From the Chronicle of Higher Education's always intriguing Careers Section comes one of the stranger columns I've ever seen there. It's the story of a woman who trailed her husband to his new tenure-track job, got hired as an adjunct in his department, was so resentful of the situation that she nearly began an affair with one of their senior colleagues, and then found herself mysteriously and damningly accused of sexual harassment by that same colleague. You'll want to read the whole thing, but here are some teasers:

Fearing that our private relationship had become public knowledge within the department, he responded by accusing me of sexual harassment.

[...]

I was called into the administrator's office who, in accordance with the university's informal grievance procedure, read me the campus sexual-harassment code and asked me to cease-and-desist all contact of a sexual nature with the professor. It was quite a terrifying experience for an adjunct who had hoped to be offered a tenure-track position there someday.

Assenting to everything I was asked, I immediately fled from his office and told my husband everything -- from the flirtation to the harassment charge. He was angry about what I had done to our relationship. He was upset that I had destroyed any likelihood of my being hired by his department.

But beyond all of that, he was afraid of losing his tenure-track job. How would his colleagues react if the professor decided to take his charge through the university's formal grievance procedure, in which many of them necessarily would become involved as witnesses or informed of the findings of the case? Beyond the issue of guilt or innocence, the entire proceeding would have a sordid tone to it, which might make many of his colleagues wish that my husband and I would just go away.

Thankfully, the professor did not choose to go through the formal review. The downside was that I was never given the opportunity to refute the charges made against me and clear my name. Nor was the professor ever held accountable for his actions.

Our greatest fear became that this man might use his power to destroy my husband's chances for tenure. We kept quiet about the turn of events and tried to patch things up with the professor as much as possible. My husband did his best to ingratiate himself with this man and pretend he knew nothing of what had happened.

[...]

The sexual-harassment officer explained to me that he didn't think the case in any way met the definition of sexual harassment and suggested that once I was teaching at the university again I might want to charge the professor with faculty misconduct. That solution might satisfy my sense of justice, but it certainly would cause bad morale in the department, which could hurt my husband's chances for tenure, so I declined.

This story may seem unique; as Humphrey Bogart says in Casablanca, "the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world." But I believe that my experience speaks mountains about the way adjuncts are treated at universities. Sexual-harassment policies are designed to protect the weak from the powerful. No one expects the powerful to use them as a tool against the weak.

[...]

My husband still works in the department and is trying his best to reach tenure. His department chairman is stepping down and we have no guarantees that the senior professor in question will not try to retaliate against my husband in the future. He grinds his teeth every night worrying about this situation and conceals his fears beneath a mask of friendliness toward his senior colleague, who has experienced no repercussions from his actions.

Writing under the cover of anonymity, and using that cover to produce a confessional account of her own abuse at the hands of the system, may seem to the author of this piece to be the only way to get her story out. But as techniques of reportage they just don't work. The facelessness, placelessness, and imprecision of the author's complaint do less to inspire confidence in her than to suggest that she labors under considerable confusion, and even, it must be said, cowardice. The punchline of the piece--that it is a parable about how abusable adjunct professors are--seems far too narrowly contrived. The case seems more amenable to illustrating how abusable overbroad sexual harassment policies are. As history has shown, such policies can be used by self-proclaimed victims to destroy just about anyone, from student to adjunct to dean; on many, many campuses, to be accused of sexual harassment is to be ruined, no matter what your rank.

What is interesting in this case is how a senior male professor was able to use the accusation against a junior female lecturer. That's a configuration you don't see very often at all, and it's quite possible he was able to use the accusation as he did because he knew he was leveling it at someone who was not likely to fight back--but the same would have been true if the accused were a junior faculty member, or a student, or a member of staff. The situation described is not one that arises specifically out of adjuncts' insecure employment status; it's one that arises out of universities' eagerness to demonstrate how very progressive they are when it comes to maintaining a harassment-free environment. You don't have to be an adjunct to get caught in the crossfire of false and malicious accusations. Just ask John Dwyer.

Overall, the story just doesn't smell right. It highlights peripheral issues (adjunct labor politics) while glossing over the central ones (like, for example, how Gilda and her husband colluded with the accusations rather than fighting them out of a desire to protect their future prospects at the school). One of the creepiest things about the piece is how what begins as a narrative of institutional injustice resolves into a tale of two grown adults willingly sacrificing their self-respect in order to try to protect their professional futures.

This explains Gilda's repeated contention that the worst thing about the whole mess is that it might, by process of contagion, affect her husband's tenure prospects--a claim that both assumes his smooth professional sailing is more important than justice for her, and takes for granted that his tenure prospects, at least in this department, have everything to do with petty interpersonal politics and nothing to do with the quality of his actual work. These assumptions may well be accurate: But in a piece that is devoted to criticizing the abuse of adjuncts, it's awfully strange not to see them more closely examined.

But of course, they could not be more closely examined without getting more specific about what actually happened, and that is something our author is not prepared to do. It sounds as though something very wrong really did happen to "Gilda Mundson." But she has chosen to tell her story in such a way that it is not possible to determine exactly what did happen. Without checkable facts, without names named, places placed, and details detailed, the piece is next to useless. It neither exonerates Gilda--whoever she really is--nor does it do much to illuminate the issue with which it claims to be primarily concerned, the politics of adjunct academic labor. If there is a moral to this overly circumspect tale told by a writer unwilling to own her own words, it's something like, "Don't express your resentment of your husband's success by getting involved with someone who has professional power over both you and your husband." But then, we already knew that.

There is, of course, the possibility that the Chronicle verified the incidents described in the column before publishing it.

By the way, you often comment on incidents of repression of free speech on campus. Do you have any comments on the booing of Doctorow at Hofstra's graduation?
http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=6611

Gilda's story highlights both the lengths some people will go to to protect professional advancement and the weaknesses inherent in the adjunct position. I agree with Erin that the details are too sketchy to make a clear determination of the accuracy of the story. It does read like there is a lot left unsaid. Either way, in the end, the situation is a reflection of the poorly thought out behavior of Gilda (failure to communicate with her husband, flirting with the senior faculty), the arrogance of full-time faculty and administration towards adjuncts, and the witch-hunt mentality of the political correctness police on campuses.

As for Wendy's comment about Doctorow, Hofstra didn't prevent him from speaking. Some parents and graduates didn't like what he had to say and they expressed their dislike by booing him. Doctorow's right to free expression wasn't repressed, nobody dragged him from the stage. But his right to free speech does not convey a right to force people to listen.

The problem here is the very existence of sexual harassment law. It should not exist. Women asked for it and men eagerly put on their white hats and rode off to save the girls. It was all a dumb mistake, born of ideological hysteria.

Life was better before this crap came along. Prior to the arrival of this braindead political and legal albatross, people flirted in the office and had affairs and that was that. If they wanted to have a fight, they went out in the backyard and slugged it out, usually with only minor injuries to show for it. Now, you can't even do that because the clever guardians of public morality, the left, have criminalized a little fisticuffs in the back yard.

The intelligentsia dug their own grave here, and they (we) deserve it for having been stupid enough to have dug the hole. It seemed awful smart at the time it started.

Just for amusement, I often remember that when I first arrived at undergraduate school in 1967, the leftist faculty was promoting free, unfettered love as the panacea of all social ills, and denouncing middle class Americans as hopelessly backward for clinging to morality. The roles are completely reversed now. Middle class America has embraced hedonism. Our betters at the academia are locked in a puritanical witch hunt.

The "Hm, I wonder what the full story is" factor didn't bother me as much as it did you, Erin. All of those anonymous pieces (as well as every letter to Miss Mentor, Miss Manners, and Dear Abby) call for a certain alienation from truth, reality, and the big picture.

In the Gilda piece, I reckoned that, whereas you and I find the use of sexual-harassment policy the central point, Gilda herself just had to get it off her chest. She'd obviously given a lot more energy to self-expression than to persuasion.

As for sexual-harassment policies, they are an imperfect attempt at redressing the bad old days (in which I was once fired for not succumbing to the boss's charms, and of which I have heard many tough over-sixty female academics complain bitterly). I dearly hope we can abandon that particular attempt and find another that does a better job of prevention.

The cure is often worse than the disease.

Hell, I could have fired off sexual harassment charges at a female boss, but I thought better of it. The individual who is skilled at handling difficult personal issues can usually find another way than legal recourse. Hell, the girl really did like me, and she made a pain in the ass out of herself as a result. I'm supposed to ruin her?

Prior to the advent of this hysteria, men kind of assumed that unfairness would happen. Women wanted legal recourse when unfairness happened. You pay for what you get in this regard.

And the law against extortion was already on the books. Law, however, is seldom the answer to intensely personal issues... that is, unless you want to pay the price of having nosy busybodies policing your office and your home. We've got that in spades now.

Most of the issues that are defined as sexual harassment would be far better resolved through deft personal diplomacy, and a healthy regard for what you are doing to another person. If a person is sexually harassing you, you can bet that that person is feeling some love for you. Whether you return that feeling is another matter. It is a positive feeling that can be managed in a positive way. Resort to the law is an admission of personal failure.

I can't help but think there must be more to this story, too. What motivated the male professor to press his harrassment charge? Possibly preemption, possibly guilt, possibly he's just a crackpot--but maybe he had some other motive that isn't hinted at in this article. I don't feel like I have enough information to understand what really happened.

The quote that stunned me most, though, was this one:

"Sexual-harassment policies are designed to protect the weak from the powerful. No one expects the powerful to use them as a tool against the weak. "

Say what? The powerful frequently use whatever weapons are at their disposal against the weak, in academia and beyond. She appears to be shocked that people in power can be mean and selfish and protective of their interests. Can a professor really be this naive about the ugly ways in which the world often works?

With regard to Wendy's comments re. E.L. Doctorow. The incident at Hofstra did leave me asking myself this question: Can one give a good commencement speech without being controversial? It seemed to me at first that the choices were: a) insipid, vacuous platitudes or b) controversial pronuncements on the big issues of the day (be they from a right or left perspective). I wonder which we would all prefer - particularly since b) is likely to antagonize at least 50% of any given audience.
In the middle of all that - someone forwarded a link to Jon Stewart's commencement address at his alma mater - William & Mary. This seemed like a helluva good address to me that seemed to indicate that there might be an option c) out there. A link to the address is posted above.

"No one expects the powerful to use them as a tool against the weak"...and..."Can a professor really be this naive about the ugly ways in which the world often works?" Of course, the use of regulations which were originally intended (or at least said to be intended) to "protect the weak" often have diametrically opposite results, in a variety of fields. Business regulations, for example, often act to protect incumbents by making entry into a market more difficult for new players.

Too often, people who propose new rules/legislation show little interest in detailed understanding of what their visions are likely to do in practice.

Well, having litigated both sides of those issues, I can say that I think, over all, we are better off with the laws that without them.

J.V.C., you took the words right out of my, er, mouth. There's a saying that in politics, never give your friends the kind of power you wouldn't want your enemies to have. Anyone with half a brain ought to have realized that overbroad sexual harassment policies are inevitably going to be used against helpless office functionaries. As usual, conservatives predicted this result, and as usual, they were right.

I think this speaks directly to the problem with Naomi Wolfe and the professor at her college who allegedly harassed her 15 or 20 years ago. She wrote about the incident and how it damaged her life in a national magazine recently. Was she really that harassed that she was damaged for life? Did he stop immediately in which case was she even harassed at all? The whole question is that one man's sexual inuendoes are someone else's harassment. Some people think any kind of sexual arrangement at all, even dating, is in a sense harassment because of the supposedly greater power of the male regardless of the situation. The whole thing can be so hard to prove one way or another that it needs to be examined very carefully before the charges are even made or accepted to be made. Careers can be badly damaged for no reason at all with no recourse possible.

As to the Doctorow commencement speech question, I was surprised at the comments of the sociology professor who made the comments about what kind of role model the parents made to do this. From what I read, the only ones who really appreciated what Doctorow had to say were faculty members. Seems as though the speech was not deemed acceptable by the parents or the graduates. Maybe the speech should have been delivered at another venue. Granted that graduation speeches could be designed more to enlighten the graduates, the event seems designed to hand out the diplomas and to congratulate the graduates in preparation of family celebrations afterwards. While faculty members may appreciate a different kind of speech, the parents tend to prefer a "congratulations, now go out and fight the good fight and win with all the skills you have learned" and Doctorow just did not realize that. As a fairly conservative person, I do not want to hear a political diatribe at a graduation from either side. Keep that for some other occasion.

Yes, Ethesis, this arena is a goldmine for legal fees.

I don't doubt that you like the laws the way they are.

The only casualties are personal freedom, individual autonomy, and human dignity.

But, hey, at least, lawyers can collect fees. That makes it all better.

Well, http://www.steveandmyrna.com/, I'm not sure you understand the point, and I've done a lot of pro bono work as well as fee work (not to mention I'm in house at a captive law firm, not doing this type of litigation these days for the most part), but, bad claims and all, the world is better for having rights than for not having them in this area.

Feel free to toss stereotypes and insults around, but don't expect to persuade that way.

"One of the creepiest things about the piece is how what begins as a narrative of institutional injustice resolves into a tale of two grown adults willingly sacrificing their self-respect in order to try to protect their professional futures."

Yah. That's the part that's giving me nightmares a day-and-a-half later. For all "Gilda's" faux-critique of power structures in academe, she seems pretty durn happy that she's found a tenure-track position of her own: her own ticket to unfair amounts of power and the ability to be a terror to adjucts everywhere...

And can someone tell me how this column fits as an example of "How to find a balance between work and family"?! Still shaking my head over that minor detail.

BTW, for what it is worth, most people who are harassed are targets because they are different or weaker or stranger, and the people most likely to complain are those who fit in the least well socially.

Which means that the legitimate gripes and the false ones are often from the same group of people (social status, personality types, etc.), which makes it all harder.

From http://www.steveandmyrna.com/'s refusal to make a claim I can guess that it is more likely than not that he is socially adjusted. (Gee, I think I just said something positive about him, but it is likely to be true).

From the Chronicle tale I read a situation where the writer is not as well balanced as some. This would make her a more likely target for someone trying to pick up on her, and, at the same time, more vulnerable to the charges brought. From the outside (without regard to the perp's history) it can be hard to tell when you have a seduction gone awry vs. an emotionally fragile person stalking someone.

It takes a better person than I am to be able to tell from the written page.

But the story, in order to fit the Chronicle, needs not to be about those issues, as important as they are, instead it has to focus on the power imbalance and the tenure track issues.

Without them, and without names and dates, it isn't a Chronicle type story.

So many of the "off notes" are really a requirement of context rather than making the story "off." On the other hand, without more details, it is hard to tell what really happened, other than you have a lot of people under pressure and unhappy.

Which is too bad.

"BTW, for what it is worth, most people who are harassed are targets because they are different or weaker or stranger, and the people most likely to complain are those who fit in the least well socially."

This is precisely the feminist dogma that got us into this mess. I'm old enough to remember. Nobody ever demonstrated that the underlying assumption here... that sexual harassment is a function of the powerful exploiting the weak... was actually true or that said sexual harassment was actually happening. Feminist ideologues insisted as a matter of theory that these assertions were true. We set about to solve the alleged problem without any proof that it existed. Old-fashioned male chivalry was at the root of this strange decision. Liberal men long ago decided to remodel their version of chivalry to: "Well, if the girl says bad things could happen, then we'd better fix it. Pretty girls don't lie, right?"

All of this nonsense is ideology gone mad.

I'll refashion the first statement in my post. We've given a potent weapon for intimidation and abuse to those who are uncomfortable with their own sexuality. My wife and I are often targets of these deranged individuals. My wife is a stunningly beautiful Filipino woman. The line of black bi women who want to get in bed with us stetches around the block. They are, indeed, often very ill at ease with their sexuality, and they are, thus, very dangerous... to us.

They seem to always construe any offense that takes place (like not getting what they want) as abuse on our part. The sexual harassment laws and the crazy domestic violence laws have this effect. We cannot allow these women any contact with us. And they want contact with us because they want to know what we know. (And, yes, what we do know would help them. They won't stop approaching us.)

30 years ago, without the constant cheerleading from schools and the legal system, we could have afforded to give something to these women. Under the current system dominated by sex-starved, crazed feminist women, and the equally crazy feminist men who live to bail them out, we would be risking everything we have to even give these women a thought.

It is hard, impossible actually, to do more than conjecture given the limited facts available. Having said that, I will indulge myself in idle speculation. My speculation is based in part on my somewhat limited experience in defending sexual harassment suits (it is not my core area of practice but any time you represent corporations these issue will arise) and on my very limited understanding of human behavior.
Here we have a woman, unhappy with her marriage and ill at ease in her career. She, by her own words engages in 'flirtation' with a tenured professor. (And who knows what she means by flirtation - a nod and a wink, an exchange of meaningful glances over a glass of chablis at a faculty soiree, or some initial phsyical encounter that carried with it the promise of more.) Something causes either him or her or both of them to pull back from the abyss of a hot, lurid, and deliciously lustful 15-mintue fumble (I'm being kind to the professor here) to ecstacy on a mahoganny desk, or leather coach in a book lined study. The tenured professor, knows full well the ways of the world when it comes to sexual encounters, even aborted one, in a workplace situation. He realizes his life may now track the screenplay for a William H. Mascy movie. What does he do? Wait for a complaint to be filed? No, he files one himself as a protective measure. Some might call this a brilliant tactical maneuver in the sexual harassment wars. Others may feel differently. Whatever the woman's actions are - they do not fit the legal definition of sexual harassment in the workplace [imho] because a subordinate is not in a position to harass a person higher up the chain of command. The male decides not to proceed with his complaint- both because he wouldn't prevail and he had no need as he has effectively precluded offensive action on her part. It was a bitzkrieg - she had no chance.
For my own part, I have no doubt that sexual harassment does take place in the workplace. I have seen it and I have litigated cases involving real incidents of same. I have also seen cases in which the charge is, in fact, a pretext with no merit.

Sorry I meant William H. Macy - not William H. Mascy (no doubt the actual spelling before they arrived at Ellis Island from Budapest. :)

Actually, I've seen harrassment that went up the food chain; it involved a subordinate who conceived such a profound and transparent longing for her (indirect) superior that her actions embarrassed him and caused teasing from his peers. The whole company knew about it. It took some very hard talking-to from human resources to get her to realize how her behavior was perceived by him and others. He never threatened a lawsuit, as far as I know, probably for the same reason that causes some men to put up with physical abuse from their wives: no one believes that they can't defend themselves, but if they do, they're cast as the bad guy.