‘A Complete Culture of Sexualization’: 1,600 Stories of Harassment in Higher Ed

Karen L. Kelsky founded The Professor Is In, a consultancy that gives academics career advice. In 2014 she created an online survey about graduate-student debt that received hundreds of responses, with some students reporting that they owed in the range of $200,000 to $300,000. Respondents found sharing the information therapeutic, and, as Ms. Kelsky says, it changed the conversation around graduate school.

Now, as news breaks daily about sexual harassment in seemingly every industry, including higher education, Ms. Kelsky decided to apply the approach again. She created a survey in which academics and former academics can submit their stories about sexual misconduct, and their responses will be shared anonymously online.

On Tuesday, 12 days after the survey was posted, more than 1,600 people had submitted stories. Academics wrote about being groped or kissed by Ph.D. advisers, being subjected to sexual comments in front of peers, being stalked by a professor.

Ms. Kelsky spoke with The Chronicle (to which she regularly contributes advice columns) about what she’s seeing in the responses and in the #metoo movement more generally. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. How did you decide on what questions to ask and what format to present it in?

A. When this #MeToo moment happened, I was just thinking about all the stories I’ve heard over my career and especially in my business, working with some 6,000 or 7,000 clients. I was thinking about the systematic elements of academia that make it rife with harassment and abuse of all kinds and the protection of perpetrators. I thought back to my Ph.D.-debt survey and realized in some ways that I’m situated to provide an anonymous space for victims, primarily women, to share their experiences and know they’re not alone. And for the field to learn the scope of this terrible scourge.

It came to me on a Thursday night. On Friday morning I created the survey, and within a day I had 500 responses.

Q. Did you anticipate it would be that many?

A. I am not surprised at the number. I am surprised at the severity of many of the stories. I expected more quid pro quo or handsy passes made after drinking at an open bar at a conference. I didn’t expect as many stories of rape and stalking and abuse.

I am also surprised at the pervasiveness of a complete culture of sexualization that has undermined the experience of so many women in academic training. The things that are not actual attacks such as rape or molestation, but are, “Well, gosh, I love it when you wear those heels.” Or, “I could barely take my eyes off you during your defense.” These things reduce women to their bodies, and it’s so undermining. What they keep saying over and over is, “I thought he supported me for my work. But once that one comment was said, I had to question everything. Was he supporting me because of access to my body, because of sexual attraction?”

Q. You mentioned systematic elements of academe that make it rife with harassment. What are those elements?

A. First of all, professors have access to a constantly renewing supply of very young undergraduate students who generally have left home for the first time and are exploring lots of different things in terms of their sexuality as well as their intellectual ideas and emotional ideas. And they, professors, can really insinuate themselves inappropriately in young women’s development.

At the graduate-training level, the relationship is so intimate, and you spend endless hours in an office alone with your adviser or in the lab with your professor. The line between your professional work and your personal life becomes very blurry, because academia is much more a way of life than it is a job.

Departments routinely have departmental happy hours. You have wine-and-cheese receptions after visitors. You go out to dinner together all the time. Scholarly conferences always have at least one open bar, if not several. Interviews for a tenure-track job take place in hotel rooms.

It’s profoundly hierarchical. So all of those who are situated lower, like a grad student, Ph.D. candidate, a new Ph.D., or a job seeker, are completely dependent on the sponsorship and goodwill of those who are higher — the tenured professors, the deans, and the provost. If they offend them, they lose access to their funding, to their enrollment, to their letters of recommendation. They basically lose access to their ability to continue in their chosen field.

Q. Do you plan to do anything else with the survey responses you’ve received?

A. I’m getting a number of inquiries from scholars who are hoping to work with the material, and I’m vetting those very carefully, because I didn’t do this to make these voices the subject of academic research. I did this for women, victims, to be able to move forward with their lives.

I want to remove plausible deniability for institutions. Columbia University was on there 25 times as of the day before yesterday [December 10]. I’m very glad people are naming the institutions.

Any name of an individual, I remove as soon as I see it. I do invite people to email me with the names if they want to. I have over 100 emails with names. I’m keeping an archive of those, and I do plan to use those names to potentially connect victims of the same individuals.

People are emailing me, naming names, saying, “I just want you to know. That’s all I want. I just want to write an email saying this guy’s name. I have kept this a secret for 10 years.” They’re not saying, “I’m going to take him to court.” They’re saying, “I just don’t want to carry this burden around alone anymore.”

Some people are going to go to court, and I hope they do. But I think other women are going to set down a burden and move on with their lives.

Q. Is there a scenario that you envision in which you do share information with scholars? What might that look like? And what do you definitely not want it to look like?

A. I want to make sure that the spirit of the research is in line with the spirit of the survey. The survey was not created to be scientific in any way. There are many criticisms social scientists will have and have already told me about. Those, I’m sure, are very valid. I don’t care. It wasn’t meant to be a research study.

I care about institutional interventions. I want institutional change. I want deans and provosts to completely revamp their handling of sexual-harassment claims. If my survey can play a role in that, then I will have succeeded.

Q. Anything sticking out, like patterns or themes?

A. What I keep seeing is that women are getting hounded out of the academy, and we’re losing their contributions, and that’s a tragedy. Even if they stay in the academic world, their research has been compromised. They had to change advisers. They lost their funding because they had to move from one institution to another. They gave up a multiyear package.

Even if they stay — so many tenured professors have contributed — they talk about their continuing PTSD, continuing depression, anxiety. So people are living emotionally compromised lives because of this.

Nell Gluckman writes about faculty issues and other topics in higher education. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.