<p>One of my 30-something colleagues married a current student in December. I do not know whether she was his student or not, and I do not have the nerve to ask! She is my daughter’s age (20), so it did make me wonder…</p>
<p>JHS, excellent post.</p>
<p>Naomi Wolf was permanently “changed” by the experience. We can debate whether she was “damaged”, but clearly, from the passion of her writing and her passion (and doggedness) on the issue, she was, and is, permanently changed. She had reason to believe that faculty at her august institution would treat her with the respect all students deserve, that she would be allowed to benefit (equally with her male counterparts) from the education and the opportunities offered, and that she would be provided a safe space to learn and grow - and, finally, to feel fully a part of her alma mater. Bloom - and Yale - robbed her of all of this, and apparently has done so with dozens of other students as well. It’s sad, and I respect her greatly for revisiting and pursuing the issue for the benefit of other students now, and to come. </p>
<p>As for Bloom, he should have been told to pack his bags decades ago. (Most of what he has produced in the past two decades is pure drivel.)</p>
<p>Just read this morning in our local newspaper a story about a NC woman who wrote an essay about her HS coach who got her pregnant & then took her to have an abortion. She wrote about it for college composition class, “I had an affair w/ my HS teacher,” & it was published in their newspaper & he turned himself in & was charged with 64 felony counts of sex with a student. Granted that this student was a minor at the time. It changed some names but named the HS.</p>
<p>I think there has been a gradual change in attitude about this subject, and that most people (I think) believe that any sexual advances by a professor toward a student in one of his classes is improper, and essentially harrassing, even if there is no quid pro quo, or threat, or overt coercion. The relationship is inherently coercive.</p>
<p>But I don’t think that has always been the general view (as evidenced by one of the articles linked above). So in the 1980’s, it may have been that Harold Bloom’s unwanted advances were tolerated because there was inadequate evidence that there were further negative repercussions for the student, such as retaliation in grading etc. I don’t think anybody would be satisfied by such a lack of response now, and I don’t know one way or the other whether that is a problem at Yale now, although I’m inclined to doubt it.</p>
<p>The shift has been so gradual, I’m not sure how widespread it really IS. Would LIKE to believe that the woman just has to say or somehow convey, “No!” and nothing bad would happen to her & the “pet” won’t get some favored position for playing along and providing “bennies,” but it isn’t the real world where I live, unfortunately. :(</p>
<p>"and I don’t know one way or the other whether that is a problem at Yale now, although I’m inclined to doubt it.'</p>
<p>Maybe, maybe not, though note Yale’s current responses to Wolf suggest there has been little if any change in officialdom.</p>
<p>Meanwhile:</p>
<p>[Can</a> Title IX complaint go public? | Yale Daily News](<a href=“http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2011/apr/05/can-title-ix-complaint-go-public/]Can”>http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2011/apr/05/can-title-ix-complaint-go-public/)</p>
<p>Yale didn’t have a policy back then. Very few colleges, if any, did. It wasn’t really seen as wrong for a faculty member to ask out a student, as long as she could say no. And, from what I’ve read elsewhere, Harold Bloom HELPED Naomi Wolf’s career considerably in its early stages AFTER she had repulsed his advances. My understanding is that he wrote her a glowing rec for the Rhodes. </p>
<p>Personally, I think the Yale Title IX law suit is complete and utter nonsense, if the reports as to the conduct complained of are true. Are there sex issues at Yale? Of course there are. There are such issues in every place populated by human beings. But the Title IX suit is really silly because the stupid Deke joke, while in remarkably poor taste, is not the stuff of genuine sexual harrassment. (Deke pledges were required to stand outside the women’s center and yell vulgar phrases about women at Yale. They got in trouble. They were disciplined, as was the frat as a whole. But the young women who filed the complaint think they should have been expelled for a stupid prank.) We should all be up in arms that our taxpayer dollars are being wsted on such nonsense.</p>
<p>Again, don’t misunderstand. If Yale doesn’t punish rapists, if Yale doesn’t fire faculty who harrass students, etc., and that was what the suit was about, then I’d support them 100%. But claiming that has a “hostile environment” because it didn’t expel pledges in a frat who yelled stupid vulgar slogans and merely disciplined them is over the top.</p>
<p>The issue is whether they have a policy NOW? That’s the entire point of the Wolf story.</p>
<p>(If you’re an alum, could you ask?)</p>
<p>@JHS – I was absolutely riveted to your post #10. I think the intention of the post is not to excuse anything but to give us a more complete picture. I don’t know who Naomi Wolf is and I tried to read the article but it is so full of details and drama that I can’t get through it. Maybe I’ll try again later.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Are you sure? It read to me like she wanted to get some attention for herself. There is a lot of detail and drama.</p>
<p>I can’t speak for Yale specifically but I’m happy to say that most colleges are not as tolerant of professors crossing those kinds of lines with their students as they were in the 80s.</p>
<p>Evidence? Wolf tried hard, and it seems that others did too, to find evidence of a policy that NOW exists that might not have back then. It might be true, I’d like it to be true, I’d be especially pleased for my Ivy graduate student d. for it to be true, but is it true?</p>
<p>She’s a writer, and she sold an article BECAUSE it has drama, with the bulk of it being about whether are now protected from what she underwent more than 20 years ago. It would have been very easy for the President’s Office at Yale to release a statement as to their policy, or to have their personnel office do so, or even their center on gender studies. So easy to make the story go away - why they don’t even have to produce a birth certificate!</p>
<p>Here’s some info:
<a href=“http://www.yale.edu/hronline/forms/shbroch.pdf[/url]”>http://www.yale.edu/hronline/forms/shbroch.pdf</a>
and
[Sexual</a> Harassment: Yale Vice President and General Counsel](<a href=“http://ogc.yale.edu/legal_reference/sexual_harassment.html]Sexual”>http://ogc.yale.edu/legal_reference/sexual_harassment.html)
and
<a href=“http://yalehealth.yale.edu/med_services/share.html[/url]”>http://yalehealth.yale.edu/med_services/share.html</a>
and
[Sexual</a> Harassment Grievance Board | Yale College](<a href=“http://yalecollege.yale.edu/content/sexual-harassment-grievance-board]Sexual”>http://yalecollege.yale.edu/content/sexual-harassment-grievance-board)
The last one has links to the formal grievance procedure, and reports for the last few years.
So who is it, exactly, who doesn’t know what Yale’s policy is, and why don’t they know it? I don’t know if there are some inadequacies in this policy–there may well be. It does look like what Naomi Wolf experienced is currently prohibited and is reportable.</p>
<p>Thanks! Good stuff. (All that is missing is any information about what happens when a case “is referred to the provost”).</p>
<p>What carries more meaning for me is what the current students have to say. As JHS outlined in his post what was well known among faculty and students in the 1980s wouldn’t have been refected in policy.</p>
<p>It is very easy to find women who had to fend off unwanted advances of professors in the 1980s. I know a handful myself but times have changed, that isn’t the climate anymore. Colleges don’t tolerate it.</p>
<p>Did Wolf interview any current students at Yale to find out what they had experienced and what they thought the current climate is?</p>
<p>
I think that may be what is bothering some of the complainants–they would like to know just what punishments are meted out, and perhaps Yale doesn’t reveal that. But I would also note that there haven’t been many complaints brought in the last few years at all.</p>
<p>[NB: Obviously cross-posted with Hunt’s stuff.] I believe Yale has a blanket policy forbidding faculty to have sex with undergraduates, and to solicit sex from undergraduates, without regard to whether they are students in the teacher’s class at the time. And that is a much broader prohibition than is common in the academic world. That policy is relatively new, though – I think it was adopted after Wolf published her story. [Further edit: Note the additional language in the second text linked by Hunt, compared to the first. Like almost all universities, Yale bans sexual relations between teachers and students over whom they have supervisory responsibilities. But as to undergraduates, the ban on “sexual or amorous relations” is absolute, regardless of supervision or not.]</p>
<p>Another thought: On CC, when people talk about elite research universities, everyone is always suspicious that their undergraduates won’t have enough contact with faculty. Well, folks, this is the flip side of the coin – close contact with faculty has some downsides as well as benefits. When faculty are selected for their scholarly output and not their teaching ability or sensitivity to undergraduate egos – and that is and will remain the case at top research universities – you are apt to get some who are narcissistic and not fully in control of their libidos. When you have contact with them, some of it may turn out to be inappropriate contact.</p>
<p>I am very conflicted about what the right thing to do is. I have no respect whatsoever for people who would retaliate against a student who doesn’t want to have sex with them (or who would even hint that such retaliation might be possible, or fail to make clear that it wouldn’t happen). Mythmom’s story bothers me much more than Naomi Wolf’s. And I am sensitive to the fact that even an honest, non-coercive proposition (if that is possible) can make a student uncomfortable enough to deny her (or him) access to that teacher, which is discriminatory in effect. But I rebel against the idea that nondiscrimination in this respect is such an important principal that we have to hound offenders out of academia, regardless of their merit as scholars. That impoverishes everyone’s experience to make certain that no one is enriched inappropriately. </p>
<p>I might even want to do that if I thought that some class of students was being fundamentally deprived of adequate educational opportunity because of it. A faculty where everyone was hitting on young women (or young men), or where it was thought acceptable for people to refuse to supervise Catholics, or Jews, or Arabs – that would be intolerable. But I don’t think it should be a university’s obligation to provide a completely squeaky-clean educational environment, free (unlike the rest of life) of any hint of discrimination in any corner. College students are big boys and girls now. Can we really not ask them to deal with this a little?</p>
<p>According to Plato, at least, Socrates seems to have been flirting (and more) with his students constantly. Aren’t we glad that he wasn’t silenced for that? Would the world be improved if he had been?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Wolf wrote the article in 2004 and if the policy was changed thereafter then obviously bringing her story and the general issue to light (after a year of fruitless attempts to work with Yale administrators) was a good thing, not just self-serving drama.</p>
<p>JHS,</p>
<p>Are you saying that the minority needs to put up with it for the good of the majority? And if so how many woman need to be affected before something should be done?</p>
<p>Am I the only one on this forum that thinks what Naomi Wolf had to put up with was and still is totally unacceptable…even when the offender is an eccentric genius?</p>
<p>It is totally unacceptable regardless of who the transgressor is. But you gotta catch him and there has to be proof. It’s hard to prove.</p>
<p>When I worked with a bunch of kids, I got a complaint one day from a young girl that one of the boys grabbed her breast. No one saw it, and it had happened the previous week. Both kids (minors). I immediately told the girl’s parent who wanted to kill the boy and demanded that he be expelled from the program. After calming down the parent and I had already put in a call up the chain of command, because I was at rock bottom, I called the parent of the boy. As I walked down a hall, I see the girl lying in a heap in the lounge area in a teeny top with a bunch of guys. Yeah, I know. Doesn’t mean the guy she accusing is vindicated. </p>
<p>To make a long story short, there was no proof, other than the kids all lie around like that all the time there. Did the boy deliberately do something or was it an accident? Found out that the girl was angry at the boy who was “courting” her and then went out with someone else. The whole craziness of this was ridiculous. The boy was warned that this sort of misunderstanding could be a major problem. His parents angry enough as well as hers that neither donated a dime that year to the fund, when both were decent though not over the top donors. All of the kids still hanging all over each other. </p>
<p>These are kids, but escalate it to adults, again with no proof. Gotta have that proof. </p>
<p>With the Yale lech, some smart women should have set a trap for him and caught him instead of just complaining among themselves.</p>