Accusation trails revered Yale scholar

NEW HAVEN - Even on a campus littered with august scholars, the literary critic Harold Bloom commands a special reverence. A specialist on Shakespeare and the Bible, the Yale professor has taught for a half-century and published some 30 books, which have been translated into at least as many languages. He is rumored among students to have memorized ``Paradise Lost.''

But when a well-known feminist author asserted in a New York magazine article that Bloom had made an unwelcome sexual advance when she was his student two decades ago, students at the Ivy League school had to grapple with another side of Bloom's legend: a deeply eccentric personal presence that the former student said had crossed the line into harassment.

``He certainly vocalizes his appreciation of all forms of beauty, including female beauty,'' said David Gorin, a senior English major who is currently taking a seminar with Bloom.

``I think it's something that if other professors did, it would be completely inappropriate,'' he added. ``But there's a sense with him, that he comes from a dying age, one far less politically correct than the one we are in now. And I think students are willing to forgive him.''

In an article published in New York magazine on Monday, the feminist author Naomi Wolf detailed an encounter she said she had with Bloom back in 1983 when she was an undergraduate. According to her article, Wolf had Bloom over for dinner, during which she hoped to discuss her poetry. But he was not interested in her poetry, according to Wolf.

``The next thing I knew, his heavy, boneless hand was hot on my thigh,'' she wrote in the story, ``The Silent Treatment.'' ``I lurched away. `This is not what I meant,' I stammered. The whole thing had suddenly taken on the quality of a bad horror film. The floor spun. By now my back was against the sink, which was as far away as I could get. He moved toward me. I turned away from him toward the sink and found myself vomiting. Bloom disappeared.''

Bloom, who has kept publicly silent since Wolf's story was published, declined to comment for this article. A student in Bloom's seminar Wednesday said that although the professor looked visibly distraught, he insisted that he would not allow the report to derail his teaching.

Wolf said she wrote her story not to demonize Bloom, but to cast a harsh light on Yale and its inadequate response to two decades of alleged sexual harassment.

``My conscience had been bothering me for 20 years,'' she said in a telephone interview after her article was published. ``I tried to quietly ask for a private meeting to check that the grievance procedures were working and to make sure that no other woman was in any kind of jeopardy.''

But because of Bloom's literary fame, campus attention has naturally focused not on Yale's harassment policy, but on the man himself. Among students, the 73-year-old professor's idiosyncrasies are nearly as famous as his work. Students flock to his seminars, spots in which are among the most coveted on campus. He wears a water bottle around his neck to hydrate frequently, and caresses his forehead when deep in thought. During class, students say, his face will freeze and his eyes shut in rapture as he cites verbatim a passage plucked from nearly anywhere in the Western literary canon.

In conversation, Bloom takes liberties that might seem out of place for a younger professor. According to students, Bloom is given to using epithets in lieu of names, calling his students ``little bear'' and ``lovely lady.'' Even outside the classroom, Bloom has been known to address both men and women as ``my dear,'' which he did at least once during an interview with a female reporter for the Globe in April 2002.

``I'm very sensitive, and I find [the nicknames] completely inoffensive,'' said Sophie Pinkham, a senior English major who is currently taking a class with Bloom. ``They're very abstract and come from a semipoetic literary critic who appreciates beautiful poetry and the beauty in people.''

Pinkham, who described Bloom as the most intelligent person she has ever met, said, ``I am intimidated by his learning and stature, but not by him as a person at all - and absolutely not sexually intimidated.''

None of Bloom's students who were interviewed for this article reported having any experiences similar to those of Wolf. But on campus, the controversy over Wolf's account of her experience has underscored the sometimes fuzzy line between harassment and tolerable eccentricity.

``There is no question that Harold Bloom realizes he's being a little risque,'' said Charlie Munford, a Yale sophomore who took Bloom's seminar last semester. ``He's not naive. But it would be ridiculous to say what he says in class is sexual harassment. If anything, he's parodying a lecherous old man.''

At Yale, where similar allegations might have ignited controversy a decade ago, reaction has been relatively muted.

"There is a sense that many of the feminist battles of the 1970s have either been won or made irrelevant,'' said Naomi Rogers, a historian of medicine and professor of women's and gender studies at Yale. ``I think that is a general sense. I think the feminist movement of the 1970s made an enormous difference in breaking silence. We are at a new kind of moment.''

Yale has not officially responded to Wolf's account, but Susan Hockfield, the provost of Yale, wrote in an open letter to students published Tuesday in the campus newspaper that school policies prevent comment on specific cases, ``even when a report may be one-sided or not grounded in fact.''

In the past 10 years, there have been four formal complaints of sexual harassment brought by students against professors, according to Helaine Klasky, a Yale spokeswoman. The results are kept confidential, although she said professors have been given punishments ``ranging from reprimand to separation from Yale.''

Klasky said that Wolf had contacted the university before she wrote the story and was notified that the two-year statute of limitations on sexual harassment claims had passed. Klasky added that Yale's policy in 1983 was very similar to the current one, lauding it as "one of the strictest policies'' in higher education.

Wolf, a Rhodes scholar and author of "The Beauty Myth,'' was a consultant to Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign. Since details of her story on Bloom and Yale were published in advance in the New York Observer last week, her article has drawn attacks from several commentators. ``Both her evidence and her reasoning are deeply flawed,'' wrote Meghan O'Rourke for the online magazine Slate.

As for Bloom, he is teaching two classes this semester, including a course on Shakespeare, ``Tragedies and Romances.'' So far, students have stood by their professor, while at the same time being careful not to downplay the severity of Wolf's accusations.

``If it's a serious allegation,'' said Munford, one of Bloom's former students, ``now is not the time to make it, because it won't be taken seriously.''