(NAME-MCE) Sexual Harassment and Group Punishment

[Anselmo Villanueva]

Sexual Harassment and Group Punishment


The destructive impact of a form of discrimination shouldn't be used to
justify solutions that may amount to publich relations and violate the
rights of innocent faculty members, writes Gary Rhoades.

Complete story below.  For related articles, go to:

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/02/12/rhoades

February 12, 2009
Sexual Harassment and Group Punishment

By Gary Rhoades <info at insidehighered.com>

Sexual harassment has been and continues to be a real phenomenon. The
evidence is clear. The destructive effects are also clear, sometimes for all
the individual parties concerned. And the adverse effects are evident for
the profession as a whole.

What is much less clear is what can be done to reduce, if not eliminate
altogether this phenomenon. Some institutions have adopted mandatory
training about sexual harassment for all department heads and/or for all
faculty members. Last year, for example, the University of Iowa instituted
such a requirement <http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/08/15/harass> in
the wake of a high profile sexual harassment case.

Such required training was at the heart of a
dispute<http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/11/07/uci>between a
University of California at Irvine professor, Alexander McPherson,
and his university. In response to Professor McPherson's refusal to undergo
the training, the university relieved him of supervision of the employees in
his lab and threatened to withhold his salary. McPherson, who was never
accused of harassment, indicated that he was offended by the requirement,
that it was a violation of his principles, and that such training was called
for only in the event that demonstrated problems had been found in a unit.
In his words, "There is no more reason that I need to take sex harassment
training than I need to take training on avoiding grand theft auto or murder
or any other crime. The state is imposing this based on politics and that
can't be allowed."

Writing as a scholar of higher education, and not as the new general
secretary of the American Association of University Professors (a post I
assumed January 1), I would offer three observations on this issue.

First is that there are other realms of activity in which faculty members
must undergo required training, without any presumption of an offense having
been committed. In research universities (where professors' work routinely
involves human subjects, though even there literary and some other scholars
are not required to undergo such training), perhaps the most obvious example
of this is the human subjects training surrounding research grants and
activity. Prior to getting grants approved by the sponsored projects
division of a university, an investigator must have undergone human subjects
training. Although the training varies by university, there are common
patterns nationally. Typically, for example, such training is online, and is
not particularly rigorous, to put it mildly. Indeed, the format involves
investigators taking an exam by reading some written passages and then
answering questions about them. After each section or module the person
finds out whether he or she missed too many questions in a section, and
proceeds. If they have missed too many questions in a section they simply
backtrack, get the same questions in a different order, and retake the quiz,
until they pass. A widely used set of exams (which are specified to
social/behavioral and biomedical research) are those offered by the
Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative, which over 830 institutions
and facilities (including a very large number of research universities, and
indeed including the University of California at Irvine) utilize. The
modules for the CITI quiz typically include three to six questions.

For the most part, although faculty complain about the inconvenience and
irrelevance of the training, I do not know of anyone who would suggest that
such training should be required only of investigators found to have
violated the rights of human subjects. The more important questions of
process and principle surround the institutional review board activities
that regulate the approval of an investigator's proposal. Here, serious
questions have been raised about compromising investigators' academic
freedom to engage in certain types of research and to research certain
subject matter. But the controversy is not, for the most part, about the
human subjects training per se. Indeed, I would venture to say that for
colleagues in the social and behavioral sciences, among the most common
comments and complaints about human subjects training are that it is
ineffective, that it does little by way of actually protecting human
subjects and seems to be geared more to protecting the institution. The same
might be said with regard to sexual harassment training, or any other
"public" program of "training" that a college or university requires of its
employees, including faculty members.

This leads to my second observation about the issue of institutions
requiring sexual harassment training for faculty. What purpose does it
serve? As Professor McPherson says of the requirement, "I have never heard
the university advance a reasonable and convincing explanation." In fact,
there is no evidence that such one-time training is effective in reducing
the activity in questions. Here, I would agree with Professor McPherson's
questioning of the rigor and effectiveness of such training. Thus, he notes
that some of his colleagues log in to the online training, wait for a period
of time, and then give random answers to questions. He also notes the
regular distribution of materials to employees providing information
regarding the rules and regulations surrounding sexual harassment, rendering
in his view the online training unnecessary.

Whatever the nature of the online training, and the behavior of the
participants, there is ample reason to question the impact of a single
experience on behavior. Perhaps there is even greater reason to questions
the behavioral impact of such an intervention when it is "virtual." However,
such formal training may nevertheless serve an important function for the
organization, by providing legal and external "cover" for the college or
university in question.

Here, it is worth noting that in 1995 the AAUP adopted a report (revised
from a 1984 report that had been adopted) on this matter ("Sexual
Harassment: Suggested Policy and Procedures for Handling
Complaints"<http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/policydocs/contents/sexharass.htm>)
that noted the incentive for institutions to adopt not only policies but
also educational programs due to some Supreme Court decisions. As a scholar
in the field of higher education, and as one who studies and writes about
higher education organizations, I would go a step further. There is a large
body of organizational research, known as institutional theory, which
suggests that one of the main reasons for the emergence in organizations of
such formal structures as required training programs is that it is a
response to external concerns about a domain of activity and an effort to
maintain or (re)establish the organization's legitimacy in the eyes of the
external world.

This need not be a cynical view, suggesting that neither institutional
leaders nor the professionals engaged in developing and delivering formal
training programs (whether in sexual harassment, human subjects, or in the
area of teaching) are actually committed to affecting and improving behavior
in the college or university. Rather, it is a view about the predominant and
ultimate effects of such formal structures. It is much easier to publicly
establish an office or an educational program to address some area of
concern (such as sexual harassment) than it is to affect the private
behaviors of professionals. Thus, when confronted with a potential challenge
to an institution's external legitimacy, because it is seen as violating
some prevailing norms in the broader society, it makes sense for a president
to support the creation of public, yet "virtual" structures such as online
training modules in sexual harassment. It makes sense because at the very
least it is a way of publicly demonstrating that the organization is trying
to do something to prevent behavior that violates society's norms and/or
laws.

Given the above, and given the premise that sexual harassment has been and
continues to be a phenomenon that we need to address and reduce, if not
eliminate, how can such change be effected?

This question leads to my third observation, which is that the change we
seek requires an exercise of political will and an excising of cultural
ills. With regard to the former, the policies and laws are in place to
enable supervisors to act fairly yet aggressively when sexual harassment
takes place. If we provide and cultivate the mechanisms to enable the
reporting of what research suggests is an underreported behavior, then the
structures are in place if academic (and other) administrators at various
levels will systematically and appropriately be receptive to reports of
harassment, forcefully pursue those cases, and perhaps most important of
all, be evaluated by their own supervisors according to whether they do so.
With regard to the excising of cultural ills, we must all take
responsibility to embed in our daily lives a pattern of interaction that
clarifies, monitors, and maintains boundaries of appropriate behavior. Among
the cultural ills we need to address head on is not only sexual harassment
(and a range of hostile and chilly climate issues), but also the academic
cultural norm of not confronting the bad behavior of peers. An argument
could be made that as a profession academics are much better at disputing
colleagues' scholarly positions and ideas than we are at sanctioning the
behaviors of peers.

Deeply embedded in the consciousness of most academics in the U.S. is a
sense of the profound value of and right to due process involving review by
one's faculty peers, and to academic freedom. Both of these are not only
found in the AAUP report noted above (as well as in its 1994 report on "Due
Process in Sexual Harassment Complaints"), they arguably can be traced to
the AAUP's important work over the past century to establish and defend
these rights. The association's report on sexual harassment identifies
harassment (based on gender, or on race/ethnicity, or other considerations,
to which I would add sexual orientation) as being unethical and as
"inconsistent with the maintenance of academic freedom on campus." It is our
responsibility as a profession, to embed in our consciousness and in our
daily practice a vigorous commitment to and promotion of a profession free
from sexual (and other forms of) harassment. Fulfilling that responsibility
(which runs much deeper than public but relatively superficial, virtual
steps like requiring everyone to undergo training) will better enable us as
a profession to benefit and learn from increasingly diverse populations of
colleagues and students, thereby more fully realizing our potential as an
academy and as a society.