A good friend of mine recently visited the Office of Sexual Harassment to complain about a faculty member's behavior lo these many years ago, back when we were meek interviewees.
During said interview, the faculty member was generally abrasive, with a lot of aggressive questions about my friend's undergrad research and whether or not it was believable. But he won this particular OSH complaint because of the following comment: "Why should we accept you into this grad program since you're female and you might just quit to have babies?"
Six years later, my friend was prompted by a feminist faculty member's talk to lodge this complaint. During the course of filing the complaint (which I'm happy to report was taken seriously), my friend also noted that this guy had been a jerkwad in the rest of the interview too.
The lawyer/OSH person with whom she was speaking said, "Yeah, but we can't do anything about him just being a jerk to everyone."
My friend: "Let me get this straight. If the guy is an asshole to women and says shitty things specifically to women, we can file a complaint; but if he's just an equal-opportunity asshole, there's nothing to be done?"
OSH person: "Um, yeah, that's about right."
Anyhow, obviously in this case the faculty member had made sexist shitty comments, so the OSH was helpful and took the report down and everything.
But as my friend put it afterwards, it's odd that you can easily file a complaint about someone who's a dirtbag to women, but not someone who's a dirtbag to everyone.
(Yes, I'm aware that someone who is a jerk to everyone will perhaps have trouble making tenure anyhow. Still, it's not like there's a formal Office of Jerkwad Behavior to complain to about that.)
15 years ago
4 comments:
In my equal opportunity briefing, we talked about this very thing and at ACCORDING TO THE LAW the deal is that him being a jerk to everyone equally is still not an excuse for him to be able to harass someone in a way that relates to their gender. So general 'jerkiness' cannot by law be taken into account when considering a sexual harassment case. Maybe that's more what they meant?
It is possible to be a jerk without being a sexist jerk. Just like it is possible to be critical of a female politician without resorting to sexist crap.
Good for your friend for doing something about it. I take it she did it now because she's graduating?
It occurs to me I have a long list of these I could report, too. I guess I thought that after X # of years, it would be so long ago that nobody would believe me, or care.
I've heard that some departments will respond by removing that person from interviewing. But isn't that just false advertising?
If there were an Office of Jerkwad Behavior, there would be almost no professors left. Such a thing would prompt a revolution in education.
I know, the Jerkwad Rule would really thin the ranks. But hey, we're all saying that academia is overcrowded, right?
Not only had my friend graduated, she had also abandoned all hope of pursuing an academic career (shitty PIs screwed her over). So now that nobody's recommendations matter, she feels able to speak up. Awesome, we should be rid of the jerkwads in what, a million years?
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