Here’s What Sexual Harassment Looks Like in Higher Education

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As the momentum of the #metoo campaign brings more allegations of sexual harassment to the surface, people are looking around their workplaces and professional networks disturbed, but not necessarily shocked at the stories emerging.

Across many industries, sexual harassment persists because people (usually men) with clout can get away with it, and victims (typically women) either are disregarded or keep quiet, fearing they will be. But higher education has additional risk factors that make the problem particularly pervasive.

Stark power differentials, especially between professors and students. The intensity of intellectual exchange. A sense of entitlement by a star faculty member, with tenure and maybe an endowed chair, who is revered in his field. A potential protégé with what feels like a make-or-break publication, grant, or job on the line. Boozy conferences, secluded labs, remote research sites.

Colleges and universities have long harbored influential academics who’ve seemed confident that they could target students or junior colleagues and never be held to account. They may have gotten away with it because of their research money, political capital, or prestige.

Firing a tenured professor often means months of hearings and sometimes lawsuits that an institution would prefer to avoid. Colleagues who suspect there’s something creepy about sexual banter with students might look the other way if the offender could one day serve on a tenure and promotion committee or chair the department.

“Whenever you have a working relationship in which the risks are really high of making a complaint and the rewards are low, that’s a problem,” says Justine E. Tinkler, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Georgia who has studied sexual harassment and how training programs affect behavior. A graduate student targeted by a big-deal professor, or the new hire who is aware of it, may want to speak up, but at what cost?

That calculation may be changing as more people come forward with expectations that the college will take action. In recent years, accusers have taken down Geoffrey W. Marcy, an astronomer at the University of California at Berkeley, and Colin McGinn, a prominent philosopher at the University of Miami. Now, with the fallout from the Weinstein scandal and the galvanizing momentum of the #metoo hashtag, American gender politics finds itself at an uncomfortable crossroads. And nowhere is that sense of unease more palpable than in the campus workplace.

It remains to be seen how those developments will accelerate the complaints. But over the past several weeks, at least a half-dozen accusations of sexual misconduct by male faculty members have emerged or gotten renewed attention.

An Eye-Opening Study

Any tendency to shrug off incidents in an academic setting as relatively tame may not hold up to a new study of nearly 300 sexual-harassment accusations on campuses. It finds that most implicate more-serious behaviors, with more than half involving physical contact.

“Few of those allegations involved things like hugging or kissing or anything that could be argued to be sort of accidental or affectionate,” says Nancy Chi Cantalupo, an assistant professor of law at Barry University. She and William C. Kidder, associate vice president and chief of staff at Sonoma State University, wrote an article about the study that is scheduled for publication next spring in the Utah Law Review.

“The majority of the cases we looked at indicated that the touching was sexual in nature and ranged from sexual groping all the way to criminal levels of sexual assault, and even some domestic violence-like behaviors.”

That pattern, she says, runs counter to the narrative that the current push against sexual harassment threatens academic freedom. It’s not what professors are saying as much as what they’re doing.

And they’re doing it a lot. One in 10 female graduate students at major research institutions report being sexually harassed by a faculty member, according to a study by the Association of American Universities.

Some offenders are serial harassers who, if found out, resign and quietly move on to another campus. They may never be stopped because their victims, who sometimes suffer for years from self-doubt and shame, don’t speak out. Some get so discouraged they leave academe.

More women in academe will feel emboldened now to share their past experiences, or to protest a hand on the knee or an unwelcome embrace, Erin E. Buzuvis, a professor of law at Western New England University and moderator of the Title IX Blog, expects.

“The thing that keeps sexual-harassment victims from speaking is the fear of not being believed or of their complaints being trivialized,” she says. “There is a lot of momentum now for believing people’s reports,” she says, rather than assuming that someone so prominent or well-regarded couldn’t possibly have done such a thing.

But even if someone comes forward to report sexual misconduct, a star professor often escapes serious consequences, as anecdotes from across higher education have shown.

That’s what Seo-Young Chu says happened when, as a 21-year-old graduate student in English at Stanford University, she accused her former professor, Jay Fliegelman, of raping her and telling her that he controlled her future. Ms. Chu is now an associate professor of English at Queens College of the City University of New York. Mr. Fliegelman, an influential scholar of American literature and cultural studies, was suspended without pay and banned from the department for two years following the incident, in 2000, but the reasons for his punishment were kept under wraps until recently. He died in 2007.

A researcher wrote in Nature magazine last year about being sexually harassed by a former postdoctoral supervisor and complaining to his university that, despite her objections, he had repeatedly made lewd comments and tried to kiss her. He was eventually found guilty of research misconduct and inappropriate behavior, including sexual harassment, but wasn’t fired, she wrote. The woman, who wrote anonymously and opted not to name him, said she had been advised to keep the outcome of the case confidential.

The secrecy that surrounds sexual harassment contributes to a whisper network that activates when people want to warn one another whom to stay away from.

As women move beyond that network and social-media sites like Twitter and Facebook, they sometimes seek a more public platform, like Buzzfeed News, which published leaked details about the investigation into Mr. Marcy.

Legal Standard Falls Short

Most anti-harassment policies are ineffective because they focus mainly on avoiding legal liability, according to a report issued last year by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The legal standard for sexual harassment is behavior so frequent or severe that it creates a hostile work environment, or results in someone being demoted or fired in retaliation. But there’s plenty of behavior that falls short of that threshold that can make people uncomfortable or lead to harassment. Sometimes such examples make their way into campus anti-harassment training.

Poorly designed training can make men feel more resentful toward women, says Ms. Tinkler, the Georgia sociologist. Sessions can also cause offense by reinforcing gender stereotypes “of men being more powerful and aggressive, and women more vulnerable and weak,” Ms. Tinkler says.

It’s sometimes hard to say when a remark or action crosses the line into harassment. But even if the behavior just makes someone uncomfortable, the offender should be told, victim advocates say.

The message doesn’t have to come from the person on the receiving end of the squeeze or sleazy compliment. Bystander-intervention policies that include men in calling out sexual aggressors or clueless curmudgeons can help avoid an “us vs. them” mentality, Ms. Tinkler says.

Along with increased awareness of harassment, a backlash is brewing, warns Laura Kipnis, a professor in the department of radio, television and film at Northwestern University and the author of Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, Even before the Weinstein reports, Ms. Kipnis says she had been hearing from male professors who were reluctant to advise female graduate students because they feared something they said or did could be misinterpreted.

At a time when universities are experiencing what she calls “a heightened climate of sexual paranoia,” a kiss on the cheek at a holiday party can become grounds for investigation, she says, and once accused, a professor will have a hard time shaking the reputation as a harasser.

That’s not to say that bad things aren’t happening and that some people don’t need to be fired, Ms. Kipnis says.

“I have no doubt sexual harassment is pervasive, and in cases where there’s groping or it’s quid pro quo,” she says, “those people should be out.”

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.