When Students Harass Professors

About a decade ago, while adjuncting in New York City, I spent a semester scared of a student.

One fall day after class, he cornered me. As he waited for other students to trail out of the room, he paced along the back wall, clutching Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric. He was shaking. Once the others had left, he shoved the text in my face, his body inches from mine. “Is this a poem?” he asked, repeating the question with which I had opened class. “Is this piece of shit a poem?”

“What’s your point?” I asked, trying to back away.

“Because I don’t. I don’t think it is,” he responded, staring at me before stalking out of the room.

I waited until he left to cry. Before that incident, he wrote on the course website a series of blog posts describing violent, sexual urges. “This woman really wanted me to punch her in the face,” he wrote of the poet Marianne Moore, “… she made me want to spartan kick a hole through her chest.” Of the medieval poem “Lanval” he wrote, “I’d rather take a shit in my own mouth and then have oral sex with myself, leaving my vagina yeast infected, than to ever read this pile of trash again.” When I gave students the option to post a creative piece inspired by one of the course texts, he wrote an additional scene for Annie Baker’s 2013 play The Flick in which one of the characters undoes his belt, ties it around another character’s neck, beats her with The Oxford English Dictionary, and ejaculates all over her.

I was told, initially, that those incidents weren’t my fault, but that the severity of the problem was hard to assess. I was told not to rush to judgment. I was told to write up the incidents “in the tone of a nature documentary.” I was told, when the student refused to apologize, that an apology wasn’t necessary because the “student-teacher relationship isn’t built on that degree of intimacy.” I was told not to disable his ability to post. I was told to model the behavior I wanted to see from him, “respectful and professional.” I was told to submit my syllabi and blog-post prompts for review. I was told to set clearer rules for communication in my classroom. I was told to “put boundaries around his interactions” with me. I was told to look into therapy. I was told this doesn’t happen to tenured faculty members.

“Bon courage,” one of my supervisors signed off in an email.

The student continued to write sadistic blog posts, each more shocking than the last. I continued to forward them to my supervisors. I was eventually told to take my chair off all future communications; he was too busy. Soon, it felt as if I had fallen in the department’s esteem. I was not asked back to help direct a program I treasured. I was honestly surprised when the department kept me on the adjunct schedule.

I suppose my fears about the student ended up being in vain. He never became physically violent with me or one of his peers. The semester ended, and I never again saw him sitting in front of me, staring, silent.

When writing this essay, I looked up the official definition of sexual harassment, to make sure that I had, in fact, been sexually harassed by this student. Illegal sexual harassment, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, is “so frequent or severe that it creates a hostile or offensive work environment.” That certainly fit my experience. The student in question submitted sadomasochistic writing to me, over and over, without my consent. He stared at me, looked me up and down, turned routine discussions to sexual topics, and told unwanted sexual jokes and stories. And yet, I felt like the problem.

If you look up the verb “to harass” in The Oxford English Dictionary, you’ll find that it involves a process of “using up and wearing out.” To harass is to tire, to exhaust through repeated attacks. One of the lesser-known definitions of harass is “to scrape,” suggesting small, repeated acts of violence that add up to deeper wounds. Everyone I interviewed for this piece described this process, no matter the severity of the harassment they had faced. A kind of wearing away.

That sort of abuse most often targets women, people of color, younger instructors, and those with less experience or fewer credentials. Research also suggests that Black women in positions of authority are at particular risk of being sexually harassed by students due to “intertwined expectations regarding sexuality and servitude.” As the legal scholar Angela Onwuachi-Willig puts it, female faculty of color are “never presumed competent.” Some students have difficulty acknowledging authority when it appears in the form of a woman, a person of color, or a faculty member whom they perceive as inexperienced. Often harassment is an attempt to assert dominance.

Instructors I spoke to reported everything from students’ sending barrages of emails — “extremely flattering (calling me a goddess) or borderline threatening” — to stalking, to threats of harm. Those same sources described coming up against administrative walls over and over when they tried to complain. As the feminist scholar Sara Ahmed notes in Complaint!, her 2021 book on harassment and bullying in higher education, “making a complaint is never completed by a single action: It often requires you do more and more work. It is exhausting, especially given that what you complain about is already exhausting.”

One instructor told me that “until [the student] broke a wall by slamming a door” in the classroom, administrators refused to listen. Another reported that the office of access and equity had told her that, because she did not have a “no-stalking clause” on her syllabus, she had to continue teaching the student who had stalked her. One faculty member told me that she had left her dream job — and a lab she had built over the last 20 years — because the administration had done nothing to stop a student from harassing her. Multiple instructors eventually turned to the police for help.

A graduate student at a prestigious Southern university told me that one of her students would make arguments along the lines of “Black people deserved to be enslaved,” wait until she — a woman of color — was alone after class, and then follow her, demanding she acquiesce in his beliefs. She was so scared of possible violence that she bought mace, yet the administration redirected her endlessly to different people and offices. She was eventually told, through her chair, that the administration did not find the student at fault, as he had not violated any rule of conduct.

In a particularly egregious account, an assistant lecturer in Britain told me that she had removed a student from her Zoom class after she, and the rest of the class, heard him masturbating. When she reported the incident, her supervisor’s most immediate concern was that she had denied the student the classroom time he had paid for. When the student masturbated during class a second time, the instructor only muted him, fearful of overstepping. She felt “petty” for being upset. Finally, she mentioned what had happened to her Ph.D. supervisors, who were appalled. She then reported the student’s behavior to the university’s conduct board — but in order to process the complaint, the board made her review the Zoom recordings to find the audio clips in question.

“I found this really difficult,” she wrote me, “as it reminded me just how bad it had been.”

In response to her complaint, the student said he was “mortified,” and the board asked the instructor if she would accept a letter of apology from him. She refused. “The issue was not him not realizing he was unmuted,” she wrote, but that he was “engaging in that kind of behavior during my classes.” “Why,” she wondered, “was the sympathy still with the student?” The following term, the student was moved into a class taught by an older man, who “did not report any kind of similar behavior.”

I have been scared of a student more than once. Two years before the student who wrote sadistic blog posts, I gave a different student an NG — or no grade — on his first paper. In this paper, on the poem “Blonde White Women,” by Patricia Smith, the student described a blonde ex-wife of his as a “natural” blonde, and wrote that you could tell, in general, if women were natural blondes by pulling down their pants. I was also blonde, and this paper followed frequent suggestive comments in class discussion. Once the student announced to his peers that he could tell I was attracted to him because I touched my hair when I responded to him. “She’s just fixing her hair,” a female student spat in response.

“OK, OK,” I hedged, trying to steer the discussion back to the text.

Because of those interactions, and his frequent habit of staying after class to speak with me, I guessed the NG wouldn’t go over well. So before handing the papers back, I told students to make an appointment to discuss any grade complaint with me. This student didn’t listen. He, too, waited until all students had left the class before screaming “you screwed me” over and over as he advanced toward me. (“Did he really scream?” I’d be asked, repeatedly.) He shook his fist at me as he continued his tirade. I don’t think I responded. I was so stunned.

After he left, I made my first trip to student services. The receptionist took one look at me and got the assistant vice president for student affairs. I was ushered into her office, and she tried to reassure me: “This happens all the time,” she said, looking me up and down. “You’ll get used to it as you gain more experience.” In a subsequent meeting, the college’s Title IX officer repeated that sentiment almost verbatim.

The student did not respond to emails requesting a meeting before he returned to my class. Although my department arranged for security to be outside my classroom at 7:45 a.m. the following Wednesday, the officer didn’t show up when he was supposed to, so my supervisor held off the irate student.

Because of the student’s aggressive behavior toward me and my supervisor, student services eventually removed him from my class. He finished up the course via an independent study with another professor, also a young, blonde woman, who was not compensated for this additional labor. I was given a new office in a section of the building behind a locked door, which made it more difficult for any student to reach me.

I’d still see him on campus, though. Once, while I was waiting at a food cart, he came so close to me we were almost touching. He didn’t acknowledge me but tried to strike up a conversation with the cook, who looked confused. Eventually, he walked away, but the intent was clear: He could and would find ways to let me know he was still there.

The first time I was sexually harassed by a student, my institution made attempts to accommodate me. The second time I was harassed, however, I became the problem. There is only so much complaining that will be tolerated, even by the most supportive administrators. My relationships with mentors deteriorated. “Fine,” one interrupted me, when I tried to assert that this kind of harassment was widespread. “So what?” She wanted me to be stronger, I suppose, to refuse to cower in a corner.

When I asked my chair to accompany me to class after the student exploded with rage over Citizen, he agreed. The student wasn’t there, but my chair sat in on the class and took notes anyway. Another student, a young woman, approached him after class and said a few kind words about my teaching. I realize now that she saw something I didn’t — that perhaps I was the one being evaluated that day.

For a time, I turned to my peers. With my colleagues Christina Katopodis and Destry Sibley, I started a feminist-activist group called Better to Speak, after a line from a poem by Audre Lorde. We organized a panel of faculty members at various stages of their careers who were willing to speak about harassment, started a Google group where members could seek help, and held a teaching workshop to brainstorm strategies for managing student harassment.

But those efforts ultimately dwindled. I remember the moment I knew it was over, when I received a devastating email from our mentor, a tenured faculty member, who I thought had expressed interest in editing a collection of testimonies. She said she was sorry she had given me the wrong impression. She could not take on any more projects.

I understand better, now, that the kind of labor necessary for a less-poisonous academy falls on those already harassed, harried, hurried. Those who are already being scraped away.

I haven’t been sexually harassed by a student since the one who was so angered by Citizen. I’ve been harassed by students in general, of course — over grades, over my pedagogy, over, I’m sure, not quite looking like what students expect a Shakespeare scholar to look like. (“Not to be a dick, but I’m paying to listen to an expert,” one evaluation read.) But it is nothing like what I was forced to deal with years ago. Maybe I did change my pedagogy, maybe I carry myself with more authority, speak with a sterner tone. Maybe I’ve become hardened by what happened. Or maybe it’s true that, as I gained more power — became an older, more experienced assistant professor — this kind of harassment subsided. What I do know, though, from the many instructors I’ve spoken to, is that this problem is widespread, that “bad” cases happen all the time, and that there is little, if any, institutional support for those of us suffering through workplace harassment.

What can be done? There are obvious problems with removing students from classrooms at will; “any behavior that makes an instructor feel unsafe” is a standard far too subjective and problematic, especially for students of color, Black men in particular. But some behavior does warrant removing a student, paying customer or not. Colleges must articulate where that line is, and enforce it. In the case of severe offenses, we need ways to hold students accountable for violence or aggression beyond simply handing them off to other faculty members.

In Complaint!, Ahmed writes that to “hear with a feminist ear is to hear who is not heard, how we are not heard.” I, and every person I interviewed, needed those feminist ears to be present at each step of a clear complaint process.

We also need, collectively, to get better at thinking about how power works. Power is not a single, unitary attribute, a treasure that professors have and students lack. Rather, as Kimberlé Crenshaw teaches us, it accrues along multiple axes, many of which have little to do with one’s job title or official position. It is no coincidence that so many of the stories in this piece concern female faculty of color abused by white male students — or that both of the students who sexually harassed me were older than I was.

Those of us committed to feminist theory and pedagogy work to make power and privilege visible to our students so that we may, then, attempt to reorganize the hierarchies we have inherited. This includes our own authority as instructors. Feminist scholars often prize democratic classrooms that affirm students’ agency. We tend to be cognizant of our own power, and wary of misusing it. Those are good instincts — but taken to an extreme, they can obscure how we are still vulnerable, our positions and credentials notwithstanding. Four years ago, The Chronicle reported on the experience of Jody Greene, a tenured literature professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz who had been stalked by a student. Greene, a feminist scholar, told the reporter: “My worry about my power made me less able to see that I was in danger.”

I do not dream of being able to swiftly remove students from my classroom. I dream about an academy where I can teach authentically and without fear. An academy where complaints from disempowered members of our community, whether instructors or students, are freely spoken. And an academy where all of us — not just those being scraped away — are invested in hearing, and addressing, these complaints.