Comments on: Avital Ronell & Judith Butler: a cautionary tale of power & accountability in academia

By: guest

guest — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 19:16:00 +0000

“Butler & Co. seem to be saying that stripping someone of tenure who has such status in the profession is in and of itself an ‘injustice’ even if she were guilty of the crimes she was accused of — and conversely, that it would be no injustice whatsoever to demote or dismiss someone who lacked such status in academia. Butler et al. are also clearly asserting that someone without Ronell’s ‘international standing and reputation’ does not deserve ‘dignity,’ which is to be accorded only to the powerful.”

I don’t like (any) people to lose their jobs, but I’m glad you said this. These bourgeois idiots think there are some more deserving of life than others. Radicals, my arse.

By: Klemperer

Klemperer — Wed, 14 Jul 2021 12:42:23 +0000

I heard dozens of tales against Weinstein, Woody Allen, James Levine and so many more, but writing from Europe this was new to me. Little example. The swedish daily “Dagens nyheter” had many, many articles about men acting horribly against women, but to my knowledge not 1 article about Avital Ronell. The same applies to a Berlin daily, the “Taz”. Strange…

I think your sentence: “The only society worth living in is one in which Avital Ronell like Harvey Weinstein, Charlie Rose, Kevin Spacey and a legion of other abusers can be held accountable for their crimes and progressive feminism requires nothing less.” is completely true.
Thank you for this great article.

By: Laubeiter

Laubeiter — Wed, 25 Nov 2020 11:51:59 +0000

Is no one replying to this? I think this is a great read. I have understood the outrage over the protective testimony the accused academic received from colleagues that is part of this post. The accuser has not received a protective testimony. What is more outrageous, the alleged harassment or the counter-allegation that the harassment did not take place and that there was a consensual exchange. If you regard the institution as a family and the senior administration of the institution as the parents while the employees are the children, then the parents did not listen to both children. Instead, they did what the Federal law requires them to do.
One more idea: I guess the letter by the colleagues is conflating academic contributions and personal integrity. The complaint about the professor did not touch upon her contributions to academic fields but delineated events that undermined the personal integrity of a subordinate by a supervisor. I wonder how a complaint about the quality of the academic contributions would have been received. My guess is that the professors that jumped onto penning a testimony for the high quality of the academic contributions of the defendant saw her own academic contributions endangered once a leading figure of the field could be convicted.