![]() ![]() Today, according to its rules Yale would unequivocally say that Bloom’s behavior was wrong and that he would be subject to discipline. This doesn’t mean that Yale’s current policies aren’t sound. Naomi Wolf extrapolates broadly from her experience with Yale today to suggest that “the atmosphere of collusion that had helped to keep me quiet twenty years ago was still intact-as secretive as a Masonic lodge.” Let’s stipulate for the sake of argument that Yale has not dealt well with Naomi Wolf in the months since she excavated the Bloom incident. This may sound like splitting hairs, but it’s not. Meanwhile, we still don’t know whether, according to Yale’s policy at the time-a “discouragement policy”-Bloom could have been fired or censured for his action had she brought a grievance. But Wolf acknowledges that what transpired was not, strictly speaking, sexual harassment. Wolf says she fended him off and vomited in the sink and that Bloom packed up the sherry and snapped, “You are a deeply troubled girl.” Bloom’s neglect of his academic duties (he failed to meet with her for the rest of the semester and then gave her a B) is itself troubling, and his come-on isn’t pretty. Afterward, he cornered her and breathed, “You have the aura of election upon you.” “The next thing I knew his heavy, boneless hand was hot on my thigh,” she tells us. Finally Bloom invited himself over for dinner at her house-Wolf lived with one of his graduate editorial assistants and her boyfriend-during which he drank several glasses of Amontillado. Somehow much of the semester “slipped away” without a meeting. Wolf’s allegation against Bloom is this: During her senior year, in 1983, she took an independent study with him. She makes a dangerous extrapolation from the personal to the political-but the personal undermines the cause that is the pretext for writing the piece in the first place. ![]() This is typical of the way in which Wolf’s article is disingenuous. We don’t know, since Wolf never tried to find out how Yale would have handled the charge. Yale’s response to her disclosure of a 1983 offense is not necessarily predictive of its response to a present-day offense-not just because the statute of limitations for what Bloom did to Wolf expired 18 years ago, but also because what Bloom did may not have been explicitly wrong by Yale’s standards at the time and by law (though from our vantage point it looks sleazy). When it doesn’t, she says that Yale must not be truly “accountable to the equality of women.” This is a kind of bait and switch. What it seems she really wants from Yale is for its administration to bend over backward for her now that she’s come forward, and thus prove that it really, really cares about its students. Yale’s Grievance Board statement is posted here-and is easily available as the kind of standard response she allows us to believe, for much of the piece, that the college doesn’t have. Both her evidence and her reasoning are deeply flawed. ![]()
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