Today’s #Slatepitch: Is Sexual Harassment Really Sexual Harassment?
By Katie Roiphe has a very lengthy piece on Colin McGinn, which protestations-too-much that she basically supports contemporary sexual harassment policies aside is an apologia. The key problem with her argument is that in questioning whether McGinn was really guilty of sexual harassment she describes behavior as…sexual harassment. In particular, she seems not to understand that an amorous relationship between a student and a faculty need not be directly coercive in order to be sexual harassment:
The reason it is important to give a rich sense of the emails and texts here is that sexual harassment is about words. As someone who teaches at New York University, I wholly sympathize with the general impulse to protect a student’s privacy, which is why I am not naming her, but the only way to understand the philosophy professor’s now infamous communications is to read them in context, and make every effort to know what they would have meant at the time to the people involved. An email floating out the possibility of having sex three times is a very different gesture if you are sending it in a vacuum to a graduate student who is just trying to get on with her work on Wittgenstein, or to one who is texting you that she misses you or is calling you “dearest” and texting about your “incredibly sexy” mind.
In fact, the gestures are not fundamentally different. They are differences in degree but not in kind. A faculty member propositioning a student for sex multiple times (or even once, for that matter) while you maintain a power relationship over them is wrong, full stop. Whether the student implied an interest or not is beside the point. Whether the University of Miami formally characterizes this as “sexual harassment” or whether it violates another category of behavior, it’s obviously indefensible. For the same reason, Roiphe’s repeated attempts to argue that the student’s behavior were ambiguous are also beside the point. McGinn isn’t being accused of sexual assault.
Indeed, Roiphe (and McGinn) ultimately seem to concede this:
According to university regulations, Colin should have reported the relationship and taken himself off of Nicole’s committee, and removed her as his research assistant. This would certainly have made things less murky, though it would also have gone against their mutual fantasy, in its heyday, of the “Colin-Nicole union,” which seemed to involve professional guidance and a sort of starry idealized intellectual partnership. In a swampy situation like this, there is also the question of what exactly you would say to the relevant university office, and when exactly, if you are not sleeping with someone, you say something.
Looking back on it, though, Colin says he now thinks he should have removed himself as her supervisor, he should have recognized the conflict and potential explosiveness of mingling their personal and professional relationship, and told Nicole he could not work with her.
The final two sentences of the first paragraph are just non-sequiturs. If you’re not only frequently “caress[ing] hands and feet” but propositioning students for sex, your relationship is not “murky” or “ambiguous” as far as university regulations are concerned. You don’t have to tell the “relevant university office” your life story; just remove yourself from any position of power over the student because of an amorous relationship. It’s only complicated if you want to throw up a fog to justify bad behavior.
And since McGinn is implicitly conceding that he violated university regulations and failed to follow his obligations, what are we arguing about exactly? Well, first, some outright nonsense:
Though he says something that also seems fair: “Real power didn’t reside with me at all. With the mere fact that a female student goes to the authorities at all, it becomes sexual harassment.” It is true that a female student has the unspoken power to whisper two words and ruin an entire career.
Boo hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo. Cite me some cases that don’t come from novels where tenured professors lost their jobs over sexual harassment charges that turned out to be false. If the argument is that the harassed student is more powerful because they can theoretically report behavior that violates the rules, this is silly. The fact that victims may complain when you violate the rules doesn’t change the fact that McGinn had great power over the students career, and any kind of amorous relationship is an unacceptable exploitation of that power.
We then get the inevitable argument that, OK, maybe McGinn did something wrong, but was the punishment too harsh?
The questions here enter foggy territory that would take true philosophers or maybe novelists to navigate: Should a man, even an arrogant man, lose tenure and a long, lustrous career over what was probably a blundering excess of attachment, a burst of infatuated blindness.
To which I would respond, again, that since McGinn resigned there was no “punishment” I don’t even know how to respond to this defense. If he was an adjunct that would be one thing; he had tenure and had due process rights. If the rules didn’t require him to resign he was free to make that argument within the university’s processes and in court if the university violated his contractual rights. He chose to resign rather than defend himself; this doesn’t entitle him to have his behavior interpreted with maximum charity.