An undergraduate seeking donations from alumni. But the words “I’m calling from Stanford to ask about your experience while you were here” were enough. Enough to send Seo-Young Chu reeling, back nearly two decades to when she says a former faculty mentor — now dead — harassed and ultimately raped her.
Chu, now an associate professor of English at Queens College of the City University of New York, wrote about that time in an essay published this month by Entropy magazine. The piece, as well written as its story is enraging, has many of Chu’s fellow academics reeling, in turn. Some have responded by asking the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies to publicly explain why it last year renamed a faculty mentorship award that previously honored the late Jay Fliegelman, Coe Professor in American Literature at Stanford University — and the man Chu says raped her.
Demands for public acknowledgment have been directed at Stanford as well. The university points out that Fliegelman was suspended without pay and banned from the department for two years as a result of the incident. But those sanctions were not publicly linked to Chu’s accusations until now.
‘The Story Tumbles Out’
“The story tumbles out” to the unwitting undergraduate, Chu wrote in her essay. It “begins with my suicide attempt at age 21 and ends with Stanford’s own punishment of the professor in 2001: two years of suspension without pay … I have never sued the rapist, the department or the school — despite the time I’ve lost and the fortune I’ve spent as a consequence of the harmful culture at Stanford that enabled the professor to injure me as well as others.”
Chu describes how Fliegelman groomed her for abuse, inviting her to a group dinner that turned out to be a one-on-one and telling her, “I’m lonely. I’m needy. I need to feel desirable. I need you to desire me.” A new graduate student who was already recovering from a suicide attempt and a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, Chu didn’t know how to respond, other than by promising to work hard. The harassment and abuse of power only escalated, as they too often do, by Chu’s telling, with Fliegelman alleged asking about Chu’s sexual history and other intimate topics. He allegedly told her all men — even her father — have rape fantasies, showed up at her dorm room uninvited and relied on her as an outlet for his own emotions. Then there was the alleged rape.
Chu says that she never personally reported the assault to Stanford but that one of her confidants did, on her behalf. The university investigated, she says, but Fliegelman was not terminated. Instead, he faced two years of unpaid administrative leave with no public record as to why. She remains haunted — literally, in a way, and figuratively — by his ghost.
‘Especially Gifted as a Teacher’
Fliegelman died in 2007, at 58, from complications from liver disease and cancer. A Stanford announcement from the time described him as an “especially gifted” who received the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching, the Associated Students of Stanford University Award for Outstanding Teaching and a University Summer Fellowship in recognition of his teaching.
The American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in 2009 also named a mentorship award after Fliegelman — which is what prompted Chu to name her rapist, initially to the group’s executive director. (Chu said Tuesday that she’d previously identified herself publicly as a rape survivor, in solidarity with Brock Turner’s accuser, in a high-profile rape case involving two students, also at Stanford.)
“Recently I learned that there is a graduate mentoring award named after (I’m just going to force myself to spell out his name) Jay Fliegelman,” Chu wrote to the society in mid-2016, upon hearing of Fliegelman’s namesake graduate mentoring award. “This man was supposed to be my dissertation adviser. I say ‘supposed to be,’ because he spent more time sexually harassing and stalking me than he did advising me academically … Surely there are better examples in whose honor this award might be renamed.”
The society renamed the award approximately two months later. But until now it’s been unclear why. So upon reading Chu’s essay, society members circulated a draft letter to the group’s executive board this week, urging it to “publicly acknowledge the reason for rescinding his name from the award and to apologize for the shatteringly specific violence enacted, however unwittingly, in naming this award after this person in the first place.”
They further called on the board “to state in no uncertain terms that the society will no longer tolerate such patterns of abusive behavior nor their normalization as part of our professional culture.”
Lisa Berglund, executive director of the society and a professor of English at Buffalo State College of the State University of New York, said in an email Wednesday that the board, at Chu’s urging, removed “the name of her rapist from the Graduate Mentorship Award.” Now that Chu has shared her story, Berglund said, “we can begin making the circumstances of that removal public. And we will respond to the other concerns raised by our members as soon as possible.”
