Corey Robin's Blog, page 26

What we talk about when we talk about sex in the academy

I have a piece in The Chronicle Review about a genre that has annoyed me for some time:

Every few years an essay appears that treats the question of sexual harassment in the academy as an occasion to muse on the murky boundaries of teaching and sex. While a staple of the genre is the self-serving apologia for an older male harasser, the authors are not always old or male. And though some defend sex between students and professors, many do not. These latter writers have something finer, more Greek, in mind. They seek not a congress of bodies but a union of souls. Eros is their muse, knowledge their desire. What the rest of us don’t see — with our roving harassment patrols and simpleminded faith in rules and regulators — is the erotic charge of education, how two particles of mind can be accelerated to something hotter. In our quest to stop the sex, we risk losing the sexiness. Against the discourse of black and white, these writers plea for complexity: not so that professors can sleep with their students but so that we can speak openly and honestly about the ambiguities of teaching, about how the most chaste pedagogy can generate a spark that looks and feels like — maybe is — sexual attraction.

I call this genre The Erotic Professor.

The latest addition is Marta Figlerowicz and Ayesha Ramachandran’s “The Erotics of Mentorship,” which recently appeared in the Boston Review. Like many practitioners of the genre, Figlerowicz and Ramachandran are professors of literature. (You’ll never find a professor of chemistry or demography among the authors of such pieces.) Also like many practitioners, they have a high estimation of the academy’s sexiness. “There are perhaps no places more vulnerable to the intertwining of work and romance,” they tell us, “than colleges and universities.” That belief, of course, reflects the happenstance of their being in the academy rather than any empirical comparison of the academy to other workplaces. The office romance is a ubiquitous feature of the culture, after all, its settings as various as a bar (Cheers), a detective agency (Moonlighting), a paper company (The Office), and an insurance firm (The Apartment).

…

One of the conventions of the genre, in fact, is for the erotic professor to imagine what her students must be feeling by reference to what she once felt, and then to state that feeling as if it were a universal law (“intellectual magnetism, a notoriously protean force, often shades into erotic attraction”), scarcely noticing that when she had that feeling, she was a student on her way to becoming a professor. What about the student on her way to becoming an HR rep? Or an accountant?

The question never arises because the real shadow talk of the erotic professor is not sex but class.

You can read more here.

 

Shabbos Reading

This morning, in shul, we read Leviticus 24, where, building up to the famous eye for an eye passage, the text says: “And he that kills any man shall surely be put to death. And he that kills a beast [belonging to another man] shall make it good; beast for beast.”

This afternoon, at home, I read the story of the Jewish writer Bruno Schultz, killed in 1942. Schultz, who lived in the Polish city of Drohobych, had come under the protection of Felix Landau, an officer in the SS. Schultz painted murals on the bedroom walls of Landau’s little boy. Landau liked to go on Jew-killing sprees in the Drohobych ghetto. On one such expedition, he murdered a Jewish dentist who had been under the protection of Karl Günther, another officer in the SS. Taking revenge, Günther hunted down Schultz in the streets. He shot him twice in the head. Explaining himself, Günther said to Landau, “You killed my Jew—I killed yours.”

 

On Democracy Now!

I was on Democracy Now! this morning, talking about Paul Ryan’s retirement, the fate of conservatism, and the teachers’ strikes across the country. My segment starts at the 39 minute mark.

Reminder: at Harvard tonight and tomorrow

Just a reminder for those of you in the Boston area..

I’ll be at Harvard Divinity School tonight (Tuesday, April 10), speaking at Andover Chapel on 45 Francis Avenue, at 7 pm. Zachary Davis of the Ministry of Ideas series will be interviewing me about Trump and The Reactionary Mind.

Tomorrow, Wednesday, April 11, at noon, I’ll be giving a talk on Trump and conservatism at Harvard Law School. The talk will be in Room 1010 at the Wasserstein Campus Center.

 

When the Senate was a goyisch old boys’ club

As I head into the home stretch of Clarence Thomas, I’m poring over the more than three-thousand-page transcript of Thomas’s Senate Confirmation hearings in 1991.

One of the eeriest revelations from that reading is not how much the Senate in 1991 was an old boys’ club; that we already knew from Anita Hill. Nor is it how much the Senate in 1991 was a white old boys’ club; that we already knew from Thomas. No, what really comes out from the hearings is how much the Senate of 1991 was a goyisch, even WASP-y, old boys’ club.

Some of the most uncomfortable moments of the hearings, for me as a Jew, is to see the subtle, almost invisible, ways in which Howard Metzenbaum (Democrat from Ohio), Paul Simon (Democrat from Illinois), and even Arlen Specter (Republican from Pennsylvania) are slighted, condescended to, and generally treated as if they aren’t full members of the Committee. The real action of the Committee lies with the goyische troika of Joe Biden (Democrat from Delaware), Orrin Hatch (Republican from Utah), and Alan Simpson (Republican from Wyoming). They take each other seriously, listen to each other intently, josh and joke with each other, respond to each other, look to and at each other. The Jews? They’re not real men, just annoying gnats, buzzing and biting about affirmative action, women’s rights, executive power, civil rights, and abortion.

The driving force here isn’t politics: despite being the liberal lion of the committee, Teddy Kennedy is treated with deference and respect by Democrats and Republicans alike. And it isn’t partisanship: Howell Heflin, also a Democrat, is given his due by the Republicans. It seems to be Jewishness.

And Jewishness of a particular sort, in which brains (Specter) and money (Metzenbaum) and persistence (Simon) are thrown into a witches’ brew, emitting fumes of a nebbishy, emasculated, Jew-y wimpiness.

The whole thing struck me as an unsettling yet revelatory tableau of what it was like to be a Jewish man of an older generation in this country. For Jews of my generation and younger, I think it’s hard to connect with this postwar moment—whose protagonists are still with us (think Philip Roth)—when Jewish men were just coming into their own in American society and finding their masculine credentials challenged. It’s a moment many would prefer to forget, but it’s there in the literature and history of the moment. It’s also there in those Senate confirmation hearings.

But however much empathy we might wish to show for the struggles of these men, those striving mid-century ethnics struggling to find their place in the sun, we should be mindful that victims can become killers, or short of that, pretty bad dudes. That moment, with all its masculine anxiety and insecurity, helped produce, or at least exacerbated, all sorts of mischief—from operatic, almost lunatic, sexism (again, think Roth, the characters in his book, I mean) to Israeli thuggery (I’ve known more than a few Jewish men who’ve told me how much they identify with the power and machismo of the Israeli state and its soldiers).

But perhaps we can mobilize this empathy in a more productive way. For what these transcripts also made me think of is how women so often feel today in predominantly male settings, where their contributions are not heard, their voices are ignored, their comments somehow diminished in subtle ways—and ways that they often find themselves alone in recognizing. Their male colleagues remain totally clueless, and if any of the sexism were pointed out to those men, they’d be genuinely and sincerely shocked, so focused are they on the other men in the room.

You were once strangers in the land of Egypt: That is the moral core of what Judaism teaches us. To remember that we were strangers, not so that we can remain stuck in our victimhood (with all the thuggery that that memory of victimhood is meant to authorize) but so that we, who have now arrived, remember what it was like to be on the receiving end of power, what it was like to be invisible, so that we don’t treat others the way we once were treated.

Remember what it was like to be a stranger in Egypt, to be the Jew in the room. Understand what it is like to be the woman in the room. On this, the last day of Passover.

Update (4 pm)

Turns out I was wrong about Simon. He wasn’t Jewish. He was Lutheran. Apparently, lots of Jews made the same mistake of thinking he was Jewish.

The Waning Hegemony of Republican Tax Cuts

Vote on the Reagan Tax Cuts of 1981

House: 321-107 (131 of those 321 yes votes are Democrats; one Republican votes no)

Senate: 89-11 (37 of those 89 yes votes are Democrats; one Republican votes no)

Vote on the Bush Tax Cuts of 2001

House: 240-154 (28 of those 240 yes votes are Democrats; no Republican votes no)

Senate: 58-33 (12 of those 58 yes votes are Democrats; two Republicans vote no)

Vote on the Trump Tax Cuts of 2017

House: 227-205 (none of those 227 yes votes are Democrats; 13 Republicans vote no)

Senate: 51-48 (none of those 51 yes votes are Democrats; 1 Republican votes no)

Why is the media—including the liberal media—supporting these teachers’ strikes?

I’ve been amazed—in a good way—at how positive is the media coverage of all these teacher wildcat strikes and actions in West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Arizona. Particularly from liberal media outlets.

I say this because it was just six years ago that the teachers in Chicago struck. Even though their cause was just as righteous as that of the teachers in these southern states, featuring many of the same grievances you see in the current moment—the Chicago teachers’ final contract included a guarantee of textbooks for all students on the first day of class; a doubling of funds for class supplies; $1.5 million for new special education teachers; and so on—the hostility from media outlets, including liberal media outlets, was palpable.

Time‘s education columnist had this to say about the Chicago teachers—many of whom were women of color, in a union led by a woman of color—on the Diane Rehm Show:

Part of this strike, it’s pretty clear, is that the union needed to have some theater for its members, let them blow off some steam, and that’s increasingly obvious.

I got into a Twitter spat with ABC News’s Terry Moran, who tweeted, “I wonder if the Chicago teachers realize how much damage they are doing to their profession—and to so many children and their families.” Moran, who makes $25k to $30k for each talk he gives (at least back in 2012), even had the gall to suggest that the teachers shouldn’t be complaining about their paltry raises.

If you were on line during that strike and supported the teachers, you were part of a fairly small crew of folks like Kenzo Shibata, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Megan Erickson Kilpatrick, Doug Henwood, and myself, arguing with the likes of Dylan Matthews (then at the Washington Post), Matt Yglesias (then at Slate), and others of that ilk. Almost no one with a national platform, save Diane Ravitch, supported the strikers.

Given the way the discussion of race, gender, and identity politics has gone the past few years, you would have thought that the Chicago teachers would have been a natural cause celebre for liberal commentators. Their spokesperson was Karen Lewis, a black woman (also Jewish!) Many of the strikers were women of color. They were working in a multiracial city, dealing with all the sorts of challenges liberals claim to care about. Yet so many of the liberal outlets and voices who have made race and gender politics a concern in recent years were either silent or critical of the teachers. (Women of color: cool; women of color in unions: not so cool. That’s how we get to preserve the fiction that when we speak of the working class or union members, we’re only talking about white men.)

There are a lot of reasons for the change in tone and coverage today: Sanders has helped change the conversation among liberals and in the Democratic Party. Trump and the Republicans have dramatized the cost of policies the nation has been pursuing for some time: less focus on funding, more focus on testing and charter schools.

But one of the big changes is that six years ago, the face of the opposition to the Chicago teachers was Mayor Rahm Emanuel—the Svengali of both the Clinton and Obama White Houses—and, behind Emanuel, the Democratic Party. People have probably already forgotten this, but in the last decade or so, the Democrats—and liberals like Jonathan Chait—have gotten really bad on education, teachers unions, and public schools.

One has to wonder if these strikes were happening in blue states, with Democratic governors and state legislatures, what the reception might be. One also has to wonder if the strikers and/or students were of color, what the reception might be. The coverage could turn out quite different, with the concerns of students of color being pitted against the unions, or with the ugly undercurrents of race working against the concerns and interests of both the teachers and the students.

Regardless of the hypothetical, the fact is that these teachers in West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Arizona aren’t just challenging the hard right; they’re also, in a way, challenging the neoliberal Dems.

That’s another reason why this strike wave may prove to be so historic: in the same way that the late 1970s signified the Republican Party’s growing willingness to challenge the Democrats and New Deal liberalism, so did it signal a fundamental shift within the Republican Party, with the hard right contesting power at the highest levels of the GOP. Those were the years that saw the rise to prominence of these new faces of the party: Orrin Hatch, Alan Simpson, John Warner (remember when he was considered the hard right?), Thad Cochran, Larry Pressler, and so on. (Both Hatch and Cochran are retiring this year, by the way.)

The challenge of this strike is not just to the Prop 13 Order of the Republican Party; it’s also to the neoliberal order within the Democratic Party.

***

That last mention of the Prop 13 Order is a reference to a Facebook post I did the other day about the strikes. Because many readers of the blog aren’t on Facebook, I’m reproducing that post here in full:

It’s 1978, and you’re a politically minded person paying attention to electoral politics. You focus all of your attention on the midterm elections. And you find that after two years of a historically unpopular Democratic president, whose approval ratings are tanking in the low 40s, the voters re-elect a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate by wide margins. You find that the voters give the Democrats complete control over 27 state governments (that is, the governor’s mansion plus the state legislature) and complete control over an additional nine state legislatures. You’ll be thinking: the Democrats are firmly in control of the country and will be for the foreseeable future. Nothing you’ll be noticing will give you the slightest clue that the country is heading for a profound counterrevolution in just two years’ time.

The reason you’ll be thinking this, beyond your focus on the midterm elections, is that you’ll have completely missed the most important political development of 1978: the passage of Proposition 13 in California, which radically gutted property taxes in California and made it extremely difficult to raise taxes in the future. This was the real harbinger of the country’s future, a fundamental assault on the postwar liberal settlement of high taxes, high state spending, high public services, in what had once been one of the most liberal states in the country.

It’s 40 years later. Don’t make the same mistake. Right now, in the reddest of red states, in the places you’d least expect it, teachers are starting a movement not only to raise their salaries and improve the schools, not only to reverse the assault on public education, not only to reverse the rule of Scott Walker which was supposed to provide a national model across the country, but to confront the real governing order of the last 40 years: the Prop 13 order.

In West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Arizona, we’re seeing the real resistance, the most profound and deepest attack on the basic assumptions of the contemporary governing order. These are the real midterms to be watching, the places where all the rules and expectations we’ve come to live under, not just since Trump’s election but since forever, are being completely scrambled and overturned.

Talking liberal amnesia with Brooke Gladstone on On the Media

This weekend, you can hear me talking about my Harper’s piece on Trump and liberal amnesia with Brooke Gladstone for a segment of her NPR show On the Media. If you live in New York, you can catch the show on WNYC tomorrow (Saturday) at 7 am and Sunday at 10 am. The segment is also parked here.

I have to say, having listened to On the Media since sometime around the Iraq War (and this weekend’s show is all about the Iraq War on the 15th anniversary of its launch), this was a bit of a dream come true. To hear that Gladstone sounds in real life exactly as she does on the radio!

The real danger of normalization

I’ve got a new piece in Harper’s, taking stock of a very American pathology—amnesia—which I analyze with the help of Philip Roth, Barbara Fields, Louis Hartz, and Alchoholics Anonymous. The piece is behind a paywall, but here’s a taste:

Ever since the 2016 presidential election, we’ve been warned against normalizing Trump. That fear of normalization misstates the problem, though. It’s never the immediate present, no matter how bad, that gets normalized—it’s the not-so-distant past. Because judgments of the American experiment obey a strict economy, in which every critique demands an outlay of creed and every censure of the present is paid for with a rehabilitation of the past, any rejection of the now requires a normalization of the then.

We all have a golden age in our pockets, ready as a wallet. Some people invent the memory of more tenderhearted days to dramatize and criticize present evil. Others reinvent the past less purposefully….Whether strategic or sincere, revisionism encourages a refusal of the now.

Or so we believe.

The truth is that we’re captives, not captains, of this strategy. We think the contrast of a burnished past allows us to see the burning present, but all it does is keep the fire going, and growing. Confronting the indecent Nixon, Roth imagines a better McCarthy. Confronting the indecent Trump, he imagines a better Nixon. At no point does he recognize that he’s been fighting the same monster all along—and losing. Overwhelmed by the monster he’s currently facing, sure that it is different from the monster no longer in view, Roth loses sight of the surrounding terrain. He doesn’t see how the rehabilitation of the last monster allows the front line to move rightward, the new monster to get closer to the territory being defended. That may not be a problem for Roth, reader of Beckett: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again.” (Though even Beckett concluded with the injunction to “fail better.”) It is a problem for us, followers of Alcoholics Anonymous: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

In other news, I’ve got a busy schedule of talks coming up. I’ve posted the schedule before, but in case you missed it, here are the remaining events this coming spring:

Tuesday, April 3, noon: Yale Law School, room TBA.

Tuesday, April 10, 7 pm: Harvard Divinity School, Andover Chapel.

Wednesday, April 11, noon: Harvard Law School, Wasserstein Hall.

Wednesday, April 18, 4 pm: Grinnell College, room TBA.

Thursday, May 3, 6 pm: Labyrinth Books in Princeton.

 

Did Jill Abramson Plagiarize Ian Milhiser?

Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of the New York Times, has an article in the current issue of New York making the case for the impeachment of Clarence Thomas. I don’t have any problems with the substance of the piece, though I don’t think Abramson breaks much new ground on the Thomas sexual harassment front or with respect to the fact that Thomas committed perjury in his Senate confirmation hearings. (Having co-authored, with Jane Mayer, the book on Thomas and Anita Hill, Abramson knows this case better than almost anyone.)

My problem is that Abramson seems to have lifted, sometimes word-for-word, an extended passage from a October 2016 blog post by Ian Milhiser.

Here is Milhiser:

He [Clarence Thomas] joined the majority decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, holding for the first time that an employer’s religious objections can trump the rights of their women employees. And, in one of the most under-reported decisions of the last several years, he cast the key fifth vote to hobble the federal prohibition on sexual harassment in the workplace.

…

In Vance v. Ball State University, a 5–4 Supreme Court redefined the word “supervisor” such that it means virtually nothing in many modern workplaces. Under Vance, a person’s boss only counts as their “supervisor” if they have the authority to make a “significant change in employment status, such as hiring, firing, failing to promote, reassignment with significantly different responsibilities, or a decision causing a significant change in benefits.”

One problem with this decision is that modern workplaces often vest the power to make such changes in employment status in a distant HR office, even though the employee’s real boss wields tremendous power over them.

Here is Abramson:

He joined the majority decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, holding that an employer’s religious objections can override the rights of its women employees.

And, in one of the most underreported decisions of the last several years, Thomas cast the key fifth vote to hobble the federal prohibition on harassment in the workplace. The 5-4 decision in 2013’s Vance v. Ball State University tightened the definition of who counts as a supervisor in harassment cases. The majority decision in the case said a person’s boss counts as a “supervisor” only if he or she has the authority to make a “significant change in employment status, such as hiring, firing, failing to promote, reassignment with significantly different responsibilities, or a decision causing a significant change in benefits.” That let a lot of people off the hook. In many modern workplaces, the only “supervisors” with those powers are far away in HR offices, not the hands-on boss who may be making a worker’s life a living hell.

The number of direct repetitions—of words, phrases, and sentences—is sizable. The faint rewording of other passages is plain. The choice of quotations from and description of the Ball State case, the set-up and syntax of the whole section, the conceptual choices (Thomas “cast the key fifth vote,” which Abramson borrows from Milhiser in order to suggest, wrongly, that Thomas was somehow the last vote cobbled together by the conservative majority, or to suggest, improbably, that if Thomas had not been approved by the Senate, a more liberal justice would have been nominated in his place and, 15 years later, would have cast a different vote) and conceptual ordering: Abramson’s passage mimics Milhiser’s to a high degree.

Abramson is not a rookie reporter. She’s one of the giants of contemporary journalism.

In case the editors at New York revise the web version of the article (it appears in the print version of the February 19 issue of the magazine), here are a screen shot of the relevant section in Abramson’s piece and three screen shots of the relevant sections from Milhiser’s.

Update (1 pm)

I just remembered that Abramson was first made managing editor in the wake of the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal, which Bill Keller, who was made editor after Howell Raines was forced to resign over the scandal, said influenced his desire to change the Times culture. Part of that change involved bringing on Abramson as managing editor.

After some googling, I found that while she was managing editor, Abramson had to deal with at least two plagiarism incidents involving reporters at the Times. In the first incident, which seems to have involved less outright copying without attribution than Abramson utilizes in her New York piece, Abramson admitted the accusation of plagiarism that had been leveled against the Times reporter:

Did Barrionuevo commit plagiarism?

“Yes,” says Abramson. “I think when you take material almost word-for-word and don’t credit it, it is.”

In the second incident, she was more circumspect:

It appears that Alexei did not fully understand Times policy of not using wire boilerplate and giving credit when we do make use of such material. As I mentioned to you, other papers do permit unattributed use of such material. He should not have inserted wire material into his Times coverage without attribution.

That said, because the new examples do not involve many words or an original thought, the transgression does not seem to be as serious as the first instance on paco.

I’ll leave it to readers to adjudicate which of these two cases is more relevant to what Abramson did in this New York article. Either way, she seems to have violated the very policies she upheld while she was an editor at the Times. And in a link-laden piece like this, she should, minimally, have credited and linked to Milhiser.