MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY--UPDATED
...who spoke out long ago about his behavior. An excerpt:
What’s relevant to me is the question of what made it so that the rest of the faculty at Berkeley – themselves, not slimy creepers and generally nice, decent people — were passive in the face of the full knowledge of Searle’s behavior. How many young women were lost to philosophy or had their self-confidence or sense of intellectual belonging undermined as a result? It’s absolutely unacceptable. Obviously there are many different possible explanations for people doing nothing in this kind of situation – shyness, naivete, indifference, obliviousness, complicity, being stymied by administrative indifference, reputational considerations, fear of repercussions, etc. But a strong departmental culture and relevant array of institutions and policies can overcome most of those things.
UPDATE: A philosopher who spent time at Berkeley in the 1980s writes regarding a "research assistant" Searle was involved with then:
Their relationship was pretty open. Why didn’t I or anyone else report him? Because it seemed totally consensual and at the time at Berkeley relationships between faculty and younger members of the profession were pretty common. Many people who would have described themselves as feminists were well aware of this particular relationship. Had I gone to a dean and complained they would have laughed in my face and everyone would have thought I was crazy. I believe that Searle started in the 1960s with consensual relationships with students and employees and they gradually morphed into the creepy horrifying cringe-worthy things that we know about now, but no-one I knew had a glimpse of that back then. Kristina Gehrman may condemn those of us who did not report him in the 1980s but that is 20/20 hindsight.
Plainly the norms have changed, and Searle's misbehavior may also have changed over time.
ANOTHER: Philosopher Cheyney Ryan (Oxford) writes:
I think people in the field were fully aware Searle was a sexual predator as far back as the mid-1970s. He came to Oregon when I first started there, 1975. He asked a woman grad student for a ride back to his motel after his mid-day talk, he said he needed to use the bathroom, and after a few minutes emerged full naked and started groping her until she could get out of the room.
I recounted this story around that time to two colleagues from other universities who both had similar stories about him. If we all knew abut this, why didn't Searle's own department know about it?
I can attest that consensual relations were viewed quite differently then. But even then, everyone knew the difference between them and blatant exploitation, as well as sexual assault. And they sometimes acted on these distinctions. I don't think the passivity/silence around this can just be ascribed to changing norms, if that is the suggestion--unless the norm is that senior people in the field didn't care about this sort of thing.
The behavior described by Prof. Ryan is in the Harvey-Weinstein league of sexual abuse and misconduct; if it was widely known, it is shocking that no one did anything about it for so long.
AND ANOTHER: Another victim, philosopher Vida Rao (Rice), speaks.
Recent Comments