Wolf, Bloom and bluff. An article in the New York Observer is reporting that in a forthcoming New York magazine piece, Naomi Wolf, feminist icon, is accusing highly respected Shakespearian scholar Harold Bloom of sexually harassing her at Yale more than twenty years ago.

Rachel Donadio of the Observer writes:

According to Yale University, Ms. Wolf approached the university last month with various requests. For one thing, she wished to explore filing a complaint of sexual harassment against Mr. Bloom. Helaine Klasky, a spokeswoman for Yale, said Ms. Wolf was told that "you are not permitted under Yale statutes to file sexual-harassment complaints 20 years after an alleged event occurred. There were policies and procedures in place when Ms. Wolf attended Yale and the alleged harassment took place, yet she did not avail herself of them." (Yale has a two-year statute of limitations on such complaints.) Ms. Klasky said that last month Ms. Wolf also contacted the offices of Yale president Richard Levin and the dean of Yale College, Richard Brodhead, as well as the public-relations office, in the context of writing her article. Furthermore, according to Ms. Klasky, Ms. Wolf "requested an apology from the university, and was told that an apology could only be issued if wrongdoing was found—and unless one’s filed a formal complaint, there cannot be any apology."

Ms. Wolf made her name as the author of the 1991 best-seller The Beauty Myth, and more recently has written books on motherhood and adolescent sexuality. Her notoriety seemed to have peaked when she famously advised Al Gore during the 2000 campaign, suggesting that he wear more "earth tones" in order to appeal to the women’s vote, and reportedly collected a monthly fee of $15,000 for her advice.

Sources close to Mr. Bloom said that Ms. Wolf never tried reaching the professor at home—his number is listed—but rather left specific, and potentially incendiary, phone messages with administrative assistants at his two Yale offices.

In her 1997 book Promiscuities, Ms. Wolf wrote about an unnamed college professor who placed his hand between her legs after showing up at her apartment to discuss her poetry. Other classmates, she claimed, had had similar experiences, but she thought she could resist.

Camille Paglia jumped to Bloom's defence, first noting the indecency of bringing such a charge after so much time has passed, before moving onto anad hominen attack: "At the beginning of the 90’s, people said, ‘Oh, Naomi Wolf, this great thinker,’" said Ms. Paglia. "But what she’s managed to do in 10 years is marginalize herself as a chronicler of teenage angst. She doesn’t want to leave that magic island when she was the ripening teenager. How many times do we have to relive Naomi Wolf’s growing up? How many books, how many articles, Naomi, are you going to impose on us so we have to be dragged back to your teenage-heartbreak years? This is regressive! It’s childish! Move on! Move on! Get on to menopause next!"

For a more light-hearted story of ivory tower misconduct, check out this story in the Telegraph. Twenty-three year old Oxford engineering student Matthew Richardson was mistakenly asked to deliver a three day seminar to a group of Chinese economic PhD candidates. Bluffing his way through the lectures by reading verbatim from a high school textbook, Richardson only lost his nerve on the second day when he finally ran out of chapters. "I have no idea who they were expecting. Being Chinese, they were inscrutable and if they were expecting someone else they didn't show it. Perhaps they thought I was a prodigy. They all called me professor," Richardson said. "It was only on my return to Britain that I discovered that there is a professor with the same name in New York. To this day I do not know if that is who the Chinese were expecting."

I hope they weren't expecting this guy.