Michael Tooley (Colorado) has posted comments about the lawsuit, which settled in 2016, including a statement from philosopher Edward Erwin (Miami), the one defendant who was not party to settlement of the lawsuit. Prof. Erwin sent me the deposition of the plaintiff, which I have read; he told me it was not "under seal" by the court. I'll say more about it in a moment. My conclusion, however, based on the deposition, is that (1) Colin McGinn behaved inappropriately in trying to initiate a romantic and sexual relationship with his doctoral student, the plaintiff; and (2) the university did not act unreasonably, though I find the plaintiff's explanation of her conduct quite plausible. I do want to highlight a point Professor Erwin makes:
Before the case was brought, McGinn, like Peter Ludlow, was blacklisted from academic philosophy. He was denied a one year Visiting Position at East Carolina University; he has been asked to withdraw his contribution to an anthology on Shakespeare and Philosophy because other authors threatened to pull theirs (Peter Ludlow has suffered the same fate), and more recently, he has had a contract for a Shakespeare book cancelled specifically because of the allegations in the case; he has had speaking engagements cancelled, and, although he has applied to several other academic positions, he has failed to make the short list for any of them.
I want to note my agreement with Professor Erwin that this kind of treatment is unacceptable; as I wrote in a CHE column awhile back:
Liberals who no doubt believe that convicted felons "deserve a second chance" sometimes sound like they think that accused or university-convicted sexual harassers should never be heard from again. But how could that be right?
Punishments should be proportional to the offense; that is a widely accepted principle of punitive justice. No one thinks that a sexual harasser should be castrated or hung. One also hopes no one thinks a sexual harasser should be prohibited from earning a living ever again. (Even convicted murderers, released from prison, are allowed to work.)
The rest of this post will concern the deposition of the plaintiff.
It is very long, nearly 700 pages of transcript, but I read it all, though some bits more carefully than others (I skimmed some of the more trivial stuff). Most of the deposition is conducted by Eric Isicoff, lawyer for the University of Miami, a defendant in the lawsuit (there is a short examination of the witness by Professor McGinn's lawyer, Patricia Thompson, at the end). Depositions are often tedious, intrusive, and cruel, full of innuendo based on slivers of evidence (punctuation, phrasing in e-mails in this case). The plaintiff conducts herself admirably in a deposition which had all of these characteristics, and then some; Mr. Isicoff is extremely aggressive and at times rude, trying at times to humiliate the witness (plaintiff's counsel objects quite a bit, and while it isn't as ugly as this deposition, there are points where the tension in that room must have been palpable). Colin McGinn was present at the deposition, and according to plaintiffs' counsel was smirking at her some of the time. It can not have been a pleasant experience for the plaintiff, which makes her steady performance all the more striking. The unpleasantness of the deposition is reason enough for a plaintiff to settle in a case like this.
A large part of Mr Isicoff's examination consists of showing the plaintiff e-mails and asking questions of the form (my language, not his obviously), "Why were you so nice in this e-mail to Colin McGinn instead of telling him to fuck off if he was really harassing you?" Defendant's theory of the case is that, in fact, the plaintiff was encouraging a romantic relationship in order to secure professional advantages from McGinn's support, and that when she failed to complete all of a summer research project for McGinn, and McGinn became annoyed, she changed her mind and reported him for misconduct. I did not find this the most plausible interpretation of the evidence adduced in the deposition, but it is a possible interpretation.
A more plausible interpretation, however, is suggested by the following remarks.
First plaintiff testifes at two points in the deposition as follows:
He [McGinn] frequently expressed his dislike and his very strong anger and motivation to destroy any individuals that disagreed with him intellectually. He talked badly about members of the graduate student body that he disliked, and being a first year graduate student, I was afraid to say anything that could possibly put me in a position to be on his bad side.
There was one point, and I don't remember exactly when this was, but somebody wrote a negative review of one of his recent books, and his response to that was calling the woman a bitch, and claiming he should ruin her career, and that he could so easily do it, because he was so esteemed and everyone trusted him and believed everything he had to say.
The review in question was Nina Strohminger's evisceration of McGinn's book on disgust.
Given that background, the plaintiff explains her apparently friendly e-mails to McGinn as follows (her e-mails did, indeed, parrot McGinn's language); she testifies she was trying to,
To reiterate what he said and to not disrespect him. This is what I did in an effort to appease him in a situation in which I felt very uncomfortable. I started to feel very uncomfortable at this point in time. It's very difficult, being a first year graduate student, to push off a professor who shows interest in your intellectual development, and Professor McGinn showed that he thought I was smart, and that he thought I had some kind of possibility to be good at philosophy, and in showing that interest, you know, I wanted to respect him, and I wanted to try to develop a professional relationship with him, and so I thought best to just try to appease him, when it looked like that's what I needed to do, and to try my best to kind of shrug off or not directly reciprocate
the advances that he was trying to make.
For a long time, she did not tell anyone about McGinn's increasingly aggressive attempts to start a romantic and sexual relationship. Here is her explanation:
I didn't tell anybody about anything that was going on because of how humiliating it was to admit that your professor wants to engage in these weird hand-holdings with you, he wants to touch your foot, and that you are so weak that you can't say no, like that's humiliating.
Late in the deposition by Mr. Isicoff, on the second day, the following striking exchange occurs with a powerful response from the plaintiff, beginning with a typically loaded question from defense counsel:
Q. Isn't it true that over the six month period of time that you were developing the relationship with Professor McGinn, you truly believed that your come-ons, innuendoes, out right explicit proclamations of personal feelings for Professor McGinn, would pay big dividends for you, academically and professionally?
MR. POLLACK (plaintiff's counsel): Objection to the form.
Q Do you agree with that?
A No, I do not believe that. And having learned to actually use him, don't you think that rather than trying to move away, I would have taken him up on giving him a hand job, or something, or actually responded favorably to his claims that I gave him an erection, that's not what happened.
What I did is, I tried my best to ignore those, and to placate him because he's an astute philosopher who is a narcissist and who has a vendetta against anyone that says anything negative towards him. I was scared shitless, and I didn't know what to do, and I found myself in a situation where I had someone asking if they could rub my foot, an authority figure that I really did not think I could say no to, and, yes, I was weak, and so I went alongwith it, and I crashed, and I couldn't take it anymore.
I suspect I'm also on his vendetta list, since I got so fed up with his hectoring e-mails to me that I told him directly a couple of years ago he was a "delusional narcissist."
Notwithstanding that, and notwithstanding that I find the plaintiff's narrative plausible, I want to reiterate that Professor Erwin is correct: whatever the precise nature of Professor McGinn's misconduct in this matter, he should not be blacklisted from the profession, from publications, or from professional events. He has been sanctioned by the University of Miami for his misconduct, losing his job. Let him, and anyone similarly situated, contribute intellectually and professionally to the extent he is able.
UPDATE: Professor Erwin writes: "Concerning your reading of the Morrison deposition, if you are merely reporting what strikes you as plausible, we do not disagree. However, others will take you to be saying that in fact this is the most plausible reading. To them I say: All depends on accepting Morrison’s statements as true." Professor Erwin does not think the plaintiff is reliable. I agree with him that if the plaintiff's statements are not accurate, then her explanation of what transpired would not be persuasive.
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