Coming Out of the Sexual Harassment Closet: One Woman's Story of Politics and Change in Higher Education

In this essay, a university professor tells the story of her sexual harassment by her graduate school adviser in order to explain the institutional cultures and structures that exist to perpetuate this type of behavior in higher education as well as to communicate the steps she took to create change and accept the events that occurred. Characterizing the documentation as a "coming out process," she describes the events that occurred from 2002–2006, using a semi-autoethnographical approach augmented with document and literature analyses. The essay goes beyond a mere re-telling of the events to an analysis of the cultural constructs that foster sexual harassment at institutions of higher education.