Marc Fisher (HM ’76) has published a lengthy look at the career of English teacher Robert Berman in the April 1, 2013 issue of The New Yorker: A Sex-Abuse Scandal at Horace Mann:
…what about Mr. Berman—this odd, secretive man who frightened away many students, yet retired to a house that former students bought for him? He wasn’t mentioned in the Times stories, but he may have been the greatest enigma of all.
The full contents of the article are graphic and may be triggering for abuse survivors.
I’m a reader of the New Yorker article and have no connection to Horace Mann. I think Berman and people like him should be locked up for life. And I hope someone help these abused victims move on and make peace with their lives. Is it possible that “Gene” in the article answered his own question, about not being able to let go? That the most difficult part of healing is to recognize that he has never stopped loving Berman. (Ms. Debora Shuger, the UCLA English professor, commented the boys in Berman’s class loved him.) Would it help if he and other Berman’s victims talk about their love for him, which is deeper than the hurt and which is more difficult to talk about? Please forgive me if what I say offends anyone. That’s not my intention.
I was flabbergasted by this article. All my life I have brushed up against personalities like this but somehow avoided becoming entangled, or felt suspicious enough of something to get away. This article depicts a case that should be studied and applied wherever svengali-like personae lurk, and young minds should be protected from their clutches.
I found the description of Berman- and people like him in my life – as laughable. Like the student who transferred out of the class after the Hamlet riddle, I just moved on after suspecting something wasn’t right. The peak of his pathetic arrogance was the vain, self-publishing of his opus magnum. I hope those still held by his basilisk gaze someday escape and move on with their lives lest they continue to live for him.
I just today finished reading Marc Fishcer’s New Yorker article on Robert Berman. I am not a victim, nor an alumnea of Horace Mann . However, I want to express my profound sadness and rage about the entrenched abuse that was allowed to continue decade after decade with the administration’s knowledge.
In the case of Berman, what struck me was that this is a man whose emotional abuse of students alone should have been a fireable offense. What sort of a school allows that kind of mistreatment of children, completely public, undeniable mistreatment, the kind that cannot be shrouded by any kind of (false) plausible deniability? It seems the sort that believed that that kind of behavior somehow lent a mystique to the school, an atmosphere of some sort of non-conformist eccentricity that said “yes, we are an elite prep school, but we’re hip; we’re not like the others,” the kind that mistakes bad teaching and emotional abuse for some kind of cache.
Where else would a teacher — a high school teacher — who regularly had half his class immediately drop out not because he was tough or even intimidating, but because he was CRUEL, be tolerated year upon year? Not too many places.
I focus on this element of what was tolerated not because I really believe that it leads directly to a tolerance for sexual abuse — plenty of “ordinary” institutions are as guilty as Horace Mann of that — but because THIS man, this one particular man who appears to have been one of the most vicious abusers at the school, could have been fired for rather ordinary reasons. Taking that action would not have addressed the horrifying phenomenon of what happens when a teacher/predator is fired without any criminal investigation — the predator continuing his legacy of destruction at the next institution that hires him unless some brave soul takes it upon himself to warn future employers, an action that would never completely stop a monster like Berman — and yet, it remains to me a disturbing element of this whole story. The school collectively (not speaking about any individuals here; not qualified to, nor do I believe that there is or was “groupthink” at Horace Mann) either passively or actively supported a kind of behavior in its teachers that certainly did not make it harder for them to include sexual abuse in their devastating abuse of power.
I said up top that I am not a victim. This is true. But I, along with so many kids at that godawful age, could have been. I was scared enough, insecure enough. It could have been me had I been in the wrong place. I can see easily how these soul-destroying brain-washing predators would leave a child, and then an adult, helpless to speak out. My greatest admiration and respect to those of you who were able to find the courage to speak.
These allegations and stories are heartbreaking. And baffling. I can imagine how confusing such an entanglement would be for a young person: I cannot remotely imagine the parental response, or the dithering from the Horace Mann administration. Had my trustworthy and conscientious daughter, now studying at an Ivy League, come to me with a report about Mr. Berman’s sexual advances, I would have skipped the school authorities and gone directly to Berman. And I would have advised him that any further predatory behavior would result in immediate death. A man so well versed in the tenets of good and evil would have understood, I’m sure. Meantime, I can only hope that Mr. Berman, at his advanced age, is close to getting a first hand experience of the Miltonian hell he lectured about for so many years.