The academy has more than its fair share of people like Alexander McPherson, the UC-Irvine biologist who refuses! to go through sexual harassment training– training the UC is obligated to provide under state law. Now he’s thinking of retiring rather than complying with university regulations.
His reasoning is as follows:
(i) the training is a “sham” and he’s been provided with no evidence that it does any good;
(ii) the state is trying to “bully” him into doing something that is “repugnant and offensive,” partly because it “carries a stigma”*;
(iii) it violates his academic freedom;
(iv) it wasn’t a law back when he started!
No, seriously, that’s really his case. These are are unconvincing for obvious reasons. (On second thought, I notice that these might be in order of most to least compelling, which is sad.)
What fascinates me, though, is the personality that judges it is worth standing on principle and leaving an otherwise peachy job over a few hours of tedium. I’m no fan of employer-ass-covering training, but I have sat through forklift safety videos and sexual harassment workshops alike and judged it a reasonable price to pay in exchange for a job. Irony: my armchair hunch is that McPherson is this much of a pain in the ass because he’s spent decades in a job that gave him enormous autonomy to decide what’s worth doing. The end result: an old codger harumphing about his sacred right to skip out of his workplace duties.
In fairness to McPherson, he would have attended had the University made this statement:
Fulfilling this requirement in no way implies, suggests or indicates that the university currently has any reason to believe that Professor McPherson has ever sexually harassed any student or any person under his supervision during his 30-year career with the University of California.
Just as the correct response to the workplace requirement is, oh, hell, might as well get this over with, the correct administrative response to cranks is: well, dude is crazy but he brings in research dollars; let’s print out this statement on some letterhead and if that makes him happy, it’s a cheap out.
(Will no one defend SH training on the merits? Oh, ok, I’ll have a go. Hostile work environments suck, and there’s value in making sure everyone has been told about the policies, even if for many people the content is old news. You’d be amazed by what some people don’t know. Furthermore, these things have content besides “no trading grades for sex!” Things I’ve learned: the extent of my obligations as a “workplace supervisor,” how to report complaints, what the investigative process is like, and so on. Not useless things to know.)
*The stigma of working at UC is, indeed, great, I must admit.
Lemieux made me read that damned thing in the first place.
The Edge of the American West 
47 comments
November 23, 2008 at 9:12 am
rick
I worked at one of the largest law firms in the world, and had to undergo sexual harassment prevention training (sexual harassment training is something different, I hope). I worked the later shift, so the people in my training session also worked the later shift. Needless to say, the education and intelligence level of the people working the later shifts (like the mailroom and document copy people) was slightly lower than the 9-5’s, excluding the author.
We had to rate a number of scenario’s on a red light, green light, and yellow light scale. These scenarios were designed to cover preventing racism, sexism, ageism, et al. One scenario consisted of proper birthday greetings for an elderly person at the workplace. This scenario, clearly a red light, had the elderly birthday person receiving black balloons and cards that said ‘over the hill!’. The reasonable people in the room rated this as a red light. However, there were objectors.
One gentleman’s defense for rating this scenario a green light was that we didn’t know the gender of the elderly person, because “only women get upset when you make fun of their age.”
It was late, so the HR person conducting the training didn’t expend the energy to reeducation this gentleman.
November 23, 2008 at 9:15 am
Vance
The SH training at my workplace (a Silicon Valley software company) was sane, informative, and not long. It even provoked healthy, serious discussion — we got the predictable jokes out of the way before it began. Not at all hard to defend on the merits.
(Actually hiring female engineers, though, was left as a problem for future sessions.)
November 23, 2008 at 9:33 am
Rich Puchalsky
“my armchair hunch is that McPherson is this much of a pain in the ass because he’s spent decades in a job that gave him enormous autonomy to decide what’s worth doing.”
Really? My armchair hunch is that anyone this opposed to it as a “sham” probably sexually harasses his students.
November 23, 2008 at 9:36 am
drip
I have no trouble defending mandatory race/sex/age/etc. seminars. I will agree that 95% (or some other really large part) of such seminars are wasted on 95% (or yet another large part of the people attending them.) First, if you learn one new thing that is good. Second, some people will learn many new things and that is good. Third, one is taught what all are thereafter presumed to know. This, too, is good. Finally, even if you know everything, the fact that everyone needs to attend these things makes it possible for some who know less than all to refuse to admit that fact and yet retain their smug ignorance. One hopes that even they might learn something by accident.
November 23, 2008 at 9:55 am
eric
Some UC campuses have in the past permitted one to do this training online. Which is about as informative but deprives one of the opportunity to watch certain colleagues harrumph and roll their eyes.
November 23, 2008 at 10:07 am
aep
I’m squirming in my chair a little reading this. In order for the state to sign off on my child custody agreement, I had to pay $100 and sit through 3 hours of parenting classes (mandatory for all). I had to listen to this condescending woman 10 years my junior (and lacking my ten years of parenting experience) tell me how to raise my children and how to deal with my ex. Then she made us role-play like we were 6. If the argument is that this system catches all the “bad” parents out there, I suppose there is some merit. BUT, would they make Dr. Spock take parenting classes? I think not. I suspect that McPherson feels like he’s already proven he’s not a sexual harrasser– 30 years at the same institution without incident. Give him a break.
November 23, 2008 at 10:08 am
Neddy Merrill
Eric and I will record “My Harumphs” and it will be the 2 Live Jews of this holiday season.
November 23, 2008 at 10:22 am
Blume
But aep, no one is making McPherson pay for anything.
Also, 30 years at the same institution proves nothing about whether McPherson understands various definitions of harrassment and university policies for dealing with incidents. Especially since, as he himself points out, they didn’t have this sort of training back when he started.
November 23, 2008 at 10:22 am
JPool
“My harumphs/ my harumphs, my harumphs, my harumphs/ my aged academic hmphs.”
November 23, 2008 at 10:25 am
JPool
I went to see a good-but-not-great production of Shadowlands Friday night, and were it to be reimagined as a musical, this would have been a valuable contribution to the firs act.
November 23, 2008 at 10:49 am
aep
hmm. Yes, I think you’re right Blume. He could’ve been calling students “hon” all this time. And, now that I’m forced to self-reflect over my own state-enforced seminar, I see some value in the University–or any institution or state or government–making its policies about such things explicit. Color me enlightened.
November 23, 2008 at 11:21 am
A White Bear
I think I need sexual harassment training. Can I admit that? I did it when I worked at a bookstore, and it was really helpful, because I do have a tendency to make mean, off-color jokes, and the video I watched made it very clear to me what was OK and what wasn’t.
But as a teacher, I sometimes think I cross the line. I’m definitely not coming onto anyone, but because a lot of the content of my class is about sexuality and that goes down a lot better with a dose of humor, I may have sexually harassed some of my students. I don’t think they minded. In fact, I do have a student accusing me of being “too sexual” in class, but it’s in a class in which none of the texts are sexually explicit at all and I’ve been really careful, and she’s clearly sensitive beyond the realm of my duties.
Anyhow, I think I would benefit from some sensitivity training. (Seriously, how can God or man expect me to teach this poem without having a good long laugh at male sexuality?)
November 23, 2008 at 12:09 pm
chris y
Do you think that if I gave up my job and set up a consultancy offering “anti-self-importance” and “get a sense of your own absurdity in the greater scheme of things” training, I would make a living?
November 23, 2008 at 12:21 pm
Brad
Do you think that if I gave up my job and set up a consultancy offering “anti-self-importance” and “get a sense of your own absurdity in the greater scheme of things” training, I would make a living?
Unfortunately, no. God knows a lot of us could use it, though….
November 23, 2008 at 12:30 pm
kid bitzer
hey awb, maybe you can help me find a poem.
it’s elizabethan, i think a sonnet. a man asks a woman how it is that all of her kids resemble her husband, given that she has many other lovers. she explains that she never starts a new amour until she knows she is already carrying hubby’s child.
it’s very droll, and her reply turns on a metaphor from cargo ships.
ring any bells?
November 23, 2008 at 1:04 pm
Sandie
I actually have a little sympathy for McPherson, at least the part of his argument that calls the training a sham. At my illustrious university, the “sexual harassment training” (or anti-sexual harassment training, technically speaking) consists of an online survey that is supposed to take 5-10 mins., and if you get something wrong, you can redo the answers until you get them right. I’d be very happy for people to take a real seminar to talk about sexual harassment, but this mandatory online seminar is strictly about the university covering its ass. That way, if a professor is accused of sexual harassment, the university can say that every faculty member has taken sexual harassment training and, therefore, the university is not liable for the faculty member’s behavior. It’s about hanging the faculty out to dry. As I said before, a real-life course (at least one hour) would demonstrate some seriousness on the university’s part about the problem of sexual harassment.
November 23, 2008 at 1:16 pm
jim
Oh dear! For my 50th, they brought in black balloons and the cake said “over the hill.” I thought they were being nice, going to all that trouble to personalize the celebration. Now I see I was being harassed. Can I still sue?
I have sat through an awful lot of corporate training over my career. Some of it has been good, most of it has been awful. There are no standards. There’s no equivalent of accreditation. Training tends to the simplistic; trainers tend to cater to the lowest intellect in the class. You do come to dread it. And remember McPherson has a PhD. When they told him his diss was accepted, he surely said to himself, “I’ll never have to be a student again.” Now he’s told he has to be, in a parody of education, too.
Yes, the reasonable man sucks it up. It’s just one day, after all. But let’s not pretend it actually has value.
November 23, 2008 at 1:23 pm
rja
My favorite sexual harassment ed story involves a foreign Ph.d student sitting through the usual spiel quietly, but with a pained and exasperated look on his face. Quiet, that is, until the Q & A period where he announced in his Benelux accent, “But the university can’t tell me not to fall in love!” You could chalk this up to an intercultural misunderstanding, but the fact that he was hilariously attired in (seriously) a mesh tank top and dolphin shorts really undermined his point.
November 23, 2008 at 2:23 pm
rosmar
That is awesome.
I believe in going to these trainings, so that if they are bad one can complain about them intelligently.
November 23, 2008 at 4:26 pm
Neddy Merrill
rja, you were at university with Gunther? Fantastic!
November 23, 2008 at 4:29 pm
A White Bear
No, Kid, I don’t know it, sorry to say! My area of expertise starts at post-Elizabethan, so I’m not much help. Sounds like a good one! Flavia might know.
November 23, 2008 at 5:15 pm
PQuincy
I find it interesting that various right-wing outlets (I limit myself to reading a few, in this case a mention in Instapundit) are defending McPherson because SHT is liberal mind-control run amok. What the state-mandated SHT really is — at least, if the online version at my university is any guide, is precisely defined above: it’s “employer-ass-covering training.”
Our version consisted of a series of scenarios offered online, with follow-up questions. The scenarios were not utterly implausible, and some of the questions germane, but the giveaway was the ‘right’ answers: they always involved informing the University administration’s officer for such matters BEFORE anything else. (There was no requirement that one choose the ‘right’ answers, by the way, but the system did require that one spent a certain amount of time on each scenario. For those with PhD level reading and comprehension speed, this meant doing a scenario, answering the questions, clicking “Next”, then reading a journal for 10 minutes for doing the next one: otherwise the “speedometer” would go to red, and one wouldn’t be certified as having spent enough time.)
Now, some of the scenarios involved the trainee merely as an observer, but quite a few suggested that the trainee might be a supervisor or a witness. And if there’s one thing I know, it’s that if ‘sexual harassment’ comes up in my workplace that involves me in any way — as a witness, as a victim, as an alleged perpetrator, as an alleged colluder, as a preventer — the very very first thing I will do is get my OWN lawyer, because the institution will not necessarily have my own interests at heart, and there is an adequate record of institutions, including universities, quickly jettisoning their employees caught up in such matters.
That said, I don’t see much harm in the training that Prof. McPherson objects to so strenuously, as long as its real rhetorical intention is clear: it is about protecting the institution, and only in a secondary way about preventing sexual harassment — though I do believe that harassment still exists, is a real, serious, and often painful problem, and deserves to be addressed.
November 23, 2008 at 5:49 pm
Lab Lemming
“That said, I don’t see much harm in the training that Prof. McPherson objects to so strenuously, as long as its real rhetorical intention is clear: it is about protecting the institution, and only in a secondary way about preventing sexual harassment — though I do believe that harassment still exists, is a real, serious, and often painful problem, and deserves to be addressed.”
A valid reason for objecting to such training is that it teaches potential victims to react through coverupable channels, and therefore may constitute obstruction of justice.
November 23, 2008 at 7:24 pm
grackle
Well, folks are different. I assume that Prof. McPherson is acting out of principle, since I can see no reward in his actions, otherwise. So, I applaud him, even if it doesn’t seem to me to be a particularly prudent battle to wage. Those Scottish Calvinists shudder at the very mention of sex.
November 23, 2008 at 7:33 pm
kid bitzer
awb–who is flavia? (other than a roman matron).
olivia cole has read the poem, and alludes to the punch-line:
http://www.clivejames.com/poetry/cole/julia
but that’s the nearest clue that i can find.
November 23, 2008 at 8:58 pm
bitchphd
A valid reason for objecting to such training is that it teaches potential victims to react through coverupable channels, and therefore may constitute obstruction of justice.
Somehow I doubt that that’s Prof. McPherson’s objection.
November 23, 2008 at 9:54 pm
andrew
kb, searching suggests it’s Julia and Agrippa, which explains Cole’s poem title.
November 23, 2008 at 9:58 pm
andrew
That doesn’t quite get you to the Elizabethan poem, but it’s another clue.
November 24, 2008 at 3:24 am
ac
Actually hiring female engineers, though, was left as a problem for future sessions
One thing to think about is how even ordinary (more or less harassment-free) male conversation can be alienating to women, and whether it constitutes a barrier to entry in male professions.
November 24, 2008 at 3:31 am
two hours
“Those are some nice melons”
The highlight of the UC online sexual harassment training for supervisors. There was also something about making a report.
November 24, 2008 at 4:16 am
kid bitzer
aha. thanks andrew.
Numquam enim nisi navi plena tollo vectorem. sat 2.5.9.
so perhaps olivia cole has not read the earlier english poem, but simply read macrobius.
November 24, 2008 at 10:00 am
bridgett
Let’s not overthink. He’s asserting privilege, not standing on principle, and thus is being an ass. If he retires because he can’t stand the indignity of being asked to sit through one more meeting he perceives as boring or useless, then he’s made a good call because he is clearly in the wrong line of work. I suspect that on receiving his letter of resignation, his dean will do the touchdown boogie.
November 24, 2008 at 10:17 am
jeffbowers
Ideally, anti-harassment training would give men and women the opportunity to talk through the sensitivities and misunderstandings that can be construed as sexual harassment. I think we all know it when we see blatant sexual harassment occur. But the gray areas in the middle are more difficult to define. So-called aggressors (almost always men) aren’t always aware when they say something insensitive, and some aggrieved parties have been known to overreact (while it’s not specifically aimed at sexual harassment, the warning against black balloons is just silly). Having a structured forum for elucidating the perceptions that make up the gray areas would be a lot more effective than simply specifying every off-color comment as bona fide sexual harassment and “training” people to a) not make any such comments or b) to report such comments. Offhandedly calling someone “hon” is not the same as feeling up a student in exchange for an A. There really is no comparison. The outcome of co-opting the gray areas under the sexual harassment umbrella is that less attention is paid to preventing more serious harassment from occurring because we are all on pins and needles over the petty stuff.
November 24, 2008 at 10:20 am
Professor Seaver
I teach at the UC and I’m more than happy to run that program in the background, clicking in from time-to-time so that it logs me as a “participant.”
Meanwhile I watch YouTubes or shop online and pay the content — such as it is — no mind whatever. After I’m monitored for umpty-ump minutes, ka-ching! I get my “training certificate.” And yippe-ki-yay I’m “trained!”
If it protects the university from lawsuits, super-duper. Do I give a rat’s ass about the training itself? No. I already know the answers, I know sexual harassment is wrong, I don’t find particular scenarios to be so “ambiguous” that I need to have them pointed out to me, and I don’t need some half-baked PowerPoint with clip-art cartoon characters to “teach” me.
I’d be interested to see what the retention rate is on this nonsense, given a pre- and a post-test. I’d be willing to believe that for those who fail the test pre-training, after some number of hours they’d fail it post-training.
This is what we used to call in government service purely a “check-the-box exercise.”
November 24, 2008 at 10:33 am
kid bitzer
first of all, i think it *is* ambiguous whether it is wrong to sexually harass clip-art cartoon characters. there are a lot of tough questions here.
as about mistreatment of cartoon characters in general. for example, what if the cartoon character is ‘clippy’ the microsoft paper-clip: is it still wrong to want to kill him?
secondly: mcpherson is write to stand up for his own reputation for complete probity. i myself refused to leave my office for a fire drill until the university counsel would write a letter confirming that i am not currently suspected of arson.
November 24, 2008 at 10:52 am
jimbo
“One thing to think about is how even ordinary (more or less harassment-free) male conversation can be alienating to women, and whether it constitutes a barrier to entry in male professions.”
What if it does? If you want to work in a particular profession, don’t you have to to a certain extent conform yourself to the existing culture of that profession? As the movie said, “There’s no crying in Baseball!”
November 24, 2008 at 10:58 am
kid bitzer
“If you want to work in a particular profession, don’t you have to to a certain extent conform yourself to the existing culture of that profession?”
exactly. we ivy league professors tried to explain this to lionel trilling, but the filthy jew still wouldn’t convert.
November 24, 2008 at 11:01 am
One of the Earl of Rochester’s Poems on Several Occasions « From Laurel Street
[…] courtesy of The Library of Congress, reproduction no. LC-USZC2-2789; thanks to A White Bear, in the comment thread over at The Edge of the American West) No Comments so far Leave a comment RSS feed for […]
November 24, 2008 at 11:10 am
jim
The more I think about this, the more I sympathize with Prof. McPherson. Look at Professor Seaver’s description above. At the end of the exercise he gets a certificate, which he can print out, which says he’s been educated about sexual harassment. This is common in corporate America. No one ever fails corporate training. All have won and all must have prizes. But do we really want a university endorsing this as a model for education, or even as valid? McPherson’s first point was that it’s a sham. Yes, it is. It’s a sham of precisely what a university exists for.
jeffbowers above describes what a university probably ought to do if it seriously wanted to engage in education about sexual harassment: the model is a seminar. But no university is going to do this. It’s expensive. It’s a pain in the neck to organize. Where are we going to get the classroom space? Who’s going to lead these seminars? What are they going to ask for as compensation?
There’s a chain of cynicism operating here. The legislature enacted the requirement cynically. The university cynically minimally meets the requirement. We all cynically suck it up as an ass-covering exercise. Poor McPherson points out that the emperor has no clothes and we laugh at him for not being sufficiently cynical.
I imagine he thought that at least some of his colleagues would stand with him. Not one has. His retirement may be the product of disappointment.
November 24, 2008 at 1:56 pm
Marichiweu
McPherson’s argument that the training is a sham and ineffective is surely, as pointed out above, standing on privilege rather than principle. It doesn’t seem to me to get him out of anything – even if it’s true, why should he receive special dispensation?
But since we’re talking about it, it certainly matches my experience. I’ve been to a couple such events: both consisted entirely of a video featuring some bland scenarios that everyone laughed at anyway, and a facilitator asking if we had any questions, which we didn’t but everyone laughed anyway. I’m sure the social psychs or whomever would have a way of studying how little impact this training had on anyone’s subsequent work behavior.
Further, the department from which I received my PhD had a pretty serious and very long-term history with a particular harassing professor. There were complaints and he entered the university’s system, which put a note in his file. They also mandated that he attend a sensitivity training, if one was available, and if not, that he watch the relevant video from the HR office’s library. He did that, documented it, and went on to harass three more undergrads and a junior professor before retiring of his own accord and getting a job at a new university. They new place knew his record perfectly well, but hired him, and there were several more documented incidents there before he again retired of his own accord. At this point everyone in the discipline knows his history, but he’s still a respected figure at the meetings and on listservs and such. I suspect this story is not unique.
My larger point being, if universities were serious about preventing harassment and creating safe workspaces and all, they’d need more than just better training modules. They’d need new hiring and tenure practices that actually get practiced, they’d need new institutional cultures that respond to these issues with swiftness and transparency rather than stealth and obfuscation, and they’d need individual faculty and administration that cared enough to act differently. I would like to think that those things are all achievable, with who-knows-what kind of gradual but constant cultural political activism. I suspect that trainings like those with which I’m familiar not only don’t help much, but actively cement the culture of ha-ha-whatever that makes this whole situation possible.
November 24, 2008 at 1:58 pm
Marichiweu
By the way, I’m copyrighting the phrase “culture of ha-ha-whatever,” so don’t get any big ideas.
November 24, 2008 at 3:30 pm
Vance
In response to my comment about maschilismo in computer science —
ac: One thing to think about is how even ordinary (more or less harassment-free) male conversation can be alienating to women, and whether it constitutes a barrier to entry in male professions.
jim: What if it does?
Um…women are deterred from pursuing a career which many would find rewarding; and (from my employer’s point of view) the pool of possible employees is unnecessarily narrowed. (This problem has actually grown worse in the 20 years I’ve been in the field.)
November 24, 2008 at 3:36 pm
Vance
That said, I’m not sure what ac had in mind. Conversation about cars and stock options?
November 24, 2008 at 5:01 pm
Some More McPherson Commentary « This is What a Feminist Blogs Like
[…] “Principles!“ […]
November 24, 2008 at 6:14 pm
ac
Conversation about cars and stock options?
No, I mean the style of conversation, and why it takes the form it does. There’s a lot of built-in sexism to the way men talk, because one thing driving gender differences in speech is men’s desire to deliberately distance themselves from women. (I.e., gender performance.)
A documented example is gossip. Men tend to look down on women for engaging in gossip—and there’s a widespread impression that men discuss More Important Things like politics all the time—but when feminist linguists study the conversations of young men they find that something like 70% of their conversation is gossip. That is, they talk about the habits and clothing and relationships of celebrities and people they know. It’s just that men frame it differently, because they don’t want to *sound like* they’re engaging in gossip, that activity of women. Instead they talk about how so-and-so looked really gay in that shirt, or what have you. The more gossipy the topic, the more fear there is of sounding like women, the more a Frame of Manliness is required.
So there’s a god-forbid-I-should-sound-like-you quality to male conversation, before more overt forms of hostility set in.
November 24, 2008 at 6:28 pm
Vance
I get you. It’s hard to imagine employers acting effectively to mitigate that kind of exclusion.
November 24, 2008 at 7:37 pm
Matt W
It’s hard to imagine employers acting effectively to mitigate that kind of exclusion.
It seems to me that what’s called for is what I understand used to be called “consciousness-raising.” Somehow letting people know that when the grad student lounge turns into a frathouse for geeks, it really is hurting the women involved, especially in the sort of field in which women are drastically underrepresented (which would be my field, among others).