Teaching and Contextualizing Gendered Violence — and Other Abuses of Academic Power — in Our Classical Texts and Communities

by Judith P. Hallett, University of Maryland, College Park

What a difference nine months made! When I first conceived, as it were, this paper in August 2015, I was, altogether atypically, kvelling rather than kvetching about reactions to gender-based asymmetries and inequities in classical texts, and interpretations of these texts, in our little grove of Academe (and, for those of you who need vocabulary assistance, kvetching is Yiddish for complaining or whinging or even “bitching”; kvelling is the antonym). In fact, I was planning to devote most of my presentation in the May 2016 panel on Gendered Violence at FemCon (on which this essay is based) to celebrating my own entirely unanticipated success with several of my own students — men who were graduate teaching assistants or prospective secondary school teachers or both — in one of my advanced Latin classes. For, in the spring and summer of 2015, I was able to raise their awareness about how to engage sensitively and responsibly, with Greek and Roman literary representations of sexual violence, mainly but not exclusively against women, in their own coeducational and single-sex classrooms, at both the university and pre-collegiate levels. But my kvelling in this paper will, alas, oy vey, take a back seat to my kvetching about the real-life academic contexts in which gendered violence and other abuses of academic power occur.

It merits notice that the classical works which these men read as students in my course during the spring of 2015, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Fasti, largely depict mythic and imaginary figures rather than historical men and women from Rome during the classical period, in this instance the members of Ovid’s own, elite Augustan milieu. The ancient Roman world of course differs drastically from our own twenty-first century environment, and our little grove of Academe. Yet in that class, as in all my classes, I also endeavored to contextualize these fictional Latin literary texts by examining both the different ancient Greco-Roman cultural contexts in which these works were originally written and read, and the lived experiences of students and teachers in the academic world today.

The lived experiences on which I can speak most authoritatively occur within our little grove of Academe, the global field of classics. Always smaller than its counterparts in other learned disciplines, Classics with a capital C has vastly shrunk of late, owing to technological advances and technologically fueled modes of international conversation. Even if everyone in our little grove, the village it takes to produce and sustain us classicists, does not know everyone else, it’s possible for all of us to know at least something about everyone else, personally as well as professionally. I shall return shortly to the topic of our global grove, the village we classicists inhabit.

But first let me address another issue: the wisdom of providing “trigger warnings”, alerting students in advance to the prominent and seemingly unproblematized depictions of sexual violence against women in the texts they are to study and ultimately teach, such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses. And let me testify that I have enthusiastically participated in the practice of issuing trigger warnings long before this practice dared to speak its name, even before it had a name. Issuing trigger warnings has long been a ritual not only in the first meeting of my Latin classes, on Catullus and Horace and Petronius and Plautus as well as on Ovid, but also when I first meet my courses on aspects of Greco-Roman culture, ranging from women in antiquity to the sources and screen adaptations of Roman historical novels. I have always felt obligated to inform my students at the very start of our time together that we will be scrutinizing and contextualizing material of this kind, discussing the conduct it describes “clinically and analytically.” I emphasize as well that I do not necessarily endorse this conduct or expect it to be imitated. I invariably conclude this informational announcement by suggesting that students who feel uncomfortable with sexual material and its discussion not continue with the class. And, on occasion, some of them have dropped the course, often owing to pressure from “religious-minded” family members or friends who don’t know a word of Latin and can’t distinguish BCE from CE. That is their right and their decision.

In this connection, let me commend, recommend, and share the challenges I have encountered in assigning, Amy Richlin’s influential essay “Reading Ovid’s Rapes”, first published over two decades ago and now revised for her 2014 collection Arguments With Silence. Like the Ovidian textual material it analyzes, Richlin’s essay itself has, in my classrooms at least, required its own trigger warnings. It occupies pride of place in my own classrooms because it articulates what is disturbing not only about Ovid’s frequent descriptions of women subjected to rape, but also the exculpatory explanations offered by Ovidian scholars in dealing with this material. I myself draw comfort from Richlin’s attempts at the end of the essay to consider how feminists can read these Ovidian narratives, by, inter alia, adopting resisting readings. Yet for years her concluding remarks have met with vehement resistance, from men and at times women in my class who, ironically, whether they acknowledged it or not, embodied feminist values in their lived realities and even their wildest fantasies. They interpreted her observations as hostile to all men, and even puritanical and humorless: so unlike the “real Amy Richlin” that I started airing video clips of her from the History Channel series The History of Sex to reassure my students that she was warm and funny as well as incisive and legitimately aggrieved.

But in spring 2015 all of my advanced Ovid students passionately embraced everything Richlin says in that essay and then some. Several, without any prompting from me, defended the essay against attacks on Facebook that denied its worth as classical scholarship. Three of the men — one from a conservative North Carolina Protestant background, another from a conservative Midwestern Catholic background, the third a Jew very sympathetic to Israel, even when its leaders and policies take stances that deeply trouble some progressive Jews such as myself — presented a well-received, impressively researched paper at the 2015 fall meeting of the Classical Association of the Atlantic States about their own anxieties over discussing Greco-Roman literary sexual violence in their roles as male instructors of female students. When I asked these men to explain their unprecedentedly positive reaction to Richlin’s essay, they replied that a generational change had taken place since the last time I taught this same Ovid course two years earlier, in 2013. I am afraid that the sexism overtly displayed, and justified, by some leftwing and rightwing political activists of their generation during the 2016 presidential election, among them several of my own students, does not inspire confidence in that explanation. Only time will tell. I will be eager to see if Richlin’s essay meets with an inclusive embrace or bitter resistance when I teach Ovid again in the spring of 2017.

In the remainder of my essay, I consider the dangers of failing to discuss sexual violence seriously for fear of offending religiously and culturally conservative students and their families; reflect upon the responsible use of the personal voice as a pedagogical tool, and acknowledge the dangers of speaking up and speaking out in small, self-contained academic environments such as university classics departments and the classics community itself. What follows, a combination of kvetching and reflecting, will mostly deal with the second and third of these issues: using the personal voice in my own pedagogy; and sharing experiences, of others as well as my own, from the professional realm, drawn on decades dwelling in the global classics village.

But to begin with the first issue: why I believe it essential to discuss ancient Greek and Roman depictions of sexual violence seriously with all of my students. As a result of some extremely unpleasant experiences with students who insisted on leaving class, and even being exempted from assignments, on sexual topics, on “religious grounds”, I reached the conclusion that these students were being unfair to their classmates as well as myself, and, in their own holier-than-thou ways, downright disruptive to the classroom learning environment. Since then I have had no compunctions about assigning, and “clinically” discussing, depictions of sexual violence, and indeed all sexual activity, in teaching and contextualizing ancient Greco-Roman texts and material objects, even if it means increasing the risk of giving offense to students from culturally and religious conservative backgrounds. My initial trigger warning at our first meeting puts the class on notice that we cannot deal fully and fairly with the texts and topics on our syllabi, and the cultural assumptions and historical realities to which they attest, without scrutiny and analysis of their sexual content.

If students who wish to censor class discussions on sexual matters insist on remaining in the class, and trying to “change the subject”, I remind them that they were given the opportunity to leave on the first day of class. Most important, all three of the men about whom I have been kvelling — because they shared, in a peer-reviewed paper at a professional meeting, their scholarly research and personal experiences about how to teach classical texts depicting sexual violence with emotional sensitivity and intellectual integrity — come from religious and culturally conservative backgrounds. Had I, and their other professors in classics and other courses, not raised various issues about these texts and their contexts, these students would never have reflected on how to present them in their own classrooms. We have to start somewhere.

Now for the kvetching. I mention, and credit, publications such as Amy Richlin’s essay on reading Ovid’s rapes, along with other professors that taught these three young men (at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, St Louis University, and Vassar College as well as my own university) because it “takes a village” of classicists to instill the requisite awareness for teaching classical texts about sexuality and sexual violence sensitively and responsibly. But often my own students — especially those entering and hoping to establish a professional home and identity in the field of classics — also, and justifiably, try to connect the content and meaning of what they study and teach about classical antiquity with their own, and my own, experiences of dealing with the conduct and attitudes of our classics colleagues world-wide. Some of these classicists in fact publish on representations of ancient Greco-Roman sexualities, in ways that may or may not suggest that they fully comprehend the gender-based (or class-based, or age-based) asymmetries and inequities in these representations. Some hold academic positions in departments and programs to which my students hope to apply, or already have been accepted, for graduate work and teaching jobs. Owing to the increased frequency in which graduate students and even undergraduates these days share their research at professional conferences around the globe, some have in fact shown interest in the scholarly work of my students, and in mentoring them formally or informally.

Inasmuch as I myself entered graduate school in classics a half-century ago, and have only “worked” as a teacher, researcher and professional citizen in the field of classics since that time, mostly but not entirely here in the US, I know, and know about, a great many of my fellow classicists who may have shown interest in, and clearly hold interest for, my own students. Indeed, much of what I know about the sexual attitudes and prejudices, conduct and misconduct of “people in the real world” is based on my own interactions with fellow classicists in our little grove of Academe. I have good reason for wanting to share this knowledge. My students would benefit immensely from personal and professional interactions — whether as graduate students, or as extra-institutional intellectual disciples and mentees — with many of these classics colleagues. Such as Amy Richlin herself, exemplary as well as tireless in her fostering of younger classicists, many of them not her own students. Yet there are other classics colleagues, with troubling personal and professional “track records” that include repeated instances of professionally inappropriate behavior including gendered violence, bullying, sexual harassment, taking credit for the work of others, and other serious ethical lapses. These are classicists whom my students and junior colleagues would do well to avoid. Can I communicate this message to them, and if so, when and how?

Which brings us to the personal voice as a pedagogical tool. I frequently share my past and present personal experiences in the classics trenches with my students, especially those aiming to join our profession: at times to illuminate the scholarly works that they read (though I rarely show TV clips as I did to disabuse them of their false impressions about Amy Richlin); at times to compare the challenges they face with those I myself encountered (never missing the chance to tell them how hard I toiled, especially in the amount of Greek and Latin I was expected to read when I was “their age”); at times because my students can ascertain a great deal of information about scholars whom we read, or whom they happen to meet, from a mere Google search, and I need to fill in gaps or correct misunderstandings. But what, when, and how much, do I share, especially if it is information about a colleague’s ethically inappropriate conduct, particularly that involving abuses of professional power, such as sexual harassment and other forms of gendered violence, taking credit for the scholarly work of others, and bullying?

One inhibiting factor for me and others with legitimate motives for sharing this kind of information is fear of violating “professional decorum”: an unwritten edict that endeavors to beautify our classics community as a unified entity by suppressing evidence of unethical and indeed harmful conduct by its individual members so as to “keep up appearances”, uphold the good name of our common enterprise, and preserve the individual reputations and future career prospects of its members (especially those who have assumed weighty administrative responsibilities, abused their power and nonetheless seek more powerful administrative positions still). Accompanying this unwritten edict is the naive assumption that information about the ethical and other failings of our colleagues will be taken into serious account during confidential discussions when their records undergo peer assessment: during job searches, tenure and promotion reviews and other evaluative procedures. However, those peer assessments rightfully requiring confidentiality rarely if ever involve evaluating an individual’s ethical conduct. At most they collect the allegedly objective and frankly expressed views of “experts” in that individual’s research specialty about the quality of his or her scholarly publications.

Rather, confidentiality is increasingly invoked to cover up, and excuse, abuses of authority and other reprehensible treatment of colleagues and students, bullying in particular. Unlike, say, a tenure and promotion review, which entails the gathering and interpreting, by one or more committees, of multiple documents that both the candidate and various assessors submit, bullying usually involves one individual’s unaccountable use of power to coerce, punish or shame another. Bullying is best effectuated in one-on-one, “personal” and unobserved communications such as closed-door conversations and private emails. Its perpetrators can be women as well as men; their victims can be senior as well as junior to themselves. Even at my advanced age and career stage I am still subjected to frequent bullying, several episodes of which delayed my completion of my paper in the months before the Seattle conference. What earned me humiliation and punishment in each instance were my efforts to stand up for and oppose injustices to students and more vulnerable faculty members; in each instance, too, excuses were made for the perpetrators, among them that they did not have time to follow the rules because they could not endure criticisms from me.

To be sure, we cannot obliterate the misuse of confidentiality to cover up gendered violence, and other acts of misconduct and mistreatment, by classics colleagues at our own institutions and far beyond. Yet, as Richlin says in her essay about reading Ovid’s rapes: we can resist, by documenting mistreatment, and misconduct, whenever possible. We can avoid one-on-one, unwitnessed and unrecorded, conversations in favor of increasingly inclusive email discussions, by copying others during email discussions that turn threatening or abusive. I am often faulted for sending too many emails. But the records these emails provide have on many occasions proven invaluable as testimony to misconduct of various sorts (especially because more than one “witness to my woes” has died or become incapacitated). Those of us, especially senior “village elders” with more (lived experience) to share and less to lose, who know first-hand about harmful conduct by classics colleagues on and beyond our campuses, should not shy away from sharing this information — ideally documented rather than through hearsay, and in a discreet and even decorous manner — with the more vulnerable students and faculty members that these colleagues are in a position to harm.

In the name of fairness, I would not recommend warning students and colleagues about the potential misconduct of an inveterate bully or harasser. But once actual misconduct, with the potential for escalation, has been called to our attention, we should not keep our knowledge a secret. However, formulating strategies for minimizing human damage should be our goal: merely sharing the injustices done to ourselves or to others, does no good. In other words, it will require our global classics village not only to produce and sustain classicists, but also to protect the vulnerable rather than those who perpetuate gendered, and other kinds of academic, violence.