Unpleasant News about Former Students

Unpleasant discussions of sexual assault ahead.

News greeted me this morning that a former student of mine (FS for "former student"), now a tenured professor elsewhere, is facing allegations of sexual assault by a former student. I have been navigating a parade of reactions: shock, dismay, soul-searching, pessimism.

Shock: this isn't someone I'd have expected this kind of thing from. I mean, that's a sorry-sounding thing to say. Is there a "type" for men who sexually assault women? Whatever type I had in my brain, and however wrongheaded it was, FS was not that type. FS has a family, a wife and two kids. Had, maybe. He's gone dark on social media.

Dismay: the person making the allegation wrote a lengthy account of the relationship she and FS had. It's sad and sordid. Reading it, I started to see just how FS's charisma could translate into that kind of ego-boosting hero-mentor that some professors (especially but not exclusively male professors) become. I'm a fairly popular professor myself. It feels good to feel looked-up-to. I was also the kind of student who loved being noticed by professors I looked up to. Those good feelings can be a dangerous combination.

As the writer narrates it, a close mentor-mentee relationship developed into a social-media/texting affair, during which FS shared a number of explicit and TMI messages. This culminated in a visit, drinking, and an unwanted advance (forcing hands down pants and up shirt) by FS despite the student's protests. The relationship continued (this is not an unusual feature of abusive relationships). FS cooled and then decided to break things off. The student, an undergrad at the time their relationship started, was thoroughly confused, hurt, and from her account traumatized by the whole thing. She apparently reported the assault to FS's institution, but since she'd not filed a police report at the time, the institution said it could do nothing. A public post is understandable after traditional legal routes are exhausted.

Of course we're hearing only her side of this story, but the narrative she posted contained copious snapshots of social media interactions that--well, I don't see any way FS comes out of this innocent. Nor should he if her report is as credible as it seems. People who commit assault must face consequences. Ditto faculty who abuse student-teacher relationships.

Soul-searching: I've often had grave doubts about the ethics of teaching in a PhD program in my field. Statistics for graduates securing a tenure-track position aren't great. We tell prospective applicants that this isn't a path to set yourself on thinking a position just like your own professor-mentors is waiting for you. On another level, though, grad students manifest extremely high levels of stress. Washouts and attrition from mental-health-related issues (and this is separate from folk who simply decide this path isn't their thing) are common.

FS has long been one of the most successful alums we've had in my time here (I was not on his committee, so the credit I can take for that is limited). He was my go-to example of how things sometimes really can work out. And now?

So far as I am aware, no hint of inappropriate behavior between FS and a student ever appeared during his time with us. But was there something more we should have impressed on him, some well-duh-but-let's-stress-it lesson: Of course, you should never become intimate with someone whose grade or career you can control, someone who's placed their trust in you that you have their best interests rather than your libido at heart. Boundaries.

On another level, I think to my shame how lucky I and some of my colleagues (particularly those of earlier generations) are. Teach for any great length of time, and it's inevitable to have some students who are closer to you than most others. That closeness, most of the time, is innocent and mutually rewarding. But it's also risky. Appropriate kinds of closeness can all too easily slip into relationships that cross lines that ought not be crossed.

The realty of power differentials means that the more-powerful person can miss or misread (or ignore or rationalize away) cues from the less-powerful person that they aren't on the same page, consent-wise. I don't even refer primarily to sexual boundaries. There is a wide vista of inappropriate behavior potentials in teacher-student relationships quite apart from sexual violations, from favoritism to overwork to codependency. I can spot some times in my own history where, if things or the people involved (including me) had been even a little different, some problems might have developed.

That said, I have never gotten drunk and forced myself on someone.

I hope the survivor here gets the healing she needs.

Pessimism: I must also say that this experience adds to some others I've not written about, experiences where other male grad students have behaved in ways that make them dishonorary members of the sexist/misogynist/chauvinist club. The #ThemToo club.

"Remember," advised Twisty on the departed-but-not-forgotten I Blame the Patriarchy blog, "men hate you." Here I take her not as mind-reading every individual cis-male on the planet, divining somehow that they personally bear animosity toward non-cis-men. I take her as meaning that, in a culture like this defined by a long history of women being objectified, minimized, silenced, and marginalized in favor of men, it's hard for men not to have some degree of contempt for women written into their social software.

Like most systemic oppressions, male supremacy comes as the default firmware of modern-day USAmerica. Being socialized in this time and place means absorbing on mostly unconscious levels that men (white, well-off men in particular) occupy the top of whatever pyramid matters: wealth, power, attention, the benefit of the doubt. It takes constant patches and updates to compensate for that firmware, and in bad moments the mind can all too easily default back to the factory settings. I am not immune. No one raised and socialized as male in this culture is (needless to say, this firmware also has effects on women and non-binary/non-conforming folk).

There are times when I wonder whether having men in institutions like mine (as faculty, as students, as staff) is worth the disproportionate risk that they will mistreat women in some way. Of course women can and do abuse people, too. But men are statistically more likely to do so, and to do so to women. Wouldn't things be better without us? Thanos snap! But of course that's wrong-headed, self-pitying fantasy.

This isn't really about me except insofar as I'm saddened by it.

What a shame.

More on Invisibilia's End of Empathy Episode

I finished the Invisibilia episode about "The End of Empathy" I was listening to. My problems with it remain.

To recap, series regular Hanna Rosen gives prospective producer Lina Misitzis an assignment: turn her interview with former incel Jack Peterson into a typical Invisibilia piece. Misitzis balks. We first hear Rosen's side of things, in which Peterson relates an odd altercation with a girlfriend (M) he had when he was a teenager. That experience, in his telling, drove him into the arms of incel culture. Violent acts by self-identified incels drove him out of that culture, and he relates that he's in a better place now.

Then we hear Misitzis's version, which highlights how alarming, abusive, and scary Peterson's behavior was. Rosen's (and Invisibilia's) empathy-for-Peterson approach, in Misitzis's view, gives too much uncritical spotlight to Peterson's self-serving version of events. This "himpathy" replicates larger patterns of sidelining female victims of male abuse and stalking.


This is a legitimate point. Peterson's story, even in Rosen's version, is thoroughly messed up. Obsessed with this woman who has told him she's not interested in him (and who, as Misitzis underlines, has no voice in this narrative), Peterson flies across the country to show up unannounced at her house. She makes him strip to his undies to make sure he has no weapons. She's afraid of him. And Peterson, even now, paints himself as the victim of abuse.

And yet. Misitzis does a thing that I have significant problems with. She replays Peterson's taped account, interspersing it with another voice, a woman's voice. The woman's voice describes her side of being the victim of extreme stalking behavior by a man. Misitzis turns Peterson's monologue into a duologue. They aren't exactly interacting, but it sets up a tennis-match back-and-forth between the he said/she said.

Here's the problem, the woman's voice isn't M, Jack's former girlfriend. It's "J." Here's a snippet from the NPR transcript:

MISITZIS: I don't have the voice of Jack's ex, but I do have a whole choir of women's voices in my address book. And after just a few phone calls, I start feeling like their experiences are all interchangeable. One in particular stands out. She's a writer in California. I'll call her J. For many years, J dated someone volatile and abusive.
J: I mean, it was a lot of sexual assault, verbal assault, the whole nine yards.
MISITZIS: J's ex sounds a lot like Jack. And her story about him sounds so similar to the one that Jack tells, I'm going to just play the two beside each other. And by the way, we did get this verified.
PETERSON [JACK]: I actually broke up with her because she was just, like, bitchy all the time.
M: There was one day where he called me probably 40 or 50 times while I was at work.
PETERSON: Then a couple of days later, I was like, look. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have tried to break up with you. But she just wasn't listening, and she wasn't answering my calls.
M: He called 50 times and was threatening to hurt himself - which he had done before.
PETERSON: I would say like, I'm going to f***ing jump off the building tomorrow if you don't stay with me.
M: So eventually, I did pick up. And he said, I know you're dating someone. I know you're seeing someone. You don't understand. You can't do this. I'm coming now.

Do you see what happens? J's voice turns, in the transcript, into M's voice. But it's not M speaking; it's J. Of course this is a rush transcript, NPR includes disclaimers about mistakes and whatnot. But even as I listened to the episode, even with Misitzis's quick explanation at the start, I got a little mixed up about just who was interrupting Peterson's narrative with her own side of things. It seems like Misitzis got M's side of things. But she didn't. She got an account of a woman who had been abused in what Misitzis suggests is a similar way to what M had suffered.

I think the intent here is admirable: pointing out how Peterson's account is leaving out a hugely important perspective. But the tactic here strains journalistic ethics. J's voice replaces the absent M, making it seem like their experiences are identical. But we don't actually know that. I agree it's a reasonable guess, and I can see how the back-and-forth makes for compelling radio. But it sneaks in some facts that aren't facts. It is a fact ("we did get this verified"--what's the this? J's story?) that J suffered from a guy who called her "probably 40 or 50 times while I was at work." But we have no indication M suffered that same thing from Peterson. We have nothing beyond Misitzis's assertion that J's story "sounds so similar to the one that Jack tells, I'm just going to play the two beside each other." She felt that they were the same, so they became the same.

That's...shenanigans. It's taking the worst example of a guy's behavior (well, not the worst--but a very bad example) and cutting-and-pasting it to apply to a whole other person. It is at least uncareful.

The bit also glosses over some other facts about Peterson's situation, facts that--without exonerating his behavior (which, again, was abusive)--at least make the situation more complicated. There's the fact, for instance, that M began a relationship with Peterson when he was 12 and she was 17. It was online. He said he was 14. That's...extremely messed up. We do not generally exonerate the older person in this kind of relationship because they thought the person they were talking to was 14 instead of 12. It's slippery at best to do so here.

And frankly that's another thing that gets glossed over here. Peterson was a teenager when he did all this stuff (the hacking into M's account, the flying across the nation to see her). M was in her twenties. That doesn't make it right. That doesn't make it not-scary for M. Plenty of teenagers can be terrifying. But it does suggest that the whole situation was quite a bit messier than J's experience seems to have been. (Did J begin a romantic relationship with a child?)

The whole segment makes me feel yucky. I had considered using this episode for class. Now I'm not sure.

The worst part is that what I see as the iffy ethics of Misitzis's dramaturgical tactic here undercuts the really important point about how easily empathy gets used to privilege male abusers' feelings and perspectives. The story prompts me to root for the extremely messed-up guy who engaged in abusive behaviors. I feel like I'm tone-policing. Or sea-lioning. Or some other bit of nasty behavior men do to make excuses for men accused of abuse.

I'm frustrated. I think that, since M's account isn't available, maybe the better thing to do would have been not to share Peterson's story at all--or at least not in the way it was shared. I agree that his version of things shouldn't go unchallenged. But Peterson's being an abusive creep in this scenario does not excuse making him seem like a much scarier, more extreme version of abusive creep--at least not without substantiation, and not without also acknowledging the creepiness of the, well, pedophilia going on here from M's end.

I feel dirty, not thoughtful. And not empathetic.

That Invisiblilia Episode on Empathy

I referred yesterday to an Invisibilia episode from this last April, "The End of Empathy." It got name-checked in the dramaturg's introduction to Heroes of the Fourth Turning, a play by Will Arbery in which white conservative Catholic characters debate the place of empathy in Trump-era conservatism. The Ann Coulter-ish Teresa argues strenuously against empathy, sounding some of the same notes as Sohrab Ahmari has. Basically, we're sick of empathy.

I've written previously about empathy at conferences before. Empathy has long been registered as one of the primary benefits of theatre. Since acting is by nature a matter of stepping into another person's shoes, and since so many plays are about getting the inside view of someone else's perspective, empathy is a primary tool theatre folk like me use.

But, for such an integral-to-the-craft notion, empathy is fairly recent. The term is just a little over a hundred years old unless you attach it to the related-but-not-quite-the-same term sympathy. It's  terminally vague and inconsistently defined from discipline to discipline. Is empathy merely a matter of perspective-taking, imagining how the other feels in X circumstance? Or does empathy imply a synchronization between empathizer and empathizee (terms I've made up just now)? Is empathy where you lose yourself in the other's feelings? Does empathy with someone mean you agree with or endorse them? Or is that sympathy? Which should medical professionals practice? Teachers? Officers of the law or courts? Does empathy lead to kindness? Does kindness require empathy as a prerequisite?

There's scads of debate about this across the disciplines and over the decades.

I'm skeptical about empathy. That is, I have a kneejerk distrust of any unqualified praise of empathy. That said, I have even more distrust for those who throw up their hands and decide to hell with it.

The Invisibilia episode caught my attention. I've listed to most of it. I have some issues with it.

It's a bit of a meta episode. Hannah Rosin, one of the hosts, introduces Lina Misitzis, a producer who's essentially trying out for a position at Invisibilia. Rosin gives Misitzis an interview she had with one Jack Peterson. Misitzis was to turn this interview into an Invisibilia piece. She decides to go a different direction.

Before we hear her direction, though, Rosen has us listen to her initial version of things.

Peterson is a former incel, a disaffected young man who for a while decided that his perceived difficulties with women were due to (1) his own unattractiveness and lack of virility; and (2) the fact that women ("femoids" as his fellow incels referred to women) were irrational, evil beings dedicated to harming men, mainly by refusing to have sex with them.

In the original Rosen interview (I should say, the edit of the interview as Rosin imagined it), Jack retells his own history with an unnamed woman (M) with whom he had a long on-again/off-again affair through his teens. This affair seems, as Jack tells it, well-salted with a lot of unhealthy and flat-out abusive dynamics, including Jack hacking into M's accounts and sending nude pictures of her to her college, boss, and family. He'd call and cry and say if she leaves him he'll commit suicide.

After yet another long-distance altercation in which M said she didn't want to see him again, Jack flies to her location and begs her to take him back. In his account, she has him strip down to his undies (to make sure he isn't armed) and then proceeds to strangle him. A half-naked Jack escapes, bangs on a window for help. Someone calls the police. When the police arrive, Jack asserts that he's suicidal to "protect" M from being arrested. This apparently starts his journey into (or is it out of?) incel-dom. After a few of the mass shooting incidents where incel-identifying men slaughtered people, he began to step away from the movement, eventually becoming a sort of spokesperson for former incels. He is 25 now.

Then we hear the version Misitzis produces.

Alarmed by what she sees as Rosen's credulity in trying to get into Jack's head, Misitzis presents a different version of the story, one that casts Jack's actions in a much different light. Specifically, she reviews Jack;s tale through the lens of women she knows (the many, many women she knows) who have suffered at the hands of stalkers and abusers. Her version is pretty stark: Jack, who has a history of abusing M, refuses to take no for an answer and flies to her location uninvited. She is apparently alarmed enough to ask him to strip to his undies to make sure he's not armed and planning to hurt her. This is, Misitzis offers, classic abuser behavior.

Misitzis underlines this point by re-cutting Jack's recorded account--but interspersing it with accounts of a woman (not M) who describes her abuser's actions. Thus we get a back-and-forth dynamic instead of a monologue: Jacks says I flew to her. The woman says One day he shows up out of the blue at my house, begging to talk to me.

Why, Misitzis asks, must we really feel empathy for Jack, who seems even now to have narrated himself into the position of victim in this story (he even goes so far to suggest that he's suffered much more than M ever has)? Why is it his side of the story we hear, his I-really-learned-from-this transformation that gets the limelight? This is, Misitzis suggests, a typical (and typically Invisibilia) peon to empathy, one that in her view demonstrates why empathy is such a problem concept.

By this point in the podcast, I'm mostly around the lake. I have a whole lot of feelings about what's happened so far--not just with Jack but with the producers.

More tomorrow.