Women's Issues

Et Tu, John Jay?

Is the College for Criminal Justice part of the patriarchy?

By Evan J. Mandery  
on

(photo courtesy of Getty)

    Ed. note

: This op-ed was written by Evan J. Mandery, chairperson of the department of criminal justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

#MeToo strikes like lightning, it seems. Recently at my home for the past 19 years, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, a senior college at the City University of New York. The allegations are grave. They include the use and sale of drugs on campus, an effort to force women into prostitution, and rape.

The story has received only a modest amount of coverage—a pair of stories in The New York Post and one in the Times. Here at Above the Law, Elie Mystal argued that the scandal would have received more attention were it not for the Kavanaugh hearings. This seems likely true. But the stories that have been written are damning, and likely have already caused lasting damage to the college. “It’s hard to read these complaints and not come to the conclusion that the whole patriarchy needs to be BURNED TO THE GROUND,” Mystal wrote. “The only problem is that there don’t seem to be nearly enough matches.” It’s a jarring thing to read, and I couldn’t help but ask, is John Jay the patriarchy? Or, worse still, am I?

I’ve certainly never thought of John Jay as the patriarchy. To the contrary, the institution does more good than just about any I know. Our student body is stunningly diverse. Fifty-seven percent of our students are women. Forty-four percent identify themselves as Hispanic. Approximately 20% identify themselves as black, about the same percentage as identify themselves as white.

The median family income of a John Jay student is $41,900. (Point of comparison: at Colorado College the average is $277,500.) While virtually none of our students come from the top one percent, about 38% come from families making less than $30,000 per year. John Jay ranked ninth out of 2,137 colleges in the New York Times’s overall mobility index—the chance that a graduate will move up two or more income quintiles. I’ve seen miracles happen at John Jay. My former student, Abdoulaye Diallo, came to the U.S. from Guinea, taught himself English while working as a bicycle messenger, and 13 years ago landed in my freshman honors class. In June he graduated from Fordham Law School. Last week, he passed the bar.

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Our college’s motto is “Fierce Advocates for Justice.” So far as I can tell, of the more than 7,000 colleges and universities in the United States, we’re the only one with “justice” in its title. Our faculty take the mission seriously. My colleagues are leaders in research on stop and frisk, neighborhood policing, false confessions, clergy abuse in the Catholic Church, child neglect and lead poisoning and innumerable other social justice topics. Most of our teaching shares the same orientation, and about half of our graduates go on to public service. (In the Ivy League, the figure ranges between 15 and 25 percent.)

I love John Jay. And yet, this.

Among my first reactions—no doubt borne of protectiveness for the college I so admire—is that we’re in the infancy of thinking about how to allocate institutional responsibility for sexual misconduct. The Weinstein Company is gone, but CBS and FOX seem to have suffered not at all, even though the allegations at the networks are most serious and concern leaders at the highest levels. It feels like John Jay will land somewhere in the middle. The college surely will endure, but every colleague I know has received calls and emails expressing dismay at the allegations, and it’s impossible to imagine that the institution will not suffer in its efforts to raise funds and attract research grants. Institutionally speaking, the meting of consequences feels arbitrary or, at the least, unsystematic.

This is hardly surprising. America has only begun to reckon with its legacy of tolerating sexual harassment and violence, and the ethics of institutional and collective responsibility have long divided philosophers. The prevailing view is that when people speak about “collective responsibility,” they are really talking about the individual responsibility of actors within the collective. For example, as Angelo Corlett has argued, when people say something like “Exxon is responsible for an oil spill” they’re really talking about the culpability of the corporation’s board members and high-level managers.

Hannah Arendt called it “senseless” to talk about collective guilt, as opposed to individual guilt, and said that the notion only served as a “whitewash” for guilty individuals to hide behind. Courts should deal with persons, she said, not “systems” or “isms.” Others, such as Joel Feinberg, who are more open to the concept, say that collective responsibility is only possible where the members have solidarity— “mutual interests, bonds of affection, and a ‘common lot.’” Question how many institutions share these characteristics. It certainly doesn’t well describe academia.

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Though we may be unsure about when the complicity of bad actors implies institutional responsibility, we can make definitive statements about the institutional settings in which complicity is likely, and the institutional practices that are likely to produce abuse. To this point in the MeToo era, the focus has been on the facts of specific cases—the she said, he said. To be sure, bringing offenders to justice is vitally important. But litigating individual cases will never be a sufficient response, and it often won’t be satisfying because the kinds of behavior at issue rarely can be conclusively proven. This is because the subjective intent of the offender is relevant to the determination of criminal responsibility, even though it has little, if anything, to do with the victim’s experience.

The public focus would be better placed on the institutional settings likely to produce misconduct. About this, we know a great deal. Many were identified by my John Jay colleagues in their groundbreaking study of the Catholic church. “The opportunity structure for abusive behavior focuses on four factors: the authority of the priest, the public perception of them, the isolation of their positions, and the high level of discretion and lack of supervision in their positions.”

Focusing on these structural considerations would change the nature of the conversation about abuse. The Kavanaugh hearings did not lend themselves well to definitive statements of individual guilt, but we know conclusively that teenage drinking creates risk, and that college social clubs and fraternities are intensely problematic. Yet, few colleges entertain the idea of banning or reforming them. At John Jay, it’s impossible to say what the investigation will reveal, but we know for sure that the professoriate shares many of the church’s risk factors, and that abuse is common. Yet conversations about structural reform at universities are rare.

Why the reluctance to operationalize the patriarchy as a set of institutional practices likely to lead to violence against women? Perhaps it’s because the salacious details of individual allegations grab headlines. More likely it’s because doing so would implicate nearly every American cornerstone institution. For it is not only universities that share the structural features of the Catholic church—authority, high status, privacy and independence—it’s the medical profession, financial firms, the movie industry, and significantly to readers of this space, government, the judiciary and law firms.

Before entering academia, I spent my life working in the law and politics. In every institution at which I worked—each law firm, judicial chamber, political campaign and government office, I witnessed sexual harassment first hand. And that was the public conduct. I can only imagine what happened behind closed doors.

Some of these men have come to justice. Most have not. That’s the random, lightning strike feel of Me Too. While we can admire the handful of women brave enough to withstand the firestorm of levying public accusations against high-profile men, we should not overlook the institutional practices that lead to these sorts of tragedies. We know unequivocally that we have only scratched the surface of uncovering sexual assault—the most underreported of crimes, and we know simple practices that can make worlds of difference—promoting social norms that protect against violence, creating protective environments, and support for reporting victims.

But opening these conversations will force a broader reckoning than any of us can bear. Because by this logic, we’re all part of the patriarchy.

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