Some readers may have noticed in the media, recent (separate) reports that two Fellows of Kings College, Cambridge, have resigned/been stripped of their fellowship due to allegations of harassment and misconduct. I haven’t seen any particular details about the accusations, and that isn’t really the point of what follows. Both the men concerned are ones with whom I’ve crossed paths, although they are not ones who’ve ever given me, personally, any trouble. I did know one of them had a reputation for ‘wandering hands’. However, when I think back to the not so-distant past, there are several men in my University whose behaviour I fear has strayed beyond the professional, in ways I find extraordinary at my ripe old age. It indicates that harassment of different kinds is still flourishing here, and no doubt in most universities up and down the country.
More than ten years ago I described one particular unsavoury individual. The fact was he was extremely senior, and the powers-that-be did not want to admit he was a serial harasser, as he undoubtedly was. And was well-known to be. He is someone who said to me at a reception for the University in one of the royal palaces that he ‘did like kissing games’ and prepared to act it out, despite me attempting to retreat as fast as I could. It was not the venue to create a scene. Perhaps even more surprising was his choice to drape himself all over me at a dinner with the VC sitting across from us. She did nothing. Have I mentioned I believe such inaction amounts to being complicit before? Although that previous post about being complicit was more concerned with observing bullying than harassment, the same comment applies. Inaction in the face of someone else being demeaned, bullied, harassed or attacked by any means other than pure scholarly argument, is a failure on the part of the observer.
The man I am describing in the last paragraph held a particularly exalted position within the University. His successor in that role, I’m afraid, I’ve also had cause to complain about. This was brought back to mind when, loading a talk onto a USB stick recently, I found a copy of the letter I wrote to him. In fact, I’d handwritten the letter and scanned it for a record as a pdf, carefully not keeping it on my laptop (always uploaded to the Cloud). I wanted to highlight his bad behaviour, but without advertising this more broadly by allowing others to access it. In due course I got a (handwritten) response, with something of an apology included. So far, so good. Did it change his behaviour – again my complaint was of him draping himself around me inappropriately and publicly? Who knows. What is it about that particular role and that academic discipline that lets the influential leaders believe such behaviour is acceptable?
In both cases these were men in powerful positions, who no doubt held the fate of many of their junior colleagues in their hands. This is what really troubles me. If you are a young researcher (typically the victim will be female), and a man in authority chooses to behave inappropriately, what are you supposed to do? Slap him and tell him not to be so silly? That is something I have never yet managed to have the nerve to do, but another female professor told me this was how she treated the first perpetrator I mention. Good for her, but it didn’t change his behaviour in general and it’s not something a twenty-something academic will do (let alone an undergraduate).
Furthermore, to go back to the two recent examples which hit the news that I mentioned in the opening paragraph, knowing that someone has a reputation of ‘wandering hands’ is insufficient to act. It’s simply hearsay. As a young academic I did once act in that way. I went to the then head of department and said I’d been told a professor in the department did such things as get his secretary to sit on his knee so he could fondle her. Said head of department was sufficiently shocked he immediately went and dressed down the professor and told him if he ever did that again he’d be sacked. None of that would be permissible these days. I had no direct evidence myself, it was all hearsay, and no enquiry was ever instigated by HR. However, it was probably an effective way to deal with wandering-hands-syndrome and one we have lost in the general tightening up of HR policies.
In the cases of the two Kings Fellows, they were both at the end of their careers, one had long been retired before this all hit the news (and I don’t know what had finally tipped the balance to this coming out into the public). One has to assume they had been ‘misbehaving’ throughout their careers. People might say, as they did to me when I publicly complained about one of the perpetrators I suffered at the hands of, ‘it was all different then’. It was of course. Back in the days when I was Master of Churchill College, another head of house admitted that when she’d been an undergraduate, one of her supervisors had done things that these days would be utterly unacceptable without any shame, and she had not thought anything of it then and would never have wanted to complain.
But, power imbalances mean that someone can be both flattered by such behaviour from a senior academic, and that it can be totally traumatic and remain as a shadow in the mind of the undergraduate permanently. I’ve heard moving accounts of long-ago undergraduates who experienced shocking behaviour from those in authority, including a (consensual) affair, which they only felt able to disclose after the death of the perpetrator. One woman wrote to me about her experiences at the hands of a lately deceased male academic and said it was ‘cathartic’ to talk about this decades on.
So, maybe it was different then, but it doesn’t alter the fact that any woman encountering such behaviour now is still placed in the quandary: what do I do? Is complaining ‘worth it’? There are plenty of accounts in the media of people who have complained and their institutions have not been able to handle the complaints in ways that don’t make the complainant feel worse, put through a long-running purgatory of an investigation which may end up going nowhere; with the victim wretched and the perpetrator allowed to continue in their professional role. The only potential protection is for others to tackle the bad behaviour when seen – and so often it will not be. Academia is only worse than other sectors because the power imbalances are more significant. One has to hope that the women (I’m assuming in the plural) who suffered at the hands of the two Kings Fellows, feel some sense of closure with the loss of the fellowships they both have now suffered. I fear it is too little too late.
