allowed. Second time: termination. No attorneys allowed. Faculty sign agreeing to the terms when they are appointed.</p>
<p>Set a good example for the students.</p>
<p>I agree, Mini. JHS, when I was working, there was the office lech who “came on” to the girl of the month. Yeah, I had my turn too. As in your narrative, I don’t know anyone who had anything to do with him. He was one big joke.</p>
<p>This is not just a college problem. It continues thoughout one’s life. And it isn’t just females being prey for males either. The sexes can be either as predator and prey.</p>
<p>JHS, I appreciate that background on Bloom, but I think you are missing Wolf’s point completely. She says she was not emotionally or sexually traumatized, but rather it affected her sense of worth as a student and put in doubt her own ability to develop scholarship. She did say that she received some terrible grades that semester and that she was denied the Rhodes scholarship. (Did she reapply and get it?) And her beef was not so much with Bloom but with Yale and how the powers that be handle these things and respond to student complaints’–the same thing behind the current lawsuit.</p>
<p>You wonder why she waited 20 years to come forward? She made it very clear that the environment was such at the time that she felt it would only bring her bigger problems. And your description of the general atmosphere back then confirms that. And she went public in 2004 after a year of stonewalling by Yale.</p>
<p>Well, I happen to think Harold Bloom’s theories pretty crack pot and his has done damage to the discipline. But that’s not what’s under discussion.</p>
<p>I was sexually harassed by Jan Kott (famous as Harold Bloom if not more so in his day.) I was no older than Naomi Wolf. I did not find it traumatic at all. I was easily able to say no.</p>
<p>More traumatic was his refusal to support my work because of his idea that “women should not be in academia.” </p>
<p>I used to have the breast index – the larger your breasts the less your male professors would take you.</p>
<p>It was unfortunate that I was small, curvy and didn’t wear thick glasses. I would have fared better academically if I had. </p>
<p>When I was unmarried and pregnant a bunch of them (Including Jack Ludwig, the original Valentine Gershback in one of Bellow’s novels) tried to block my dissertation from being accepted, even though University Microfiche awarded it best dissertation of 1987 when the female Dean of the Humanities went over their heads and accepted it.</p>
<p>That’s just me. Fending off unwelcome advances? Part of the territory. Letting their spurned egos destroy my academic career? Traumatic.</p>
<p>I am not advocating for accepting the harassment. Of course it is creepy and unethical. But I don’t think it can ever be totally stopped (and some of the women preyed on women too. I don’t know if men preyed on men. Out of my experience, and no one talked about this then.) Two of the female teachers were definitely ■■■■■■■■ for women as was my first department chair at my job. She always seemed to be lifted up my necklace to admire it.</p>
<p>I survived psychologically, but the academic heights I had dreamed of were definitely thwarted. Might have been anyway, but all this guys absolutely refused to help me.</p>
<p>I did get a lot of action, though. Almost got sold by one professor as “Bubbles, who cost 9 camels” or goats or whatever he said.)</p>
<p>My D found none of this at Barnard, a very feminist institution. I don’t think the male professors there would risk this. According to her, everyone is behaving themselves at law school too, although she says they express shock (she is small, curvy, etc etc) that she is interested in death penalty work and prisoners rights.</p>
<p>The males were very upset that I was writing about Thomas Pynchon, obviously too macho for me. (One of them had written about him – very poorly I might add.) In fact, one went so far as to suggest my work was plagiarized (because he couldn’t have thought of it) and went so far as to assign a junior, un-tenured faculty member the job of finding my original source. Of course she couldn’t. Her conclusion was that it was entirely original. It was.</p>
<p>The women were wonderful. I had usually been a woman who loved being one of the guys. I didn’t think men were awful and women wonderful at all. I was single and pregnant by choice, and not the choice of the father who only wanted to be married. But I was warmed and amazed at how the female faculty members united behind me and refused to let my career die entirely.</p>
<p>Of course not of them was as prestigious or as well placed to help my career.</p>
<p>Sax,
I’m sorry, but I didn’t realize that you were presenting the movie as a way to facilitate communication on this issue. I only hope that today’s college women are as successful when bringing a harassment suit (assuming that it really happened and isn’t fabricated) as the woman in the movie. </p>
<p>Clearly this issue needs to be discussed. I naively thought that sexual harassment was no longer tolerated. From what I am now reading, I am naive indeed to have such thoughts. And I will readily admit that I was stunned that Naomi Wolf experienced such a wall of silence when she asked for the school’s policy on this. What are they afraid of if there is in fact a well developed (and used) policy?</p>
<p>It is very troubling to read about the Wall of Silence/Stonewalling that met Naomi Wolf. I really do wonder what other schools have as their official policies & what is actually being done by colleges/Us about this issue. The person I know who was stonewalled because of her gender had it happen within the past 10 years at our in-state flagship.</p>
<p>Yale had only been coed for what–a bit over ten years–when the event Naomi Wolf describes occurred. Women who lived through some of the decades prior to that can remember the familiar feeling of not being taken seriously, intellectually or professionally, by men in positions of power. It is a demeaning, demoralizing feeling, and it is almost always done on purpose. </p>
<p>What I hear Naomi Wolf saying in her article, as much as anything else, is that the treatment she allegedly received from Professor Bloom and Yale University was a theft of the educational product her parents were paying good money for her to receive. It was larceny, theft, fraud. It was also arrogant and unfair and wrong. The man was supposed to be teaching her and helping to advance her skills and career.</p>
<p>What I hear her saying is that she has no confidence that things have gotten any better!</p>
<p>Mythmom, I’m stunned & saddened by your experience. I filed charges against one prof., and was surprised that other profs came to my support. It seemed they were disgusted by his behavior over the years. You, however, were left floating on an island. Then to be pregnant…wow! I wonder if your experience influenced your dtr’s choice of school, and also her strength of character while being so attractive.</p>
<p>Neat you got the U M award. I got that in my field several years before you, and never knew if it is still continued. At least that publication helped for others.</p>
<p>bookworm: How sweet to share that sisterly connection. It am happy to hear your experience was better than mine.</p>
<p>Yes, my daughter started coming to Women’s Studies classes (not my primary discipline but asked to teach in the days before anyone had studied it) when she was two months old.</p>
<p>She began by wanted to attend Columbia, but in the end, she didn’t apply. She said she much preferred the atmosphere of Barnard. She had never had close women friends. Her best friends were guys, and she wanted to change that. She made lifelong friends at Barnard with similar values. And she got to shake Hillary Clinton’s hand at commencement. (Well they all did – not special kudos to her.)</p>
<p>What is your field?</p>