Thoughts On JFC
By MALIA CHUNG '20
I am, without doubt, a supporter of the #MeToo Movement. As the daughter of two feminist parents and the eldest sister of three girls, I won’t ignore recent news which exposes prominent male figures for sexual assault, rape, and misogyny: Bill Cosby, Kevin Spacey, Harvey Weinstein. At home, on the couch, my mom tells me and my sister about my godmother who, before we were born, was assaulted, pinned down on a beach while she was out for a run. My mother tells us about her own experience of a graduate school teacher sexually harassing her, about the time she was groped on a bus in Turkey, how she made the bus driver pull over right there, on the side of the road, in the middle-of-nowhere into which she marched off. She tells us, as women, we must be prepared—strong and vocal. In my Creative Writing class, I wrote a poem about all of it: my godmother, my mother, my future as a woman in all cultures, everything encapsulated by one moment in a self-defense class, the quivering of quads, fists snapping back into place, the power of fight.
And yet, amidst all of this empowerment, I can’t help but question the firing of Mr. Connolly. Unlike most students at Milton, I’ve known Mr. Connolly since I was a baby. While I grew up on the school’s campus, my dad’s classroom was located right next door to Mr. Connolly’s, at the end of the English Department cul de sac. This year, Mr. Connolly became my Creative Writing teacher, one of those rare teachers who has consistently pushed me, questioned my work, and believed in me enough for me to love working. Mr. Connolly’s room is a collection of poems, each kept safely in plastic sleeves, snippets of the thirty-five years worth of students who’ve sat at that same harkness table. He spent hours reading each one of my poems and short stories, dredging up old works to give to me: Red Dog by Dave Smith, What the Angels Left by Marie Howe, Half in Love by Maile Meloy. He told me that these authors would be my new teachers when he ran out of techniques to pass on. But I am not ready to be on my own yet. I didn’t get to say goodbye or thank you.
Charged with “sexual misconduct” over three decades ago, at a different school, in a different context, and with no accusation of any misconduct in his thirty-five years at Milton Academy, Mr. Connolly is now wide-open to misinterpretation. We do not know Mr.Connolly’s story, and the lack of specifics offered to our community invites the characterization of Mr. Connolly as someone who we, as a school, have never known him to be. Do we risk creating a school environment that fears for its safety when there isn’t danger? I believe that as a culture, we need to be able to read nuance: to see the particulars, the setting, the light, as Mr. Connolly would tell us. Not all offenses should be equated.
Imagine the learning potential had the school kept on Mr. Connolly, had he been given the chance to publicly acknowledge his mistakes, had the school made a final point of forgiveness, for starting anew. And when should the past be put to bed? When should we be able to make mistakes and move forward? Do we create victims of dozens of students who will never finish work—who will never begin work—with Mr. Connolly?
I know that in this particular time, this point in culture, our school must have felt it had no choice but to handle the situation as it did, with a quick erasing of the matter. To some extent, I do find comfort in thinking that, had there been a serious incident of sexual harassment at Milton, the school would have taken action to resolve the issue. I’m just worried that we’ve begun to punish the wrong people.
In the past week, I’ve been challenged to reconcile my support of #MeToo and my admiration for Mr. Connolly. I, for one, will continue to remember him this way: his notes for revision in the margins of my work, his advice that revising work again and again yields a more perfect art. No one can take this learning away from me.