The Dangerous Intimacy of Grad School: Was the N.Y.U. Harassment Case Inevitable?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/18/nyregion/avitall-ronell-nyu-title-ix.html

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Among the many upending impressions left by the story of Nimrod Reitman, a former graduate student who has claimed that his celebrated mentor sexually harassed and assaulted him during a long period in which she seemed to wage a bizarre abduction of his emotional life, is that the American university’s current reputation as a hothouse for delicate flowers — protecting students from any possible offense or indignity — is just partially earned.

Mr. Reitman, who received his doctorate from New York University in 2015 for a 500-page dissertation titled “On the Serious Motherhood of Men: Dissonance in Music, Rhetoric and Poetry,” studied under Avital Ronell, a renowned philosopher and professor of German and comparative literature in her 60s, against whom he filed a Title IX complaint last year. Mr. Reitman is gay, and Professor Ronell is a lesbian.

The resulting investigation concluded, this spring, that Mr. Reitman had been a victim of sexual harassment but not sexual assault. Later, administrators suspended Professor Ronell for the coming school year, mandating that any future meetings she might have with students be supervised, while the university said that it was examining subsequent claims of retaliation, which could lead to further sanctions.

The question of retaliation revolves in large part around a letter signed by more than 50 scholars and delivered to N.Y.U. shortly after it determined Professor Ronell’s guilt. Arguing that terminating her or relieving her of her duties would be considered an “injustice” to be “widely recognized and opposed,” the signatories claimed that her brilliance and stature ought to exonerate her.

That stance, in itself, had the effect of revealing the hypocrisies of an institutional culture that surely sees itself as more enlightened than CBS or Miramax. But the letter went on, more precariously, to accuse Mr. Reitman of “malicious intent.”

If N.Y.U. were to determine that Professor Ronell had any hand in corralling her friends and colleagues to produce it — something she says she did not do — she would be vulnerable to the charge that she had been seeking revenge against a student who filed a Title IX complaint, an obvious violation with serious consequences.

Among the famous academics to sign the letter was the philosopher Slavoj Zizek, who in defending his involvement with it, wrote that his allegiance to Professor Ronell had nothing to do with her work or position, but rather stemmed from the fact that he had been at N.Y.U. during a two-week period when the investigation, which lasted 11 months, had been at its “peak.” Some people “caught in the process,” as he put it, “talked to me privately and showed me some notes.” He believed that Professor Ronell was “a walking provocation for a stiff Politically Correct inhabitant of our academia.”

“Political correctness” is a term now diluted to virtual meaninglessness, and of course, the “politically correct” response to documented sexual harassment these days is often the immediate loss of a job.

What the relationship between Mr. Reitman and Professor Ronell illuminates most clearly is the obsessive and overwhelming role an adviser can have in the life of a graduate student, especially, perhaps, in the humanities, where a job market that has been contracting for nearly two decades often leaves students feeling entirely reliant on those advisers to help them get them tenure-track positions.

Mr. Reitman has had three prestigious fellowships since he finished his Ph.D., the current one nonpaying, but fellowships are default positions for people who don’t get jobs. Mr. Reitman, in fact, received not a single offer from the 20 schools to which he applied for teaching positions. Whether this has to do with the complicated nature of his relationship to Professor Ronell, who he claims sent letters of recommendations on his behalf that were all too tepid and never pushed for him anywhere, the realities of a depressed academic market, or deficiency on his part, is hard to know.

Whatever the truth, these letters of recommendation hold far more importance than they do in other professional fields. A letter for a young academic specializing in 17th-century Portuguese history, for example, must make a case for that candidate’s exceptionalism in relation to the competing candidates in the field. If it cannot do that, the prospects can be nonexistent.

“This sense of dependency that a student has on an adviser is a holdover from the medieval roots of academia, when the student is in the thrall of the master,” Leonard Cassuto, an English professor at Fordham University who has written extensively about the challenges of modern graduate schools, told me. When the student is in the hands of a star who commands great authority over the world of a rarefied discipline, the dynamic of the worshiper and the worshiped can seem immutable.

Both the Title IX report from N.Y.U. and a lawsuit that Mr. Reitman filed this week against the university and Professor Ronell, as well as a statement that she issued on Thursday evening in response, include floridly worded communications between the two that suggest an unusually intense relationship. The emails and texts included in Mr. Reitman’s complaint depict a needy woman making demands on his time: “I was crying when I did not hear back from you. It was a hard night,” read one. Or: “I am on a need to hear from you basis, please don’t refrain much longer!”

Professor Ronell, who denies all allegations of harassment and assault and stalking, provided excerpts from emails in her statement which are meant to demonstrate Mr. Reitman’s devotion: “Sweet Beloved, I was so happy to see you tonight, and spend time together. It was so magical and important, crucial on [sic] so many ways. Our shared intimacy was a glorious cadence to our time in Berlin.”

Yet as ardent as his emails seem, almost all of them, she maintains, included a request to review and edit his writing.