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How Academia Still Struggles With Sexual Harassment (buzzfeed.com)
New submitter Dr. Scatterplot writes: Richard Feynman is celebrated as a brilliant scientist and idiosyncratic character. He is also someone who today might be accused of sexual harassment. That is, if his students felt empowered to report him. Whether his department would have done anything back then is a different matter. How far should academic communities go to protect their intellectual capital, at the expense of further harm to their students, past and present? UC Berkeley and exoplanet astronomers are walking that line with prominent professor and exoplanet discoverer Geoff Marcy. "Four women alleged that Marcy repeatedly engaged in inappropriate physical behavior with students, including unwanted massages, kisses, and groping. As a result of the findings, the women were informed, Marcy has been given 'clear expectations concerning his future interactions with students,' which he must follow or risk 'sanctions that could include suspension or dismissal.''
It's the conflict between universities wanting to be an open environment of learning, education, and research (i.e. their fucking job) and actually making money. Universities literally make money on the discoveries of their researchers. So unfortunately they get plenty of leeway when it comes to this, because most universities aren't willing to actually fight a tenured professor on this.
Meanwhile, universities adopted extremely stringent rules on campus rape. It's not like they don't believe this is a problem. But they sure as hell do believe that students are expendable but professors aren't.
(Personally, I think university sexual harassment and rape proceedings should have power to fire tenured professors - tenure is supposed to protect professors with unpopular opinions, not professors who sexually harass their students.)
quickly turning into SJWdot
"How far should academic communities go to protect their intellectual capital, at the expense of further harm to their students, past and present?"
As a male university professor, my answer to this is very clear. We should not protect them. For many reasons:
1/ You begin brilliant does not mean you can do whatever you want.
2/ For most of us, we can do our research from a prison cell.
3/ Our students are the main product of academic life. We all love to believe that our research is the most important. But realistically we have the opportunity to touch the mind (the mind I said!) of hundreds of students each year. They will be our legacy, let's make it good one!
Because sexuality and talent in any given academic discipline are independent variables, academia has to deal with various kinds of harassment in exactly the same way as any other place of work. Unfortunately it is unable to, because campuses are increasingly being colonized by the sort of toxic misandrists who could not find a job anywhere else, and so are making academia their private fiefdom. So long as their definition of harassment is "anything that men like," the Feynmans of the future will have to find homes in private research institutes.
How many female students approach their male professors each year, attempting to use sex as a bargaining chip? Those visits during office hours, exhibiting cliched behaviour like dropping a pencil to bend over and retrieve it. Flirting, quick furtive touching, inquiring about "extra credit," occasionally even flatly and outright making a proposition to trade sexual favors in exchange for a passing grade. I'm old, paunchy, balding, unattractive; I know precisely what these misguided young women are up to, as they're certainly not after my good looks or great fortune. Such harassment is common at many campuses and yet I see no prominent feminists standing up to decry this behaviour.
Case dismissed. Why does this trash keep getting posted here.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Exceptions are made for the exceptional. It is not a right or wrong moral conundrum so much as it is the way the World works.
you are morally bankrupt.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Since you need power structures in order for harassment to carry any weight/threat, yes, a disproportionate amount of harassment is men against women.
Don't fall into the common techie trope of expecting everyone else to explain everything to you by spouting a pathetically-informed opinion.
"when he was a young, boyish looking professor at Cornell, Feynman used to pretend to be a student so he could ask undergraduate women out .. Feynman .. trying to get women in bars to sleep with him .. documented affairs with two married women"
.. that were considered acceptable or amusing in 1950 would quite rightly cause instant outrage in 2014."
Have these fragile flowers ever thought of saying no to sexual advances. What Feynman does/did with his dick - as long as it's between consenting adults - is nobody's business except his.
"It's not surprising to find these anecdotes disturbing and even offensive"
Well then, don't read about them.
"the propensity to lie on the beach and watch girls"
OH, shock horror !
"actions
No they wouldn't, it's just that the political-correctness-feminista dictatorship would try and get you fired if you say any different.
Richard Feynman, sexism and changing perceptions of a scientific icon