Although we have no access to the confidential dossier, we have all worked for many years in close proximity to Professor Ronell…

Draft letter in defense of NYU German Professor Avital Ronell.

The letter’s list of signatories reads like the syllabus of my lit theory proseseminar in grad school. And this is their very public performance of moral reasoning:

The absolute reverence for charismatic, against-the-grain smartness––a smartness that cannot be limited by clarity or force of argument, constrained by evidence, tempered by humility, sullied by philistine integrity, bothered by commitments to an other who is not an abstraction––is an ethical and intellectual sham.