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        Volume CCXXXIV, Number 45                    May, 2004              

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Victim and Spy reporter Nollie Tangere, Yale '03

By Bella Whiner
with Nollie Tangere, Yale '03

Well-known Spy City Staff Reporter Magnolia "Nollie" Tangere has accused world-famous Yale Professor Roman Hans of sexually harassing her when she was a Yale undergraduate three years ago.

Tangere set forth her shocking charges in a letter to the Yale Corporation, which details the entire ugly incident. According to Tangere, she was a student in Prof. Hans's sophomore comparative literature seminar Deconstructing the Myth of Seduction in Academe: From Ancient Athens to New Haven.

"Prof. Hans said each student in the seminar had to write a poem or sonnet expressing their feelings about studying with a scholar as eminent as he. I worked for three weeks on my poem," her letter recounts.

The letter sets forth the full text of Tangere's prosody:

The Mighty Elm

I approach the mighty elm
I shiver at the sight. Its powerful limbs
knarled with age
overwhelm indeed ravish me
The elm blocks out the sun I catch my
dress on its thorns and I am
naked innocent open I throw
my arms around its trunk
and it fills me up and we become
one oh to lay at the foot of the elm
in its throbbing shade

"I was extremely proud of this poem and felt that it represented my maturation as a creative writer," the letter adds. "So I asked Professor Hans to dinner at my apartment to discuss my work." She said that it was common for each female student in Prof. Hans's classes to invite him to a private dinner at least once each semester.

The letter continues: "As a sign of the academic importance of the occasion, I wore my black slip dress and lit my apartment solely with 23 candles, one for each hour of the seminar. I opened a bottle of champagne to create an appropriate mood for poetry. Then I read him my poem."

Readers should be aware that the following portions of this article contain text that may be offensive to some. Young children should read this only with the support of an appropriate adult. [Can we get on with it? The entire copy desk is getting a– Copy Ed.][Control yourself – Ed.] "I felt that the poem required me to read it in a whisper, so I pulled up my chair next to his and stared into his deep brown eyes. After I finished, he took my hand, which I thought meant that we had bonded on a literary and spiritual level."

"'Nollie,' he said, 'Your poem exemplifies the deconstructive anti-textualization that I try to foster in my seminar. I loved it. Now say hi to my friend Samuel Johnson.' Prof. Hans then unzipped his fly and exposed his male organ which appeared to be semi-tumescent." According to the letter, Ms. Tangere then fled her apartment and spent the night on the sofa of a friend in Branford College.

Noted Yale professor of comparative deconstruction and alleged harasser Roman Hans

Tangere said today: "It is with a heavy heart that I take this complaint public. I do this not because I hope to gain fame or fortune or a clerkship on the New York Times or The Washington Post [Dream on, Nollie – Ed.], but because I want to protect future generations of Yale undergraduates from the depredations of this monster."

Reached at his intersession apartment in Chamonix, Hans, the Grover Cleveland Professor of Literature and Eros at Yale, disclaimed knowledge of the entire event. "Wasn't she the girl who wrote that silly sex column for the Yalie Daily?" Hans asked.

After being informed that Ms. Tangere had indeed been the sexuality editor of the Yale Daily News, Hans said he could not recall the incident: "I rog–uh, tutor so many imaginative young women that I can't recall Ms. Tangere." He admitted that from time to time he dines with students in their apartments or at Vinnie Verducci's Grotto d'Amore on Whalley Ave., but said that such meetings were perfectly appropriate.

"You have to remember that these delicious young ladies are so lovely, yet so very frail and inexperienced in the ways of the world, so that they may not always be able to distinguish their fantasies from reality. It's quite a common literary problem. Derrida wrote about it extensively, you know," Hans concluded.

Reaction on the Yale campus was mixed. Hannah Rexia '05, who succeeded Ms. Tangere as sex columnist for the campus newspaper, said: "God, if he made a pass at me, I would have screwed him into the ground." Her fellow editor, Roger Nunn '05, grumbled: "He's the greatest swordsman in the history of Yale. Why can't he leave a few for the rest of us?"