Letter of Resignation and Reflection on the CES Crisis

By Mary N. Layoun January 2, 2025

Dear Boa,

Happy new year – a new year I hope brings some modicum of justice and peace to our sorry world.

In the context of that sorry world, I write to you for two reasons. The first is to express my continuing deep concern about your own circumstances – the devastating toll on your person, your name, and your exemplary international reputation caused by the events that began now nearly two years ago. I refer to the slanderous article that appeared in – and was subsequently pulled from -- a Routledge Press anthology. Subsequently, CES leadership initiated a frenzy of poorly conceptualized and poorly communicated responses that have made a travesty of due process, fairness, and intellectual community. They’ve also made a travesty of the notion of principled and even-handed leadership. 

I don’t say this rhetorically or hyperbolically. As a member of the External Monitoring Unit at CES these past five years, I – with my international colleagues -- have been tasked with having annual meetings with CES research groups and their individual members and with CES leadership teams. We’ve read numerous reports and proposals generated by CES. And we’ve written reports on our observations. We have observed both the tremendous accomplishments of the Center you founded and led until five or six years ago and your own remarkable international esteem across a range of countries and peoples. And so it is with intense dismay that I’ve observed the way in which CES leadership has grossly mismanaged an admittedly difficult situation. Intentionally – or, perhaps unintentionally, though I have profound doubts about this latter -- they have encouraged and participated in a frenzied rush to judgement by academic and political institutions and the media based on rumor, innuendo, and unsubstantiated claims. The last two years have been a stunning lesson – as if we needed one – in vengeful virtue signaling, bad faith, and dishonesty.

It is not only in Portugal or at CES that veritable witch hunts have seized public attention and had devastating consequences for those deemed guilty because accused -- without proof or occasion for self-defense. (John Putnam Demos’ work on the European and U.S. witch trials, Entertaining Satan, and other ferocious more-contemporary parallel furies of targeting, The Enemy Within are sobering reminders of how such frenzies work.)

And there’s no little irony in the situation which targets you and your work. For you have always drawn attention to the ways in which patriarchy works in conjunction with colonialism and capitalism. Nonetheless, in the aftermath of the mounting fury of slanderous accusations, the damage to your international standing caused by the furor of defamation is severe. Even those persons and institutions who know the accusations to be slanderous are silent out of fear of being accused themselves – as institutions or persons. (The media firestorm and public defamation that is occurring is, again ironically, some kind of perverse testimony to how powerful your ideas and work are. There’s an awful lot of time, money, and energy being spent in hurling accusations against you.) And so invitations to you are withdrawn; publication of your work are delayed; prestigious awards are threatened.

Because things have been so slanderously distorted, so blown out of proportion, I only hope that the pages of documentation that you’ve assembled to defend yourself will be carefully read and considered. It is critical that charges and judgements be based on careful review of evidence and documentation. If it might be on any help, I will happily invoke the Greek goddesses of Justice, Θέμις and her daughter Δίκη, when I return home to Greece. But please let me know if there’s anything more I can do.

Finally, I come to the second reason I write to you – which derives unequivocally from the first. I know you have recently resigned as Emeritus Director of CES. And subsequently, Graça Capinha, Joao Arriscado Nunes, Antonio Sousa Ribeiro, Adriana Bebiano, and Maria Irene Ramalho also resigned. I, in turn, can no longer in good faith continue to work with what CES has become -- another institutional instrument of repression and injustice, of "trial" by hysterical rumor and unsubstantiated accusation. (I’m deeply sorry to say this.) So then, I want to let you know that I am going to publicly resign from the CES External Monitoring Unit. As soon as I return to Greece, I’ll write a letter to the current director, cc’ing all relevant CES leaders. I no longer have any hope that I and my colleagues on the EMU will be able to persuade the CES leadership teams and the signatories to the letters that there are other fairer and more balanced ways of engaging.

Again, I’m deeply sorry to say all this. And in spite of all, I send you my very best wishes for a better new year. In dark times, as Brecht says, we’ll still have singing.

Mary N. Layoun,

Emerita Professor of Comparative Literature

University of Wisconsin, Madison