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January 5, 2003
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Charlotte Allen on Boalt, harassment, and bad policy
In today's L.A. Times (registration required), Charlotte Allen takes up the Boalt case with a refreshing skepticism.
Jennifer Reisch's belated and highly questionable accusations of sexual harassment have not only caused former Boalt dean John Dwyer to step down, but have become the occasion for Laura Stevens (Reisch's lawyer), Linda Hamilton Krieger (a Boalt law professor), and others to push for policy change at Berkeley. Berkeley already has a Title IX officer whose job it is to hear complaints about sex discrimination, and Boalt's student body is already well over 50% women. But Stevens, Allen notes, will not be satisfied until she has overhauled the entire culture at Boalt:
Stevens, however, wants more: for the law school to set up a comprehensive sexual-harassment training program to teach students, professors and administrators how to create an "environment" in which no female student would ever have to suffer from unwanted male attention. The program would entail not only re-education, but a law-school speech code that would forbid even the cracking of jokes that "make women into meat," as Stevens puts it.
Allen argues that in such demands, we can see how the Boalt case has "wandered far from the original issue" and notes, too, that this "might be a good thing" for Jennifer Reisch, about whose credibility Stefan Sharkansky and I have raised "serious questions." She then proceeds to take the agenda of Stevens and Krieger apart, showing how the policies and procedures they are demanding will actually work to create the sort of hypersexualized, deeply threatening environment they are supposed to eliminate--in the brave new world of sensitivity training and speech code, men are demonized as potential predators; women are infantilized as potential victims; words, looks, jokes, and romantic overtures wound; and heterosexuality itself is pathologized as a motive force so damaging that it ought, by implication, to be snuffed out altogether.
Allen ends an intelligent article on a chilling and telling note:
In the Dwyer case, involving two highly intelligent adults, what are we supposed to do -- raise the drinking age to 35? Even the alleged victim's supporters seem to agree that her case isn't strong, and from what we know about her, she suffered no professional harm.But that doesn't seem to matter to the sexual-harassment industry. What matters is seizing on some excuse, any excuse, to push through a campuswide regime of vague and subjective standards that would place all interaction between the sexes under a legal cloud.
Read the whole thing--Allen gives good background and context for the Boalt situation, and also offers a timely commentary on the move other schools (most recently the University of Texas) are making to "tighten" their sexual harassment policies.
