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Dr. Terence Kealey, a top administrator at a major British university, is facing a torrent of criticism for writing that staring at female students in class is a “perk” of teaching college.
In the same article — a humor piece for the Times Higher Education supplement — Kealey (pictured at right) called the idea that student-faculty sex “represents an abuse of power” a “myth.”
He also compared classrooms to high-end strip clubs.
Olivia Bailey, the Women’s Officer of Britain’s National Union of Students, said she was appalled by Kealey’s “astounding lack of respect for women,” and commenters online have called the article a defense of sexual harrassment.
But Kealey, the Vice Chancellor of the University of Buckingham, is unrepentant, saying he was merely ” employing humour to highlight the ways by which people try to resolve the dissonance between what is publicly expected of them and how they actually feel.”
I came across a blogpost this morning (via @HappyFeminist‘s Twitter feed) that asked what struck me as an interesting question, and I’d like to take a swing at answering it:
How do you teach feminism if you are not a feminist?
To answer this question, it seems to me, the first thing you need to do is to define your terms. If by “teaching feminism” you mean teaching about feminism as a movement, then you teach feminism the same way you teach Marxism, or existentialism, or surrealism — with as full and as sympathetic an understanding of the movement (and of its critics) as you can muster. If you’re going to talk about feminism in the classroom, you have an obligation to learn enough about it to talk about it intelligently, and that’s an obligation you have whether you’re a feminist or not.
In her post, Ashley says some teachers don’t teach feminism because they think they don’t know enough about it, or because they haven’t thought about teaching it, or because they don’t have time. She’s right, but those objections shift the topic a bit — from how you teach feminism to when.
So when should you teach feminism? When it’s part of the story you’re trying to tell, and when it’s part of the toolkit you’re trying to help your students assemble. More broadly, you teach about gender when it’s relevant … and when you’re talking about people, gender is almost always relevant.
You don’t need to “teach feminism” to talk about gender, of course, and you don’t need to teach from a feminist perspective to talk about gender. You do, though, need to have an understanding of how gender works. You need to have an analysis of gender, a perspective on gender. (More to the point, you need to have a considered perspective on gender, because by the time you can talk you have a perspective on gender, whether you realize it or not.) You need to know how you’re going to come at gender issues when they arise, you need to know why you’re taking the approach you’ve chosen, and you need to know how you’re going to work productively with students who are coming from a different perspective.
And of course that last paragraph applies as much to activists as it does to teachers.
October 7 update: Readers coming from Minding the Campus should know that I take issue with KC Johnson’s gloss on this post. I’ve submitted a comment to that effect over there, and written a follow-up post here as well.
In a new post this morning about last week’s Hofstra rape case — in which a student initially said she’d been raped by five men, then withdrew her allegations — Jaclyn Friedman writes the following:
There’s a widespread assumption that recanting an accusation means that you’re admitting you lied. But in reality, lots of victims recant not because they made it up, but because they come to the unfortunate realization that it will cost them more, emotionally, to pursue justice than to let it go.
We’ll probably never now what happened in this case, but it’s entirely possible that she was threatened by the accused perpetrators or their associates, interrogated by the police about her sexual history or what she might have done to “provoke” the attack, or blamed and slandered by the media or people in her community. All of these things happen all too often to rape victims who speak out. Let’s not ignore the possibility that they happened here.
This is important stuff to keep in mind, and Friedman makes other good points along the way. But I’d like to take it a step further: Even if the Hofstra student lied in her original statement to the police, it doesn’t automatically follow that she wasn’t raped.
The cultural pressures that lead women to falsely recant rape charges are the same pressures that lead women to blame themselves, or expect blame from others, when their rapes don’t follow an accepted narrative. If a woman is raped by a man she’s been intimate with before, or raped in the course of a sexual encounter that began as consensual, or raped in circumstances in which her judgment may be called into question, she can expect to be disbelieved, shamed, and attacked, and that expectation may lead a rape survivor to alter her story to make it more palatable to police, or to a jury, or even to her friends and family.
I don’t know what happened that night, and I expect that I never will. I’m not accusing any of the five men who were named of anything, and I’m not saying that the fact that they were accused means they must have done something wrong. I don’t know, and I’m not interested in speculating.
I do, though, want to say clearly that the question of what happened isn’t a binary one of “she told the truth, and they’re guilty” vs. “she lied, so they’re innocent.”
It’s possible that she lied and that some or all of them are guilty.
A new exhibit on the white anti-slavery activist John Brown opens today at the New-York Historical society, 150 years (minus a month and a day) after he tried to start a slave uprising at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. Brown was executed in December 1859 for his role in that raid, but his actions — at Harper’s Ferry and before — helped to spark the Civil War.
I’ve got a photo on my bookshelf, in a carved wooden frame I bought at a rummage sale. The photo is actually a postcard, though it’s been trimmed down and you can’t really tell.
It’s this photo. John Brown, swearing an oath.
John Brown was an abolitionist, of course, and that’s part of why I like him. But I’ve never really been explicit about why I like him so much, why I’m drawn to him as opposed to any other white abolitionist. I think I just figured it out, though.
In 1856 John Brown went to Kansas, where pro-slavery and anti-slavery whites were fighting. He wanted to intervene on the side of righteousness, and he did. He went to Kansas and he killed a bunch of white people. He killed white people who were standing in the way of racial justice.
Three years later, with the Civil War looming, he acted again. This time he raided a federal arsenal to try to liberate weapons for a slave uprising. He was caught, and hanged.
The photo I have is of the John Brown of 1856. (By 1859 he had a huge flowing beard.) The Brown in my photo was the Brown who saw racism and went to Kansas.
Now, I’m not big on killing people. Not at all. Not even in my most ludicrous fantasies of radical action am I big on killing people. It’s never particularly been the killing people part that attracted me to Brown.
It’s more, I think, that he went into the white community first. It sounds weird, phrased like that, since his work with white people consisted of murdering them, but that’s what he did. He took his whiteness and he used it in the service of racial justice, used it to do what a black person couldn’t have done, used it in his own community.
When I look at that photo in that frame, I’m reminded that I’m white. I’m reminded that whiteness is an identity, one among many. I’m reminded that whiteness is specific, not generic. And I’m reminded that as a white man, I’ve got important work to do.
University of Michigan Near Eastern Studies professor Yaron Eliav is teaching again at the university, eight months after he publicly admitted slapping a Michigan law student whom he had paid for sex.
Eliav met the student, who was then 22 years old, through Craigslist, and paid her $300 for a sexual encounter in April 2008. After their meeting, she filed a complaint with police, saying he had slapped her twice in the face. (He later admitted to slapping her and hitting her with a belt, but claimed the acts were consensual.)
Police refused to charge Eliav with assault, and one officer publicly mocked the student for filing charges, saying that since she had been engaged in illegal sex work at the time, “she should have cracked a legal textbook before coming in to the police station.”
The incident became public last December when Eliav and the student both pled guilty to misdemeanor prostitution-related charges. Each was fined and made to pay court costs. Eliav, who has tenure, was placed on paid leave last semester while the university investigated the incident.
studentactivism.net 
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