I first heard about the U of New Mexico controversy via Facebook, when Joy Harjo left a status update reporting that she’d had to quit her job because the university was preventing her from protecting her students from sexual harassment. Based on just that description, I was sympathetic.
Based on the description in The Chronicle of Higher Education (which Harjo also posted on Facebook and commented upon fairly neutrally: “here’s some background”) I am not.
The crux of the matter is not that one faculty member, Lisa Chavez, took on side-work as a phone dominatrix and that this work put her into association with her students in ways that do not positively support the ideal student-professor relationship — that much was admitted by Chavez, and, as the Chronicle says, she “quickly quit the phone-sex job, admitted to a serious lapse of judgment, and was not found by the university’s administration to have violated any law or policy.”
No, the crux of the matter is that afterwards, other faculty in the English department went on a witch hunt. And “witch hunt” is really the phrase for it, with more-than-average appropriateness: just as Medieval women who did not sufficiently conform to contemporary ideas of womanliness were pursued without reason, taunted, tortured, and deprived of their lives, some at the U of New Mexico want to pursue Chavez without reason, shame her, torment her, and deprive her of her job.
Because despite her stopping, apologizing, and being cleared of wrongdoing, others from her department have quit and sued the university, angry to be denied the right to “punish” Chavez themselves by faculty panel. The fact that they believe she should be punished when she’s been cleared of any wrongdoing is irrelevant to them. They are seeing this situation through their own moral filter, and they are so upset that others don’t share that filtered vision, and so convinced that their vision is the correct one, they’re fighting well beyond the point of absurdity — it’s as much as madness.
I’m not going to boil this down to a simple fight between 2nd and 3rd wave feminism, or sex-positive feminism vs. anti-porn feminism, because, even though both dichotomies apply, what gets me more is the attitude (especially among those who have quit the department or are suing) that Chavez, because she has done this thing, is now somehow permanently tainted, that her admitting she made a mistake and quitting the side-work isn’t enough, that she must be dragged through a ritual whose only use would be to try to shame and humiliate her and then possibly oust her from the department.
It goes beyond “Biblical”: I mean, the Bible talks about forgiveness too. But those are the later parts. Bronze Age desert dwellers would certainly recognize what Harjo and Warner and the others want to do: they want to purge by fire what they perceive as an uncleanness in their community. They want to wash their hands in Chavez’s metaphorical blood.
I remind anyone who reads this that Chavez “was not found by the university’s administration to have violated any law or policy.” That sentence should read to you, if you value a just society of rules and laws, as a closed case. There are those, though, whose sense of “morality” obeys no rule or law: it is a creature capable of redefining “justice” to match its repulsion for the “other,” and its need for hierarchy and revenge.
The people in the U of New Mexico English department who took this witch hunt upon themselves actually left naughty photos of their colleague on their department chair’s desk with a note suggesting the pictures were from “Appalled Parents.” This crass maneuver, designed to shock their chair into taking action against Chavez, reveals a lot about their way of thinking.
First, it reveals that they see their students as children. This is an unfortunate way to see undergraduate students but a ridiculous way to see graduate students, who, especially in a creative writing program, are probably closer to 30 than 20, on average.
More importantly, though, their goal was to raise the specter of the disapproving authority. Parents are the persons between us and whom (rightly) lie the most sexual taboos and barriers, the most crushing moral judgments; parents are the people who can, with a word, return us to uncomprehending children twisting in the throes of guilt and shame, and make us feel those emotions with the intensity of childhood, when our yet-undeveloped brains couldn’t put feelings or events into perspective or context.
With that action and those two words they revealed that they want the others around them to get all a little bit more Lord of the Flies–only with more slut-shaming. They would prefer if everyone stopped thinking about inconvenient facts like, no university law or policy was violated, and started looking at emotionally incendiary pictures with their child- (if not their lizard-) brains.
It is not the role of universities (or creative writing programs) to degrade adults into judgmental shame-mongers who care not for the letter of the law. In fact, almost all university missions include expanding student empathy and acceptance of differences, and of respecting codes of ethics be they law or rules against plagiarism. But the goal with this little picture-leaving move was to get people to shut down the higher reasoning centers and “other” her into something “dirty” that must be hidden from mom and dad.
Again, there is no law or even a rule against what Chavez did. Her actions merely complicated the student-professor relationship — hardly an unprecedented consequence in the world of creative writing graduate programs, where everyone’s an adult and people get very close by virtue of the work they’re doing. Among us there are many male professors who are sleeping with their female students — an infraction far worse than anything Chavez did, one that actually does violate most universities’ rules of conduct (while Chavez violated none). Those rule-breaking men are often reprimanded, but rarely are they dragged through the mud, or fired, for what they do or did. They are certainly never saddled with a label as loaded as “prostitute.”
What’s happening to Chavez not only shows the bias against women in this position, but against sex work — even completely legal phone dominatrixing, which is essentially a kind of voice-only interactive performance. Her colleagues are characterizing her (wrongly) as a prostitute. This also tells us a lot about their frame of mind: to them, anyone who profits from something vaguely sexual is clearly an exploiter, a victimizer (of their grad school “children”), and they must be allowed to “protect” the students from this person — meanwhile, any woman who uses men’s desires to make a few bucks after work (even if it’s just voice work over the phone) is a prostitute.
Not, she used sex work to make a few bucks. No: she is a prostitute.
It’s the label-of-being as opposed to the describer-of-doing. The way our world (mis-)sees it, a man can be a fireman for 40 years, and when he quits, he’s not a fireman anymore. But if a woman “sells it” once, she is a whore. It becomes what she is. It’s the worst kind of sexism. It’s also common, and runs deep. Chavez never performed a sex act for money — her colleagues are just flat wrong to use that phrase — but because they are making this mistake, using this label, they are invoking the cultural biases that surround it.
And this is why, I believe, some in the U of New Mexico English department have lost their minds. They have ceased to see Chavez as a person — with whom you reason, from whom you accept apologies and make peace. They now see her as a beast: an unclean danger to the innocent who must be destroyed lest this imagined corruption spread. The basis for this view is sexism, but not the simple kind: it’s a complex built of the anti-woman attitudes that make some want to label and objectify and destroy a woman, just because they don’t like how she uses sex and her sexuality; attitudes that make them want to drag her before an assembly of disapproving peers to have them yell “shame, shame!” like the red-clad girls in The Handmaid’s Tale; attitudes that make them want to sew a scarlet “SW” for “sex worker” on the lapel of a woman who dared earn money dominating men on the phone.
I use the literary references for a reason. This is an English department we’re talking about. They study history and culture and society and psychology, they exercise empathy daily just to understand what they read, they live in the world of perspective and points of view. They should be able to see beyond their own. They should know better.
***
Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.
45 responses
The very idea that sex work cancels out any other job you may have, makes you incompetent and a threat to society, is prevalent and ridiculous. Thanks for pointing this out.
Hopefully (although this may be too much wishful thinking) people will see this whole event as shocking – not because of the teacher/sex worker but because of the witch hunt.
We should be shocked that those trying to get an education and have a protected environment of a creative writing classroom have to deal with faculty members who are so judgmental that they can’t see past their own ideas and values. I wouldn’t feel safe sharing my writing in that kind of classroom; feeling like my writing would be judged by their ethical bias instead of the merits of the writing. As a writing teacher myself, I think it’s horrible.
This is a great article, thank you.
i agree that the crux of the matter, as you say, is the witch hunt. i wholeheartedly agree that sex workers should be treated with dignity and that the stigma surrounding their jobs should not be used to make character judgments. i also like your point about empathy and forgiveness.
but i wonder if all the departmental focus on the rightness or wrongness of what chavez did–along with the rightness or wrongness of her keeping her position–doesn’t totally distract from the needs of students. it seems that the climate of that english department–attitudes that won’t go away, regardless of whatever institutional judgments are made with respect to chavez’s “conduct”, and faculty issues that won’t go away no matter how passionately and intelligently anyone defends sex work–could be uncomfortable for any student, even one who is approaching thirty and/or has enough experience to navigate the politics, faculty tension, “morality,” etc. etc.
everyone knows the students don’t deserve this hand. i don’t mean to say that they need to be “protected” from chavez. but they should be protected from the apparent mood/politics of their english department. i hope that this will happen in a reasonable, sensitive way.
a – I completely agree. The students are the 2nd biggest victims of this situation. (Chavez definitely ranks first, by my accounting.) If the issue had been dropped at the moment she’d quit the side job and apologized, both Chavez and the students would have been saved this pain. (The quitters and suers would have been saved the pain too, but that’s hardly the point: it’s pain of their own making.) If it’s the duty of faculty to “protect students” from anything, it should be their duty to protect them from faculty infighting that might affect the quality of education. By pursuing punishment for a colleague whose activities they “disapproved” of, they have caused actual harm.
excellent article about hot button topic. i am always shocked when “intellectuals” and in this case “educators” turn out to be bigots & unenlightened vicious hate mongers. and it happens ALOT. well done Ms. Letter. I am the author of a book called “Hos Hooker Call Girls & Rent Boys” & run an event called Sex Worker Literati in NYC at the Bowery Poetry Club, & wanted to invite u & Chavez to speak at our monthly show. sterryhead@gmail.com. Brava!
Interesting article, and I think I mostly agree with your point.
One comment not on the main topic, though: witch hunts were not, in fact, a phenomenon of the Middle Ages. They were a phenomenon of Europe during the age of the Protestant Reformation (the reformation began in the early 1500s.) And they tended to be concentrated in countries where Protestantism, not Catholicism, dominated.
Okay, back to the rest of the article ….
Great article! As someone who is a former phone sex operator and now spends her days writing for them, I totally sympathize with Ms. Chavez and feel angry on behalf of her. Your job doesn’t define you. I have found the problem is that people like to lump everything in the adult industry together. So sex trafficking is equal to phone sex is equal to escorting, etc.
And somewhere in the midst of it, women are labeled as whores. It’s unfortunate.
I think this post misses the point entirely. This matter is about a professor’s responsibilities, and adhering to the policies and ethics of a workplace. I encourage close reading of the Chronicle article. Unless people have a specific agenda, they can see how this issue is about much more than sex work. There is discussion of some of the other things this prof has done — quoted in the profs own words. But really the issue is about the university’s handling. Clearly, the proper channels of an objective examination of the issues were denied by the administration. Allowing the issues to be examined properly, and according to policy, would have saved everyone (including Chavez) a lot of difficulty.
I agree, @misses the point, that objectivity is necessary in a situation like this. What’s most clear from the details in the Chronicle piece is that emotions were (and are) running very hot in the U of NM English department — and hot emotions do not make for objective assessment. When the administrators called in an outside lawyer to examine the situation, that person was an objective assessor with no relationships in the department and no stake in the outcome, beyond keeping the client (the U) from getting sued. The objective assessment tells us that, because Chavez did not violate any law or university rule, the case is closed. Had the department acted against her, despite that, they would have been in the wrong, and the university would have been culpable.
According to many reports in the media, that UNM investigation was done by a lawyer hired by the President. The Presidnet shut down the proper channels of investigation — both the OEO office and the Faculty Ethics Committee to do his own “outside” investigation. Many who were interviewed were shocked that none of what they discussed was taken into account. (google Locksley and Schmidly to find out about another current UNM lawsuit due to a highly improper investigation.) This is a pattern at UNM and one reason the Pres. received an overwhelming no-confidence vote from the faculty. It has all been big news. But bottom line is — the university really really messed this one up.
I would just point out that an outside investigation is more objective than an inside investigation, and that, in the course of any investigation, a great deal of information must be ignored, even if it is sensational or incendiary, because it is irrelevant.
I strongly disagree that this type of outside investigation was more objective than one by the proper channel — the OEO office (which is supposed to function as a unit separate from the university) or the Faculty Ethics Committee (comprised of faculty from different depts. at a large Research U.)
In fact, this “outside” investigation was anything but objective, and UNM ignored vital and absolutely relevant info, including many students’ formal complaints. Most faculty and students who were interviewed know it, and that is partly what this matter is about. Chavez is not the one being sued, etc. It’s the University, for its behavior in this.
@misses the point, If any student had filed a formal complaint against Chavez that would indeed be new information. I can find no confirmation of this suggestion anywhere, and I would appreciate your source, if it exists.
As for the judgement of which is more objective, I suppose we must agree to disagree, since I see faculty peers whose professional and political lives are deeply intertwined as, by nature, unobjective.
One lawyer specially hired by the President to investigate is more objective than the OEO office?? What is the OEO office for?? A Faculty Ethics Committee (formed by other depts.) is in place to handle such matters, yet administration closed off that proper pathway too. I would imagine these things would concern someone who seems to be concerned with faculty and student rights in general — if an administration thinks it can just make sudden decrees. If the “decree” had gone a different way in this matter, I don’t think you’d be defending the bigbossman. But I see we are just going back and forth. I’ll move on.
I’d recommend reading this blog post by one of Chavez’s students, who was mentioned in the Chronicle article: http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2010/09/standing-in-crossroads.html
I would be with you 100% if I thought this was a case of a professor who had taken up a side job of sex work and was being pilloried for that. However, I think this situation is a bit more complicated than that, particularly as it sounds like Chavez’s decision to go into sex work and the fallout from it resulted in a hostile learning environment for some of the students (and not because the student was a prig hellbent on a witch hunt, either).
The numerous Chronicle comments also show a need to believe that there’s “more going on.” I suppose my bias is to believe someone innocent unless proven guilty.
I believe that it’s very important that student complaints be followed up on, but I also believe that not all student complaints have merit, and that it is very possible that the U’s investigation of these events turned up exactly that.
Most importantly, though, I believe that a person should not be judged by peers who are incensed and spinning with righteous fury. In courts of law, it is sometimes preferable to be judged by a single, professional judge than by a jury of one’s peers — it’s preferable when you have reason to believe that jury of peers will be biased against you.
I definitely do not dismiss the possibility that some students (that one in particular, certainly) may have been made uncomfortable, and may have made some bad decisions themselves (the blog post you link to is mostly a defense, it seems, of her own awkward behavior), but I also believe that Chavez ceasing the controversial behavior is more than sufficient in this case.
How much should we punish a person for bringing controversial ideas into a classroom? For stepping over a fuzzy line (I say fuzzy because there simply is no rule against what she did) that vaguely outlines student-professor mores?
Lastly, I really think we need to examine this kneejerk, “there must be more going on” impulse. Is that something some simply want to believe in order to justify their disgust with Chavez? It’s the same sort of thinking that led some to label her a “prostitute” (another version of “more going on”). I’m not saying with absolute certainty that there isn’t “more going on,” but in the absence of evidence, why are be so inclined to assume there is?
Because, in my experience as a journalist? There is usually way more going on than ever makes it into a news article, no matter how extensive and in-depth that article is. And in a case like this, where the ethics are murky and the perspectives are manifold, I think it’s only fair to accept that, yeah, things are not as simple or clear-cut as some might think they are.
As far as her punishment, I have no idea. I do know that it sounds like she did more than just bringing “controversial ideas” into the classroom. Some accounts indicate that she encouraged her students to take part in sex work, to give their writing darkness and edge, and criticized those whose writing did not have those qualities. Some have also said that she smeared those who filed complaints at her. That qualifies as a little more than just bringing “controversial ideas” into the classroom.
The OP has a good point about the way we view sex workers in our society as permanently tainted and ruined and good for nothing else beyond serving as sperm receptacles. I am just not sure that this case supports her argument.
I think it unlikely that this discussion will resolve much given that few people are in possession of all the facts beyond media reports. It is evident that feelings run high on all sides, and this has been reflected wherever this topic has come up for discussion.
Clearly there are differences of opinion as to what the proper procedures were. What is not mentioned is that the university appointed a mediator to try and bring both sides of the disagreement together. Readers will need to judge who is hurting the students, program, department and university the most now, as this drags on over many years.
For a discussion on the broader issues see the many posts on on Sex and the Public Square, detailed in our response to the Chronicle article (Comment 113)
http://chronicle.com/article/In-Professor-Dominatrix/124369/
Michael Goodyear
Dalhousie University
Sex in the Public Square
http://sexinthepublicsquare.org/
One last thing: Cases of sexual misconduct in environments like the workplace or academia aren’t necessarily problematic solely because of the power imbalances between the professor/student or boss/employee, but also because of the way it affects people who have to deal with the two who are directly involved in the situation. The ladies at VIDA posted an essay that touches on this: http://vidaweb.org/full-disclosure
If her adult students were not calling this dominatrix hotline it would have never come out that she was employed in this second job. There was no solicitation involved, correct?
Perhaps the professors who are so high on their moral horses should be tackling that ‘problem’ instead or perhaps embracing that once an adult, your personal sexual life is just that.
Sharon Warner’s lawsuit is available online. It might be of interest to the people reading and commenting here: http://www.courthousenews.com/2009/10/06/NMBondage.pdf
Wow. The lawsuit is very interesting reading, as is the student’s blog post, who clearly is “student c” from the lawsuit. I’m not really feeling for Chavez, though.
“Those rule-breaking men[referring to professors] are often reprimanded…”
Not all professors who sleep with their students are men. For example, there is a female professor at my University who is currently being reviewed by the school ethics board for sleeping with several male students. If she is found guilty, is this just another display of sexism or will you stand behind your original argument Amy? You of all people as a writer should know better then to make generalizations such as those.
The complaint is very interesting — thank you for posting that link. I hope everyone who reads it will remember that it is not a finding of fact, but simply Warner’s point of view of the situation — the view from the lead horse on the witch hunt, if you will.
@Daniel: you’re right of course. I should not have specified men.
You know, I read everything I could– sort of like I devoured the whole Virginia Quarterly Review suicide thingy- and I just have to side with the many students who filed complaints and the three professors who resigned and not Chavez who just comes off horribly in all the stuff I could find online. I find nothing objectionable about her phone sex work, or, frankly, whether or not she had sex with her grad students- that happens everywhere– but it sounds like she really slandered a student and then to pull the “it’s because I’m bisexual and non white” when one of the profs who resigned was Native American and a lesbian…I mean, who is she kidding? Chavez is the clear winner here, and as happens often in academia and the world at large, the lying bullies win. She wins. I guess what I find particularly objectionable is that- actually being gay and non-white IS a real issue in many places. So to pull that stuff out when it’s clearly NOT the case- it’s pure sleaze. Anyway, I guess it’s a matter of who you believe- the students, or Chavez. I’m with the students.
The reference to the mediator is interesting. Many of the faculty referred to those facilitated discussions as “facilitated muzzling,” as it was reported in the newspaper back then. The main focus of President Schmidly’s facilitator was to muzzle the people who were making complaints. No discussion of “the past” was allowed. Really crazy stuff.
Wow. I am really stunned by this article. Having read the Chronicle piece and the thoughtful comments and the blog entry by grad student Carrie Cutler, I think you are way off base. Lisa Chavez was clearly a menace in the classroom and a terrible role model as a teacher. No way should she be allowed to teach. Ever again. Anywhere. The woman is clearly more than a little off kilter. Had I been in her classroom I would have quickly protested and then exited. This comment to the Chronicle piece sums it up for me:
“It is a sign of the times we live in, when firing this person is not even an option at this point. “Bad judgment”? Are you kidding me? This behavior is beyond inappropriate! Being a phone sex worker is bad enough, but had she kept that to herself, that would be one thing; everything about it spilled into her “work” in the classroom! Having sexually-charged conversations in the classroom, praising phone-sex in class as a bona fide way to earn extra money, soliciting your graduate students to “work” in this area – particularly to make their writing “darker” and “edgier,” and then photographing yourself with them in sex poses? Oh, yes – and then accusing one of these students of having mental problems? This is what passes for the qualifications to teach writing?”
Clearly Ms Chavez had no business teaching.
Lisa,
That comment from the Chronicle which you say is 1) thoughtful and 2) which sums it up for you says way more about you than it does Chavez. It makes the claim that being a phone sex worker is “bad enough,” which is basic slut-shaming, and the idea that discussions of this type don’t belong in the classroom at all suggests that discussions about sex and sexuality should be off-limits to everyone. That’s more than a little ridiculous. These are adults we’re talking about here–not fifth graders. Why shouldn’t sex work be considered a topic for discussion in a creative writing classroom? Look, if you’re uncomfortable about talking about the darker side of sex, that’s fine, but don’t push that off onto the rest of the world.
A couple of other things: you say Chavez is “clearly a menace in the classroom” but what do you base that on? Maybe she was, but I’m not going to fool myself into making an argument either way because I wasn’t there, and neither, by your own admission, were you. And you claim that she was a terrible role model as a teacher, but even if that’s true, what does that matter? Again, we’re not talking about fifth-graders in this class–we’re talking about adults, people in their early to mid 20’s at the youngest. They don’t need role models, and it’s insulting to them to suggest that a college professor should be one.
I would recommend this blog as well (found via the Chroncle):
http://dankprofessor.wordpress.com/category/lisa-chavez/
It’s really ironic that, even though Chavez did not violate any applicable laws or UNM policies, her colleagues who perpetrated the nasty photos/bogus note from appalled parents stunt blatantly violated the harassment policies of just about any university in this country. Their actions–and the consequences for them–should not be mitigated simply because Chavez worked briefly (and perfectly legally) as an “SW.”
Not so great an article. The author is so biased in her writing I can’t tell what she is objectively reporting and what she is slanting. Maybe this is a great injustice, but just from reading this article, I can’t tell. Its best to attempt to report the facts neutrally and let the reader draw his or her own conclusion.
Editor’s Note: The email address associated with this comment is bouncing, meaning this is an anonymous comment.
Wow. The first few comments made me do some further reading on the whole thing. It’s possible that Amy and a few commenters just had a knee jerk reaction, thinking this was some kind of anti-sex-work thing. Otherwise, I just can’t see how her completely one-sided commentary came out of what the Chronicle article reports. It just doesn’t add up.
Why does she so insist fellow faculty really labeled Chavez as a prostitute? The only reference to that word was Chavez herself alleging that she was being called a prostitute and also filing that she was being discriminated against for her race and bisexuality. (Apparently, her allegations were found to be unfounded.) And one of the main objectors to Chavez’s behavior is bisexual, Native American poet Joy Harjo.) Does that raise any eyebrows about Chavez’s trustworthiness in what she reports? This commentary here is written with such an odd certainty (and goes way over the edge with its assumptions.) The Chronicle reporter was ever-so-careful, it seems, to use documents – like Chavez’s own words in her accusations against the student she believed reported the matter (of being mentally unstable and making threats) and also against faculty.
Do you really think the colleagues and students are harrassing Chavez by reporting the matter to administration? What???? That is the most absurd thing I have read here. And very scary I might add. Very scary. Faculty are actually required to bring students’ sexual harassment concerns to a superior (and it’s clear that many students were complaining) — but then are called harassers for this by Chavez supporters. This is pretty darn creepy. I’m thinking sometimes the seemingly left can be so damn right-wing; the blindness to what this implies about speaking up about injustice is incredible here).
As more information has come out, I can see what the story really is. Students and faculty asking the university to follow its policies sure doesn’t seem like a witchhunt to me. I read elsewhere that the President of the AAUP and the current Faculty Senate President had also formally asked the administration to forward the matter to the Ethics Committee, as per policy. If nothing else, the ethical issues and Chavez’s behavior with students should have been allowed to be examined. Schmidly’s closing off the proper channels and hiring his own lawyer does not an investigation make. One thing is pretty darn clear from everything I read, and knowing the kind of procedures in place at universities — the proper procedures were denied, and a fair process did not happen.
Interesting to note that “Read Through”‘s comment came from the same IP address as “JBC” https://therumpus.net/2010/09/the-scarlet-sw-for-sex-worker/comment-page-1/#comment-47655, and the four comments from “Misses The Point.” So this is one person trying to have the voice of at least three people, which is dishonest, I think.
better call the internet police, Stephen. And let’s exhume Pessoa’s body while were at it, just to make sure we killed him all off.
@amy it sounds like that student was coerced, not that she ‘made bad decisions’. I mean, that’s victim blaming. Imagine telling a rape victim “well you shouldn’t have gotten drunk” or “you shouldn’t have hung around with someone who could overpower you physically.” In this case it sounds like someone from outside academia being pressured to do things sexually that they didn’t want to do, by someone inside academia and by someone who has all the power in the situation.
On another New Mexico related note: NMSU still has a great creative writing department, free of sex related drama.
Rawbbie,
I’m wondering where you’re getting the notion that the student was coerced, because it doesn’t sound like it from anything I read in the Chronicle article. What did I miss?
Brian,
Here’s a blog post from one of the students who filed complaints against Chavez-
http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2010/09/standing-in-crossroads.html
I feel for her.
@Brian
The link paula posted is what I’m talking about.
The larger point is that even if the accusations are true (which they might not be), Chavez still violated no law or university policy. She took appropriate action by quitting the outside job and having the offending photos removed from the website. She apologized, and changed her ways. My argument is that this strange circumstance — that some in her department refuse to accept that, leave it at that, and move on — can be explained by certain cultural biases.
Some people involved in this — especially the student who wrote at Shakespeare’s Sister and Warner, whose complaint is public — have made their perception of events available at a link’s notice to all we webgawkers. Chavez has been (understandably, I think) overwhelmed by the accusations, and, while she maintains that the worser accusations are not true, she does so only privately. Would we feel differently if the internet were plastered with her first-person account of things? I don’t know. Probably. As in so many things, the person without the stomach for mudslinging takes the worst of it, while the slingers gain great sympathy.
It is foolish to pretend that we the webgawkers know what happened better than those tasked with investigating. The villainization of Chavez is not based on reason or fact; it’s based on rumor and bias. But I say again that Chavez has already made amends, paid penance, and altered her behavior. The desire to pursue her beyond that point is simple madness.
Rawbbie,
I read that when it was first posted, and I’m still not clear on what Cutler was coerced into doing. Working at the same place Chavez was? Cutler was working there before Chavez did, so it’s hardly reasonable to claim Chavez coerced her into that work. From the Chronicle piece under the heading “Accusing Accusers”:
“In fact, there were several current or former students pictured on the Web site. Among them was Carrie Cutler, a 33-year-old graduate student who had worked for the company before Ms. Chávez took a job there. Ms. Cutler, who remains in the creative-writing program, says she had hoped that taking phone-sex work, which she had heard Ms. Chávez praise in class, would not only help her pay bills but help her remedy Ms. Chávez’s complaints that her writing was not dark or edgy enough. She says she quit after growing tired of being on the phone at all hours and dealing with prank callers or people who asked for things she felt uncomfortable providing.”
I don’t see coercion at play here. Is there something I’m missing?
Brian, because she’s 33 and a phone sex worker, her claims of harrassment against Chavez are not valid? Also, she’s just one of the students who made complaints. Obviously, as in the Virginia Quarterly Review case, we only have some information. For instance, the actual complaints made to the various venues are not made public as far as I can see, besides Warner’s and Hrajo statments and the lawsuit. So- we can choose to interpret just from partial facts. Based on those partial facts, I see one woman with a tenure track job, who had multiple complaints made against her from students and other faculty, who them threatened to sue, and then some students left, as did two other faculty, one who also was gay and non-white. My feeling – and really that is all it is, but there it is- is that the person who clearly wins this battle is Chavez. She kept her job and everyone else seems to have lost, the students, and the other professors. The claim by Chavez that this had anything to do with her being gay and non-white is most offensive and makes me distrust her. Anyway, not sure when or if we’ll get more information regarding the students complaints, but they should clear things up. Otherwise, its just choosing to believe a side. I tend to believe the losers in these situations.
Brian, because she’s 33 and a phone sex worker, her claims of harrassment against Chavez are not valid?
Whoa whoa whoa–I never said that and I never even hinted at that. What I asked was where the claims of coercion were coming from, and I asked because the claim seems to be that Cutler took the job at the phone sex company because Chavez pressured her to–claims made by others, I should add, not by anything I’ve seen Cutler write. And all I pointed out is that if people are going to claim that Cutler was coerced into that job, then they need to explain how that works, given that Cutler was working there before Chavez was. That’s all I was asking about, and how you get from that question to the idea that I automatically assume Cutler’s claims are not valid is beyond me. And I want to add, given that I’ve been consistently defending sex work in general in this thread, that I find your suggestion offensive in the extreme.
I guess I feel for everyone in this situation… I’ve been in “creative” situations where fantasy and reality seemed to overlap, and it can feel scary. Despite it becoming more mainstream, lots of people are really triggered by SM, I mean, it’s triggering by nature, isn’t it? So I can imagine a student being in class, getting into these discussions, and then not being sure if it felt comfortable or not. I’m of a mind that if even one person complains about SM being discussed in class, it shouldn’t be brought up any more. I don’t think that’s being anti-sex or prudish, just respectful of boundaries. (Obviously, I’m talking about classes where SM isn’t part of the curriculum.)
And I’m really, really disturbed by the report that Chavez spread rumors that Cutler was mentally ill and threatening to harm her classmates. Who knows if that really happened, but there’s obviously a lot more to this story than we’re hearing. I can understand the impulse to want to use this situation as an example of broader patterns of injustice in our world, and sure, everyone should be allowed their voice, but it sounds like it was getting awfully uncomfortable for the students. Mostly, it’s too bad that the school couldn’t provide more effective mediation.
Hopefully I don’t sound too critical here, because I do see the value of putting the situation in a broader context, but one-sided articles like this one just pile on to the lack effective communication that likely started the conflict in the first place.
Lots of misinformation, half-information, biased information, assumption, prejudice, and exaggeration affecting all conversation (e and otherwise) around the Chavez/Warner situation. No one has all the facts. No one should cast a stone. No one should destroy a career through gossip. But gossip is 90% of the “facts” we are receiving about this case, gossip is what we are telling each other, gossip is what we are forming opinions about. The campaign against Chavez is being waged via gossip. The outrage at Warner is begin fanned by gossip. The national opinion of UNM CW is being formed by gossip. Gossip masquerading as fact.
Hmmm… Much ado about something? Is it a few ounces of throbbing hot gristle between the legs or what? As for me this entire thread is incontrovertible proof that Buddha is right, “The unenlightened are insane.” Now, does that mean that I’m unempathetic to the plight of prostitutional exploiters? No – it means that I feel empathy with all prostitutes (the unenlightened) who feel compelled to trade time/energy/services for goods or financial compenstion (salaries, profits, stocks/options, dividends, alimonies, etc.). The saddest fact of the whole sordid mess is that nobody noticed the cause, Consumer Society (i.e., modern civilization and its totally ecocidal socioeconomic system). Love, Blessings & Blissings
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