"What About My Students?"

I arrive at the appointed time to the first floor of Avery Hall, Pitzer College, Claremont CA.  First, I notice what I always notice about the sterile and completely soundless environment of that building.  From some point northward, I can hear the deafened sound of voices.  There must be a group of students lingering around the campus in the late afternoon. 

It's November 2nd, 2009.  I enter an even quieter room where 5 people who had arrived before me, are seated around a table.  It's the first week of my suspended teaching schedule.  It was half way through a 16-week semester when I was teaching two of my core classes: American Literature: Beginnings to the Civil War, and 20th-21st Century American Women Writers.  The greater pain I feel at this moment when I go to lift the heavy solid wood door, is that of having been censored by the Dean and the full membership of a Faculty Executive Council, for charges relating to my women's literature course and for allegedly missing "more than half of my courses."  

How I could be teaching offensive course material in a class I didn't attend, never seemed to occur to those faculty and administrators now in the advanced stages of violating my academic freedom through the most atrocious tool they had: sexual victimization.  Even today, the experience of being passed from one perpetrator to the next all the while knowing that there would be no one willing to help me but that on the contrary, the English department and the administration would embolden itself by violating what I believed was the near-sacred space of my classroom and the educational opportunities of my students, I entered the room, all faces turned to me.

The panel elected to examine the evidence and interview the victim and the accused, was led by two psychologists, one was an African American psychologist and one held a supposed expertise in "organizational psychology."  Because academic institutions and departments are hard to explain to those unfamiliar, I plan to discuss the psychology factor in a later writing.  Suffice it to say, the persecution of a poet was a free-for-all for any professor, and many professors played a role, whether they viewed themselves as scientists, social scientists, psychological scientists, or even other literature professors.  The most important thing to all of them was to establish their way of doing things as acceptable, as "selective," as judicious, as "socially responsible."  The last thing they needed or wanted was to see the failure and falseness of their claims evidenced in a woman, a woman well-equipped to document, describe, and ultimately expose the widespread sexual degradation of their utopia.

As utopias go, they either fail in details or fail in total.  Think of Hawthorne's novel, "The Blithedale Romance, " and you think of romance, of the unfeasible romance of ideas destined to be fetishized or betrayed.  Pitzer had no romance contributing to its decadence.  Romance had long gone by the wayside and been thoroughly mocked even as a goal.  Daily there were vicious e-mail attacks not only on ideals but on the right to possess or declare ideals even as such.  All that had remained of ideals decimated as unrealistic, un-profitable, and unsuitable, was a core of vengeance for anyone daring to as yet believe in them even as unlikely dreams.  In order to maintain whatever pretense to ideals was needed to operate at all, all idealism had to be clearcut from the forest to convert it into saleable units for P.R. propaganda.

I heard once irrevocably bound to a contract with all of the preparation of an elite UC degree to the private sector, that nothing but sexual harassment had been rendered out of its English department where harassment flourished like a mold in an incubator.  Life forms one never imagined would arise in such auspicious-for-evil circumstances….a negligent Board of Trustees, a recalcitrant Maoist Dean with expertise in victim scapegoating, and a President with a lecherous drug-addled husband fond of groping younger women to her jealous chagrin, and so-called literature professors with specialties without foundations, a virulent misogynistic rationale and racial preferences turned to persecution, nothing could be farther from the truth of liberal humanism.  This was the hunting ground. I was the quarry.

I remember it well-- the day Ntongela Masilela gave me an African dyed cloth of a giraffe.  Out of the blue, he would begin to present me with unwanted gifts, slowly and deliberately cultivating an unrequited special relationship with me.  Though he was the last, he was not the first of my harassers.  The others had done their damage and when detected, would stay clear of me.  But this harasser was different.  He began to lure me with comments about my children.  

When I walked in, I sensed the power of the institution as it was countenanced in the faces of those assigned to carry out "the procedure."

Jeffrey Lewis, the ringleader began.  He blank-faced read a statement that no retaliation would be carried out against me.  As he finished I stated, "I've been removed from my courses.  My courses are cancelled.  My students, what about my students?"