On Wednesday, Sept. 12, Carnegie Mellon University history professor Lisa Tetrault taught the 23 students in her “#MeToo: naming and resisting gender violence” class about Anita Hill’s role in the 1991 Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings — a subject that many of her students had never heard about.
When class met again the next Monday, Christine Blasey Ford had been named, alleging that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her at a party in 1982.
“It was literally history happening,” she said. “By the time I saw them on Monday, the whole thing had blown up.”
At this point, much is still unknown about Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing on Thursday. He is now also facing an allegation from Deborah Ramirez that he exposed himself to her at a Yale University party and one from Julie Swetnick that he attended parties in high school where women were drugged and gang raped. Whether or not he is ultimately confirmed for the Supreme Court, the issues raised in recent weeks will likely reverberate for some time.
“I think it’s a really big deal,” said Rona Kaufman, an associate professor at the Duquesne University School of Law, specializing in consent and the impact the #MeToo movement is having on the law. “I think this is a ‘Who are we?’ moment. I hope we are who I think we are.”
In a news conference Wednesday afternoon, President Donald Trump called the Kavanaugh hearing “a very very important day in the history of our country.”
Judge Kavanaugh denies the allegations and has called them a character assassination. His defenders have characterized him as a victim of con artists and of a left-wing conspiracy.
Some Republican senators and Mr. Trump have cast doubt on the substance of the allegations, noting that Ms. Ford, a California university professor, never reported the allegations to police, or that a person would not repeatedly attend parties where women were sexually assaulted, as Ms. Swetnick said she did, or that Ms. Ramirez was too inebriated to be believed.
The discussions taking place around Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation can have both positive and negative consequences for young people.
“We should be using this as a moment to have these conversations,” said Sara Goodkind, an associate professor of social work at the University of Pittsburgh. “I think young people are really listening and watching what’s happening. Girls are listening to how sexual assault is being downplayed — it’s heartbreaking — and I also think boys are getting the message, especially from Kavanaugh’s defenders, that what they did when they were young will not have consequences.”
To some extent, the allegations may educate men about what Ms. Goodkind describes as a reality for young women. “I think there are many women to whom this is not news,” she said. “I think there are many men who don’t understand it, in part because most men don’t do these kinds of things. It’s a small minority of men who are committing these acts.”
At the Duquesne law school, Ms. Kaufman on Monday signed a letter along with law faculty from across the country urging the Senate to ask the FBI to investigate the claims of the three women, to refrain from making public statements attacking the accusers’ credibility and to conduct its own questioning, rather than hiring a prosecutor.
She organized that the hearings would be shown in the law school tomorrow, for students, faculty and staff to be able to witness.
At Carnegie Mellon, Ms. Tetrault said that she is now spending about 20 minutes twice a week in her #MeToo class discussing the Kavanaugh confirmation process. Her students are “outraged by all these things and they’re traumatized by it,” she said.
This is the first semester that she’s taught the #MeToo history class but, she laughed, she’s sure it won’t be the last.
Anya Sostek: asostek@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1308.
First Published: September 27, 2018, 12:10 a.m.
