I Worked With Avital Ronell. I Believe Her Accuser.

The Left doesn't like the rules it made.

The humanities are ablaze. This month The New York Times reported that the Title IX office had found Avital Ronell, a professor of German and comparative literature at New York University and a superstar in literary studies, responsible for sexually harassing a former student, Nimrod Reitman, now a visiting fellow at Harvard. A lawsuit filed by Reitman fills in the details. Leading feminist and queer scholars like Judith Butler, Lisa Duggan, and Jack Halberstam have defended her — or at least deflected criticism.

I believe the allegations.

It is simply no secret to anyone within a mile of the German or comp-lit departments at NYU that Avital is abusive. This is boring and socially agreed upon, like the weather.

Stories about Avital’s “process” are passed, like notes in class, from one student to the next: how she reprimanded her teaching assistants when they did not congratulate her for being invited to speak at a conference; how she requires that her students be available 24/7; how her preferred term for any graduate student who has fallen out of favor is “the skunk.”

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This is how institutionality reproduces. Even the call to think critically about power becomes a clever smoke screen. There is a whole dissertation to be written on intellectuals using the word neoliberal to mean “rules I shouldn’t have to follow.” “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.”

You cannot have a cycle of abuse without actually existing abusers.

In a milquetoast take for The New Yorker, Masha Gessen applauded Duggan as a model of “academics doing their job: engaging with things in great complexity.” Of course power is messy. But there is no complexity in studying forests if you can’t recognize a tree from a few feet away. This is not wisdom; it is an eye complaint.

Structural problems are problems because real people hurt real people. You cannot have a cycle of abuse without actually existing abusers. That sounds simple, which is why so many academics hate it. 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. Intelligence is a hungry god.

In this way, Avital’s case has become a strange referendum on literary study. Generations of scholars have been suckled at the teat of interpretation: 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: that Avital quite simply sexually harassed her student, just as described. Sometimes analysis is simply denial with more words. Sometimes, as a frustrated student in a first-year literature course always mutters, the text just means what it says it means.