Luke Ford

From Janet Malcolm’s 2019 collection of essays:

* [John] Roberts had a wonderful way of listening to questions. His face was exquisitely responsive. The constant play of expression on his features put one in mind of nineteenth-century primers of acting in which emotions—pleasure, agreement, dismay, uncertainty, hope, fear—are illustrated on the face of a model. When it was his turn to speak, he did so with equal mesmerizing expressiveness. Whenever he said “With all due respect, Senator”—the stock phrase signaling disagreement—he looked so genuinely respectful, almost regretful, that one could easily conclude that he was agreeing with his interlocutor rather than demurring. During the first round of questions, Biden flashed his famous insincere smile and said, “This shouldn’t be a game of gotcha.” In point of fact, the Democrats—notably Biden himself—“got” Roberts a number of times, but no matter what disagreeable things were said to him he maintained his invincible pleasantness.

* Lindsey Graham, who is a southerner, speaks at northern speed, and to highly entertaining effects.

* He was like the host of a successful and elegant party. Everybody could go home feeling good and good about himself. No one had spilled his champagne or been rude. When, four months later, Roberts joined Scalia and Thomas in their dissent to the majority opinion in Gonzalez v. Oregon , which upheld the state’s law permitting assisted suicide, no one even seemed to feel betrayed. Good parties cast lovely long shadows.

* The Democrats came home from the hearing for Samuel Alito as if they had been beaten up by a rival gang in a bar. At the Roberts hearing, they had been vigorous and assured, sometimes even magnificent, in their defense of liberal values. At the Alito hearing, they were erratic and disoriented, as if suffering from a malaise they had fallen into between the two proceedings. In fact, what they were suffering from was the nominee….Throughout the hearing, in answer to almost every question, Alito said, in effect, that he had come here on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad—and thus defeated every attempt to engage with him in dialogue. Each answer ended the matter then and there. He was like a chauffeur who speaks only when spoken to, and doesn’t presume to converse. While Alito listened to questions, his face was expressionless. When giving answers, he spoke in a mild, uninflected voice. His language was ordinary and wooden. His manner was sober and quiet. He was a negligible, neutral presence.

* Twenty years ago, William Rehnquist, at the hearing for his elevation to Chief Justice, offered a model for how to parry embarrassing questions about your past. When asked about reports that as a young poll watcher he had harassed minority voters, Rehnquist shook his head sadly and said, “No, I don’t think that’s correct,” and when asked about a restrictive clause in the lease to his country house barring “members of the Hebrew race” he said, “I certainly don’t recall it.” Alito, similarly, didn’t recall joining the Concerned Alumni. “I have racked my memory,” he said each time he was asked why he had joined. Nor could he explain why he hadn’t recused himself in the Vanguard case. The Democrats realized too late that their pursuit of the Concerned Alumni and Vanguard matters was a trap. This time, the Republican bridesmaids didn’t merely simper. They hastened to close ranks and attack the Democrats for their cruel badgering of Alito.

* It was at this moment that Mrs. Alito got up and left the hearing room to have her famous cry. The TV camera barely caught the image of her figure brushing past two seats, and the TV watcher would have attached no significance to the sight. Unlike the forbiddingly beautiful and elegant Mrs. Roberts—who sat motionless during her husband’s hearing, with a look of intense, almost anxious concentration on her face—the buxom Mrs. Alito fidgeted and looked around and never seemed to be fully engaged with the proceedings. As it was later reported (around the globe), Mrs. Alito had been so upset by the bad things the Democrats had said about her husband, and so moved by Graham’s defense, that she had to leave in tears. But to anyone who had observed Mrs. Alito’s demeanor in the days before the incident, Charles Isherwood’s comment in the Times —“Surely grinding boredom may also have played a part in her scene-stealing eruption and flight from the Senate chamber”—had the ring of truth.
The Alito hearings were indeed grindingly boring. Although subjects of the highest interest were introduced—spying on citizens, torture, abortion, the right to privacy, civil rights, discrimination, executive power—the talk was never interesting, since Alito could never be drawn. Like Roberts, he eluded the Democrats’ attempts to pry his judicial philosophy out of him, but, unlike Roberts, he offered no compensatory repartee. He was always just a guy answering questions very carefully.

* “On email, people aren’t quite themselves,” Shipley and Schwalbe write. “They are angrier, less sympathetic, less aware, more easily wounded, even more gossipy and duplicitous. Email has a tendency to encourage the lesser angels of our nature.” It also has the capacity for instant retribution.

* If you don’t consciously insert tone into an email, a kind of universal default tone won’t automatically be conveyed. Instead, the message written without regard to tone becomes a blank screen onto which the reader projects his own fears, prejudices and anxieties.
To counteract this perilous ambiguity, Shipley and Schwalbe suggest a program of unrelenting niceness. Keep letting your correspondent know how much you like and respect him, praise and flatter him, constantly demonstrate your puppyish friendliness, and stick in exclamation points (and sometimes even smiling-face icons) wherever possible.

* Sexual harassment isn’t sexual abuse—exactly. It lies on the border between a crime and a mistake. It is a minor offense with major associations. Garner’s oscillating identifications with harasser and harassed, her lurchings between generations and genders, her alternating states of delusion and perception invite comparison with the coded messages of patients in psychotherapy. In the unconscious we are children and parents, old and young, victim and aggressor, gay and straight all at once. In an afterword [to the later American edition of The First Stone ] Garner unnecessarily defends her book against the criticism it has received from feminists in Australia. It no more needs defending than our dreams do, with which there is no arguing, and which are always true.

* Halfway through this remarkable and peculiar book, the feminist academic Jane Gallop tells a story about two dazzlingly brilliant male professors who were on her dissertation committee when she was in graduate school in the mid-seventies, and whom “I did my utmost to seduce.” The men were reluctant at first: “Both of them turned me down, more than once.” However, “over the years, I did what I could to sway them. Trying not to be too obnoxious, I watched for opportunities that might present themselves, prepared to take advantage and press my suit.” Finally, both men bowed to the fate better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. “I had sex but once with each of them,” Gallop reports. “Neither of these became a ‘relationship.’ It was just what is called ‘casual sex.’” She adds, “To be honest, I think I wanted to get them into bed in order to make them more human, more vulnerable.… I was bowled over by their brilliance; they seemed so superior. I wanted to see them naked, to see them as like other men.” And, most important of all,
“Screwing these guys definitely did not keep me from taking myself seriously as a student. In fact, it seemed to make it easier for me to write. Seducing them made me feel kind of cocky and that allowed me to presume I had something to say worth saying.”

* As she wore down the professors’ resistance, she gamely goes to work on the reader to whom the merits of her idea of pedagogy as a sort of sixties love-in may not be immediately apparent. “I sexualize the atmosphere in which I work,” Gallop writes with the matter-of-factness with which another teacher might speak of charts and slides. Further, she calmly tells us, she habitually forms intense, sexy, even sexual relationships with certain of her students. Her extracurricular activities with students have ranged from shopping for clothes to going to bed. Although she actually stopped sleeping with students in 1982, when, rather inconveniently, she fell “madly in love with the man I’m still happily with today,” she has continued to be available to favorite students for kissing, fondling, and talking dirty. This is her teaching style. When we put down her book (such is its dogged seductiveness), we are almost persuaded that any other style is unthinkably stuffy.

* One of Sade’s contributions to pedagogical technique may be the institution, alongside the traditional oral examination, of an anal examination. The Sadian libertines have a technical term for such an examination; they use the verb socratiser (to socratize), meaning to stick a finger up the anus. This association between the great philosopher/teacher and this form of anal penetration recalls the Greek link between pedagogy and pederasty.…
Pederasty is undoubtedly a useful paradigm for classic European pedagogy. A greater man penetrates a lesser man with his knowledge.

* In Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment Gallop offers the equally novel view of professor/student sex as a transaction that reduces rather than increases the power of the putative “greater man.” We have seen the student Gallop reduce her intimidatingly brilliant professors to a couple of contemptibly naked guys; and we see the obverse as well: the professor Gallop so reduced. She writes of her seduction early in her teaching career by a student named Micki, who came to her lecture afterward, “bursting with the sense of having possessed me but a few hours earlier,” and looking “like the proverbial cat who’d eaten the canary”; and of her fling with a student named Scott, a sort of volunteer worker, who kindly offered to sleep with her when her boyfriend (another student) left her, and paid a house call on her birthday because “in view of the occasion, he wanted to make sure I got laid.”

* “At its most intense—and, I would argue, its most productive—the pedagogical relation between teacher and student is, in fact, “a consensual amorous relation.” And if schools decide to prohibit not only sex but “amorous relations” between teacher and student, the “consensual amorous relation” that will be banned from our campuses might just be teaching itself.”

Modern American pedagogy is poised on the fiction that there is no “greater man” or “lesser man” in the teacher/ student dyad. Although the socratizing lecture course is still offered, the action in American higher (no less than lower) education is in the democratizing discussion class. Here any idiotic thing the student says is listened to as if it was brilliant, and here our national vice of talking for the sake of hearing ourselves talk is cultivated as if it was a virtue. A good teacher is someone who can somehow transform this discouraging gathering of babblers into an inspiriting community of minds working together. That an erotic current (a transference, to use the psychoanalytic term) is the fulcrum of this transformation is unquestionable. The students begin to speak the teacher’s language and to ape his thought, like lovers under the illusion that they are alike. Gallop is a good teacher who is also a dedicated bad girl. Her transgressive after-class relationships with students are evidently a condition of the sparkle and zest of her performance as a teacher. Teachers like her—larger-than-life characters with quirky minds—are the teachers one remembers best from college. They are a precious resource, there aren’t many of them, and colleges know their worth and compete for them. Gallop has offered a persuasive argument for the harmlessness (to the student) of a teacher who is a pushover. (She never addresses the obviously more fraught question of the teacher who is a seducer.) But her book has not convinced me that the unpleasantness she has been subjected to has put her teaching at risk. The book itself is a testament to the prod that unpleasantness can provide to a restless spirit. The new repression can only spur the irrepressible Gallop to new audacities.