He Makes a Joke. She Isn’t Laughing: ‘Lingerie’ Comment in Elevator Leads to Uproar Among Scholars.

He says he was joking when he asked to be let off an elevator at the ladies’ lingerie department. A female scholar who was attending the same annual meeting of the International Studies Association was not amused, and neither was the association when she complained.

Now his refusal to formally apologize has touched off the latest skirmish in the #MeToo battles rocking academe. At issue is whether a comment made in jest rises to the level of a punishable offense, and what happens when a complaint some deem as trivial results in a vicious online backlash against the offended party.

The fuss started when Richard Ned Lebow, a professor of political theory at King’s College London, and Simona Sharoni, a professor of women’s and gender studies at Merrimack College, ended up in the same crowded elevator during a conference at a Hilton in San Francisco last month.

She said she offered to press the floor buttons for people in the elevator, whom she described as mostly conference attendees and all, except one other woman, white middle-aged men. Instead of saying a floor, Lebow smiled and asked for the women’s lingerie department “and all his buddies laughed,” Sharoni wrote in a complaint, the details of which he disputed, to the association later that day.

“After they walked out, the woman standing next to me turned to me and said, ‘I wonder if we should have told them that it is no longer acceptable to make these jokes!” she said in her complaint.

Sharoni, who wrote in her complaint that she has experienced sexual harassment in academe in the past and was shaken by the incident, said it took her a while to figure out that Lebow thought it was funny “to make a reference to men shopping for lingerie while attending an academic conference. I am still trying to come to terms with the fact that we froze and didn’t confront him,” she wrote.

After glancing at Lebow’s name tag, Sharoni says she went back to her hotel room to check out the association’s code of conduct. She then wrote to Mark A. Boyer, the association’s executive director. He forwarded the complaint to the group’s Committee on Professional Rights and Responsibilities, which determined that Lebow had violated the conduct code.

Lebow insists it never should have gotten to that point because he tried to resolve the problem informally, as the association’s conduct code recommends. After being informed that his conduct was under investigation, Lebow wrote Sharoni an email assuring her that “I certainly had no desire to insult women or to make you feel uncomfortable.” He suggested that Sharoni, who was born in Romania and raised in Israel, might have misinterpreted his remark. When he was young, in the 1950s, he said, it was a “standard gag line” to ask the elevator operator for the hardware or lingerie floor as though one were in a department store.

“Like you, I am strongly opposed to the exploitation, coercion, or humiliation of women,” Lebow wrote. “As such evils continue, it seems to me to make sense to direct our attention to real offenses, not those that are imagined or marginal. By making a complaint to ISA that I consider frivolous — and I expect, will be judged this way by the ethics committee — you may be directing time and effort away from the real offenses that trouble us both.”

It turns out, that’s not the way the association read the matter. Boyer informed Lebow that his remarks had been deemed “offensive and inappropriate.” An even “more serious violation,” than the elevator remarks, Boyer wrote, was “that you chose to reach out to Prof. Sharoni, and termed her complaint ‘frivolous.’”

Lebow was told to write an “unequivocal apology” to Sharoni and submit a written copy by May 15 to the association’s executive committee. The apology should focus on Lebow’s actions, rather than Sharoni’s perceptions of them, it said, adding that if he failed to comply, the executive committee would consider appropriate sanctions.

Lebow refused. He also sent an email to colleagues calling his treatment “a horrifying and chilling example of political correctness” that “encourages others to censor their remarks for fear of retribution.” In an email to The Chronicle on Sunday, Lebow said he made the joke “to relieve the slight claustrophobia I felt in such a crowded lift.”

He said it was a man, not a woman, who asked for the floors and that the other men in the elevator were not his “buddies” as she had described them. He wasn’t smiling, he said, and she wouldn’t have known if he was because he was standing in the back and she was in front of him.

Lebow added that he felt he was the “aggrieved party,” as someone who has supported, mentored, and coauthored with women in the profession for 53 years.

Boyer said on Sunday that he couldn’t comment on the pending case.

Sharoni told The Chronicle that the real chilling effect will be against people who experience and report sexual harassment.

“For decades, women and other marginalized groups in the academy had to put up with white men who decided what counts as a violation and what is ‘frivolous,’” she wrote in an email. “As someone who has dedicated her life to confronting sexism (and other forms of discrimination and oppression) in academic spaces, I cannot and will not remain silent when misogyny is at play.”

This incident was first reported in a Washington Post column by Ruth Marcus, and as word of it spread, Sharoni said she started receiving dozens of emails and comments on her web page. Most included sexual innuendo or the word “lingerie,” and some commented on her physical appearance. She forwarded the most troubling to Merrimack officials, who reached out to the campus police. James Chiavelli, chief of staff to the president at Merrimack College, said on Sunday that the campus police are monitoring the reaction.

“The college supports our faculty members and we’re pleased ISA does, as well,” he said in an interview on Sunday. “I have to say that I despise the anonymity social media gives people to reach out with the kind of vile, misogynistic comments and threats she’s been receiving.”

Among those who came to Sharoni’s defense were Craig N. Murphy, a professor of political science at Wellesley College and a former president of the International Studies Association He said he believes in the association’s code of conduct and its grievance procedure and that he is disappointed in Lebow’s unwillingness to deliver “a sincere apology.”

“Personally, I can understand why someone hearing the elevator remark would take offense,” Murphy wrote in an email on Sunday. “Sure, it’s an old joke, one my father used to repeat in the 1960s, maybe even into the early 1970s, which was when he started to learn about what he called ‘male chauvinism,’” Murphy wrote. “I still tell some of my dad’s stupid jokes, and I hope I’d be gracious if someone pointed out that, as a result, I’d mindlessly said something offensive. I hope that, in time, Ned will see it that way.”

Update (5/7/2018, 9:15 a.m.): This article has been updated to include a credit to the Washington Post columnist who broke the story.

Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.