Survivor-Shaped Specters and Gaps
A guest blog post by Seo-Young Chu
Content Warning: We are honored to share Seo-Young’s experience but please note that this may be distressing to some readers, as it discusses rape and suicide. We hope that by sharing her story, others may find hope and community.
In the year 2000, during the month of February, a young Korean American woman named Jennie Chu nearly became a victim-shaped gap in academia.
She had just turned 22 years old. She was a first-year PhD student in the English Department at Stanford University. She was working as a teaching assistant for Jay Fliegelman, a tenured academic in his fifties and the William Robertson Coe Professor in American Literature. Unlike Jennie Chu, who was new to Stanford, new to California, and new to the profession, Professor Fliegelman had been teaching at Stanford for decades. In fact, Professor Fliegelman had received his own PhD from Stanford before Jennie was even born.
Shortly after Jennie’s 22nd birthday, Jay Fliegelman raped Jennie Chu. Shortly after the rape, Jennie tried to end her life.
Somehow I survived.
After a grueling investigation that resulted in my abuser being suspended for two years without pay, I changed my name from Jennie to Seo-Young and transferred to Harvard in 2001, switching my field from Early American literature to science fiction. In 2007, while struggling to find a job in academia, I completed my dissertation and received my PhD. What I did not know at the time: While I was on the job market, my abuser was being honored with a “Jayfest”—a 2007 conference at Stanford celebrating Jay Fliegeman’s life, mentorship, and scholarship—and I was being blacklisted. Shortly after my abuser’s death in August 2007, Stanford honored him with a memorial resolution that made no mention of his predation. In addition, Stanford acquired my abuser’s collection of expensive rare books—some of which he used to groom my younger self as well as other women (most of whom wish to remain unnamed)—and named it the Fliegelman Library. And both Stanford and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies named mentorship awards in Jay Fliegelman’s honor.
It wasn’t until I received tenure at Queens College, CUNY, in 2016 that I felt brave enough to google “Jay Fliegelman.” Only then did I learn about the mentorship awards, the library, the memorial resolution, the coverup. In November 2017 I published “A Refuge for Jae-in Doe,” an essay documenting the afterlife of what happened to me at Stanford. To my surprise, the essay attracted media attention. I spent my post-tenure sabbatical—during which I was supposed to be completing a book manuscript on North Korea—sharing my story with journalists (see the sources listed below), working to remove my abuser’s name from mentorship awards, meeting with and listening to other survivors (including others who were abused by Jay Fliegelman), and trying to transform our collective trauma into meaningful action.
In the years since I first publicly disclosed I am a survivor in 2017, it has become increasingly clear to me that survivors are disappearing from academia. Our schools, our syllabi, our classrooms, our bibliographies, our campuses, our research labs, our thesis committees, our libraries, our conference panels, our departments, our programs, and our monographs are riddled through and through with survivor-shaped gaps. Each gap is a place in academia where someone has gone missing due to bullying, harassment, retaliation, predation, sexual assault, mobbing, and/or other abuses of power. Some of these gaps are shaped like allies who have left academia due to moral injury. Not every gap, moreover, is shaped like a survivor. Not every victim survives.
Even though I survived and am still in academia, I am not quite fully a survivor-shaped presence. I teach online on account of threats, rape trauma, and agoraphobia. I stay away from many academic conferences in order to avoid running into professors in the Stanford English department and others who enabled and/or defended my abuser. I have had to recuse myself from reviewing manuscripts that cite my abuser’s work. I have given up on becoming a full professor. To this day, when a male colleague in a position of power expresses interest in my work, I wonder if my work is actually interesting or if he is interested in raping me.
In some sense I am a survivor-shaped ghost, an absent presence, a kind of academic shadow or specter. Like other academic specters, I am what academia tries to forget and repress. Like all ghosts, we haunt.
How can we make our presence less haunting, less spectral, more vivid, and more concrete?
How can we build community, solidarity, agency, and dialogue among those who have been displaced from academia?
Is it possible to measure and even reclaim the knowledge we have lost to rape culture and abuses of power?
What would it mean to illuminate the victim- and survivor-shaped gaps in higher education?
How can we use our collective ingenuity and expertise to repair broken systems, get justice for survivors, and make the problem of rape culture legible and thus amenable to rewriting?
I don’t have all the answers. I do believe that in order to answer such questions, we need resources like Callisto.
Callisto can help to illuminate the survivor-shaped gaps.
Callisto can help us to reclaim the knowledge we have lost to rape culture and abuses of power.
Callisto can help build community, solidarity, agency, and dialogue among those who have been displaced from academia.
Callisto can help to transform those of us who are survivor-shaped absences and ghosts into active participants in a larger movement—in academia and beyond.
Callisto can help to prevent what happened to me from ever happening to anyone else.
#MeToo #MeTooAcademia
Related:
A Refuge for Jae-in Doe: Fugues in the Key of English Major (Entropy Magazine)
After ‘A Refuge for Jae-in Doe’: A Social Media Chronology (ASAP/ Journal)
I ended up being hospitalized again (The Cut, New York Magazine)
Dear Stanford: You must reckon with your history of sexual violence (Stanford Daily)
How #MeToo Helped Seo-Young Chu Name Her Harasser — Testimonies (New York Magazine)
KoreanAmericanStory.org #MeToo Project (KoreanAmericanStory.org)
I, Discomfort Woman: A Fugue in F Minor (The Margins/Asian American Writers’ Workshop)
Other relevant sources (in chronological order):
“Ghost From the Past: Professor’s essay about being harassed and raped by her late adviser sparks calls for public acknowledgment of the reasons for his past suspension from Stanford and the renaming of a disciplinary society mentorship award that bore his name.” By Colleen Flaherty (November 9, 2017).
“2 Women Say Stanford Professors Raped Them Years Ago.” By Katherine Mangan (NOVEMBER 11, 2017).
https://www.chronicle.com/article/2-women-say-stanford-professors-raped-them-years-ago/
“ASECS Executive Board Statement on Harassment and Abuse” (November 11, 2017)
"English faculty told to redirect press questions on sexual assault allegations to University communications." By Brian Contreras (Nov. 13, 2017, 1:00 a.m.).
“Sexual Harassment and Assault in Higher Ed: What’s Happened Since Weinstein.” By Nell Gluckman , Brock Read, Bianca Quilantan, and Katherine Mangan (NOVEMBER 13, 2017).
“Editorial Board: Let’s hold faculty to a higher standard on sexual assault.” Opinion by Vol. 252 Editorial Board (Nov. 14, 2017, 3:00 a.m.).
“Here’s What Sexual Harassment Looks Like in Higher Education.” By Katherine Mangan (NOVEMBER 16, 2017).
https://www.chronicle.com/article/heres-what-sexual-harassment-looks-like-in-higher-education/
“Open Letter from Alumni to Stanford: Not in Our Name.” by OP-ED (NOVEMBER 22, 2017).
https://stanfordpolitics.org/2017/11/22/open-letter-alumni-stanford-not-in-our-name/
“‘A Professor Is Kind of Like a Priest’: Two recent cases reveal how the structure of American graduate schools enables sexual harassment and worse.” By Irene Hsu and Rachel Stone (Nov. 30, 2017).
https://newrepublic.com/article/146049/a-professor-kind-like-priest
"Stanford: Sexual misconduct revelation exposes storied professor's secret." (Dec. 1, 2017).
“Behind the Fliegelman sexual misconduct investigation.” By Fangzhou Liu (Dec. 2, 2017, 3:37 p.m.).
https://stanforddaily.com/2017/12/02/behind-the-fliegelman-sexual-misconduct-investigation/
“Former students of Jay Fliegelman describe inappropriate relationships, sexual misconduct in 1980s, 1990s.” By RUAIRÍ ARRIETA-KENNA (DECEMBER 3, 2017).
https://stanfordpolitics.org/2017/12/03/jay-fliegelman-sexual-misconduct/
“An open letter to Stanford on sexual harassment in academia.” Opinion by Gloria Fisk and From the Community (Dec. 5, 2017, 3:00 a.m.).
https://stanforddaily.com/2017/12/05/an-open-letter-to-stanford-on-sexual-harassment-in-academia/
NOTE: Professor Alex Woloch has yet to respond (December 2023).
“What Happens When Sex Harassment Disrupts Victims’ Academic Careers.” By Nell Gluckman (DECEMBER 6, 2017).
“Former Grad Students: Our Professors Raped Us.” By Vanessa Rancaño (Dec 7, 2017).
“‘Fairly Normal and Routine’: 50 Years of Sexual Violence at Stanford.” By RUAIRÍ ARRIETA-KENNA & ROXY BONAFONT (JANUARY 31, 2018).
https://stanfordpolitics.org/2018/01/31/sexual-violence-cover-story/
“Provost, General Counsel offer personal contributions to anti-sexual assault organization after Stanford denies Fliegelman victim’s request for donation.” By Alex Tsai (Feb. 26, 2018, 12:20 a.m.).
“Moving Forward by Looking Back: Feminist Scholars in Solidarity with Seo-Young Chu.” BY MAGDALENA L. BARRERA, SHELLEY LEE and CELINE PARREÑAS SHIMIZU (March 16, 2018)
“Academia’s #MeToo moment: ‘I’m really struck by how endemic this is’: ‘There isn’t a day in my life when I haven’t been eaten away by it in some way.’” By Nick Anderson (May 10, 2018).
“‘My Professional World Has Gotten Smaller’: How sexual harassment and assault distort scholars’ lives in the academy.” By Julia Schmalz (MAY 11, 2018).
https://www.chronicle.com/article/my-professional-world-has-gotten-smaller/
“Stanford One Year After #MeToo: How Stanford’s Response Failed Victims of Sexual Assault.” By KYLE WANG (JUNE 14, 2019).
“How #MeToo Helped Seo-Young Chu Name Her Harasser — Testimonies New York Magazine” (Sep 29, 2019).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tVhymU3DcM&list=PLXQRPSEGHTBiFsePIdraK3KNHvXQ1iFaM&index=7
"Was It Worth It?" By Irin Carmon and Amelia Schonbek. Additional reporting by Sarah Jones (Sept. 30, 2019).
https://www.thecut.com/2019/09/coming-forward-about-sexual-assault-and-what-comes-after.html
“Title IX at Stanford: A timeline of recent events.” By Emma Talley, Kate Selig, Sarina Deb, Daniel Wu, Ujwal Srivastava, Lauryn Johnson, Anastasiia Malenko and Danielle Echeverria (June 9, 2020, 11:35 p.m.).
https://stanforddaily.com/2020/06/09/title-ix-at-stanford-a-timeline-of-recent-events/
“This—trying to get Stanford to rename the Fliegelman Library—is one of the projects I’ve been working on this year. It’s degrading and mostly invisible work, but I feel compelled to do it. I’m sharing the email below because I want there to be a record (outside my “sent messages”) that I tried to do something. Unlike my 22-year-old self, I am not running away from what happened.” By Seo-Young Chu. (July 1, 2021)
https://www.facebook.com/groups/SAAASA/posts/5687106724695954/
“Stanford removes library collection, brick honoring affiliates accused of sexual misconduct.” By Cameron Ehsan, Victoria Hsieh and Kathryn Zheng (July 9, 2021, 5:10 p.m.).
https://stanforddaily.com/2021/07/09/stanford-removes-library-collection-brick/
“The Impossible, Crucial Task of Teaching About Rape as a Survivor” by Emily Van Duyne (April 18, 2022).
https://lithub.com/the-impossible-crucial-task-of-teaching-about-rape-as-a-survivor/