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9 SEXUAL HARASSMENT IN THE UNIVERSITY Nancy ("Ann") Davis The notion of sexual harassment entered public consciousness in the United States with the publication of a survey on sexual harassment in the workplace conducted by Redbook in 1976. More than nine thousand women responded to the survey, and almost nine out of ten reported experiencing some sort of sexual harassment on the job.l Unsurprisingly, these revelations stimulated a lot of discussion in the news media, the popular press, and academic joumals.2 At about the same time, sexual harassment was found by the courts to constitute a form of sex discrimination and thus to be illegal under the terms of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, or national origin.3 Shortly thereafter , the same sorts of protections were held to extend to the educational sphere.4 Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 forbids sex discrimination in all public and private institutions that receive federal money from grants, loans, or contracts. Though sexual harassment in the university began to receive attention in the media in the late 1970s, it was not until 1986 that educational institutions themselves really began to sit up and take notice. In that year, in Meritor Savings Bank FSB v. Vinson, the courts held that it was possible for an employer to be found guilty under Title VII if an employee's harassing conduct created a "hostile environment" for the harassed employee, and it allowed individuals who were the victims of sexual harassment to sue employers that did not have a policy that clearly prohibited sexual harassment.5 These findings have been held to be applicable to educational institutions, and though many institutions had initially been slow to react, most were not slow to draw the obvious moral, namely, that it was not just an individual harassing instructor who might be liable to prosecution but the university that Sexual Harassment I 151 employed that instructor as well.6 Most educational institutions have formulated or are in the process of formulating policies concerning sexual harassment. In addition to being illegal and in opposition to expressed policies of many (if not most) educational institutions, sexual harassment is condemned as unethical by the American Association of University Professors, and by many of the myriad professiC''lal organizations that most faculty members are associated with.7 It is difficult to produce a comprehensive, uncontroversial definition of sexual harassment,8 or a philosophically watertight account that explains just what it is about the different kinds of behavior that have been described as sexual harassment that makes them all of a piece unethical. Though, as we shall see, these difficulties pose problems for attempts to formulate fair and effective policies concerning sexual harassment, they pose no serious impediment to the achievement of consensus about the more blatant forms of sexual harassment. In the classic quid pro quo case in which an instructor puts unwelcome sexual pressure on a student and makes it clear that the student's academic evaluation or professional advancement is contingent on her yielding to that pressure, what the instructor does is obviously coercive, unjust, disrespectful, and discriminatory.9 It is an abuse of power and a betrayal of trust. And it is inimical to the existence of a healthy educational environment in a number of ways. Yet surveys conducted at college campuses around the nation reveal that a sizable proportion of female college students-somewhere between 25 percent and 40 percent-report they have been subjected to some sortofsexual harassmenton the part oftheir instructors ,10 and anecdotal evidence provided by female students, faculty members, and administrators corroborates those findings. Surveys may be difficult to interpret and compare, for they do not all employ the same definition of sexual harassment, and anecdotal evidence must always be treated with caution, but it is clear that sexual harassment and other forms of sexually inappropriate behavior are no rarity in the university.ll Any serious participant in higher education must be puzzled and distressed by this fact. Commentators have identified many different sorts of factors as contributing to the prevalence of sexual harassment in the university. Some have emphasized that the university was and remains a maledominated institution whose ground rules and procedures were fashioned by men. Traditionally, the influential teaching and administrative jobs in the university have been occupied by men, and it is men [3.133.156.156] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 08:51...

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