Avital Ronell, a queer professor at New York University

Our thanks to John for this. Extracts:

Ronell, for her part, has denied all allegations of sexual contact and sexual harassment between her and her former graduate student. (Neither she nor her lawyer has responded to numerous requests for interviews from Jezebel.) In a statement to the Times, she described the email exchanges as mutual conversations between two consenting adults. (It’s worth noting that she doesn’t dispute the content of their emails, but rather Reitman’s framing of them as harassment): “Our communications — which Reitman now claims constituted sexual harassment — were between two adults, a gay man and a queer woman, who share an Israeli heritage, as well as a penchant for florid and campy communications arising from our common academic backgrounds and sensibilities. These communications were repeatedly invited, responded to and encouraged by him over a period of three years.”…

The kind of behavior Reitman alleges against Ronell is not an isolated incident, but rather, thrives in a system in which professors wield a wildly disproportionate amount of power over their students, particularly graduate students. Advisors, especially senior faculty like Ronell who are highly regarded in their field, have the ability to dictate the futures of their mentees post-graduation when they enter a market where jobs—especially tenure-track jobs—are increasingly scarce. This is exacerbated by a situation in which the blurring of lines between the personal and professional in the relationships between professors and their graduate students is, if not the norm, not particularly frowned upon and often encouraged. “People know that she is very friendly and open and crosses traditional boundaries in relationships with her students,” [J4MB emphasis] Safit, Ronell’s friend and NYU colleague, told Jezebel.

Just published.

Enjoy (44:09).

FACT

Times caption: James Glaisher, left, and Henry Coxwell in the basket of a hot air balloon in about 1862

FICTION

Times caption: Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones in The Aeronauts

Isn’t it inspiring, how courageous women are in works of fiction?

Women are strong.
Women are amazing.
Women need quotas for fictional accounts of courageous achievements.

A piece in today’s Times:

When film-makers decided to plunder the history books for a story of airborne excitement they found what they were looking for in the tale of James Glaisher and Henry Coxwell, with one niggle.

The balloonists and their near-death experience in the skies over Wolverhampton in 1862 would be much better, they reasoned, if one of them were a woman. [J4MB: Why “much better”?]

So while the meteorologist Glaisher will be memorialised in The Aeronauts in a performance by Eddie Redmayne, the daring balloonist Coxwell has been replaced with an imaginary female aeronaut named Amelia Wren. Tom Harper, the film’s writer and director, who oversaw the recent BBC adaptation of War & Peace, has forgone accuracy for the opportunity to place Redmayne opposite Felicity Jones, who starred with him in The Theory of Everything.

The omission of Coxwell has irritated the Royal Society, which argued that there were plenty of female scientists of the period who deserved to have their stories told on film.

Keith Moore, head of library at the scientific institution, said that Coxwell’s story should be better known. “It’s a great shame that Henry isn’t portrayed because he performed very well and saved the life of a leading scientist,” he told The Daily Telegraph. “Glaisher was just looking at his instruments — he was very much the cargo.”

The two men had risen to about four miles above the ground when Glaisher began to feel desperately ill. When he tried to raise one of his arms from where it rested on a table he found that it would not move. He tried to call out to Coxwell, but no words emerged and his head lolled to one side.

“In an instance darkness overcame me,” he wrote afterwards. “I believed I would experience nothing more as death would come unless we speedily descended.”

Unfortunately, the release valve that would allow the balloon to descend had become entangled in ropes and could only be freed if one of the men climbed out of the basket. The air was thin and the temperature fell to minus 29C as Coxwell, a balloonist of great experience, pulled himself up into the shrouds of the balloon. Clinging on with both hands, he used his teeth to operate the valve. [J4MB: This is, of course, the character who will be portrayed as a woman.]

Historians believe that the balloon reached a height of 7 miles (37,000ft or 11,000m) before it was brought under control.

The men fared better than the pigeons they had brought with them for experimental purposes. The one that they dropped over the side at an altitude of three miles “dropped like a piece of paper”. A second, dropped at four miles, flew vigorously in circles while losing height. A third, ejected between four and five miles, “fell downwards as a stone”. [J4MB: Doubtless the male character will be portrayed as the pigeon-lobber.]

Todd Lieberman, the film’s producer, has previously spoken about his wish to make the story authentic, saying: “A top priority for us on The Aeronauts is authenticity. [J4MB: Other than the barefaced lie that one of the two people involved was a woman, anyway.] With that in mind, we intend to do as much balloon filming in the sky as the weather will allow.”

You can subscribe to The Times here.

A piece in today’s Times by Rosemary Bennett (Education Editor), Nicola Woolcock (Education Correspondent), and Ryan Watts (something else). Emphases ours:

The proportion of pupils getting top grades at A level hit its highest in more than five years even though the reformed exams have been described as the toughest in a generation.

Pass marks were lowered to ensure that enough pupils got top marks, analysis by The Times has discovered.

At Edexcel, the pass mark for an E grade in biology was 24.3 per cent compared with 46 per cent in 2016, before the reforms. In physics it was 21 per cent compared with 50 per cent, in chemistry 22 per cent, against 56 per cent in 2016. A similar pattern emerged at AQA where the pass mark for biology was 19 per cent compared with 41 per cent in 2016.

The official figures showed that 26.4 per cent of exams taken were awarded an A* or A, the highest proportion since 2012.

You can subscribe to The Times here.

Enjoy (47:47).

Pitiful. An extract:

It is undeniable that these problems, and a great many more, from wage inequality to so-called “honour” violence, female genital mutilation to workplace sexual harassment, disproportionately affect women.

The first two parts of a three-part “essay” by Special Snowflake for The Economist titled, “How to convince sceptics of the value of feminism.”

Interesting (audio, 21:44 – 27:10).

Interesting (13:01).

Jeff Ketland is an academic, the video of his ICMI18 talk “A feminist witch hunt at Oxford University” will be published in coming days. His speaker profile on the ICMI18 website:

Jeff is a professional logician, mathematician and academic philosopher. He was the victim of a female Borderline Personality Disordered stalker for over two years. He was then the victim of a feminist vigilante lynch mob campaign of false accusations, running him out of his job at Oxford and driving him and his family out of their home. He was reinstated after proving the allegations false.

He’s posted the same broad comments on the 50.50 “Feminism is Cancer” piece on three occasions, and each time the moderators have removed them. His screenshot of his latest comments, posted in the early hours of this morning: