Instructors mull dropping NYU feminist scholar from syllabi for alleged groping of male student – IOTW Report

Instructors mull dropping NYU feminist scholar from syllabi for alleged groping of male student

And her defenders’ work, too

College Fix: One of the debates within #MeToo is how to handle the teaching of material by scholars who have been accused of sexual misconduct at any level, whether the alleged conduct is relatively new or decades old.

New York University’s fallen feminist scholar, Avital Ronell, is the latest whose work may be quietly shelved by instructors who have previously included it in their syllabi. Also the chopping block: work by her initial supporters.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on the “blowback” to Ronell in college classrooms, including how students and fellow scholars are responding to professors who initially defended Ronell against sexual-harassment allegations by her former grad student, Nimrod Reitman.  MORE

17 Comments on Instructors mull dropping NYU feminist scholar from syllabi for alleged groping of male student

  1. Ronell is a prog idiot of outstanding proportions.

    Apparently, other prog profs are attempting to outdo her idiocy now by pretending she never existed.

    Creative, eh? …..Lady in Red

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  2. Oxymoron of the Day: “Feminist Scholar”

    Show me one of those stupid fucking cows that is a bona fide scholar. Being masterful at spewing culture destroying verbal diarrhea all day hardly counts as scholarship. Every college in the country could shut down every victims studies department they have and close the corrupt “diversity” offices and save billions of dollars while improving the actual academics of their schools by 300%.

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  3. (From the article in The Chronicle of Higher Education: )

    “In the course, students read from Ronell’s The Telephone Book, among other works.”

    You know, I have always wondered who authored that epic literary masterpiece. I was particularly enthralled by the chapter entitled “The Yellow Pages”.

    🙂

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  4. VietVet….I looked it up at Amazon. Damn thing costs $50! (Poor students can’t afford that!) Here’s the summary, what you’ve missed:

    “The telephone marks the place of an absence. Affiliated with discontinuity, alarm, and silence, it raises fundamental questions about the constitution of self and other, the stability of location, systems of transfer, and the destination of speech. Profoundly changing our concept of long-distance, it is constantly transmitting effects of real and evocative power. To the extent that it always relates us to the absent other, the telephone, and the massive switchboard attending it, plugs into a hermeneutics of mourning. The Telephone Book, itself organized by a “telephonic logic,” fields calls from philosophy, history, literature, and psychoanalysis. It installs a switchboard that hooks up diverse types of knowledge while rerouting and jamming the codes of the disciplines in daring ways. Avital Ronell has done nothing less than consider the impact of the telephone on modern thought. Her highly original, multifaceted inquiry into the nature of communication in a technological age will excite everyone who listens in.
    The book begins by calling close attention to the importance of the telephone in Nazi organization and propaganda, with special regard to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. In the Third Reich the telephone became a weapon, a means of state surveillance, “an open accomplice to lies.” Heidegger, in Being and Time and elsewhere, elaborates on the significance of “the call.” In a tour de force response, Ronell mobilizes the history and terminology of the telephone to explicate his difficult philosophy.

    Ronell also speaks of the appearance of the telephone in the literary works of Duras, Joyce, Kafka, Rilke, and Strindberg. She examines its role in psychoanalysis—Freud said that the unconscious is structured like a telephone, and Jung and R. D. Laing saw it as a powerful new body part. She traces its historical development from Bell’s famous first call: “Watson, come here!” Thomas A. Watson, his assistant, who used to communicate with spirits, was eager to get the telephone to talk, and thus to link technology with phantoms and phantasms. In many ways a meditation on the technologically constituted state, The Telephone Book opens a new field, becoming the first political deconstruction of technology, state terrorism, and schizophrenia. And it offers a fresh reading of the American and European addiction to technology in which the telephone emerges as the crucial figure of this age.”

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  5. @Lady in Red: So…let me see if I can summarize that book for you:

    “The telephone is a very important and influential invention that has altered human civilization profoundly, producing a myriad of significant societal effects.”

    There – I just saved you fifty bucks.

    😉

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  6. @TheMule September 12, 2018 at 1:45 pm

    > Every college in the country could shut down every victims studies department they have and close the corrupt “diversity” offices and save billions of dollars while improving the actual academics of their schools by 300%.

    But, but… then what titles would we buy our daughters!? Our daddy’s little princess, is just as good as all the boys, daughters!? Whaaa!

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  7. FYI:

    Genesis 10 (KJV)

    1 Now these are the generations of the sons of Noah; Shem, Ham, and Japheth: and unto them were sons born after the flood.

    2 The sons of Japheth; Gomer, and Magog, and Ma’dai, and Javan, and Tubal, and Meshech, and Tiras.

    3 And the sons of Gomer; Ash’kenaz, and Riphath, and Togar’mah.

    4 And the sons of Javan; Eli’shah, and Tarshish, Kittim, and Do’danim.

    5 By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations.

    6 And the sons of Ham; Cush, and Miz’ra-im, and Phut, and Canaan.

    7 And the sons of Cush; Seba, and Hav’ilah, and Sabtah, and Ra’amah, and Sab’techa: and the sons of Ra’amah; Sheba, and Dedan.

    8 And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one in the earth.

    9 He was a mighty hunter before the LORD: wherefore it is said, Even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the LORD.

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  8. @Uncle Al: Here’s the way you’ll hear most people use “nimrod” today:

    From The Urban Dictionary

    nimrod

    n.

    The true definition of Nimrod is “A great hunter”, but after Bugs Bunny called Elmer Fudd this name for so long in Looney Tunes cartoons, it took on a new meaning….a moron or klutz.

    Ex: “Jacksonville isn’t the capital of Texas, you f***in’ nimrod!”

    😉

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