The Week: What You Need to Know About the Past 7 Days

The fact that women face sexual harassment in academe is not news. But doesn’t that make the fact that it’s still so pervasive, and so pernicious, even more inexcusable?

A. Hope Jahren’s opinion article in The New York Times this month could serve as a catalyst on this issue. Ms. Jahren, a professor of geobiology at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, wrote about the harassment that her female peers in the sciences typically face from male colleagues in a way that reads almost like notes on field observations.

She described the initial disclosure of feelings — usually through email, and often acknowledged by their author as inappropriate. She cataloged the surprise and anxiety such contact creates, and the impulse to ignore it in hopes that it will go away. She noted how such overtures tend to build toward social invitations, and toward uninvited physical contact, and the trepidation that builds in the subject of these attentions as they become bolder. She discussed the powerlessness that many female students and researchers feel in the shadow of powerful male faculty members, and as parts of a system that often responds poorly, or not at all, to complaints about such behavior. She detailed the cost to science of sexual harassment: talented women who leave research and teaching rather than continue to face a hostile environment.

Her evidence is anecdotal, but it is consistent. And she wrote that such unwelcome advances “have been encountered by every single woman I know.”

But what is most surprising, and depressing, about Ms. Jahren’s description of sexual harassment in the sciences is how utterly unsurprising it is. The pattern of the attempted seduction she described resembles the accusations leveled against male professors for years, including in recent high-profile cases such as that of Geoffrey W. Marcy, an astronomer at the University of California at Berkeley who resigned last year after repeated accusations that he violated the institution’s sexual-harassment policy.

Many colleges are now embroiled in difficult conversations about campus racial climate, and how to improve it. Those conversations were sparked by a wave of contentious protests. It is difficult to imagine female graduate students and faculty members taking to the campus quad with signs and bullhorns and demands. But until administrators and faculty members as a class take these problems seriously, attacking them at their very root — where future professors are trained — there will be no remedy for women in science, nor for the heartbreakingly resigned tone of Ms. Jahren’s piece.

Scapegoated?

Neither academe, nor the University of Missouri, has heard the last of Melissa A. Click. The American Association of University Professors announced last week that it would investigate the decision by the university’s Board of Curators last month to fire Ms. Click. Censure of the institution for violating her academic freedom is among the possible outcomes.

Ms. Click, who was an assistant professor of communication, was catapulted to national notoriety last fall after video of her attempting to block a student journalist from a protest by black students went viral. She apologized, but state policy makers made it clear that they wanted her gone. More than 100 of her colleagues signed a letter expressing their support for Ms. Click. No one at the university ever lodged a formal complaint against her, which meant that her actions were not subject to official internal review. The Board of Curators took matters into its own hands.

Ms. Click, who is appealing her firing, applauded the AAUP’s decision to investigate. In her first public statement since the board’s decision, she accused the curators of listening to “conservative voices” in the legislature, and said that she had become a scapegoat for “standing with students who have drawn attention to the issue of overt racism at the University of Missouri.”

Refugees

Sara Goldrick-Rab is well known within the worlds of sociology and education policy, and she’s verging on national renown, thanks to her vocal activism for lower-income students. That makes her departure from the University of Wisconsin at Madison noteworthy. But even more notable is the reason she provided for leaving — concerns over the future of tenure, and academic freedom, in Wisconsin.

Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, engineered the removal of tenure protections from state law last year. The university’s Board of Regents subsequently passed internal policies designed to bolster tenure protections. Ms. Goldrick-Rab, who inspired calls for her dismissal last year for mentioning similarities between Mr. Walker and Adolf Hitler on Twitter, dismisses the system’s new policies with the hashtag "#FakeTenure.” In a blog post announcing her move to a new position at Temple University, she writes that “firing me would be quite easy” at Wisconsin now, thanks to the compromised state of tenure, and that many of her tenured colleagues at Madison are now “terrified sheep.”

Ms. Goldrick-Rab’s announcement comes on the heels of news that Larycia A. Hawkins, a political scientist, will join the faculty at the University of Virginia after being put on leave by Wheaton College, an evangelical Christian college in Illinois, for stating that Muslims and Christians “worship the same God,” a view it found inconsistent with its statement of faith.

Frederick R. (Fritz) Steiner recently announced he would step down as dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin in favor of a position at the University of Pennsylvania in part because of a new Texas law that will allow students to carry firearms on campus.

It isn’t uncommon for distinguished faculty members to be lured to new positions even when everything is rosy, and Mr. Steiner, for one, has said that factors other than guns played into his decision. But the recent high-profile departures hint at a possible exodus of scholars, who are often politically liberal, from states and institutions increasingly influenced by conservative policy makers and administrators. Of course, scholars with lower profiles may not have so many options.

Symbolic Gestures

Harvard University became the latest major institution to alter a key part of its physical identity to accommodate concerns about honoring a dubious historical figure. Martha L. Minow, dean of the Harvard Law School, announced that she would recommend the school retire its shield — its de facto logo — which was based on a bookplate belonging to the family of Isaac Royall Jr., an early donor to the law school and a slaveholder.

Meanwhile, Stanford University is taking perhaps the next logical step in dealing with the recent tide of questions over how to handle contentious symbols. The university’s leadership announced this month that it would establish a committee to devise principles for considering and renaming streets and buildings on campus. The new committee’s first task will be to tackle the case of Junípero Serra, a Roman Catholic priest who established missions throughout California and was elevated to sainthood by Pope Francis last year. The Stanford Undergraduate Senate introduced a bill this year to consider renaming a street on the campus that bears Father Serra’s name, because of his association with the cultural repression and genocide of Native Americans in California.

Testing, Testing ...

Hundreds of thousands of high-school students took a new version of the venerable SAT exam this month. A survey of more than 8,000 people who took the new test preferred it over the previous version by a factor of 6 to 1, according to the College Board, which owns and designs the test. Students’ own unfiltered reactions on social media were mixed to the point of unhelpful equivocalness. Colleges will have to make their own judgments on how well the new test measures college readiness when the students who took the new test start showing up in their classrooms.

Lee Gardner writes about the management of colleges and universities, higher-education marketing, and other topics. Follow him on Twitter @_lee_g, or email him at lee.gardner@chronicle.com.