Hugo Schwyzer

Ralph Luker at Cliopatria linked to this post from Crazy Ph.D: Sex, Collegiality, and the Academic Conference.  Reading it brought back memories of just how powerful my male privilege was in grad school.  Dr. Crazy writes about many things in her post, but especially about the complex and dangerous interplay between sexuality and power when one is a young, female graduate student.  She relates some real incidents from her past (in safe, oblique terms), and then muses:

The point here, though, is that I think as a woman and a feminist and an academic it’s difficult to know what to do. Because the likelihood is that at some point or another one will be propositioned, or at the very least pursued in a way that is not professional. And any response can have potentially negative consequences, not only in relation to the person who propositions one but in relation to the ways that other people react. For example, I TA’d for a professor who is married to Famous Important Scholar in my field. She got her job at the university where I did my Ph.D. in no small part due to the fact that she is married to FIS. And, to top this off, she had been FIS’s graduate student. Do you know how much I respect her - even though she has a great book and is not an idiot? NOT AT ALL. I feel like she is where she is because of who she’s f*cking. And to me, that’s not playing by the rules. I don’t think she deserves the job she’s got, and I think it’s bullsh*t in this job market that somebody would get a job in that fashion.

And then:

…I fear that if I introduce myself to an Important Man that somehow I’m going to be read as trying to use the fact that I’m young, attractive, whatever to trick him into some sort of professional assistance. Or maybe I’m afraid that I do use my appearance/age in that way, and I think it’s wrong?

Good questions.

UCLA has one of the largest — if not the largest — history graduate programs in the country.  My first year of grad school (1989), I was one of fifteen medievalists chasing the Ph.D.  We were almost all white, but evenly divided between men and women.  Since I also did a field in early modern Europe, I spent lots of time hanging out with "early modernists", who were disproportionately female.  Over the years, as we sat in seminars together and studied medieval paleography together and TA’d together, we became a fairly tight-knit bunch.  And I saw first-hand how many of my female colleagues in grad school struggled with the issues that Dr. Crazy outlined.

Like most grad students, I hero-worshipped the Famous Important Scholars in my field.  (I wrote about that here.)  Until I opted at the last minute to do a field in medieval philosophy with Marilyn Adams, all of my mentors were men.  It goes without saying that there was never any sexual tension with any of these FiSs!   These men often met privately with me — with their office doors closed.  I was glad the doors were closed, as I did not want my fellow grad students hearing me confess my own fears and doubts about my intellectual abilities (something I shared with alarming regularity).  I also didn’t want anyone to hear a certain (now retired) paleographer lament my ignorance of early monastic manuscript hand. 

But I never, ever, worried that I would be "hit on" by any of these men.  I worshipped them.  I followed them around.  I hung on their every word.  I read their books and articles assiduously.  And I knew that when they looked at me, they were looking at Hugo — not at my breasts or my legs.  I was relieved when they shut the office door,  because that meant that I could have some one-on-one time with these men whom I so admired and for whose praise I was so hungry.

Would that my female colleagues had all had the same experience!   One young woman in my same year (I’ll call her Stacy) formed a close relationship with a much older professor of mine (long since retired, I’ll call him Professor Y.)   In the early 1990s, Stacy and I both served as his research assistants.  (He had lots of grant money, happily enough).   Professor Y was divorced.  Stacy did not have a boyfriend.  Stacy and I both worked closely with Professor Y.  As often happens, we didn’t just do research with him.  We went to lunch with him.  We went to the car wash with him (heck, I TOOK his car to the car wash twice.)  And because we were working on different projects for Professor Y, Stacy and I rarely met with him simultaneously.

No one ever suggested that Professor Y and I were having an affair.  When other students saw Professor Y and me having coffee and a danish together on campus, no one — to my knowledge — questioned why he and I were spending time alone together.  The same was not true for Stacy.  The rumors started early, and were vicious.  Someone reported seeing them leave campus together in his car.  Others said they saw them walking together, leaning against each other, in the sculpture garden.   What I could do safely with Professor Y, Stacy couldn’t — not without becoming the subject of nasty innuendo.  When Stacy was given a coveted TAship the following year (so was I, for the record), many folks questioned whether she had legitimately earned it.  Stacy heard these rumors, and was hurt by them.  Personally, I think she had a huge intellectual crush on Y.  Then again, I suppose I did too.  I don’t think they were sleeping together, but I suppose I’ll never know.  What I do know is that the rumors were part of what contributed to Stacy dropping out of grad school after receiving her master’s degree. 

In the early modern field, there was a very famous specialist in Italian renaissance history.  He had quite a reputation as a lecher.  At one time, one of our graduate advisers regularly warned incoming female early modernists against working with him, despite his stellar publishing record.  I spent a quarter as his research assistant, and found him an unpleasant, exasperatingly unclear taskmaster.  Any thoughts I had of doing a minor field in Renaissance history vanished after 10 weeks working for him.  But the worst I had to endure was his perpetual tardiness and his abrupt personality.   I knew two women in the early modern program who claimed that he had propositioned them.  There were rumors that other women had had affairs with him.  No one formally complained, even though by the early 1990s, everyone knew about sexual harassment procedures.

I talked to one of the women who had been propositioned by this Renaissance man.  She told me that she was afraid that if she filed a sexual harassment complaint, all of her other male professors would shun her.  "They’ll be so afraid I’ll charge them, they won’t work with me", she said.   In the intimate world of grad student-professor relationships, a reputation as someone who files charges would be the kiss of death for her career.  I wish I could I have assured her that things would be otherwise, but I suspect she was right.

There’s no question that my maleness smoothed my graduate school career.  My male mentors would have had little trouble seeing me as younger (perhaps slightly more neurotic) versions of themselves.   I could go out to lunch with them and meet behind closed doors with them, safe in the knowledge that the attention I would receive was purely intellectual and professional in nature.  I was free not only from unwanted sexualization, I was free from the gossip of my colleagues.   That kind of freedom gave me a confidence that carried me through the long years of grad school all the way up to completing my Ph.D.