On the response to professor Kirk Nesset’s arrest
Like everyone else, I was shocked to hear about professor Kirk Nesset’s arrest last week on child pornography charges. However, I was equally puzzled by the response.
Let’s set aside for the moment the confusion as to why Allegheny would cancel classes in this particular circumstance, especially given its past failure to do so in the wake of (equally if not more traumatizing) events such as 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, Abu Ghraib, Ferguson, or closer to home, the handful of officially reported cases of sexual violence that occurred on campus last year, the suicide of Allegheny student Chuck Mahoney in 2002, or the more recent death of Gregory Sadler, whose body was found in North Village in April 2013. In none of these cases did the College see fit to cancel classes or hold a campus-wide event to collectively “share our thoughts and emotions.” As one of my senior students put it in reference to Sadler’s death, “if there was a time when we [the students] needed counseling, that was it.”
The same student expressed confusion as to why he was being solicited by administrators and faculty to seek counseling in the first place, to be made to feel as though he might “need someone to talk to” about Professor Nesset’s arrest. It’s a valid question. After all, most students (and many faculty, myself included) didn’t know Kirk personally. Yet, there’s certainly a level of distress involved in having someone who many considered a friend, a mentor, a teacher, and a talented artist turn out to be a connoisseur of child pornography. It’s a disconcerting situation that provokes a whole range of emotions—anger, betrayal, fear, paranoia, astonishment, disbelief. But the question I keep asking myself is: does it really warrant a campus-wide shutdown? Isn’t it more suitably approached as a “teachable moment”? And if so, what are we teaching?
So far, all I’ve heard is it’s “a time to reflect,” that we, as a community, need to come together to share, listen, and express how we personally feel. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for voicing opinions and frustrations. But why do these conversations always seem to happen at the level of personal experience and therapeutic discourse? As if the problem can be addressed (or smoothed over) by handling it in the manner of post-traumatic stress disorder. Is it really possible to have a “frank and open discussion” when anything that falls outside of this mode is made to seem either inappropriate or insensitive? So long as our discussions take place solely at the level of individual feelings, are we leaving something out or limiting the possibilities for understanding?
What hasn’t been acknowledged is that child pornography is hardly unfamiliar. It’s unfortunate, to be sure, but certainly not uncommon (at least not for readers of the daily newspaper). In fact, the same day the news broke about professor Nesset, there were similar stories in the New York Times (about a Brooklyn Tech teacher who was accused of preying on and taking pictures of female students) and the Erie Times-News (about a group of Pennsylvania state officials caught exchanging emails containing pornography). In the same vein, we’ve been deluged in recent weeks with high-profile stories of male sexual assault and domestic violence involving NFL players. Certainly, we shouldn’t conflate these incidents (there’s a significant difference between downloading and distributing child pornography and engaging in sexual abuse, rape, and molestation), but we shouldn’t separate them either.
So how does this relate to the case of professor Nesset? Partly, I think it has to do with our willingness (or lack thereof) to make connections to the broader culture, and the swiftness with which we seek to demonize him as a social pariah in order to wipe our communal hands clean. Thus, we might proceed to speak in the language of personal experience, while also participating in collective displays of moral outrage, disgust and distanciation. But I wonder, to what extent does this have the effect of blinding ourselves to the fundamental role that broader cultural and economic systems play in all this? How does the practice of consuming child pornography, for example, relate to other, equally exploitative and immoral practices, such as consuming products of child sweatshop labor? How does the former resonate with the mentality of a broader commercial culture that regularly depicts women in sexually infantilized ways?
Of course, the dominant discourse doesn’t allow for such questions. All we’re instructed to do is express our own personal outrage. Nonetheless, we might also “reflect” on the ways child pornography is hardly outside the realm of cultural normality. Surely, no one would disagree that women are routinely eroticized as submissive and powerless within our commercial media system. Moreover, images of female passivity, vulnerability and fragility appear endlessly, not just in pornography, but countless music videos, magazine ads, and cable TV shows. Ours is a culture where young female bodies are constantly on display for visual pleasure, or used as props for male power and prestige.
As advertising scholar Sut Jhally puts it, the cultural environment in which we live generally encourages a “pornographic imagination”—an unquestioned and automatic point-of-view that persistently positions women as sexual beings to be gazed at. Surely, this “normal” way of seeing can’t be separated from the more (acceptably) troubling incidents of girl-child pornography. As Jhally says, “in the world of commercial realism, women never seem to leave girlhood behind.” They are ceaselessly represented in infantile ways (from lingerie ads to beer commercials to Miley Cyrus to reality shows like Girlicious), and these “rituals of subordination” are a conventional aspect of media culture.
Perhaps the conversation we ought to have, then, is not about deviant or monstrous individuals—although that’s certainly an easier one, as it allows us to avoid asking difficult questions that implicate everyone, while expressing righteous indignation. Rather, we might consider the more disturbing possibility that our social codes of gender and sexuality are to blame as well; that there is something at work here that reaches beyond personal experience or how we feel, and includes the eroticization of women and girlhood as a taken-for-granted aspect of dominant culture.
Certainly, there’s nothing to excuse people who participate in child pornography. But we should ask ourselves, are these “sexual predators” simply outside the realm of civilized behavior, or are they actually over-conforming to the cultural norms—norms that result in all-too-frequent incidents of not only child porn, but related instances of pornographic media, male violence and sexual assault against women (of which, again, there have been numerous cases at Allegheny)? Indeed, we’re fooling ourselves to think these are completely unrelated matters, or that having an open auditorium gathering to share our feelings amounts to “dealing” with the problem. It might make us feel like we have a voice, but it’s not until we connect that voice (and the corresponding language of personal experience) to broader social, cultural, and institutional systems of power that we move toward addressing the root causes of our sanctimonious outrage.
Joe Tompkins is an assistant professor of communication arts at Allegheny College.
James lesko • Feb 8, 2016 at 10:26 pm
Mr.Nesset should have been fired and have his pension revoked. The crims he committed are beyond the realm of comprehension. To take some joy in seeing a child sexually abused is sick and I am sure his behavior has been going on for years if not decades, he is a deviant who needs to be dealt with the harshest way possible. I just saw he got 6 years in prison….I don’t know if that’s enough for a man who had over a half million images of children being abused on his computer. Mental illness is not and excuse for this behavior
James • Oct 19, 2014 at 8:03 pm
Prof. Tompkins courageously pointed out that exploitation of and violence towards children that is of a non-sexual nature (i.e., sweat shops, or more horribly, the results of war) can be equally or even more damaging to the children effected than sexual abuse. However true this may be, we as a society draw a stark “line in the sand” between sexual abuse of children and child abuse of other types.
As an illustration, if you knowingly possess a pair of shoes produced in a sweat shop exploiting children, you are a passive consumer of child abuse. Yet you’ll not be publicly vilified for this wrongdoing. Take a look at http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/lwp/NLC_childlabor.html to get a sense of the scale of passive consumption of child abuse, all of which we typically undertake without moral reflection. And knowing this, I still have not boycotted Wal-Mart. Why?
I hypothesize that this line in the sand that we’ve drawn, creating a categorical difference between sexual abuse of children and child abuse in all other forms belies a deep and thought-provoking truth: we have not drawn that line for the sake of the children, at least not only for their sake. We have drawn it largely because it is easy, and satisfying, to make a pariah out of a person with unusual sexual proclivities. Consider the many reasons a person might be labeled a sexual pervert short of pedophilia.
Perversions are inherently unusual – meaning most other people don’t share them. It is easy to cast judgment on a person for wrongdoing when you are completely innocent of the same “sin”. In contrast to this, we ALL share a need and desire for material goods, so we collectively dismiss the suffering and exploitation of the foreign children that make our excessive level of consumption possible.
And it goes without saying, the other reason we’ve drawn the line is because unlike most “perversions”, sexual contact between adults and children is intrinsically exploitive and abusive. So child pornography has two strikes against it, whereas Wal-Mart affiliated manufacturers have one strike (for actually exploiting children, but not being otherwise revolting to most people), and defecation pornography has one strike against it (for being viscerally revolting to almost everybody except a true pervert, but not necessarily exploitive to the actors).
Liberal academics generally cannot cast judgment on a person solely for being a “pervert”- that would seem small-minded after all. I do think however that a lot of our institution’s supposed acceptance of rare sexual proclivities is forced. Behind the smile and magnanimous gestures, I suspect there is often a person who is a whole lot more concerned with appearing enlightened than actually accepting and coming to grips with the other person’s sexual oddities.
Some reading this will be feeling a bit of moral outrage on how these contemplations blur the lines of what is right and what is wrong. If you feel this way, you should ask whether your outrage might be stemming from the difficulty in reconciling the inherent contradiction in our shopping behavior and political choices. God knows, it is hard to accept that if child pornography is evil *solely* because of that industry’s effect on children, than a moral person must also investigate and change his or her purchasing habits. Lest he or she be, *gasp* – as guilty as the pariah Prof.
As I see it, to be morally consistent, there are three solutions that would resolve the contradiction.
1) posit that it is morally proper to judge a person as a sexual pervert if you find their sexual proclivities to be revolting. This solution creates a substantive difference between consumption of child abuse products that is of a sexual nature from that of a non sexual nature, making Professor Nesset’s collection far, far more evil than a person’s dress collection. This solution is globally and historically extremely common, leading me (a student of anthropology) to question whether this solution simply helps those cultures that adopt it, while obviously causing at the same time horrible pain and degradation to the minority population of “perverts”, whether they be homosexuals, incest fans, or adulterers (source: The Bible).
2) posit that child-abuse in other lands is not a problem requiring a moral or legal response from Americans. In this scheme, the next step is either adopt secondarily Solution 1 – meaning society is still free to make this pornography illegal, because consumption of it is an objective moral failing requiring atonement. Or – Solution 3 – meaning the abuse of children in the US would remain a punishable crime, however consumption of child pornography produced abroad would not be illegal, and neither would possession of products produced by children in sweat shops.
3) posit that perversions are generally acceptable, except when acting on the perversion results in sexual violation of another person – in this solution, pedophilia is a perversion of the same caliber as other sexual perversions, but the evil comes from acting on it. Child pornography consumption, while not directly abusive, is “acting on it”, and therefore wrong, in that demand for such material drives the production of it. This solution would require making all knowing possession of products of child abuse, wherever produced, illegal. While our government does use this exact solution as the constitutional rationale for making Nesset’s images illegal, our government’s approach to child abuse is inconsistent in that we do not have laws protecting the children of other countries except in the case of pornography. I therefore conclude that our legislators are suffering from the same intellectual bifurcation that Prof. Tompkins was originally complaining, underlining the relevance of this inquiry.
I would be gratified to hear responses to these thoughts.
James lesko • Feb 9, 2016 at 12:26 am
James your an idiot, trying to say that downloading and sharing child pornography is equal to buying a pair of shoes from Walmart. You rammbled on made no sense, what Nesset did is criminal period! He needs to be in prison and that’s were he currently is. Watching and sharing images of children being sexually abused is criminal behavior don’t try to minimize this behavior. Who knows what else Nesset might have done. I’m sure he has engaged in this criminal behavior for years and would not have stopped until he got caught. It is not a victimless crime like your making it out to be. Children are damaged for there entire lives being victims of this kind of crime.
James Hoople • Oct 6, 2014 at 5:09 pm
I find it very concerning that the College administration appears to have been blindsided by the allegations now surfacing regarding this person’s nineteen years’ worth of rampantly inappropriate behavior. All three of my children attended and graduated AC during this time and all three encountered multiple people who had personal stories of inappropriate conduct by this person. Nobody should have been surprised that this extended into the internet. Who protected this person?
Lee Scandinaro • Oct 6, 2014 at 2:54 pm
Look at how quickly this conversation turned into a discussion about the individual charges against Dr. Nesset. Further proving Professor Tompkins’ point about the individualizing of this case and similar cases.
The Loch Nesset Monster • Oct 7, 2014 at 5:22 pm
He didn’t have a PhD. Don’t give this creep more credit than he’s due.
Allegheny alumni 99 • Oct 11, 2014 at 3:56 pm
University of California Santa Barbara he got his PhD there
Stephen • Oct 6, 2014 at 11:08 am
The only thing I’d like to say is that I don’t think the difference between more “active” sexual crimes and more “passive ones (i.e., rape versus downloading child pornography) is nearly as important as you imply. The victimization, trauma, and harm is just as real, and just because Nesset was capitalizing on victimization more directly committed by others does not in any way diminish from the gravity of the offense. I don’t think the distinction is really very stark, honestly I feel that they are equally repulsive and unconscionable. I do agree that the reaction of the College is incongruous and likely rather disingenuous, but I don’t think that means they should not have handled this the way they did… it simply means that there is no excuse for treating equally harmful or traumatic events as seriously. That’s the real problem here, not how this situation was treated, but rather how others were ignored. It just… saddens me.
Alum '08 • Oct 5, 2014 at 10:41 pm
I agree that this article and Allegheny’s general response are dancing around the fact that Kirk Nesset was infamous for inappropriate conduct with female students. I’m an alum, I knew him fairly well, and I’ve seen this for myself.
Sexual attention from a professor puts students at serious risk. Why didn’t Allegheny address his behavior years ago? The Dean DeMerrit was dismissive of the press. I’m hardly surprised she chose the CYA course. DeMerrit once suggested to me I was not intelligent enough for my current course of study (which, incidentally, I obtained a doctorate in). This is the kind of person Allegheny promotes.
More astounding is the fact that Nesset was not fired after he admitted to the child pornography charges. So, what will it take for Allegheny administrators to be proactive about the welfare of their students? In my experience, Allegheny is an overly image-consious and profit-focused institution. Students need to create a supportive community and take care of themselves until this can be changed – don’t look to the administration for help.
Surly • Oct 6, 2014 at 8:31 am
For what it is worth, Nesset instantly resigning was the best and fastest outcome for all involved. For reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with protecting accused child pornographers, tenured professors can’t be fired at will. Check out the AAUP’s statements on the historical protection of academic freedoms and tenure if you want to know why. But the bottom line is Nesset COULD NOT have been fired quickly, at least not more quickly than he resigned. Within 15 hours of the news breaking, the institution had a signed resignation and had announced that to the world. That’s lightning fast for an institution to move.
ETW, 2012 • Oct 5, 2014 at 8:23 pm
Talk about having a pedagogical ax to grind…
Jon, 2012 Alum • Oct 5, 2014 at 7:39 pm
Professor Thompson,
1) You begin your article by suggesting we “set aside for the moment the confusion as to why Allegheny would cancel classes in this particular circumstance,” but then spend a few paragraphs discussing your confusion as to why Allegheny would cancel classes in this particular circumstance. This rhetoric is deceptive. Intentionally or not, you are being deceptive. The matter at hand is that an Allegheny professor possessed and distributed child pornography and has allegedly sexually harassed his female students, and you are editorializing in the student newspaper. Your deceptive rhetoric is not appropriate here.
2) While there is most certainly a time and a place for discussing Prof. Nesset’s actions in a broad context of “over-conforming to the cultural norms” which include “the eroticization of women and girlhood as a taken-for-granted aspect of dominant culture,” the idea that all current dialogue should exist solely in this context is, at best, condescendingly pedagogical.
It is immeasurably important that students are given the opportunity and encouraged to discuss Prof. Nesset’s ownership and distribution of child pornography and his alleged sexual harassment of female students in the context of “personal experience and therapeutic discourse” precisely because such a discussion is NOT an attempt to smooth over the issue by “handling it in the manner of post-traumatic stress disorder,” but rather an opportunity to build momentum towards Title IX change.
Prof. Nesset was alleged to sexually harass female students going back at least 10 years. Had Title IX better served the victims of sexual harassment, Prof. Nesset’s encouragement of inappropriate student/professor relationships and his crime of possessing child pornography could have been curtailed earlier, leading to fewer victims.
I deeply, earnestly appreciate your concerns about the relationship between Nesset’s crimes and alleged crimes and “social, cultural, and institutional systems of power.” It is indicative of both your sense of justice and responsibility and your academic adroitness. But there is talking about root causes, and talking about talking about root causes. Expressing “personal outrage” is a completely necessary step in “‘dealing'” with the problem because it can build momentum to a solution, while your demand that the conversation should be about social codes and gender, while good, seems to be ignoring the possibility of affecting change in the short-term.
#ACgauntlet #Allegheny College
Ryan the Pomeranian • Oct 5, 2014 at 11:50 pm
1) It’s not deceptive. It’s contradictory. Big difference.
2) I don’t think you know what the word “pedagogical” means, because it doesn’t fit in the sentence you’re using.
Acgrad • Oct 5, 2014 at 4:12 pm
While all your points are valid, I think the bigger picture is the fact that female students were regularly warned by other faculty members not to be alone with Professor Nesset. Why do you think that is? I personally have heard several other “violations” against this professor that students were too afraid to report. Hopefully now some of these students will have the courage to come forward.
Jeremy Hoople • Oct 5, 2014 at 4:00 pm
I’m an ’05 Alumn, and very active in the Allegheny comunity, and I feel I must point out an elephant in the room. It is a bit seperate from the current charges at hand, but extrememly relevant. Kirk Nesset had a 19 year reign of sexual harrasment and predation aimed at his female students. I have seen some of it, had family targeted by it, and heard a steady stream of rumors for 15 years. Some administration, faculty, and staff knew, and/or had a strong suspicion. I predict that influenced class cancelation and counceling being encouraged. My social media feeds have been exploding with stories of his attempts, and a few successes, at bedding Allegheny students. And there has been a growing outcry among students and student groups to find a way to reform and overhaul how titleIX related cases are handled, with a focus on victim/survivor advocacy. and this could be a tipping point.
Frank • Oct 5, 2014 at 11:19 pm
Title VII mandates certain employees of the school to report suspicions so allegations can be investigated. If Nesset’s behavior was as embedded in the consciousness of the community as it appears in print, then where were the voices of his colleagues during all of this?
Allegheny alumni 99 • Oct 13, 2014 at 7:46 pm
I agree with “frank” reply. Rumors are rumors, and these supposed successes in bedding Alleghenians, are probably indeed stories, just as you worded them. Have you actually sat face to face with someone who was victimized? I am guessing the answer is no, and that it’s all second hand rumors. I still think the FBI charges are legitimate, obviously, but all the rest is banter, the wake of a ship…
07 Grad • Apr 6, 2015 at 11:51 pm
We who have ‘known’ him I think could say a lot, but I’m going to hold back and I think everyone else should as well. Let us keep in mind the brutal “backlash” he will be receiving within the correctional facilities… things they don’t teach at Allegheny.
An Allegheny Student • Oct 5, 2014 at 2:36 pm
Hi Professor Thompson-
Current Allegheny Student here, practicing those critical thinking skills I’m supposedly acquiring with this lofty liberal arts education. Here are some thoughts your article has conjured:
(1) Deplorable as it may be that Allegheny has sidelined past tragedies in our culture and community, from 9/11 to student deaths to the wealth of sexual assault cases (and another wealth silenced), perhaps we should look at this day of reflection as a pivotal change in the dynamics of our community. I agree that Gregory Sadler’s death was not fairly handled by the administration, and that our community could have benefited from a day of reflection then. However, I do not think that event should be compared to this one, or any past events. Instead, I see this day of reflection as a new model for the way our campus will respond to future events. Perhaps this model is more of a grand gesture, extending to victims of past tragedies, which echoes in the broadness of discussions at Friday’s forum.
(2) I completely agree that pornography is a more overt extension of the way women are implicitly abused by our androcentric culture, and I agree that culture is largely to blame. I agree that largely, Kirk Nesset is being dehumanized as a fluke in our community, instead of a product of the culture. However, I think that pathologizing Nesset’s behavior is important. Although I believe culture is to blame, I do not think its incrimination is sufficient. The quantity of pornography (half a million files!) Nesset consumed separates him from a normal spectrum of behavior; his actions are obsessive and addictive. To answer some of your open-ended questions, I agree we are all influenced by the vile cultural eroticism of women and girls, and we can relate Nesset’s behavior as a product of society AND an act of psychopathology.
(3) I would not devalue personal reflection. I knew Nesset personally, as did much of the community, if not yourself and your student, and we deserve respect for our grieving. Much of this outrage stems from personal betrayal and the way our culture does dichotomize “good” and “evil” behavior. This is a traumatic situation for many; maybe idyllically it should not be posited as trauma, but in our place and time, it IS traumatic for many.
(4) I view the campus-wide shutdown AS a teaching moment. There is room within personal reflection to contemplate the influences of the culture, as you and I are both doing. If this day of reflection produced these conversations about culture, mental health, patriarchy, addiction, and human nature, than I ask what more are you asking for? If you were at the forum on Friday, then you witnessed that the discussions extended wide beyond “personal feelings” and issues relating to Nesset. The forum provided all students and faculty with the opportunity to voice their concerns to the administration. The Campus newspaper, as I write, as acting similarly as a forum.
I wish to remind you that not everyone is treating Nesset as a social pariah, and that the day of reflection did spark important conversations about culture and mental health for some. In my opinion, I think the school did the right thing by cancelling classes Friday and encouraging discussion. As a student of Nesset, I needed it. I feel like the day of reflection mollified by anxiety about the event, engaged me in critical conversations, and allowed more transparent discussions in the community.
Joe Tompkins • Oct 6, 2014 at 1:34 pm
These are terrific points! And indeed I’ve heard the discussion on Friday was productive — particularly in terms of students being able to raise their collective frustrations and concerns about ongoing problems of sexual assault and racism on this campus, which I think are very real, and have unfortunately been going on as long as I’ve been at Allegheny (going on 5 years). To the extent that Friday’s meeting proves to be a catalyst for continuing those conversations — and even more, for transforming those conversations into organized action — that would be great.
Incidentally, I had written the piece before the Friday forum, and I actually had in mind the institutional response of shutting down classes and turning this into a communal event structured primarily around the framework of therapy and counseling (including the “free therapeutic massages” being offered). While I appreciate the traumatic impact Kirk’s arrest had for many people, I’m also looking to broaden the conversation in order to connect that sense of frustration to the larger structural issues being raised at the forum.
Certainly, I agree that personal experience can be powerful — after all, social justice begins with individual experiences of rage and frustration with the status quo. However, I am also worried that unless those individual experiences can be organized into a more focused, collective voice, we’ll simply find ourselves back at square one, unable to address and transform the conditions that got us here in the first place. As another colleague of mine put it in another context, the key moving forward is going to be building coalitions for change.