"That was a long time ago. Are you going to sue us? Oh, we're glad you're not. We'll get back to you some time. Good-bye."

Miss Wolf's article has stirred up a large number of responses that Arts and Letters Daily lists-- oddly enough, all of them by women, and critical of her. The criticism doesn't seem to be that she's lying. Rather---well, take a look at some excerpts (from the set: Chronicle of Higher Ed». Meghan O’Rourke ... Zoe Williams ... Margaret Wente ... Anne Applebaum ... she burst into tears ... Caroline Overington ... Zoe Heller). Boldfacing is mine.

Yale's response to her disclosure of a 1983 offense is not necessarily predictive of its response to a present-day offense--not just because the statute of limitations for what Bloom did to Wolf expired 18 years ago, but also because what Bloom did may not have been explicitly wrong by Yale's standards at the time and by law (though from our vantage point it looks sleazy).

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Most of Wolf's broader case against Bloom--and the oppressive atmosphere at Yale in 1983-- rests on hearsay: "Some women friends, however, persuaded me not to speak to anyone official -- the university saw him [Bloom] as untouchable, my friends warned."

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Moreover, she makes no distinctions among the gravity of the charges, which range from rape to a professor putting his hand on the knee of a student not enrolled in any of his courses---the kind of thing Jeffrey Rosen argues might better be called "privacy invasion."

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Wolf picked a funny old time to come out with this charge - not within the two years that charges can be investigated by the authorities; some considerable time after she had made suggestions of harassment on a public forum, though refused to name names (owing to the "soft spot of complicity" in her soul); two full decades after the event itself.

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Sundry other commentators have unleashed a weird level of spite, specifically Camille Paglia, who raged: "It really grates on me that Naomi Wolf for her entire life has been batting her eyes and bobbing her boobs in the face of men and made a profession out of courting male attention."

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..it really is debateable whether or not some drunk bloke putting his face quite near yours and his hand on your thigh, when you thought he'd come round to read poetry, undermines your value to an entire institution. In the barometer that runs from "misunderstanding" to "act of violence", it leans irrefutably towards the former.

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"It's a desperate power grab," says Katie Roiphe, a well-known feminist who wrote a book on date rape. "People didn't pay attention to her last book on motherhood. She wants to regain the sense of outrage of the feminism of the early 1990s."

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Mercifully, Ms. Wolf's version of victim feminism is out of date. Most people would agree that her 20-year-old effort to get even (and her extravagant claims for the trauma she suffered at the time) are a bit bizarre. But they are no more bizarre than campus sexual-harassment policies, where victim feminism still reigns supreme. These policies treat every case of boorish, drunk behaviour as sexual predation, and they define sex between faculty and students as essentially illicit. Consensual sex across the lines is deemed to be impossible because of built-in power imbalances.

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But perhaps her real problem with Harold Bloom was that he shattered her illusions. The man she idolized and revered turned out to be a disagreeable pig. That's another lesson young women have been learning since time immemorial. It's a hard one. But you get over it.

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Now, there are a number of surprising elements to Wolf's article, all of which deserve more intense scrutiny. One is her bizarre description of her attempts to get bewildered university bureaucrats to do something -- she doesn't know what -- long after the statute of limitations has run out. Another is her account of the hand-on- thigh event itself, which seems to have taken place late at night in her apartment, where Bloom had come at her invitation.

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But in the end, what is most extraordinary about Wolf is the way in which she has voluntarily stripped herself of her achievements and her status, and reduced herself to a victim, nothing more. The implication here is that women are psychologically weak: One hand on the thigh, and they never get over it. The implication is also that women are naive, and powerless as well: Even Yale undergraduates are not savvy enough to avoid late-night encounters with male professors whose romantic intentions don't interest them.

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In Promiscuities, she writes that after her professor put his hand on her leg, she went to the sink and vomited out of "disgust and drunkenness." In the New York magazine article, she simply "found myself vomiting."

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According to sources close to Mr. Bloom, on at least one occasion Ms. Wolf came to Mr. Bloom�s home and left an erotic poem there for him to read. Questioned about that, Ms. Wolf said, "For God�s sake. Some of my poetry was racy and erotic. Some was about the Bible and Greek myths. I�m sure that I dropped off manuscripts of my poetry with all the people who were mentoring me with my poetry at the time. I dropped off the same manuscript with John Hollander," another professor and her adviser at the time.

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Sources who knew Ms. Wolf and Mr. Bloom in the early 80�s said that Ms. Wolf enjoyed her rapport with the eminent professor.

"I believe we were very cordial," Ms. Wolf said. "I�m sure that I was delighted that he was taking an interest in my work. I was absolutely thrilled. I was a young poet, and he was the most brilliant man at Yale, and I was delighted. I can�t stress that enough. No question. I was delighted as a student. I�m sure I told people how happy I was."

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In reporting her story, Ms. Wolf didn�t attempt to contact other students who might have had similar experiences with Mr. Bloom. In fact, Ms. Wolf said she had planned to use only two examples in her story--hers and one other--until the senior administrative assistant to the Women�s and Gender Studies Department put her in touch with a handful of other women with grievances against other professors.

Ms. Wolf also said that she didn�t file a complaint because she was "terrified of being in a room alone with Bloom." Yet according to Ms. Klasky, under the grievance procedures in place at Yale since 1979, an accuser would never have to be in the same room as the person she was accusing.

Let's be constructive. Suppose everything Miss Wolf says is true. My apologies to Professor Bloom if it is not--but he hasn't denied it, and the story sounds credible to me. What should Miss Wolf have done in the year 2004? How about Professor Bloom? How about Yale?

First, we should clear some garbage out of the way. Whether she should have come forward earlier is not the immediate question. Of course, it would have been better if she had gone after Bloom tooth and nail back in the 1980's, and if Yale had responded well then, and if Bloom had apologized. But that's water under the bridge.

Also, her current ulterior motives are irrelevant. Maybe she wants to sell books, or hurt Yale, or something. But if she has a genuine complaint, those other motives are unimportant to our question.

Finally, laws and rules are unimportant, if we think that it is morally wrong for a professor to make a pass at a student to whom he will shortly be issuing a course grade, then whether Yale had a formal rule against it at the time, whether it subjects him to civil or criminal liability, and if so whether there is a statute of limitations is all unimportant. For Hitler to gas Jews in Poland was not illegal Does that make it OK?

What should Naomi Wolf have done?

She was correct not to sue, and not only because the statute of limitations is up. Rather, this is not the kind of offense we want brought into courts. It is too hard to measure damages, and too much nasty stuff would have to be dragged in for the court process to take its usual course (the sexual histories of both Bloom and Wolf are relevant).

The best thing is usually to complain to the person who has offended you-- in this case, Bloom. It is quite understandable that she wouldn't do it 20 years ago, but by now she ought to be recovered enough to be able to write him a letter asking for an apology.

If Bloom did not respond to the letter, the next step would be to go to Yale. Wolf was in a special situation, because she thought to bring up the old story only because Yale was asking her, as an alumna, for help in fundraising. Because of that connection, I think she used the correct channels-- ones in the central administration. Absent that connection, an approach to the chairman of the English department-- or to Professor Hollander, an old teacher of hers--- would have been more appropriate.

What she should have hoped for from the university is either for it to persuade Bloom to apologize, or to issue a statement laying out the evidence and saying whether the University believed her story or not, and if not, why not.

If both Bloom and Yale failed, Wolf should have gone public with the story, in exactly the way she did.

What should Harold Bloom have done?

Bloom should have apologized privately to Wolf as soon as he heard about her complaint. If she held out for a public apology, I'm not sure what he should have done.

What should Yale have done?

Yale should have listened to Wolf's ill-focused desire for a response and suggested the plan I laid out above-- that Yale officials would first approach Bloom. If he apologized, that would be the end of it-- the University could in good conscience refuse any requests for new processes, etc.

If Bloom did not apologize, and Yale believed Wolf's story, then the University is in an uncomfortable situation. Bloom is a valuable member of the faculty, and could quite credibly threaten to move full-time to New York University. Yale should have approached NYU and issued a joint statement endorsing Wolf's chargesw while saying that they are too old to justify formal administrative action.

If Bloom did not apologize, and Yale disbelieved Wolf's story, then the University should do as it did, brushing her off, but--- also getting ready to justify brushing her off when she went public with the story. Yale hasn't done a good job of the "getting ready" part.

Yale's response disappoints me, for the most part, because it is bureaucratic. I say "for the most part" only because I can at least feel good about this evidence that private universities are as bad as state universities in this respect, so my own Indiana University is not at as great a disadvantage as I'd thought. Here's Yale's response as reported by the Yale Daily News:

Yale spokeswoman Helaine Klasky said Wolf contacted Yale with her accusations, but she explained that Wolf had not acted within the two-year statute of limitations for such complaints.

"As we explained to Ms. Wolf, Yale has very clear guidelines and policies for any sexual harassment claims," Klasky said. "Any claims must be brought in two years after the alleged incident. At the time when she was a student, she did not avail herself."

Klasky said Wolf asked for an apology but was told that Yale can't issue an apology "when there's no finding of wrong-doing."

"Yale takes any claim of sexual harassment very seriously," Klasky said. "That is why we have such stringent policies and procedures in place and why we encourage students when appropriate to avail themselves."

Thus, we have a perfect example of what I've been bringing up at Indiana University with regard to our procedure for student complaints-- that stringent policies and procedures supposedly written to protect the students end up in practice being a way for the institution to excuse itself from behaving with decency. The more apparent procedural fairness there is, the less fair is the actual process.

A big part of this problem is that people use criminal procedure as their model. It is actually dubious that our elaborate system of criminal procedure in post-1960 America makes sense even as criminal procedure-- witness the explosion of crime during the 1960's, the vast expenditures on criminal justice since then, the slowness of justice, and the innumerable cases of known criminals going unpunished. But the procedures make even less sense in other contexts. Three examples are:

1. Student Complaint Procedures. That is the subject above.

2. Fighting Terrorism. During the Clinton years, and to a large extent still, the prevailing idea was that the U.S. should fight terrorism as crime, and with the same procedures for foreigners abroad as for Americans at home. In this way of thinking, we could not send a soldier to Afghanistan to shoot Osama Bin Laden even if we knew where he was, because (a) he had not yet been tried and sentenced to death in an American court and exhausted his appeals, and (b) the soldier is not authorized as an executioner anyway.

3. The Clinton Impeachment. Many people said that for impeachment it was necessary to find the President guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of a statutory crime. This misses the whole point of impeachment, which is to replace a very bad president. If there were clear and convincing that President Bush was planning a military coup, for example, but not proof beyond a reasonable doubt, would we really want the Senate to acquit him in an impeachment case?

4. Regulatory Offenses. The distinction between criminal and civil penalties for regulatory crime is a complicated area of law. One thing I have heard, though, is that a misbehaving corporation generally prefers to be charged with a criminal offense than with a civil offense. That is because the penalty is going to be a fine in each case, but the government's burden of proof is much higher if it is a criminal fine than if it is civil damages.

5. Contracts. This goes the other way, perhaps, but it is relevant that companies often seek to escape the formal procedural protections of the U.S. courts when they make contracts with each other. What they do is insert arbitration clauses, which say that they give up the fairness protections of the government courts and agree to go to a private arbitrator who has much less formal procedures (though his fees are higher!). The companies know that the supposed fairness of the government courts actually results in unfairness, which they do not want in their dealings with each other.

One final point, before I go back to proofreading and grading. Miss Wolf really has two grievances. The hand on her leg is the one we have been discussing. But I find the charge that Professor Bloom ignored her after agreeing to lead an independent study equally serious. Combined, the two charges each become much more serious--- the combination implies that Professor Bloom agreed to lead an independent study in the expectation of sexual favors. [in full at 04.02.28b.htm .      Erasmusen@yahoo.com. ]

UPDATE: See also 04.02.29a. My Reasoning for Design of Organizational Grievance Procedures; Matthew 18. To return to Eric Rasmusen's weblog, click http://php.indiana.edu/~erasmuse/w/0.rasmusen.htm.