The Notebook Dump

 

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Allegations are coming by the bushel, and we are in a moment of figuring out how to sort them. In journalism, there’s a term called “notebook dump,” the process of throwing together all your reporting — every note taken, interview conducted, scene observed. Some stuff won’t make the ultimate story; the notebook dump is how you see what you’ve got, and figure out how to move forward.

The women of America are currently engaged in a notebook dump of epic proportions, releasing the anecdotes they’ve been carrying since puberty.

— Monica Hesse and Dan Zak, “Who’s next? A moment of reckoning for men – and the behavior we can no longer ignore”

Every day, the whisper network roars more loudly. Women used to tell these stories to each other, but now we can start putting together documents and massive correspondence chains. Once untouchable bullies and titans are coming down and falling hard.

It’s amazing. It’s exhausting. It’s about time.

It is, as Hesse and Zak note, a notebook dump of epic proportions. Most of us are not seasoned journalists with armloads of notebooks to sort through. But I think we have all been doing our own notebook dumps. Quietly, or not so quietly, we have been sifting through all the crap that we’ve lived through and lived with, the grossness of all the stuff we saw, all the garbage behavior we have suffered through.

I don’t know what we should do with all that. But I’m becoming more and more sure that we need to do a real, no holds barred, notebook dump in the academy. Maybe you’re already doing this? As Emma Healey’s “Stories are Like Passwords” passes through our hands again and again, I know that we have been doing this, and doing it for a long time. But, even still, it’s hard to resist holding back a little. I know I have. I’m sorry. I am still trying to figure out know how to do this. Naming names feels dangerous. And this from me, a tenured academic who has much more security in the profession than most. As Jennifer Berdahl’s personal reckoning tells us,

a fancy professorship doesn’t shield a woman from being harassed or empower her to do anything about it… Ambition is the enemy of righteousness in poorly led academia. High h-indexes, editorial power, and social networks protect harassers by motivating their targets to remain silent, administrators to do nothing, and otherwise honorable colleagues to duck in the sidelines. You might end up where and what you want to be, but not who or how you wanted to be when you get there.

We have a lot of truths to tell even though we know all too well that there are still devastating consequences for us when we tell them. And I also know that, for many, even telling in the most private of spaces is not, or not yet, possible. It will trigger too much.

But, if you have some notebooks to dump, and you want to dump them, let’s do this. We don’t have to decide in advance what we want to do with what we share and what we dump. But let’s do this and let’s be really loud about the fact that we are resolutely engaged in a notebook dump of epic proportions. And we are not going to stop.

Just letting everyone know that this is what we are doing, that we are talking to each other and doing so with names and dates, that we are tracking patterns of this crap as much as we are singular incidents, could have a behavioural modification effect going forward. Every sexual harasser should know that their high h-indexes and pals in admin can’t protect them forever. They should wake up every morning wondering if this is the day where the story of their terrible behaviour is busted wide open and their legacies will be swept away in a torrent of righteous feminist anger.

Let’s go back to our notebooks, and find some places where we can start comparing them, again. Let’s help each other figure out what we want next. Let’s do it together and let’s have each other’s backs.