The Real Scandal in Academia
Collage of pulp-fiction covers.
My first tenure-track job out of grad school was in Washington, D.C., a dozen years ago, when it was common for Washingtonians to claim that D.C. was Hollywood for ugly people (both towns being focused on power, prestige, social ascendance, and its attendant glamour—basically, high school for grown-ups). So I wasn’t surprised to see that the sexual harassment allegations sweeping Hollywood are also common to D.C.
More surprising is the relative lack of attention thus far to such harassment in academia, where—to judge by the content of literary fiction—sexual harassment has been a staple for decades. (J. M. Coetzee’s brilliant comes to mind, as does ’s , Francine Prose’s , Denis Johnson’s , ’s , to name a few, and of course ’s , whose predatory narrator is a professor of literature, if not preying on a student.) Some of the male writers whose
