Later that week I attended a meeting of the Sexual Harassment Committee. It was unusual for someone as new to the job as I was to serve on this committee, but I had sat on the Disciplinary Committee at a previous job in Louisiana, and it was thought that my experience there might be useful here, so that when a seat had fallen vacant at the beginning of this semester, I had been invited to take it.
I had hesitated before accepting. I had had a taste of the hostility one is liable to receive in return for doing this kind of work. In Louisiana, at a clambake on college grounds, a senior professor had overheard a sophomore warning some freshmen about the chiggers – insects that burrow under your skin; a local hazard. Without stopping to think, the professor had blurted out a foolish witticism: ‘We’re not allowed to call them chiggers any more,’ he had said, guffawing, ‘we have to call them chegroes.’
It hadn’t taken the students long to find their way past the smirk of glib humor in this, to the leer of racism lurking beneath it, and before the party was over they had lodged a protest with the student council. The matter was brought before the Disciplinary Committee, and we agreed unanimously that the joke was a speech-act showing an implicit contempt for the sensitivities of minority students. The professor was asked to make a written apology, but instead of doing so he had resigned – a gesture that aroused a storm of publicity in the local press. For several weeks the members of the Disciplinary Committee, myself included, had been pilloried as fanatics of the new religion of Political Correctness. Given the low level of reporting in these newspapers, not to mention the extreme reactionary position they took on all social issues, this wasn’t as painful as it might sound – there was even a certain sense of martyred righteousness to be had from it – but I hadn’t much enjoyed the experience, and the thought of exposing myself to a possible repetition of it up here at Arthur Clay College, didn’t greatly appeal.
What decided me in the end was the sense that as a teacher of Gender Studies, instructing my students in the science of unscrambling the genetic code of prejudice, false objectivity and pernicious sexual stereotyping that forms the building blocks of so many of our cultural monuments, I had an ethical obligation to follow through on my intellectual principles into the realm of real human relations, where these hidden codes wrought their true, devastating effects – or at any rate not to refuse to do so when asked. Either I believed that what I did for a living had a basis in life itself, or else I was wasting my time.
I knew, of course, that the proceedings of these committees had by now become a stock-in-trade object of satire in popular plays and novels, but once I had made up my mind to serve, I found that I cared only as much about this as I had about the Louisiana newspapers: not enough to baulk at doing what I considered my duty. It was a matter, finally, of standing up and being counted.
Sexual Harassment Awareness Week was in two months’ time, and the first part of our meeting was taken up with our two student representatives outlining proposals for Take Back the Night events, Date Rape seminars, a Speech Code conference, and so on.
After we had voted to support and finance these proposals, the students left us and we proceeded to discuss what our chair, Roger Freeman, described as a ‘delicate matter.’ This turned out to concern a young lecturer who was said to be engaging in sexual relations with several of his students. As yet there had been no formal complaints, but the rumors in circulation suggested it was only a matter of time.
The lecturer, a fellow Englishman named Bruno Jackson, was aware of the rules governing this sort of conduct. He and I had both attended the Sexual Harassment seminar, obligatory for all new faculty, at the beginning of the year. There, we were addressed by Elaine Jordan, the school attorney (and a member of this committee), on the need for constant vigilance and self-scrutiny. She advised us to keep our office doors wide open during one-on-one meetings with students of either sex. She urged us to look around our desks for objects of an inadvertently suggestive nature that might offend or upset a sensitive student. As an example, she gave the case of a visiting Australian Adjunct who had written the word ‘Ramses’, the name of a condom brand, on the chalkboard behind him. Two or three of his students had been made uncomfortable by this, imagining it to be some kind of Australian method of importuning. When the man was brought before the Sexual Harassment Committee, he expressed astonishment, claiming the word referred to a Turkish cigarette of the same name, which a friend had asked him to buy in New York, and that he had chalked it up to remind himself. To the extent that he wasn’t officially reprimanded, he had been given the benefit of the doubt, but his contract had not been renewed. ‘And be advised,’ Elaine had continued, ‘these things stay in your record. Permanently.’
She had then gone on to warn us about the dangers of introducing the subject of sex into classroom discussions. ‘Obviously you can’t always avoid it, but be sensitive. Some students find it embarrassing, especially when they think a faculty member’s harping on the subject unnecessarily. We get a lot of complaints about teachers who are always looking for the sexual symbolism of a poem or story -’
It was here that Bruno Jackson had interrupted her. I had already noticed him reacting with ill-concealed amazement and sarcastic disbelief to much of what Elaine had been telling us, as though it was the first time he had encountered anything like this, which was unlikely, given the peripatetic job history he and I shared. I myself had heard numerous versions since coming to the States from England seven years ago, and was no more surprised by it than I would have been, say, by a flight attendant demonstrating safety procedures before take-off.
‘Wait a minute,’ he’d said in a voice brimming with aggressive irony, ‘are you saying I have to put a lid on discussion of sexual imagery in the books I teach?’
Elaine looked at him, startled. She saw herself as our ally – a purveyor of information necessary to our survival – and it clearly upset her to be spoken to as an oppressor.
‘No, that isn’t what I’m saying -’ Her eyes darted anxiously about the room in search of support. ‘I’m just saying you have to be sensitive.’
I nodded vigorously, and one or two other people followed suit.
‘The kids don’t like being made to feel uncomfortable,’ Elaine continued. ‘They’re very young, remember. Not even in their twenties, some of them -’
‘I see,’ Bruno had said. ‘So for instance, I’m teaching Jane Austen this week. Mansfield Park. There’s this one scene where a girl loses something down the back of a sofa. She pushes her hand down the cracks between the cushions and starts feeling around for it. It’s all very heightened, and as far as I’m concerned it’s a thinly veiled image of female masturbation. Are you saying I should just gloss over that?’
Elaine, who had recovered her composure now, gave him a level stare. ‘All I’m trying to do’, she said, ‘is I’m trying to alert you to the possible consequences of certain acts. I’m not here to tell you how to teach your classes. That’s a judgment call only you can make.’
‘I’ll take that as a veto on masturbation in Jane Austen then,’ Bruno had said with a smirk. He’d looked around the room, as though expecting complicit smiles. I avoided his eye, and as far as I could tell, not one of us, male or female, had given him the slightest hint of encouragement.
After the meeting I had gone up to compliment Elaine on her handling of the situation. She thanked me profusely. We talked for a while – about what, I forget, though I do remember thinking that she was a more vulnerable and emotional person than her somewhat bland exterior had suggested.
Looking back at Bruno’s behavior, I see that it wouldn’t have been difficult to predict the trouble that was now looming over him.