Professor here. There are several rules we cannot break without jeopardizing everything. On this list is “Don’t do anything with students that can be misconstrued as a sexual advance” or whatever formulation you’d like. I’ve had students drunk email me, stop by my office to give me gifts and then want to study there,…

Full-on protective tenure should only apply towards what you’re publishing, i.e. they can’t fire you for publishing in niche weird fields, publishing strident feminist manifestos, publishing findings that contravene accepted knowledge, etc. EVERYONE should get a hearing if accused of interpersonal wrongdoing, whether…

I don’t know if anyone outside academia understands how uniquely terrifying it is to go up against the machines of institutional power there, especially as a grad student. You pour your entire life’s work into your degree and (if your advisors are unscrupulous) put up with all types of abuse because you know these…

Ugh. I’m a sociologist, and the discussions at the national conference about the whole Michael Kimmel accusations have been sadly illustrative of your point. Older scholars shrugging it all off like it’s totally reasonable to try to fuck multiple grad students over years and years.

1. Believe victims. He was a victim.

As a current PhD student (read: kinja name), I see this kind of shit constantly. My specific field seems far less prone to it, but the weird relationships in a highly imbalanced world are everywhere.

Don’t. Fuck. Or. Try. To. Fuck. Subordinates.

No one at my work knows anything about my sexual fantasies,

Pretty much the same. Especially a lot of it is just common sense.

“It’s not the same thing to accuse a male person in power versus accusing a woman. It’s just not the same thing, because we’ve got a culture and a very long history in which males were dominant and abusing their power.”

This is a weird fucking case.

I was a graduate student around the same time with the alleged victim, in a different department. I cannot give you much detail, because I would like to stay anonymous. I took Avital’s classes, but she was not in my diss committee. I’m commenting on an article for the first time, but I felt like what I know should be…

Right? I mean, when I see any of my students heading toward my office, I’m thinking, “crap, this person’s bring me more work to do.” And that is not sexy. So, maybe it’s my sheer laziness that has kept me from perving on my students. Or maybe it’s the fact that I’m an adult and I’m capable of not engaging in sleazy…

I’m disappointed to see how many people are attempting to discredit a victim by implying that a queer man filing a title IX complaint in any way indicates a bad-faith weaponization of the #MeToo movement.

I don’t think it’s ethical to blur professional and personal lines when there’s a power imbalance in a professional setting. Anecdotal, but as a supervisor, I zealously avoided personal connections with my employees and others who were not necessarily my direct reports, but were subordinate to me in my position. 

This is terrible. It doesn’t matter if the two people are legally adults; she was effectively his employer. An advisor is meant to champion and mentor their advisee, not engage in a sexual relationship with them. Zizek’s defense about “eccentricity”is willfully beside the point.

You articulate this really well. As soon as we start dehumanizing others we stop looking at the fact that many people can act in profoundly kind and loving ways in some aspects of their lives, and profoundly cruel and hateful ways in others.

I think that the believe that only “evil” people commit acts like this keeps victims from being believed actually.

My thanks to the author for sharing the story, and also my condolences - there’s pain all over the place here, from knowing what happened to your daughter, to dealing with the suicide of your father, to finding out that a loved one is capable of committing sexual assault (on a child, no less).

Hotlining someone, in the state I am currently in, is calling children’s division of abuse and neglect. As a teacher, I am a mandatory reporter and I have had to make that call a small number of times. You give the details as you know them and let the agency handle the investigation.