Wolf III: To Grieve or Not to Grieve?

(Continued from Parts I and II.)

Harold Bloom doesn’t get off the hook, just because Naomi Wolf has the bad faith to bring out the old victimological ploys while denying that what she is up to.

Assuming that things went roughly as she recounted them, Harold Bloom did do something wrong. He didn’t just get drunk and put a crude move on a student whose work he was grading, he blew off his basic responsibilities as an instructor. A professor who takes on a student for an independent study course is expected to give the student assignments, to track progress on them, and to meet with the student weekly. It isn’t clear from Wolf’s account whether he met with her in his office once or twice, or never bothered to at all. But soon enough, if she is telling the truth, he was dodging meetings with her. There was only the fateful dinner, and afterward, no further contact—she says her poems went into his box in the department mailroom, and his final grade report was mailed to her. Simply for failing to hold up his end of an independent study course, Bloom deserved to get chewed out by his department chair. (Unless, of course, Bloom had been extended the privilege of enrolling students in independent study courses without having to meet with them. In that case, his department and the upper administration needed to review the wisdom of keeping such a prima donna on the payroll.)

Wolf had multiple opportunities to seek justice, or at least some acknowledgment of wrongdoing. She says she was too scared to try any of them. She was convinced that her academic adviser would rate Bloom’s interests over hers. She doesn’t mention either Bloom’s department chair or the dean of the college (though at one point she insists that a trip to the dean’s office is “intimidating” to students per se). She says she wanted to file a grievance… and was talked out of it. In fact, “some women friends” talked her out of speaking to “anyone official.” “In the absence of transparent procedures, decoding the right rumors was how you survived.” You would think Wolf and her friends were helpless inmates of some total institution, not students at an elite university.

Undergraduates are not known for their deep knowledge of the way a university works. If any of Wolf’s friends had ever filed a grievance against a faculty member, she doesn’t mention it. One supposedly told her about a woman whose complaint against a male graduate student was not upheld by the Grievance Board—with the alleged result that the woman had a breakdown and dropped out of Yale. (Other portions of Wolf’s account suggest that some of her friends were Bloomian acolytes themselves. Could any of them have been more interested in protecting the guru than in supporting her?)

I should note that Jennifer Weiner, an Ivy League contemporary of Wolf’s, has little patience with this kind of story:

As someone who attended a similar institution in roughly the same era that Wolf did, I can assure you that Ivy League undergrads are practically marinated in entitlement. If you had a beef with anything, be it person or policy, you felt perfectly entitled, justified, and encouraged to tell someone. Even if you were on financial aid. Even if you were female. By the time I got to Princeton, in the heyday of P.C., especially the women.

In any event, Naomi Wolf never talked to a faculty member or an administrator about her run-in with Bloom. Her parents asked a professor they knew to intervene—she says he declined to get involved—and that was the end of it.

The New York Observer article indicates that she would never have had to be alone in a room with Harold Bloom during grievance hearings, undermining at least one of her stated reasons for avoiding the process. I will add that faculty members often make the opposite complaint from Wolf’s: they think that grievance procedures of the kind that Yale was using are tilted against the professor, not the student, when sexual misconduct is being alleged.

That said, I have a little sympathy with Wolf concerning institutional grievance proceedings. Flagrantly political decisions can happen in the best of them. Where witnesses cannot be cross-examined (a lot of grievance procedures do not allow it), some may lie with impunity to the grievance panel.

However we might evaluate it, the extreme confidentiality that Wolf complains about is commonplace. (I have seen how grievance proceedings work, both in a three-initial corporation where I was once employed, and in academia where I am now, so I think I have some basis for generalizing). A fair and reliable procedure will be able to find for an employee against a manager, or for a student against a professor, when the manager or the professor is in the wrong. But the penalty assessed against the offender is frequently not revealed to the person who filed the successful grievance (it never was in the three-initial corporation’s process, just as Wolf says it never is at Yale). Naturally, if the offender is pushed into quitting, or is removed from a management position, the outcome will be visible—but how and why it occurred will be known to very few. Lesser sanctions will be kept officially quiet, and may not even become the subject of rumor.

Wolf, then, is at best naïve when she complains about lack of transparency as though it is unique to Yale University (“as secretive as a Masonic lodge,” she laments). Suppose an irate alumna of Clemson University called the president’s office, or a dean’s office, and demanded to know the outcome of a particular grievance not involving herself. Or suppose she demanded to know what penalties had been imposed against administrators or professors who had been on the losing side in grievance procedures over the past so many years. She would be told that these were personnel matters, grievance proceedings are highly confidential--now please go away. If a former employee were to call the offices of a high-level manager in a three-initial corporation, asking questions of this kind, the response would be identical in content, and probably brusquer in manner.

We can certainly debate the rationale for such policies. I have heard it said that corporate managers would never consent to be subject to grievance proceedings, unless they could be spared public humiliation when the rulings went against them. Maybe so, but that’s a strictly pragmatic appeal to existing “power relations.” Wolf correctly recognizes that “the reputation of the university” and “damage control” are highly motivating to university administrators. Naturally, fear of lawsuits stimulates wagon-circling, and some of those suits are filed under Federal sexual harassment law (as Wolf is aware, both the Federal law and Yale policies and procedures mandated by a Federal judge were in place by the time of her run-in with Bloom). But it isn’t just sexual improprieties that prompt such fears. She’d have gotten no further, in her conversations with Yale administrators, had she demanded to know how administrators had been penalized when they were found to have misused university funds, or how professors were disciplined, when they were caught issuing fraudulent grades or driving drunk with students on board. Wolf doesn’t let such details complicate the picture.

What’s clearly false is Wolf’s assertion that university grievance boards (or administrative rulings made without a grievance procedure) never go in favor of female students who have brought complaints against male professors. On the contrary, sometimes they have found for female students whose charges against male professors were overblown, or fabricated outright. Daphne Patai’s book Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism presents a number of documented cases. For instance, Leroy Young was fired summarily from a tenured faculty position by the president of Plymouth State College--without an investigation, immediately after Young had prevailed on appeal against a student who claimed that he had sexually harassed her. But you’d never know that from Wolf’s sample of unidentified size, drawn from an unknown number of unnamed universities: “Not one of the women I have heard from had an outcome that was not worse for her than silence… No one was met by a coherent process that was not weighted against them.” Really? Another female student sued Leroy Young—who had passed a polygraph test denying her charges—and ended up collecting $115,000 from his former university.

What’s more, any decently conducted grievance proceeding would not have permitted Wolf to make unsupported assertions, as she does in her article, that Harold Bloom was propositioning other female students, or subjecting them to unwanted touching, or having affairs with them. Her entire evidence to those effects consists of rumors that she heard in 1983 plus rumors that a couple of her sources heard at other times. If Bloom was laying his racket all over town, why couldn’t Wolf, with her extensive connections, turn up one other Yale alumna who wanted to describe her bad experience with him? Maybe Wolf was just being lazy, as somewhat better quality sources have suggested that Bloom had affairs. For instance, a published interview in GQ from 1990 described how the door to Bloom’s home was opened by a younger woman, obviously not his wife, who stuck around the entire time that the interviewer was on the premises. But you’d think Wolf would have regarded corroboration as vitally important…

Indeed, a grievance proceeding might have led to challenges to her story. Until the other two diners depart, and Wolf puts her poems in front of Bloom, we have no idea from her published accounts what sort of interaction was going on between them, for she retells not one word of their conversation. Or is asking “What did you say to him?” as off-limits as asking “What were you wearing”?

Continued in Part IV.