Marjorie Perloff, What the Avital Ronell Affair Says about The State of the Profession, Los Angeles Review of Books. Perloff describes herself as “an 86-year old retired female professor, having held the Sadie Dernham Patek Professorship of Humanities at Stanford University from 1990-2002. Before that, I was Florence R. Scott Professor of English at the University of Southern California; I have taught part time at USC again in recent years and am currently Florence R. Scott Professor Emerita.”
After quoting from a number of Ronell’s emails to Reitman (as quoted in his lawsuit), she observes:
Anyone who finds these comments “playful” “queer coding” must have a very strange sense of humor. Reading these emails, I felt deeply sorry and embarrassed for their author, who had trusted her lover and was being so increasingly put off. It makes no difference at all whether the two actually had sex; the point is that Avital was clearly a woman in love and she was suffering. Not surprisingly, then, she turns on Nimrod and does indeed hurt his job prospects. But he is by no means the innocent victim for, as his own narrative suggests, he partly brought the situation on himself. Why was he so besotted with Avital to begin with? Why was he so eager to study with her, and evidently only with her: he mentions no one else. Why was he originally willing to move into the Paris apartment of a single woman twice his age, even if she was going to be his thesis advisor? And so on.
The real victim here — and this point has not been sufficiently made although Jon Wiener implies it — is the university — not just NYU but the university at large. When people in other fields and professions open the lengthy complaint, they are given a capsule view of two small departments that share faculty (German and Comp Lit), departments that only takes in a handful of graduate students a year, all of them, incidentally, on fellowship, departments in which a professor has an intimate and obsessive relationship with one particular student, which means making him the teacher’s pet at the expense of all the others. It is a dangerous power trip on her part.
Andrea Long Chu, I Worked With Avital Ronell. I Believe Her Accuser. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Long Chu is no longer a graduate student at NYU; she lives in Brooklyn and is a writer and critic.
Last year I worked as a teaching assistant for Avital Ronell. I hadn’t sought out the appointment; I am a doctoral student in comparative literature at NYU, and that semester I was, per the handbook, guaranteed a teaching job. A few months before the position began, I received an email from one of my professors informing me that Ronell’s other teaching assistants were “all taking her class and working hard to familiarize themselves with her particular methodologies, texts, style, and so on.” I was “encouraged” to do the same. I was told this was “an important part of the process with Prof. Ronell.” After all, there were other students eager to replace me.
This was not abusive, obviously, only irritating. The lightly mobbish tone of the email — “this is a nice job you got here, shame if something happened to it” — was jarring. In theory, at least, teaching assistants are junior colleagues, not employees, and I had thought that my position was guaranteed.
William Cheung
, In Defense of Avital Ronell, The Chronicle of Higher Education. William Cheung is currently a graduate student in the German department at NYU.
Here at NYU German, graduate students share work, food, and anxieties. We get group piercings after slogging through a seminar on Johann Georg Hamann, cry about our breakups at the Cozy Soup & Burger diner, make plans to take the ferry to Rockaway beach, correct each other’s work deep into the night. Sometimes we steal wine from department-hosted events and self-medicate against the stress of writing in light of the non-existent job market. Our faculty are there for us, try their hardest to read our work, and treat us as more than ways to enhance their own prestige.
We care and are cared for. The circumstances that have brought us together are largely Avital’s doing, and the circumstances that have struck her down strike at us all. Most of us graduate students in German are supportive of her, and just about all of us signed a May petition attesting to the superb quality of her mentorship, a petition with 129 student signatories. Imagine my horror then when reading Andrea Long Chu’s piece. Though I deeply respect Andrea and her scholarship, this particular piece is utter tabloid clickbait posing as investigative journalism.
Bernd Hüppauf, A witch hunt or a quest for justice: An insider’s perspective on disgraced academic Avital Ronell, Salon. Bernd Hüppauf taught modern literature, cultural theory and comparative literature at NYU, where he was also director of Deutsches Haus.
Before I offered Avital Ronell her job, I’d had many in-depth conversations with her. She engaged my queries with what seemed like understanding. She said she’d throw herself into the building of an integrated study and research program. She promised actively to contribute to department research, conferences and publications. Once she had assumed the position, however, she broke all her promises. She did her best to sabotage the program. She pursued one goal: The work of Avital Ronell and Jacques Derrida must be at the center of all teaching and research. Instead of an academic program, we were left with boundless narcissism. Once she’d become the head of the German department, she had her secretary announce in a departmental meeting that in the German department no student’s written work would any longer be acceptable unless it cited Derrida and Ronell.
In Professor Ronell’s opinion, I was not enough for her. So she began, after an initial period of acclimatization in the department, to undermine my position as department head. When she spoke, I noticed deviations from the facts; in her deeds, the signs of disloyalty. An unpleasant tension took root. I didn’t expect gratitude, but I could not have imagined such disloyalty. If Martin Heidegger obliterated the name of his predecessor, ejecting him from the o\ces he eventually occupied, as Ronell claims (in "The Telephone Book"), then obviously he was her role model.
The university belongs, like the church and the military, to the social institutions that are situated at a considerable distance from democracy and adhere to premodern power structures. Professor Ronell was unusually skilled at manipulating these. Nothing is so important in these power plays as the unconditional support of the dean of faculty. Luck was on her side. The dean had changed, and the new dean admired her and her publications, of which, I suspect, he had not read a single one. If he had, he would have had to disown his own. But his confidante in the comparative literature department provided him with evidence of theory-queen Ronell’s genius. He took every opportunity to throw himself at her feet.
Heidi Haitri, Some Considerations Regarding the Avital Ronell “Affair”, Theory Illuminati. Haitri is an artist, curator, and editor, based in New York City and Berlin.
By living their thinking twenty-four hours a day, that is to say, by actually caring, and not merely inhabiting a “position,” or a job, doggedly honest types, a Socrates, a Diogenes, a Jesus, a Bruno, a Nietzsche, a Reich, a Derrida, or a Ronell show that they disdain, or more infuriatingly, deplore, the concerns of the entrenched majority, and they inevitably incur their resentment. When they suggestively invoke her “star status” as if it has come about through the machinations of a malign cabal, or worse, that she has somehow sought it out, perhaps even in lieu of the incessant efforts that actually account for it, when, as far as I can judge, she sets no great store by it, I can only hear the indignation that dogged or even killed too many of the forebears that all the while held out to them a precious gift. Star or not, she well understands and never evades the fact that she is also vulnerable, insecure, fragile, sometimes unbalanced, and, perhaps astonishingly, dangerously ingenuous.
For a brilliant writer, she can be disarmingly unedited, improvisatory, with all the potential for falling flat that that implies. She is playful, and often even hilarious (the present email evidence to the contrary notwithstanding) in her more casual communication – no friend or acquaintance who has weighed in has disputed that her way of talking with just about everyone she knows is different only in detail, but not in substance or tenor, from the Reitman correspondence.
Personally, I love the way she talks and feel that it is deeply reflective of who she is, and I think that the fact that she makes no apparent effort to hide or to protect herself, to cover up the lesser urgings of her formidable mind, is admirable, if it might not play too well in court. [...] Of course she surprises us all the time as well, but she surprises us, more astonishingly for that, within the range of certain severe ethical limits that we believe circumscribe not only her writing but her being, however transgressive she may be in other respects. She writes and she lives (and especially she teaches) as a moral action, explicitly in opposition to the corporate, the state, the militarist, the patriarchal, the hetero- normative (or any normative whatsoever), the self-righteous, the totality in general.
Her work is her self.
Corey Robin, The Unsexy Truth About the Avital Ronell Scandal, The Chronicle of Higher Education. Corey Robin is a professor at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York’s Graduate Center.
The question of sex, of Ronell’s work and stature in academe, of literary theory or critical theory or the academic left, of the supposed hypocrisy of the scholars who rallied to her side, of the fact that the alleged harasser is a woman and gay while the alleged victim is a man and gay — all of this, if one reads Reitman’s complaint, seems a little beside the point. And has, I think, clouded the fundamental issue. Or issues.
What’s clear from the complaint is just how much energy and attention — both related and unrelated to academic matters — Ronell demanded of Reitman, her student. At all hours of the night, across three continents, on email, phone, Skype, in person, on campus, on other campuses (Ronell berates Reitman when he does not accompany her to the weekly lectures she is giving at Princeton that semester; according to Reitman, she even punishes him for this act of desertion, removing him from a conference she was organizing and at which he had been slated to present), in apartments, classrooms, hallways, offices, subway stations (there are multiple scenes at the Astor Place stop, with Ronell either insisting on walking Reitman to the train or keeping him on the phone until he gets on the train), and elsewhere. It’s almost as if Reitman could have no life apart from her. Indeed, according to the complaint, when Reitman had visitors — a member of his family, a friend — Ronell protested their presence, seemingly annoyed that Reitman should attend to other people in his life, that he had other people in his life. That really is the harassment: the claims she thought she could make on him simply because he was her advisee.
Depending on whom you believe, Ronell’s claims on Reitman may or may not have been for sex, but the sex was only one part of the harassment. Ronell’s largest claims were on his time, on his life, on his attention and energy, well beyond the legitimate demands of an adviser on an advisee.
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