Two

On Friday, March 31, 1995 I was sexually harassed by Professor Stephen Dobyns, a well known creative writer and Syracuse University faculty member. Although I did not know Professor Dobyns very well and had little contact with him, he evidently knew who I was and was familiar with my political commitment to revolutionary Marxism and the global emancipation of women. Approaching me at a gathering held by a creative writing student in celebration of his fiction reading earlier in the evening, Dobyns immediately initiated a series of aggressive and hostile remarks and actions: First, Dobyns addressed me by saying “Hello, Pol Pot” and I brushed off the comment by saying that I was not connected with that regime. Second, he proceeded by putting his arm around the man next to him, gesturing toward me and leering at me while telling this man “I'm looking at her breasts right now." When I was angered and walked away, Professor Dobyns called after me, “You stupid Stalinist bitch!" I refused to be intimidated by his remarks and did not accept them in silence by saying, “You are a tired old man, aren't you?" To this Dobyns responded by throwing a drink in my face. Following this incident I learned from several other graduate students that this kind of sexual intimidation was evidently a pattern on the part of Professor Dobyns (which, by the time this reached a formal University hearing, included three reported acts of physical assault and multiple instances of verbal sexual harassment).

On Monday, April 3, 1995, I filed a formal grievance letter to the Affirmative Action Officer at Syracuse University against Professor Dobyns for sexual harassment of a visual, verbal, and physical nature. Along with sending this letter to the Affirmative Action Officer, I sent it to various deans and all of the faculty and graduate students in several different departments in the College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Visual and Performing Arts, the Law School, the School of Education and the School of Social Work at Syracuse University. In addition, I faxed this letter to various local and national newspapers, television stations, and radio programs as well as journals in the Humanities. These actions were to emphasize the fact that sexual harassment is a public and social issue, not a private and personal matter. Three days after the public release of this letter Syracuse University suspended Professor Dobyns with pay from his teaching and advising duties for the rest of the semester (the end of which was approximately three weeks away). I also wrote and distributed, with the help of the Marxist Collective at Syracuse University, an "Open Letter to the Syracuse University Community on Institutionally-Shielded Sexual Harassment" which began to address the conditions within the Department of English at Syracuse University, its Creative Writing Program and the University itself which helped perpetuate this broader social problem. Among other things this text included a critique of the way in which the traditional notion of “creativity" defined as “the freedom to do whatever one wants" is used to discourage any principled commitment to progressive political and social theory and practice and further, to legitimate reactionary social practices.

In response to my formal grievance and open letter, the subsequent series of texts that I wrote and co-wrote, texts circulated by the Marxist Collective at Syracuse University (which, besides a group of staff workers that I will discuss below, was the only organization at the University to publicly come forward and vehemently support my formal grievance and the struggle to abolish sexist violence), and those texts circulated by a small core of Creative Writing students who refused to defend Professor Dobyns' sexist practices, a series of reversals took place in order to whitewash the issue of sexual harassment and exempt him from any responsibility. Two days after the circulation of my grievance letter, Professor Dobyns circulated his own text; an “apology" not for sexually harassing me or any other student (which he denied) but for his long term problem with alcohol and depression. In short, he claimed that I and others were not the victims of his sexually harassing practices rather, he was the “victim" of alcohol. In an interview with the Syracuse Post-Standard, Department of English Professor John W. Crowley added another level to this reversal by arguing that white male writers have historically been the “victims" of alcoholism (McKeever, “Alcohol Woes" C-4).

This set of reversals was evidently quite effective for Dobyns as, in response to a formal hearing in which 12 witnesses established sexual harassment as a pattern on his part toward his students and colleagues (a pattern which the three “character" witnesses called to support Dobyns had no information to disprove), the University responded by giving Dobyns merely a two year suspension, only one semester of which is without pay. In addition, in what the University called a “harsh" punishment, Professor Dobyns is “required" to provide proof to the university of continued treatment for alcoholism, engage in 170 to 200 hours of community service in the Syracuse area with “organizations that seek to meet the special needs of women," and pay me $600 compensation for wages lost from missing work (which to date the University has not followed up on). However, this “punishment" is by no means “harsh" especially in light of the fact that Dobyns has openly admitted that he has “no economic reason for teaching" (Buckley 10). Consequently, what this “punishment" really represents for Dobyns is a year and a half of paid vacation time for sexually harassing his students. The “severity" of such a punishment is even more ludicrous in light of the fact that the preceding year Syracuse University actually fired two professors for sexually harassing their students. In other words, because of Dobyns' commodifiable textwares, and because he has celebrity status and marketability for Syracuse University, he is considered to be “above" the “standards" and “principles" set forth by Syracuse University in its sexual harassment policy: “sexual harassment corrodes the values most central to the mission of the University. Avoiding its occurence [sic.] is of the highest priority" (Faculty Manual 37). Far from maintaining a principled committment [sic.] to ending sexual harassment, as Syracuse University claims, in actuality it demonstrates an unprincipled approach to sexual harassment; it approaches sexual harassment on a case-by-case basis which enables the University to do whatever is most convenient for its marketability. Furthermore, the community service that Dobyns must perform in actuality represents the University's refusal to make its expressed “commitment” to ending sexual harassment a fundamental part of a university education. This is manifested in its “individualizing” of the problem of sexual harassment (locating it within the behavior of just one professor), and pushing this problem off onto a smaller organization with considerably less resources, which is now to be burdened with the responsibility of “educating” him.

However, the most aggressive reversal (the assumptions of which I will discuss at length), led by Tobias Wolf, Mary Karr, Brooks Haxton and others attempting to shore up the politico-pedagogical bankruptcy of traditional creative writing theory and practices, argued that the Syracuse University Creative Writing Program was the “victim” of a “totalitarian” Marxist attempt to rid Syracuse University of Creative Writing and, by implication to rid the world of “creativity," “individuality," and “artistic freedom of expression." Underpinning this McCarthyist logic is the set of assumptions that the Syracuse University Creative Writing Program shares with the dominant form of creative writing pedagogy in the United States which depoliticizes art and places the “free expression” of the “individual” as the most progressive possible task over and above freedom from exploitation.