Bad Ethics and Bad Art

I have been trying to avoid the brouhaha over the Terence Kealey’s piece on lust as part of a ‘light-hearted’ and ‘wry’ look at the “the seven deadly sins of academe” for the Times Higher Education Suplement. My automatic response was distaste.  But reading Belle Waring’s robust response at Crooked Timber to Steve Fuller’s intervention on an earlier article, I have read the original article and Kealey’s and the commissioning editor’s defence.

It was Mary Beard’s satiric defence that tipped me into writing this post, but first mini-brouhaha at CT.  It started with Steve Fuller’s intervention in the comment thread.  Fuller has ‘history’ with CT and his comment was hardly going to smooth things over, accusing as he did the CT commentariat of an irrational dislike of Terence Kealey and the old charge of liberal males trading PC-feminist opinions for sex.  Belle Waring makes it clear just what kind of a powder keg Kealy was sitting, providing a harrowing account of how sexual harassment blights people’s lives.

Nevertheless, I think Fuller did have a point, however undiplomatically expressed, that the CT commenters were charging down a well-worn path.

Fuller’s point that Kealey was never going to be given the benefit of any doubt by muesli-eating, sandal-wearing, Guardian-reading liberals is surely correct.  I know, being one, and a child of the ’80s, still resenting the politics of greed and selfishness inflicted on us.  There are few remaining symbols of the smug neo-liberal triumphalism at the heart of it all, but the University of Buckingham is one of them, and a part of me certainly connected and understood the blood lust for its vice chancellor.

Kealey describing females as a ‘perk of the job’ seems to have caused most of the trouble, but I can remember taking visitors around UCC while lecturing there and agreeing with another colleague about the delight and privilege of working in such an environment, rich in youth swarming over the college’s compact and pretty campus.  This was a 100% aesthetic thing; it had nothing at all to do with lust; and it could quite innocently be described as a ‘perk of the job’.

Part of Kealey’s problem was that he was trying to be too clever, of course, and in his mischief has, unwittingly, but all too accurately, sketched an unpalatable psychological reality of sexual politics in academia.  To the uncharitably minded, and those who have been burnt in this arena, it looks like a nod and a wink.

All of which leaves me wondering whether we shouldn’t be trying for a more charitable and generous towards Kealey, but also (really interesting this) whether ‘satire’ was indeed a valid defence.

Well I do think we should try to be more charitable towards Kealy, just as we should try to be charitable towards anyone, especially those that we are inclined to dislike.  This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t deplore an attitude, or even a whole philosophy, that we suspect is being subliminally assumed in the article (and its response) and I thought Daniel Davis did this admirably in his original CT post, even if his witty swipe at Kealey was to be expected.

But there was clearly ironic intent in Kealy’s original article—was Mary Beard’s invocation of satire a successful defence?

Taking several more, careful looks at the Kealey piece, I was left in no doubt that he was aiming his darts at the ways crude sexual exploitation of female students gets justified, by satircally mimicking the locker room style in which it is discussed. Come on everyone, NO VICE-CHANCELLOR (not even of Buckingham) calls women students a “perk” unless satirically (and aiming a dart at precisely those assumptions). Honest.

My problem with this is that there appear to be other explanations for the ‘perk’ joke, the piece indeed being written in a witty and “good ol’ boy” jocular style of locker-room “male collusion”—clearly the VC could not be condoning sexual relations between staff and students, and he makes this clear at the start of his THES clarifying article.

This is a moral piece that says that middle aged male academics and young female undergraduates should not sleep together. Rather, people should exercise self-restraint.

So it is reasonable to assume from the context that the satire of the locker room is being used to reinforce the taboo of student-staff sexual relations, but nowhere is it clear (in the original article, or the apology) that Kealey isn’t in deadly earnestness when he says you ‘should look but not touch’.  This was the point underlying Daniel Davis’s original CT article and Belle Waring’s pointed follow up, where she makes it clear how much damage can be done ‘looking but not touching’.

Kealey may well have intended to satirise the locker-room mentality itself rather than merely use it as an amusing prop to illustrate the temptations of lust for middle-aged academics in constant, often intimate, proximity to young students, with all the complications that the power relationship brings, but we can’t tell.  When embarking on satire and irony on an incendiary topic in which a misunderstanding can do real damage it is a good idea to ensure that there is sufficient structure in the piece and its context to be able to unravel its true meaning.  The likes of Swift and Austen (and many in between) were masters of this kind of thing, taking great care to ensure that the ironic scheme was well supported—Mansfield Park rather than Middlemarch may make a better literary model for the Kealey’s next satirical outing.  (And yes Mansfield Park has plenty of irony—the novel’s design requiring that it to be carefully hidden.)

Perhaps Kealey should decide whether he wants to stand accused of perpetrating bad ethics or bad art on us.  I can’t see how he can have it both ways.

In her article, Mary Beard says of the commentators on the original article that they had ‘no ability to read or understand satire AT ALL’, but I would have expected her to provide a more careful analysis of Kealey’s piece, especially given the context of the modern conservative movement’s ethical tics.  Here is Krugman from June:

First of all, there’s a difference in what bothers them. When a liberal politician engages in sexual betrayal, what bothers his erstwhile supporters is the betrayal. When a conservative politician does it, what bothers the supporters is the sex.

This was the subtext of Daniel Davies’s CT article.  Kealey and others should be giving us reason to dispel these kinds of caricatures, or at least take care that they don’t get reinforced, however accidentally.