Clearing Up the Harassment Mystique

HALFWAY THROUGH READing the case studies chapter of The Lecherous Professor, a sensitive and pioneering analysis of the problem of sexual harassment at universities. I caught myself thinking. "Thank God I'm not pretty enough to have ever had to deal with any of this."

I knew at the time, vaguely, that there was something subtly wrong with that reaction and two chapters later I found out exactly what it was The authors, Billie Wright Dzeich and Linda Weiner, two administrators at the University of Cincinnati, are more than just clear thinking, reasonable and forceful, they are also comprehensive. What I had thought was a personal and idiosyncratic reaction, they have identified as a syndrome and proceeded to debunk as one of the many tangled and self destructive myths associated with the messy issue of sexual harassment.

A common explanation for sexual harassment on campus is that faculty are daily bombarded with the temptation of young women who are so physically desirable that they cannot be ignored. People typically respond to a report of sexual harassment by asking if the victim is pretty. After hearing a coed's complaint, deans and department heads frequently express shock at a faculty member's behavior by commenting. "She isn't even that attractive. "The attempt to establish the woman's beauty as a cause of sexual harassment diverts attention from the real power issue. It is a standard was of discounting the professor's responsibility and shifting the blame to the victim.

The Lecherous Professor is a landmark work not only because it is the first comprehensive and fully analytic study of an increasingly volatile problem, but also because it moves beyond the mere of outrage. Along with gathering facts, figures and examples of harassment, it also scrutinizes the structure of universities and the academic life style in general to try to determine him so seemingly shocking an occurrence--a professor coercing a student with the use of sexual pressure--can in fact be so pervasive. As Dzeich and Weiner understand, it is not enough simply to cry. "Faculty harassers are evil, universities are callous--this must be stopped!" One must try to root out the problem through understanding.

Why would highly intelligent men in positions of authority misuse that authority for sexual purposes, and with the frequency the evidence is beginning to reveal? This is the baffling underside of the controversies--at Harvard and elsewhere--over how to punish offenders. An administrator who argues, as Dean of the Faculty Henry Rosovsky did two years ago, that the nature of the punishment meted out to a convicted sexual harasser should not be revealed to the harassment victim is expressing something deeper than just paternalistic bias. To some extent, he is also implying that harassment is somehow "natural"--a weakness which the faculty member has succumbed to, but which should not be allowed to ruin his career or otherwise affect the past of his life. Dzeich and Weiner show how the pervasive myths about college women's beauty, voluptuousness and often sexual looseness, in fiction and is much academic office chatter, help give professors this impression that the young women in their classes are somehow there for the taking. In another compelling formulation, the authors take account not only of the academic profession's particular setup, which is ideal for the harasser who is so frequently given sole power over, for instance, a graduate student's dissertation grade or the rank of honors she will receive--but also, of the pressures which could lead stagnating middle-aged faculty members to try to restore their self-respect with sexual power-trips. Most daring and compelling of all, the authors cite psychological theories which postulate that much of an adult's self-image is formed in high school; they then extend that observation to point out that many men intelligent enough to have chosen academia as a career were probably ostracized in high school as wimps, lost out on social life to the football stars, and have carried a sense of sexual inadequacy or insecurity all the way into middle life and their contacts with younger women.

ALL THIS IS NOT TO SAY that The Lecherous Professor is compassionate towards sexual harassers. Far from it--but the very strength of the book is the manner in which Dzeich and Weiner restrain their tone to one of reasoned rational analysis, letting the words of victims and the stories of cold reactions to the scandals within universities create a sense of outrage on their own. Their stories run the gamut from verbal harassment to threats of assault. One woman from a community college reported.

One day I was walking across campus with a t-shirt that said "California" on the front I met one of my professors, and he just stared at me for a minute before saying. "My, I've been to California but I don't remember its being so mountainous." I felt the teacher was being very silly...I felt like saying. "Doesn't your wife please you?" I was angry because I wasn't coming on to him.

Other advances are more serious and sometimes even a bit kinky:

Dr. (name deleted) asked me to come to his office to help me rear-range his books. Maybe it was my fault for going in the first place. He has these high bookcases, and the only way you can reach them is to stand on this little stool. I remember I had on this tight blue skirt that made it hard for me to step off and on that stool but the skirt was pretty long. After a while, he got up and walked over and started bumping the stool. At first I thought he was just kidding around, and I laughed. Then I got sort of scared because he almost knocked me over. I told him to be careful and that I didn't think he knew I was really scared. "I know you are but the only way to keep from falling is for you to go about your business while I lay down on the floor here and watch you." I think that's exactly how he said it. I was afraid to leave, so I just kept on taking books down while he laid on the floor and looked up my dress at my underpants...I guess I should have reported it to somebody, but I didn't know who. No one would have believed it anyway.

Other examples in the chapter have a familiar sound, like a Harvard freshman's report of her poetry professor's repeated attempts to proposition her in and out of class in the spring of 1982.

Dzeich and Weiner do not shy away from the more complex cases of sexual harassment, such as the ones in which the student gives in to the professor's advances or even becomes emotionally involved with him; not knowing that she is one of a long line of victims. A male student affairs dean in Ohio expresses his frustration at watching such affairs go on:

Women are sincerely attracted to him, fall in love with him. If I were to try to speak to them and say, "You're just a part of a pattern I've watched for ten years, they'd tell me it's none of my business, and they'd be right. When the affair breaks up, maybe they just feel the normal heartbreak over the end of a love affair, but I get so angry seeing the same pattern over and over again.

In small isolated college campuses, women report similar patterns in which students have had to watch the professor go on to the next student affair, sometimes even with someone in the same dorm. Because the affairs were fairly visible and commonplace, there was little attempt to put a stop to the professor's pattern.

Most impressively, the authors of The Lecherous Professor do not shy away from admitting that the issue of sexual harassment is complex and sometimes ambiguous. In addition to the perceptive analysis of harassers' motives and possible psychological makeup, they include chapters on female faculty members who do not feel themselves in a position to intervene on behalf of female students; on the politics of lodging and following through complaints, and on the difficulty of related problems such as "sexual hassle," or sexist and offensive remarks in the classroom, which do not threaton directly but reinforce women students' awareness of their lack of maneuvering power. Nevertheless, their basic insight rings out clearly: such confusion is no excuse to let harassment continue. Nor is the issue so confusing, as some college administrators like to insist, that the ambiguity is an excuse for not taking decisive action:

Actually, sexual harassment is not that difficult to recognize. Sexual harassment is a professor talking about having a "magic tongue." It is grabbing a student's breast or lying on the floor and staring up her skirt...It is not, in the vast majority of cases, ambiguous behavior. It is not, as some imply, a figment of a students' imagination or a weapon women use to damage men's reputations. These worries are usually expressed by men and women who have had little experience dealing with harassment cases or who impose confusion on themselves.

AT THE HEART OF Dzeich and Weiner's argument is a completely rational assumption: an intelligent professional can be expected to tell the difference between friendly contact with a student and inappropriate sexual pressure based on his authority. The myth of confusion and of ambiguity, is a strong weapon against harassment victims, but confusion can be cleared up. Books like this are an essential step in this progression towards clarity.