Slashdot Mirror
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!
As long as there's something for someone to gain, expect the "struggle with sexual harassment" to continue. Here's to the day no one can benefit by dividing people and organizing one side against the other. Maybe someday our society will reach that level of enlightenment.
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.
Two of my friends were trapped with a faculty adviser who was incredibly abusive (verbally) toward one, and regularly sexually harassed the other. On a daily basis, for years. They tolerated his abuse for so long because they felt they had no choice. Getting a different adviser would mean abandoning their work (in theoretical mathematics), setting them back a ton of money (in academic loans) and years of work/research. Reporting the adviser's abuse would result in the same penalties for them.
It was a messed up power dynamic of which their adviser was likely fully aware and certainly took full advantage. Even after obtaining their PhD's, my friends can't do much about it. They still need the adviser's support as a reference, for getting published, and they just want to put it all behind them.
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.
The problem with social justice is not with its primary mission; striving to make the World a fairer place is a lofty goal indeed. It's just that, realistically, the World and life itself are inherently not so fair... and attempting to eradicate unfairness from life is every bit a fool's errand.
The World is not black and white. If a Nazi child molester with leprosy showed up at your door with a cure for the cancer your spouse was dying from... you sir, would likely make a deal with that devil.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Case dismissed. Why does this trash keep getting posted here.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Seriously Slashdot?
It is only BS when you are the abuser. Real men don't need to harass women to get in their pants. Only losers with the personality of a turd need that kind of tactics.
The empowerment reporting sexual offenders by students has turned very much into a witch hunt. It does not really matter any more what male scientists have actually done. It matter what femele students feel. And the indecent mind has a vivid fantasy. You can interpret something indecent into everything you like, report your teacher and put him into trouble. This is very much how witch hunts used to work. What happend with Emma Sulkowicz, the lady who carried the mattress in order to get her ex-boyfriend ejected from university? She has not been charged with false accusations. And she never will, according to feminist double standards. Instead, she is celebrated as performance artist by the feministe SJWs, and she is doing porn movies. Instead, she had just unsuccessfully blackmailed her ex to return to her.
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.
[citation needed]
"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
Hacker News.
After reading the linked piece about Feynman, it doesn't seem that his alleged sexism (and I'm not claiming it did or did not exist) is at all comparable to what Prof Marcy has been accused of. Feynman may have been a "typical sexist male of the '50s", but Marcy is being accused of criminal acts including sexual assault.
Accusations without strong proofs mean nothing. If there is a single incident that has serious factual credibility then the man should be fired on the first offence. But these situations are rarely filmed or witnessed by several bystanders. At some point we need to have vey severe punishments for people who make complaints with no evidence at all to back up those claims. The sports team at Duke leaps to mind. Those boys spent a fortune on lawyers. Their team was ruined and their school year and future prospects were also damaged. So just why is the crack whore that made the false claims not doing a fifty year prison sentence?
SO MUCH THIS.
It is awful how these toxic people have slowly been taking over and colonizing the education system.
Everything is racist, sexist, homophobic, nationalist.
Oh, well, unless you are not a white male, in which case you are always the victim of those white males. Damn dirty white devils they are.
The worst part is these people that actually sound like that don't realize their horrific double standard and hypocrisy. You try explain it to them and they will maliciously attack your character, even lie about you. (and in some cases, even fabricate evidence against you to get others to attack you!)
But the worst part, the worst part of all of this is those naive sheltered people that have NO IDEA what actual harassment is, so they call any simple levels of contact as being abusive. These sheltered people that have had zero contact with people outside close friends and family, usually overly religious families.
Or worse, those people who didn't like the sex they had, RAAAAPE. FUCK. People that scream rape due to disliking sex need to be imprisoned for perverting the law. You can bet 90% of these people would cave at the mention of a lie detector (even though they don't work, but most people think they do, which is what matters)
This sort of stuff is causing so much bullshit on campuses and dorms right now.
People go on about "ohhhh, think of the children!", think of the poor sheltered adults that have had zero experience with actual life so think everyone is out to get them and end up coerced in to lying by others. There are millions of adults abused and lied about every year by people abusing the law. Children don't have shit on the problems that adults face with harassment. Those little squits have it easy.
Children can't think for themselves? What about the millions of adults that get abused by insurance companies in to buying things they don't need? What about the millions abused by salesmen in general?
You do not gain a sudden level of experience when you reach, say, 18. It is the most retarded concept ever. But let's not get in to that matter, lest we start a discussion war on pedophilia as well! That's all we need.
But seriously, those sorts of people can have stupidly childish mentalities well in to their 40s. It is a damn shame. More needs to be done about combating it. It just leads to so many problems for them as well as everyone they come in to contact with.
I've never once heard of a man getting in trouble for holding a door open.
I've been accused of harassment before for holding a door open. But this is the same woman that assaulted me in the workplace on another occasion..
Since you need power structures in order for harassment to carry any weight/threat
I don't need power structures to feel uncomfortable, insulted, distressed, stressed or angry.
yes, a disproportionate amount of harassment is men against women.
No. You're lying. You have no evidence for this. In fact..
by spouting a pathetically-informed opinion.
I think this describes superbly your post.
This attitude runs completely contrary to everything those working in the sciences are trying to achieve with regard to gender equality.
Students should never be propositioned by academic faculty. Whether it's inappropriate physical behaviour, inappropriate verbal behaviour, or even respectful courting. Deliberately or not, this is unreasonably leveraging a position of power that educators have over their students -- students who usually have a desire to impress, be noticed by, and be liked by their supervisors.
Students need to know that they can rely on their professors for academic or career advice, without having to worry about other motives.
Eliminate tenured positions. Problem solved!
That will be $24.95, Check, Cash or Money Order?
"since you need power structures"
But you don't need power structures. Racism, sexism and harassment are not defined relative to power. Not outside of Marxism anyway. It's perfectly possible for a person of low power and status to hold bigoted opinions and it's perfectly reasonable to criticise those opinions regardless of power.
You can't just apply a Marxist power analysis and declare whoever has less power to be in the right. This kind of shallow and simplistic moral thinking opens you up to all sorts of hypocrisy.
For a minor example of the kind of problem from a few decades ago "Should a man hold a door open for a woman?". For awhile you would receive abuse no matter HOW you answered that. (From different groups, but still abuse.) For that matter just last week I heard a woman saying (as a compliment) to a man that it had been years since the last time a man held a door open for her. She still saw that the the proper polite behavior.
Door opening is initiated by the female, and so cannot be harassment. She slows down, and the man gets to the door first. If she doesn't slow down, then the man has to run ahead, which makes him look silly. If she doesn't slow down, then she isn't a lady, and he shouldn't run for her. We don't have a shortage of polite men, we have women instead of ladies.
Richard Dawkins, Bill Maher, and many other outspoken progressives have lamented the growing trend in universities to control speech on campus, going so far as to ban speakers they disagree with. The push for this self-censorship is coming from the student body itself. Berkley was singled out by Dawkins as particularly disappointing since he (rightly) sees it as the "home of free speech during the civil right's movement". As a "boomer" myself, it's disappointing to see the next generation throwing out the civil rights that we fought for in favour of the same kind of intellectually claustrophobic political correctness we fought against.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
What the fuck is the point of working at a university if you can't hit on the women?
Are they supposed to stay celibate or something?
They aren't allowed to fuck their colleagues, because muh work place relationships.
Now they aren't allowed to fuck their students.
They spend 90% of their waking time there. It's the only place they will meet hot 20 year olds.
As soon as I saw the Richard Feynman article was on SciAm, I knew it was a POS.
Around the early 1970's SciAm's staff underwent a radical change in an effort to
become "politically correct". Instead of drilling down on the science, their articles
watered down any results that might be offensive to the politically motivated segment
of its readership. Since that time it has gone to hell.
If you think SciAm is good. find a library with archives going back to the 50's and 60's.
The difference between then and now is astounding. I really used to look forward to
every new issue, but by the mid 70's, I let my subscription lapse. Every month had
become a disappointment.
Richard Feynman lived in a very different world with different norms and standards.
Too bad the muck suckers at SciAm aren't interested in anything except their bottom line.
It seems like it only counts if the victim is female - especially in cases like Amherst where they prosecuted the victim (male) and defended the perpetrator (female).
Do something when the rules are consistently applied to everyone.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
As a male university professor, my answer to this is very clear. We should not protect them.
I completely agree...but we need to be careful that these accusations have evidence to back them up. If you just rely on a handful of students to make accusations then you risk scenarios where students can threaten false accusations for better grades. I think the real dilemma is when is the evidence strong enough to act on so that the guilty do not go free and the innocent do not get punished? Set the the threshold too high and you protect the guilty, set it too low and you can't effectively teach and do research.
I don't see any proof that Feynman was sexist.
The only thing I see is a a bunch of stories of how he tried to get laid in his off hours by women he had no professional relationship with.
Is it trying to get laid? That's called being a man. ( Well at least wanting to get laid is. Trying is also a function of courage and moral values. )
Is it telling stories about it? That's just being honest.
Is it trying to pick up women at bars? Ever been in a bar?
I am a male working in academia, and first rule of academia (they teach you this, even in TA training),
do not have a relationship or encourage such things with students. There are plenty of other places to meet people,
but it is inexcusable to show such interests in a student who you are teaching.
First of all, I’m happily married and would not want to violate what my wife and I have agreed to, whether she knew about it or not.
But the university I work for (along with most others) take inappropriate behavior very seriously. I have had to pass certifications on this, so I have put some thought into the issue. When you are in a position of power relative to someone else, there is just way too much potential for abuse of that power. If you understand that underlying principle, then you can safely date without causing any harm.
Unless your university has very specific fules, I would suggest perhaps a few rules of thumb that should keep you out of trouble:
- Don’t ever date a student in your own department.
- Staff in your own department, maybe, but have to be handled carefully — avoid any you might have some authority over.
- Faculty in your own department are pretty much free game, especially if they’re tenured.
- Faculty and staff at any level in any other department are free game.
- Graduate students in other departments, maybe, but have to be handled carefully — prefer older ones.
- Never date an undergraduate student, even if they’re nontraditional.
- Any student who has graduated and is no longer a student is okay, but you have to be careful about others suspecting that the relationship might have started before they graduated, which could get you into trouble.
Also, just because you first meet someone off campus (at a bar, say) doesn’t mean that these rules don’t apply. If you find out that someone you’re talking to at a bar is an undergrad at your school, you really need to break it off immediately. I don’t care how turned on you are by each other at that moment, the risk of that biting you in the ass later is just too great.
And remember, this isn’t all about you protecting yourself from getting into trouble. It’s about protecting your students from psychological harm. I’m in Computer Science, and we just don’t have enough women in STEM fields. We have to make sure women (and men for that matter) feel that they’re going into a safe educational environment where people in authority are not going to prey on them. Students should earn their education and their grades, not buy them with favors, and they need to be able to be awarded the education and grades they’ve worked for without predators interfering.
You're right. You personally don't need an entire system of oppression to feel uncomfortable, but you would need that system of oppression to be (not just feel, but actually be) helpless in the face of that feeling. Your singular anxiety does not create a system of oppression against you. My anxiety does not make the people who make me feel anxious into bad people.
If harassment is defined by the system of oppression, and the current system of oppression is patriarchal consisting of toxic masculinity, then what I said is not a lie.
Male professor / teacher sleeping with an adult, consenting student = rape.
Female professor / teacher sleeping with an adult, consent student = wonderful.
Thanks, feminism!
"If harassment is defined by the system of oppression, and the current system of oppression is patriarchal consisting of toxic masculinity, then what I said is not a lie."
Harassment isn't defined that way, and there is no patriarchal system of oppression consisting of toxic masculinity. So it was a lie.
Try to do it covertly, get the qualification you are after and a new job, and then sue the individual and the institution on the basis of the evidence you've got. Should pay off the debts nicely. Ultimately hitting institutions in the wallet is the way that will make a real difference, and the technology now exists to ensure that decent evidence can be obtained.
Well, you're starting to see it in junior high/high schools.
They aren't allowed to fuck their colleagues, because muh work place relationships.
Academic couples within a university (or even department) is not only acceptable but quite common. It's even something that some places go out of their way to encourage and is commonly referred to as a "two-body problem". It's also common for couples to split and rearrange within universities, usually fairly amicably. The important thing is generally that there not be an imbalance of power in the relationship.
I'm in an academic couple since graduate school and there were periods where we worked at the same place, but different departments. We're currently in different divisions of the same university but write proposals together where one will be PI and the other a Co-I (depending on the focus of the proposal). We're both very senior and have substantially independent careers, and as long as we aren't in a situation where the bulk of one of our funding is controlled by the other, our ethics people are ok with it. I know other couples that have worked in very close proximity without issue, as long as there's some mechanism to prevent favoritism or relationship issues overflowing to the work.
You mean that feminism is over? It won? Women are equals in all things and all places? Holy crap! This is big news! Start the presses! Spin up the blog engines! Feed the buzz!
Oh, wait, yeah, there still is one, and no, feminism isn't over. Damn. So close...
As a Berkeley student in the 90s, I think the roots were already quite evident back then.
The 60s legacy of activism and outrage stuck around like some kind of standing wave. Students poured through and temporarily compressed in this crucible but nobody taught them real values. In fact, by the 90s we were already seeing people act outraged at the suggestion that any issue or idea might be more important than another. The act of outrage and activism was carried forward as a cultural identity and aimed at whatever pointless issue of the day there happened to be. Rather than a means to an end, activism became its own purpose. Places like Berkeley accumulated more of this type through self-selection, while non-activists often became cynics and slackers elsewhere.
I am supposed to be Gen X. I was raised by Silent Generation parents, while many of my childhood peers had Boomer parents. It was plain as day to me that the Boomer-raised cohort tended to have more self-absorbed activists with no purpose. My Silent-raised cohort seemed to have more idealists, slackers, and misanthropes who saw it as mostly futile. It's probably no coincidence that we echoed our parents' dip in the population curve, moving through life with schools and other institutions shrinking and around us between the larger Boomer-fed pulses. We were and remain outnumbered and under-represented in the popular conscience.
Where is the proof of this patriarchal system of oppression consisting of toxic masculinity?
Aside from the appallingly tone deaf support for Geoff Marcy while simultaneously none for the unfortunate recipients of his actions, I post this to point out that the UC system has an amazingly hard to admit / change institutional desire for certain symbols of diversity, regardless of how dubious a goal they actually achieve, while at the same time overlooking real issues in their midst.
The UC reflected by Vice Chancellor Basri (who took the job at $202,500 / year thank you very much, and leads a bloated "diversity"-driven bureaucracy), routinely flouts the law in terms of admissions based on merit, and is in constant search of symbolic diversity for its own end. Yet they're so busy funding symbolic "diversity" that they don't have time to fix or acknowledge what's right under their nose.
The proof is in this new place called "everywhere". It was formerly in another place called "throughout history".
So you are refusing to honor your burden of evidence.Truth is you can't provide a single piece of evidence to support your claim.
Hacker news is already sucking on the SJW bottle.
Om, nomnomnom...
No, you're ignoring the entire span of human history, from the classic stories of female betrayal (so classic they're in the damn Bible), to the medical concept of "hysteria" that could be cured by a fingerbang, up to the long-standing idea of husbands "owning" their wives that survives today in many places in the world (including such things as "marital sex can never be rape"), so clearly no individual instances I pick will satisfy you.
Oh wait, I just picked some. Will they satisfy you? Do I care if they do? We'll find out!
I've seen several cases of sexual harassment filed in various companies I worked for over the years, and not once was the guilty party fired. They were required to attend "sensitivity" courses. They lost their bonuses for the year. They were passed over for promotions. Sometimes they were reassigned to lesser roles in the business.
But they were not fired.
Why should academics be held to higher standards than those in industry?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Right, so probably not the most representative sample there.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
All schooling, up to, and including, university must be single-sex education systems with no mix of gender. We must also not have any lesbians or gays in school since they'd happily cop off with each other if they were segregated or not, so they must be taught in isolation.
This includes teachers. No rug munchers or fudge packers, only heterosexuals segregated into their same sex school.
That is the only way to stop sexual harrassment.
But please remember, a woman molesting a child (11 years old) is seen as "Rather unwelcome" but even the boy's dad gainsays what the boy says about his feelings of the rape, AND THE JUDGE AGREES WITH THEM.
It's just not possible for a woman to rape a man. Because the man ALWAYS wants sex.
Pick any "yes means yes" campaign. Ask the proponents of such measures how long women who initiate sex should be sentenced to jail, if they failed to first obtain explicit affirmative consent from their would-be partners.
And of course no men were oppressed throughout the history of the human race and no woman ever did the oppressing.
If you want to see sexual harassment of a type that would result in prison sentences if it was men, wear a kilt to a bar in England.
OK, so you lose John Nash right off the bat (courted a student). Presumably you lose Feynman. How about Einstein himself? Well, he cheated on his first wife with his second, who was also his first cousin on one side and second cousin on the other (her maiden name? Einstein). Niels Bohr married a woman he had hired as a typist, so sorry, gone. Werner von Braun married his first cousin also. Boltzmann married a student. Hmm... science is getting kind of thin.
Classic! A single counter-argument invalidates general trends! "Well, it happened to us once or twice, too!" Amazing!
That's not a citation, that's a personal anecdote. It's also putting the burden of proof on me, when you're the one who made the claim.
My school isn't struggling with it at all, they are doing it extremely well.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
You think there wasn't any "inappropriate" contact? Might want to double-check with an anthropologist, but I'm pretty sure courting behavior among humans generally involves such contact. Nash was a professor, Alicia was his student. Couldn't get any more clear-cut than that. Backpedal away, but like it or not, with your standards, we lose the Nash Equilibrium.
Who he hired to type for him. So a little nepotism along with sleeping with someone he had power over. You're setting physics back quite a few years.
A student at the institution he was a professor at.
That's the way a lot of student-professor relationships go. You're the one insisting they're always wrong.
Glad to hear you're OK with incest though; wouldn't want to lose Einstein and Von Braun.
Once or twice? Try reading a history book sometime genius. Most men were not oppressors they were oppressed, usually by male rulers bit sometimes by female rulers as well. The post was a terrible time for just about everyone. How many women were forced to fight in wars? Do you think only women and girls were sexually assaulted? 75 years ago the terrible white men you so despise died in their thousands to overthrow one of the most evil regimes in history. Give the left back to people who know what to do with it and stick your micro aggressions and your trigger warnings up your arse.
You're right, most men weren't oppressors, but most oppressors were men. That's the entire point.
Those male oppressors did some things to women, and other, different things to men. Neither of these experiences invalidates the other, no matter how much you'd apparently like to think it does.
That evil regime you're talking about, funny story, if it's the one I think you're talking about, it was made by ... white men.
Certainly English law accepts covert recordings as valid evidence.
I dated a feminist once who would get angry with me for holding the door open.
Then I dated a woman who wanted me to and was angry when I didn't.
You seem to have a gift for making women angry.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Power is not relevant to racism or sexism. It is relevant to harassment, since that implies that the victim can't just walk away, and can't stop it. If I hit on a woman, I may be being rude and crude, but that isn't harassment. If I hit on a woman I have some power over, that is likely to be harassment.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Then you need to Google the definition of the word "anecdote". Asking for evidence that affirmative consent will be equally applied to women is as banal as asking for evidence that 70's feminists left the draft out of their demands for "equality."