Sexual Harassment on Campus: A Guide for Administrators, Faculty, and Students

Abstract

Harassment on Campus: A Guide for Administrators, Faculty, and Students, edited by Bernice R. Sandier and Robert J. Shoop. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 1997. xii + 323 pp. $36.00 Harassment in Higher Education: Reflections and New Perspectives, by Billie Wright Dziech and Michael W. Hawkins. New York: Garland Publishing, 1998. xix + 191 pp. $55.00 There was a time in higher education, not so long ago, when sexual harassment in any of its several forms was simply tolerated by many as a case of boys being boys. The women affected by the practice were expected to be understanding, while the institutions stared away, consigning harassing behavior to the dirty little secrets corner, like preferential treatment of admissions for children of well-to-do and influential persons, Professor Charlie's excessive drinking, campus crime statistics, and the criminal behavior of a subset of pampered athletes. Lawsuits, insurance carriers, and the light of publicity have removed all these embarrassing practices from the college closet. Indeed, reading the increasingly critical literature in higher education and the stories appearing with regularity in the Chronicle of Higher Education reveals a veritable Fibber McGee closet of awfuls. Anyone in higher education for any length of time has likely an experience with this subject matter. I was once asked to reassure college trustees that the person they were hiring for a senior position, for which I chaired the search committee, was the best candidate for the position, when he an accusation of sexual harassment pending against him at his home institution. I done my due diligence investigation and invested untold hours talking to persons who knew the parties; but ultimately, how could I know the truth? It was a he-said-she-said charge, including a disaffected employee, and only the two of them knew the complete truth of the incident, which happened a year and half earlier but was still unresolved. I have known persons on either side of this practice and believe there to have been saints and sinners on both sides. I was once a witness in an admissions case, where a woman not admitted into the doctoral program I chaired took the department to federal court, where, among her many accusations she accused me of telling her she had to do in order to be admitted into the program. Never mind that what I actually said was that she would have to take several classes and do well in them to compensate for her low GRE. By the time an EEOC case was filed (the agency refused to issue a letter to sue), depositions were taken, and the case was dismissed, my half-sentence, taken out of context, was made to seem salacious and inappropriate. At the same time, I have known persons and represented clients who virulent, blatant, hateful sexual behavior directed at them, and nothing happened to the perpetrators. How one feels about sexual harassment may well turn on where one sits. About one thing, though, there can be no doubt: the academy takes the matter more seriously than it has before, so much so by 1999 that some observers believe the pendulum has swung too far in favor of complainants. Muffled cries can be heard that such harassment complaints are a matter of crying wolf. The notion that colleges have gone too far in the direction of automatically validating women's claims does not occur to the authors of Harassment on Campus: A Guide for Administrators, Faculty, and Students or of Harassment in Higher Education: Reflections and New Perspectives. These two works are complementary in that both are practical and hands-on approaches to formulating campus policies. The authors of both consider sexual harassment a permanent part of college culture; however, they believe strongly that this behavior can be tamed and contained if policies are properly implemented. Sandler and Shoop note, Sexual harassment is an organizational and managerial problem, not a people problem. …