The Ronell Affair is Bad...

But the culture that supports it is worse.

The latest #metoo story has managed to get plenty of press. At least on the surface, it looks like an intriguing variant on the more usual stories of male sexual predators. In this case, the predator, Avital Ronell, is a lesbian, and the prey a much younger gay male (and, at the time of the alleged misconduct, Ronell's student), Nimrod Reitman. More intriguingly still, Ronell has managed to rack-up a who's who list of (often fact-challenged) academic defenders. (The affair first attracted a broader audience when Brian Leiter brought attention to the incredibly embarrassing defense letter penned by (the usually comparatively rigorous) Judith Butler. Since then, Reitman has sued NYU for Title IX violations, and a steady drumbeat of scholars, peers, colleagues, and former students have weighed in. I'll leave it to the curious reader to pick through that material, but many good links are available at Leiter's Blog, 

The assorted grotesqueries of that situation have been well covered, but the irony remains rich. So-called "theory" departments, which typically pride themselves on their close analysis of structures of dominance and coercion, fail to so much as recognize obvious misconduct among their own ranks. The circling of the wagons among the now-established guard has been (unintentionally) both hilarious and deeply cringe-inducing. And the factually and argumentatively impoverished apologetics that have followed the initial broader publication have been equally pathetic.

Most recently, the former chair of NYU's Germanic Studies department, Bernd Hüppauf, who apparently offered Ronell her original position in the department, has published a rather long essay detailing his history with Ronell. Although Leiter quite correctly describes the essay as a "damning account" of Ronell's time at the department, it's rather worth exploring more broadly, because, well, everybody in it comes off looking basically horrible, and inadvertently illustrates a lot of the ways that university life produces and shelters awful people.

The essay is basically a parade of horribles, but what really stands out for me is an almost studied indifference to the actual plight of students suffering under the nonsense Hüppauf describes. Hüppauf actually opens with a flashback to a discussion with one of Ronell's students complaining about her abuse. Apparently it didn't so much as cross Hüppauf's mind that he might have some role in curbing that sort of abuse. And tellingly, this feeble sort of learned helplessness pervades the entire article. Hüppauf eventually gets around to the students--in part IV of a six-part piece. But even there the telling is entirely bereft of any clear opposition or attempted remedial action. He doesn't even really seem to have any conception of how opposition could even be broached.

In his telling, Hüppauf is the usurped hero of this tragedy. He came to New York after being asked "to resuscitate a moribund German department"...at NYU, that prestigious private university where the humanities go to die. Ronell apparently got offered her position only after making all sort of assurances about her committment to build the program Hüppauf envisioned. On his telling, after getting her position, Ronell quickly went to work sabotaging that program, at one point supposedly even having "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." 

Now, this sort of episode is surely cringe-inducing. But what should anybody really make of it? It's hard to even comprehend how an academic environment like that could possibly function. And it's even more difficult to imagine the cramped intellectual and moral space in which other professors would do anything more than laugh off such incredible nonsense.

On his account, Hüppauf (amazingly!) went into his new job with little-to-no awareness of deconstructionism or the looney-tunes atmosphere that had spread like a virus through literature departments since Derrida first introduced American literary scholars with literally no philosophical background to shitty, glib prose and poorly done philosophy.

Our unsuspecting German transitions directly from his initial misunderstanding of deconstruction to a discussion of Ronell's attacks on his leadership. Here again, the discussion is instructive. Although he nods to Ronell's personal dishonesty and imperiousness, what really seems to rankle is her "disloyalty." Talk of loyalty is virtually always a sign of biased thinking, but what could it possibly mean here? Was this a team project, or an academic department? Of course, a big part of the criticism of Ronell involves the idea that her own scholarship is really closer to a cult of personality than to an objective academic enterprise with anything resembling expertise or normal conventions of scholarly rigor. But the entire account is pervaded with the insinuation that personalities are the only real movers in this enterprise.

What follows is described as a "coup" in which Ronell succeeds in (dethroning?) replacing Hüppauf as Chair. Again, the language is instructive. Hüppauf describes a pattern of Ronell unilaterally gaining the--what?--support, enthusiasm, "loyalty?!" of the dean of the faculty, who is basically described as a compromised idiot--someone who admired Ronell's publications, but couldn't have read them? This is not the stuff of a normal academic program. This is the ugly rot of palace intrigue.

Hüppauf's account is difficult to follow, at least partly because he avoids any direct discussion of his own actions or any clear timeline throughout. But also at least apparently because his desire to vilify Ronell outruns the humdrum facts of the account. We do manage to learn that Ronell became the acting chair of the department prior to Hüppauf's hiatus in Berlin. Hüppauf avoids any details on how the chairship is assigned, and in many departments regular rotation is simply the ongoing custom, especially since chairships  often involve bureaucratic hassles that most scholars prefer to avoid in favor of their own scholarship. His time at NYU appears to have begun in 1992, and Ronell's move came in 1996, so he'd probably been chair for at least four years prior to the reported "coup."

The rest of the account invites similar scrutiny. It paints a picture of an authoritarian Ronell terrorizing her colleagues and students alike, with the aid of a compliant Dean. But of course, there's little more than silence about any actual opposition from her professor peers, in what appears to be a sizeable department. A perusal of the web page suggests a faculty of 16. Of that, Hüppauf apparently served as chair when almost a third of that number of faculty was hired. (Of course, that itself is likely a pertinent fact, since unless the hires all came with tenure, some of those hires involved the extreme uncertainty of the tenure-granting process.)

What's most galling about all of this, though, is the idea that one person--and, a lot of crappy reporting notwithstanding, a pretty obvious intellectual charlatan--could exert such a destructive influence on an entire collection of scholars. Because that suggests less a free and equal collection of mature scholars, and more an immature clique of sycophants whose primary focus is on maintaining the privileges of membership, whatever the hell the supposed job happens to be. And that, naturally enough, is pretty bleak, and very pathetic. Welcome to the humanities.

Hüppauf obviously set out to write an indictment of Ronell. Along the way, he tarred his entire department and the university administration overseeing it.