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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.)
"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.
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.
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
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.
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..
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Right, so probably not the most representative sample there.
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