Wolf IV: No Other Recourse?

(Continued from Parts I, II, and III)

Let’s grant, for the sake of argument, that Harold Bloom really did exactly as charged. On top of that, let’s grant that Naomi Wolf couldn’t have gotten any justice while she remained at Yale. Not by confronting Bloom, not by talking to her adviser, not by talking to Bloom’s department chair, not by talking to the Dean of the College, not by filing a grievance.

The situation nonetheless changed when she graduated. She may have imagined him as a malevolent deity, ready to zap her to the ground anywhere she might endeavor to hide, but in fact Harold Bloom was a mere mortal, and he no longer had any authority over her. Wolf didn’t even owe him for the Rhodes Scholarship; he had recommended her before the night of the fatal dinner, but she failed to get it then. When she won the scholarship, on a second try, it was entirely with letters from other professors.

Sheepskin in hand, New Haven in her rearview mirror, Wolf could have written Bloom privately and demanded an apology: “Remember me? What kind of way to behave was that? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” If he failed to come through with the response she deemed appropriate, she could have written a letter of complaint about him to his department chair. If she didn’t get a response out of the chair, she could have written a reminder letter and cc’d it to the Dean of the College. And so on, up the ladder. She could have done these things at minimal risk to herself or her career, within a couple of years of the alleged offense. Instead, she waited 20 years to demand some kind of response from Yale, then sprang the charge in a public forum where Bloom would have no chance to rebut it.

Roderick Long has insisted that Wolf’s months of calls to administrators, and her article published after they failed to give her what she wanted, constitute “blowing the whistle on sexual harassers” at Yale. Only in her dreams. Real whistleblowers expose wrongdoing while it is going on. Most often, they assume the risks inherent in exposing it while they are still in the institutional environment. Not everyone has the guts to be a whistleblower; you do it knowing that you could get shafted. Frank Glamser and Gary Stringer--the professors at the University of Southern Mississippi who dared to investigate a Vice President who lied on her vita--are whistleblowers. As I write this, the president of their university has locked them out of their offices because they blew the whistle, and is seeking to fire them and put an end to their academic careers. By contrast, Wolf says that she used to tell the students who came to her speeches, “I have not been brave enough.” That’s right, and it continues to be right. The biggest risk she runs is negative publicity, in a line of work where controversy attracts attention, and bad publicity is widely preferred to none. Neither Harold Bloom, nor the entire administration of Yale University, can do her any harm whatsoever.

Nor, to pick up a point from Part II, is there much reason to think that Wolf wrote her article to help other women. Besides herself, she describes six who were allegedly mistreated by men at Yale. Rachel Donadio says she was originally going to mention just one—until an indispensable administrative assistant in the Women’s Studies department handed her more cases on a plate. Two of the women say that their professors raped them. Yet who, after reading Wolf’s article, is going to remember Cynthia Powell or Stephanie Urie? Powell’s story reads like chunks of a police report; Urie’s apparently consists of extracts from a legal brief. What happened to them, if they are telling the truth, is immensely worse than what happened to Wolf, if she is. But for them there are no “heavy, boneless” hands hot on thighs, no floors spinning, no kitchen sinks to back into. Such vividness Wolf reserves only for herself.

To be concluded in Part V.