"... fearing that to have their names attached would threaten their chances in an already desiccated job market.
But even if this was just gossip, I would believe it. When it comes to the American academy, I trust raw, red rumor over public statements any day of the week. Academic celebrity soaks up blood like a pair of
Thinx. A letter to NYU’s president, Andrew Hamilton, a
draft of which leaked in June, argued that Avital’s 'brilliant scholarship' qualified her for special treatment.... That Avital’s defenders are left-wing academic stars is not particularly surprising if you’ve spent much time in the academy... When scholars defend Avital — or 'complicate the narrative,' as we like to say — in part this is because we cannot stand believing what most people believe. The need to feel smarter is deep.... We would be intellectually humiliated to learn that the truth was plain: that Avital quite simply sexually harassed her student, just as described....
It’s possible that Avital genuinely believed that her student loved her, that he wanted to protect her from the scary, hostile world. In that case, the alleged assaults would have literalized the romantic tone she required he use. 'Hold me,' they would have said. 'Make me feel loved.' There is a phrase for all of this: cultish subjection...."
From
"I Worked With Avital Ronell. I Believe Her Accuser," by Andrea Long Chu in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
What I chose from that article I chose for
clarity, not abstruseness. Mostly. There's one abstruse thing that's the very thing that made me decide to blog it, which you see in the beginning of the post title:
Process: Wild things live in this word.
IN THE COMMENTS: Henry said:
Now that I'm reading the article, there are references to the wild throughout.
"She had just wanted to be coaxed, like a deer to a salt lick."
"That afternoon, quite without knowing it, like burrs attaching themselves to some passing animal, the students had been persecuting Avital."(1)
"...abuses like Avital’s grow like moss, or mold."
Interesting that this kind of wild is Victorian -- the wild of tooth and claw, mold and decay. The academy is not civilized.
Posts
66 comments:
Wait, I thought a feminist was supposed to need a Nimrod like a fish needs a bicycle.
Four pages of posts with the “underpants” tag!
I misread it at first. Wild things live in this world. I thought the word process was an instruction.
Wild things live in this world sounds like a truism. Unless the "world" is the world of academia where the truly wild things are furtive and corpuscular.
"Patty is our new 'Process Manager'."
"Patty doesn't know how to DO anything."
"...we cannot stand believing what most people believe. The need to feel smarter is deep...."
An accurate description of academe.
Bill Clinton needed a lot of understanding too.
Avital sounds like a headache remedy. The whole story is a #MeToo effect: a try for a mob outrage hit.
It all comes down to women's inclination to nag.
The wild thing in the world is female mood swings.
Abstruse: WTF is a dessicated job market? It must not refer not to the current full employment job market, right? Who would have hard time finding a job? Maybe it's hard for academic leakers who buck the leftie circle the wagons at all costs approach?
Added: Brave actor- playing period girl in a commercial. Maybe not as brave as diarrhea girl, but still.
Avital sounds like a headache remedy.
In business school Fictional Drug Company's fictional drug is Damitol.
How much did Thinx pay her for the product placement in this essay?
"Process: Wild things live in this word. These stories come from sources who strongly wished to remain anonymous...left-wing academic stars...believing what most people believe. The need to feel smarter is deep.... We would be intellectually humiliated to learn that the truth was plain...Avital...sexually harassed her student, just as described.... believed that her student loved her,...There is a phrase for all of this: cultish subjection...."
[Head Exploding]
Can thinx be cut into bicycle helmet forehead pads, is the question.
Now that I'm reading the article, there are references to the wild throughout.
"She had just wanted to be coaxed, like a deer to a salt lick."
"That afternoon, quite without knowing it, like burrs attaching themselves to some passing animal, the students had been persecuting Avital."(1)
"...abuses like Avital’s grow like moss, or mold."
Interesting that this kind of wild is Victorian -- the wild of tooth and claw, mold and decay. The academy is not civilized.
* * *
(1)The full quote is worth capturing:
That afternoon, quite without knowing it, like burrs attaching themselves to some passing animal, the students had been persecuting Avital. As far as I could tell (given that we had no prior relationship), I had done the same when I had failed, during my coursework years, to give much thought to her at all."
Another quote worth capturing:
“If we focus on this one case, these details, this accuser and accused, we will miss the opportunity to think about the structural issues,” wrote Duggan. This was code. It meant, “You can talk about structural issues all you want, so long as you don’t use examples of people we know.”
Tommy Duncan said...
"...we cannot stand believing what most people believe. The need to feel smarter is deep...."
An accurate description of academe.
Interesting phrase you've called out. The second half is undoubtedly true--lefties are desperate to be thought of as the smart ones. But the first half is just as undoubtedly false. Lefties cannot abide diversity of thought. Everyone must (MUST!) think the same thing.
The whole point of #metoo was to hurt Trump.
#ThemToo was the point.
tim maguire said... Everyone must (MUST!) think the same thing.
yes, but;
WHAT everyone must (MUST!) think Has To Be different from what people would think on their own.
We have to Train them INTO the correct forms: Like we do with bonsai plants, you know, Warp them
Academia, Hollywood, the Vatican- they all seem to have the same power structure.
What's the opposite of diversity? University" -Kate
Nothing will get you shunned from the modern university like free-thinking.
"The whole point of #metoo was to hurt Trump"
Trump is the light bringing bastard we needed.
Blogger tim maguire said...
"The second half is undoubtedly true--lefties are desperate to be thought of as the smart ones. But the first half is just as undoubtedly false. Lefties cannot abide diversity of thought. Everyone must (MUST!) think the same thing."
The point is that the academic left despises "what most people believe". They think the deplorables are stupid. Yes, the left demands uniformity of thought. The point is that they demand their uniformity.
You will never get another cushy job if people think of you as a free-thinking infidel to the one true faith.
" We spend our days parsing commas and decoding metaphors. We get high on finding meaning others can’t. We hoard it, like dragons. We would be intellectually humiliated to learn that the truth was plain: " Sounds like someone we know.
They are all snowflakes.
Give us some clarity ( dirt)Ann. You are a feminist and former college professor. Did you bully your students? Did you wear outlandish clothes to class? Being such a outspoken feminist did you treat your male and female students the same?
clarity, clarity, clarity.
What Avital Ronell seems to have wanted from the grad student who filed the complaint is emotional labor of the romantic kind -- frequent demonstrations from the grad student that he harbored intense, exclusive feelings of warm intimate attachment to her -- along with a lot of errand-running. Ugh.
Something that makes the woman feel that she is on the receiving end of this.
[All:] Love is the thing that has licked 'em?
[Nathan:] And it looks like I am just another victim.
Yes, sir, when you see a guy reach for stars in the sky,
You can bet that he's doing it for some doll
When you spot a John waiting out in the rain,
Chances are he's insane, as only a John can be for a Jane.
When you meet a gent paying all kinds of rent
For a flat that could flatten the Taj Mahal,
Call it sad, call it funny, but it's better than even money,
That's the guy's only doing it for some doll.
When you see a Joe saving half of his dough,
You can bet they'll be minting it for some doll,
When a bum buys wine like a bum can't afford,
It's a cinch that the bum is under the thumb of some little broad
When you meet a mug lately out of the jug,
And he's still lifting platinum folderol
Call it hell, call it heaven, it's a probable twelve to seven
That's a guy's only doing it for some doll.
Who says you can't Avital?
"Four pages of posts with the “underpants” tag!"
And it's absolutely all great stuff.
Try the menstruation tag too. It's scintillating.
"[Head Exploding]"
I made sure to include the "cultish subjection" part for you.
If you go to the link, you'll see there's a book that uses this term... a book by Avital Ronnel:
"There is a phrase for all of this: cultish subjection. It comes from a book called Complaint, released this year, in which the author writes of graduate school as a kind of indentured labor. “I was a painfully earnest baby scholar,” she recalls, “dedicated, conditioned for every sort of servitude, understanding that doing time, whether in graduate school or as part of a teaching body, amounted to acts — or, rather, passivities — of cultish subjection.” The author’s name is Avital Ronell."
Wait - I just started reading the article and it's turned unexpectedly hilarious - the cult lady was harassing a guy named Nimrod Reitman?
Thanks for the frontpaging. Rereading that comment, I misapplied my emphasis. The italicized words should be Victorian and civilized.
Nimrod der mächtige Jäger.
This should be a wake up call for academics to the joke that university arts courses have become but it won’t. They are entrenched. Their reputations are tied to a continuance of the obscurantism of post-modernist theory. I was in grad school in the late eighties when my art professors were desperately reading every French deconstructionist they could find in order to throw around the vocabulary and ideas of simulacrum, critical theory, signs and signifiers etc. Camille Paglia was one of the few voices critical of this wave of madness and they did their best to drown her out. There was also the physicist Alan Sokol who exposed the gibberish in a famous hoax. It had little affect.
The interesting thing Chu did was make Ronell's offense purely individual and human. "You cannot have a cycle of abuse without actually existing abusers." The adviser/student structure did not abuse Reitman, Ronell abused Reitman.
Now if only Chu could move from the microcosm to the macrocosm. No woman was ever abused by a patriarchia structure, she was abused by a man. No Black man was ever abused by white supremacy, he was abused by a racist.
Real life ain't a theory of literature. A narratives don't hurt anyone, people hurt people.
Compare this with Weinstein, whom we are told represents a wicked structure.
Effect not affect.
Ann,
"Except on formal occasions, she always went by that one name, “Avital,” like Plato, or Cher."
Or like ”Ramtha” Oh yeah, she's got it goin' on. Cult Lady 101.
"Eventually I kissed the ring. I attended a session of Avital’s seminar and visited her in office hours. Her manner in that meeting was odd, wounded. “I just wanted to make sure you and I are OK,” she told me with a concerned look, as if we were recovering from a nasty fight. “Of course we are!” I exclaimed, tripping over myself to reassure her. Avital softened. She had just wanted to be coaxed, like a deer to a salt lick. She smiled. I smiled. This was the process."
This was ”Love Bombing” - in an academic setting.
Compare the reactions of the letter-writers supporting Avital to their reactions to Weinstein. Now tell me if they're sexist.
"We get high on finding meaning others can’t. We hoard it, like dragons. We would be intellectually humiliated to learn that the truth was plain."
This describes gnosticism.
The deal with gnostiscism is that it doesn't go anywhere. You can't build on it, like you can with science, because it does not describe the natural world. The mysticism of the modern world is no more advanced than the mysticism of ancient Egypt.
"The need to feel smarter is deep.... We would be intellectually humiliated to learn that the truth was plain..."
So there it is : the essence of elite academic thought. One must make everything more complicated than it really is, so that only the elite can understand it.
I see Avitol as a prima donna virtuoso sophist, who wouldn't know an absolute truth if it bit her in the ass.
It sounds like Ms. Chu eschews all of this.
"Avital still mostly talked about men."
And many female NewAge "feminists" are obsessed with studying certain men in order to attain their "male pole". Nietzsche is common (And hints at the Nazi strain running through NewAge).
"Blaming her students for making her feel drained."
Oprah warned us about "energy vampires".
"The call to think critically about power becomes a clever smoke screen."
I get a lot of that here - from conservatives.
“You can talk about structural issues all you want, so long as you don’t use examples of people we know.”
Alex Jones, Gwyneth Paltrow, Oprah, Bill & Hill, Orrin Hatch, Tom Harkin, Arianna Huffington, Shirley MacLaine, etc. - I know all the names.
"There is no complexity in studying forests if you can’t recognize a tree from a few feet away."
This is what it's like, trying to explain cultism, here. If no one can recognize, for instance, there's something awful bizarre about people being willing to kill - for water - then how can you grasp the rest?
"We cannot stand believing what most people believe."
So much today hinges on beliefs - and people just go along. It's crazy.
"My department has been largely silent since the news broke. Faculty members have said nothing to us. Upset and ashamed, my fellow graduate students and I speak with one another cautiously. We heal, or don’t, alone."
Now that does sound like dealing with a cult. Nobody comes to the aid of a cult's victims. Conservatives yell at us that there are no victims. That insures victims get no help - but will get more abuse - and the victimizers will get a free pass.
"A culture of critics in name only, where genuine criticism is undertaken at the risk of ostracism, marginalization, retribution — this is where abuses like Avital’s grow like moss, or mold."
This is what happened to my life. As soon as I said the word "cult" - as soon as it was real to me - they had the power to make sure I was never taken seriously again. Meanwhile, they carry on.
"The lawsuit against her reads as a portrait, not of a macho predator type, but of a desperately lonely person with the power to coerce others, on pain of professional and psychic obliteration, into being her friends, or worse."
Ha-Ha!!! So, I ain't so crazy after all - that is fucking IT.
"There is a phrase for all of this: cultish subjection. It comes from a book called Complaint, released this year, in which the author writes of graduate school as a kind of indentured labor. “I was a painfully earnest baby scholar,” she recalls, “dedicated, conditioned for every sort of servitude, understanding that doing time, whether in graduate school or as part of a teaching body, amounted to acts — or, rather, passivities — of cultish subjection.”
The author’s name is Avital Ronell."
WOW! THAT IS FUCKING WILD!!
I hope Billy Bush got a huge severance from NBC.
"So there it is : the essence of elite academic thought. One must make everything more complicated than it really is, so that only the elite can understand it."
Status seeking is simply human nature. Wall Street and corporate heads rank themselves by the size of their income and value of their material possessions, while academics do it by the size of their intellectual achievement, influence, reputation, etc. Everybody wants to be at the top of the heap in their particular cohort.
Except for those who really just don't care, (a minority among those actively seeking success in their field).
fearing that to have their names attached would threaten their chances in an already desiccated job market.
Desiccated. Lololol have fun with that image of the “higher learnEd.”
Academics are, as a group, f***in' crazy.
She was born 30-years too late to fulfill her calling
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_guards_in_Nazi_concentration_camps
Robert: The difference is the goals of money guys, science guys and engineering guys are typically set by society as a hole. The so-called librul arts frequently devolve into cults of personality. Especially the pomo-decon where the entire subject is made up of incoherent rantings of an overcompensating bureaucratic mind seeking absolute obeisance.
"Status seeking is simply human nature." (RC)
Yes, "all is vanity..."
Chu writes well, and even thinks pretty well, considering. But she has a hard time resisting her academic training, which says that all relations are exploitive, everything is personal, and you must paint yourself as a victim, lest you be taken for a predator. She should ditch those losers she's hanging around with, she might amount to something.
Ms.Chu presents herself repeatedly as a victim -- of the most absurd type. She complains about being encouraged to take a seminar with a professor for whom she is going to be a teaching assistant.
That is an entirely normal thing to be advised to do. Despite her presumption that she is to be the professor's colleague, she is a student learning how to teach in that teacher's courses, and she should normally familiarize herself with that professor's style and work.
She whines that graduate school is sado-masochistic for everyone except white men. That is the derangement of academic presumption -- perfect inversion of the truth.
I had the poor judgment to attend grad school when the residual old-school pervy men were having an entirely unexpected last hurrah with the new-school pervy "gender studies" womyn/whatevers. I still cannot differentiate between them, except that the oldies were purged by the youngies and they all enjoyed it -- but nobody else did.
So now new generations of youngies are purging new generations of oldies. I suspect they're still all culpable of the same behavior. I don't doubt the allegations against the professor are true, but Ms. Chu protests too much.
Howard said...
"She was born 30-years too late to fulfill her calling
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_guards_in_Nazi_concentration_camps"
Where ze guards did yoga and took ze homeopathic medicines, jah? Funny how zat vas ze appropriate treatment for making sure ze cruelty was dispensed, no? No.
Yet it still is today...
This case is very well documented, without the usual he said/she said that impacts most #MeToo allegations. If Avital Ronell does not lose her job then I have no sympathy for #MeToo accusers.
Blogger Big Mike said...
This case is very well documented, without the usual he said/she said that impacts most #MeToo allegations. If Avital Ronell does not lose her job then I have no sympathy for #MeToo accusers.
Chivalry is dead among Trumpiseenas. BM and his allies use soap opera mean middle school girl revenge logic. Bravo
Chu writes well
Agreed! Her column was entertaining. Not a lot of people can write like that.
We Are Not a 'Cabal,' Just Critics of Trump
Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury,....
I once sat in an audience of 250+ professors and grad students as a visiting Nobel-winning scientist gave a lecture. He was using an overhead projector (late 1980s), and stood next to it as he placed his transparencies one after another on it.
His shoulder obscured the light's path to half the screen behind him, which he could not see because it was BEHIND him. We, the audience, could only see half of each page, dammit!
I tolerated this as long as I could stand, two whole slides, and finally politely raised my hand and pointed out the problem to him. He turned to look at the screen, un-obscuring the slide for as long as he was rotated, saw no problem, and continued with his semi-obscured lecture for another 45 minutes.
Nobody else in that entire auditorium saw fit to say a word about it. Academics!
I prefer The Nightwatch moment.
My Mona Lisa moment was meh all this fuss for that?
Andrea Long Chu can't possibly be an academic. She can really write!
"Like most purportedly edgy things, it was less edgy than it imagined."
"When it comes to the American academy, I trust raw, red rumor over public statements any day of the week."
"The need to feel smarter is deep. Intelligence is a hungry god."
Good, insightful stuff.
@Howard, chivalry has been dead for decades, stabbed in the back by feminists. Weren’t you at the funeral? It was the quite the social event.
You folks think this grifter writes well? You think she doesn't think you're part of the evil white male patriarchy? Read her specific complaints about white men. She feels her "healing" wasn't adequately recognized by the university over something that didn't even involve her.
Read harder. Also, consider this: the complaint against the professor, who is clearly a nut, insists that a wealthy, world-traveling, brilliant young man was forced into a several-year repeated rape by an elderly woman, commencing on their first meeting before he even arrives at the university, and that his mommy, a judge and legal scholar, advised him to stick with it nonetheless. Does that even make sense? It is too crazy to believe. Note his amorous emails back to her are not in the legal documents. Consider what he must have said to perpetuate this intense nutcasery in his life for so long.
He submitted to her several times a day against his will for years? Nonsense.
He is the metoo# movement you're angry at.
She is nuts but offered a quid pro quo he clearly took at any cost until he failed to get the academic appointment he wanted, and not a moment sooner. It stinks to high heaven, and you fall for it because you think it invalidates metoo#?
Read harder. Don't make me agree with Judith Butler, for criminys sake.
@Tina Trent, she had the power to utterly destroy his career. She held all the power in the relationship.
I’ll tell you what. You don’t agree with that thinks-with-her-vagina Judith Butler and I won’t join the followers of Paul Elam. Deal?
Big Mike: Chivalry is owned by each man. Give that up, you concede the field to feminists and by definition become a cuck. Women cannot coerce sex by the unspoken threat of violence, that's a major difference in this case, but you have bought into the feminasty de-balling.
@Howard, you are full of shit if you assume that women cannot coerce sex.
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