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Do Works by Men Implicated by #MeToo Belong in the Classroom?

Two years after the rise of the #MeToo movement, educators continue to grapple with how to deal with writers and artists accused of abuse.

Emily Gowen, a literature instructor at Boston University, had a “provocative conversation” with her students about whether it was appropriate for her to assign works by a writer accused of harassment.Credit...Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times

For Martina Myers, a high school English teacher on the Navajo reservation in Arizona, Sherman Alexie’s novel “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” seemed too good to be true: funny, well-crafted and focused on Native American youth.

Her students at Piñon High School, many of whom struggled with substance abuse and mental illness, took to it immediately. They wrote poems in response, on native pride, addiction, self-acceptance and suicide attempts.

So when Ms. Myers learned last year of the allegations of sexual harassment against Mr. Alexie, who issued a statement admitting he had “harmed other people,” she felt two waves of betrayal — first for her students and then for herself, a survivor of abuse.

“When the #MeToo movement happened I told my story,” Ms. Myers said. She knew some of her students, too, had experienced sexual assault.

But she decided not to tell her class about the accusations against Mr. Alexie. “They thought it was the coolest thing in the world to have that role model; why take that away from them?”

Two years after the #MeToo movement exploded from a social media phenomenon to a national reckoning over harassment and gender discrimination, toppling powerful figures in nearly every industry, many continue to grapple with how to treat the work of men accused of sexual abuse. The issue is especially thorny in high school and college classrooms, where young people can form deep attachments to the writers and artists whose works help shape their worldviews.

Questions have swirled on campus about what to do with certain cultural mainstays: Roman Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby,” Chuck Close’s “Big Self-Portrait,” even Neil deGrasse Tyson’s books on astrophysics. Should they be canceled — banished from public engagement like some of their creators? Or should they continue to be studied, only with frank discussions about abuse and harassment?

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Novels and films like Roman Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby” and Woody Allen’s “Manhattan” are at the center of the debate.Credit...Photos clockwise from upper left: James Nieves/The New York Times; AP Photo; Tony Cenicola/The New York Times; The New York Times; Patricia Wall/The New York Times; United Artists/Getty Images

Savanah Lyon, a theater major at the University of California, San Diego, who graduated in June, racked up more than 20,000 signatures on a petition last year calling on her school to cancel its longstanding “The Films of Woody Allen” course, after allegations that the filmmaker assaulted his adopted daughter. (Mr. Allen has consistently denied the claims.)

For Ms. Lyon, the question of whether to stop studying the works seemed a no-brainer. But the school’s academic senate rejected the petition in a statement, citing concerns about free speech.

Canceling a course because its materials are controversial or seen as morally problematic, the senate said, “would undermine both the value of free inquiry and the associated rights of faculty to engage in such inquiry by choosing their course content.”

Ms. Lyon was unmoved. “When you teach works like Woody Allen’s you’re normalizing and romanticizing the culture of abuse he was part of,” she said, noting the parallels between accusations against Mr. Allen and the relationships his characters have with younger women in films like “Manhattan.” “It’s not censorship to be selective when you choose the art you teach.”

Educators say that their worries about curriculum changes are more complex than censorship, and wonder whether some perspectives, especially those of authors of color, can be replaced.

Nadia Celis, an associate professor of literature at Bowdoin College, had her “Teaching the Caribbean” class upended when the author Junot Díaz was accused of harassment and unwanted sexual contact with at least two women last year. M.I.T., where Mr. Díaz teaches, cleared him of misconduct after an investigation found no evidence of his wrongdoing, but the accusations prompted intense debate in the literary world.

News reports of the allegations spread the same week Professor Celis’s class was discussing Mr. Díaz’s novel “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” She had planned for her students to discuss the novel’s themes, including toxic masculinity and abuse of power. Suddenly, she said, it seemed those subjects had come to life.

Her students were disheartened. Professor Celis had previously brought Mr. Díaz to campus to address students on navigating professional success as a man of color. Now she felt torn about using his most famous book — and still has not made up her mind about whether to assign it this year.

“I’m convinced that teaching the mind of male domination is important,” Professor Celis said. “But now I’m teaching against the book.”

As educators like Professor Celis wrestled with questions in the wake of abuse allegations, many readers had already made up their minds. In April 2018, a month after reports of Mr. Alexie’s abuses, sales of “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” were down 39 percent compared with the same period the previous year. Sales of his memoir dropped 59 percent that month.

For Mr. Díaz, total print sales of his books in the United States dropped nearly 85 percent in the seven months after the reports against him, according to the market research firm NPD Group. A study of e-book circulation in American public libraries, by the e-book company Overdrive, found that the number of people who checked out Mr. Alexie’s 12 e-book titles and Mr. Díaz’s five declined in 2018.

Some argue that tossing out works by men accused of abuse creates an opportunity to break up the “old white guys” club that for too long defined school reading lists.

Amy Hungerford, dean of humanities at Yale, who previously taught “The History of the American Novel Since 1945,” began her course one semester with a question: “Who’s missing from the syllabus?”

The students perused the list of names. Flannery O’Connor had made it. Cormac McCarthy. Toni Morrison.

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Amy Hungerford, dean of humanities at Yale, decided after several years of teaching a course on the American novel to remove David Foster Wallace’s works from the syllabus.Credit...Monica Jorge for The New York Times

They ventured guesses — John Updike, maybe? — and eventually landed on David Foster Wallace, who died in 2008.

Professor Hungerford had decided after several years of teaching the course to remove Mr. Wallace’s works from the syllabus. Her decision was shaped by several factors, she said, including stories of his abusive behavior toward women. The lesson once focused on Mr. Wallace now draws on the work of the graphic novelist Alison Bechdel.

“There’s always more to read than you can ever read, and when you’re thinking about the opportunity costs on a syllabus, that can certainly be a consideration,” Professor Hungerford said.

But others have stuck to their reading lists, sometimes even addressing the moral stakes of their decisions in class.

Emily Gowen, a literature instructor at Boston University, asked her freshmen to read Mr. Díaz’s short story “The Cheater’s Guide to Love” alongside his essay in The New Yorker about being sexually assaulted as a child. Then she asked whether it was appropriate for her to assign his work in light of the accusations against him.

What ensued, she said, was an “unbelievably provocative discussion.”

“I wanted them to feel entitled to question the syllabus, which is this thing students take for granted as neutral even though it’s actually loaded,” Ms. Gowen said. “I wanted them to know that art is nuanced and complex, and in any artist’s life there is going to be something objectionable, but that’s not an excuse to close ourselves off from engaging with the art.”

Abi Hulick, a sophomore at Boston University, said the conversation served to remind her that the classroom is not a “vacuum” — it is an open environment, subject to all the forces of political and social change. But she also said she might not have wanted to financially support Mr. Díaz by buying his book, and was relieved when the teacher sent out a PDF.

Clare Hayes-Brady, a professor of American Literature at University College Dublin, teaches Mr. Wallace’s work with reasoning similar to Ms. Gowen’s: No artist’s history, she said, is free of controversy.

“Shakespeare abandoned his family. Norman Mailer stabbed his wife,” Ms. Hayes-Brady said. “We don’t love the people we love because they’re morally virtuous.” She added, though, that students who found Mr. Wallace’s work especially “triggering” were permitted to skip the class conversation on his work, or decline to read it.

Vinny Ramos-Niaves, a junior studying literature at Ball State University, initially questioned his professor Jeff Spanke’s decision to assign a book by Mr. Alexie. But after a class conversation that stretched late into the night, he changed his mind.

“The more we talked about him, the more I realized that the whole question of canceling books written by people who aren’t great is an important conversation to have,” Mr. Ramos-Niaves said. “We wouldn’t be able to have that conversation without understanding what the work was.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 11 of the New York edition with the headline: Suitable for the Classroom? #MeToo Spurs a Rethinking. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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