NEW YORK (NY)
The New Republic
November 30, 2017
By Irene Hsu and Rachel Stone
Two recent cases reveal how the structure of American graduate schools enables sexual harassment and worse.
It was 1998 when Franco Moretti approached Kimberly Latta on an airplane. At the time, Latta was a PhD student at Rutgers, and Moretti a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. Latta recalled, “[Franco] came over with a big smile on his face and said, ‘Hello, hello! Do you remember me?’” Latta, who was sitting beside a friend, summoned the courage to respond. “Of course I remember you,” she told Moretti. “And I will never forgive you for what you did to me.”
It wasn’t until this year that Latta spoke out publicly. Latta wrote—on Facebook, in a letter to Stanford administrators, and to reporters—that Moretti stalked and raped her in the 1984-1985 school year, when she was a graduate student and Moretti was a visiting professor at UC Berkeley. Latta is now a practicing psychotherapist; Moretti has been a professor emeritus at Stanford since 2016. (Irene Hsu, a co-writer for this article, graduated from the Stanford in June 2017 with a degree in English.)
Latta’s Facebook post, published in November, followed an essay by Seo-Young Chu, now an associate professor of English at Queens College, CUNY, about how her advisor, the late professor Jay Fliegelman, sexually harassed and raped her when she was an English PhD candidate at Stanford.
These stories have surfaced as part of the #MeToo movement, a watershed moment for workplace equality that has shaken politics, the media, and the entertainment industry. They mark what could be the beginning of a long-overdue public reckoning with power and consent in American graduate school programs. The allegations against Fliegelman (who died in 2007) and Moretti are not singular instances of faculty sexual abuse, limited to a single department within a particular educational institution—in the past month alone, graduate students have spoken out against faculty at Princeton University and the University of Rochester, among a slew of others. They are the product of a larger culture of silence and complicity, which has made for a dangerous, destructive, and exclusionary educational environment.
Moretti became a professor at Stanford in 2000, where he taught until his retirement. While there, he established “distant reading” as a novel and controversial mode of criticism. He is a veritable celebrity as far as literary scholars go, having been profiled in The New York Times and The New Yorker. His research was collected in Canon/Archive, co-authored by 14 others, which was published at the end of October by n+1 books. (Shortly after Latta’s Facebook post, the editors of n+1 books told The New Republic, “We were disturbed to hear of the allegations against Moretti, which only came to our attention yesterday. n+1 does not tolerate sexual harassment and abuse, and we take these allegations seriously.”)
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