Column: No Help Against Harassment

So this guy -- let's call him Ralph Righteous -- decided to exercise his constitutional right to free speech by getting creative with a Xerox machine. He took an out-of-focus, candid photo of me from the DP, and blew it up several times. He appended a derogatory slogan to his artwork and posted it in the hallway outside his office. It just so happens that I use that hallway to go to work each day. And so do my students, supervisors and co-workers. The poster stayed up for several months, until Ralph removed it for reasons known only to himself. I had investigated several mechanisms for resolving what I saw as a workplace harrassment issue, but I had not brought or sought to bring any official charges against Ralph. The University's sexual and racial harrassment codes (which apply to all students) did not address Ralph Righteous's posting of my picture with a generically insulting caption, and the University's workplace harrassment codes (which would have prohibited Ralph's behavior in the place where I work) do not apply to graduate students, even those who work for the University. So neither of those channels were open to me as a means of resolving this increasingly public problem. Several University administrators and friends urged me to pursue resolution of the matter through other official channels. See the ombudsman, someone suggested. I had a very nice talk with the associate ombudsman, whom I found friendly and supportive. But she held out little hope for a resolution through her office. She didn't feel that negotiation would be useful with someone who seemed so disrespectful of my feelings in the first place. The kind of person who would put up an insulting poster in the first place, she said, is not likely to feel remorse about having maligned a colleague. She had a point, I felt, and furthermore, I was disinclined to use my dignity as a bargaining chip with someone whose intentions seemed unfriendly, to say the least. I still had one official avenue for resolving this problem: Ralph's department chair. Like all department chairs, the head of Ralph's department was charged with the responsibility of maintaining reasonable workplace standards of respect and dignity. In fact, the reason that graduate students do not fall under the staff guidelines for workplace comportment is that department chairs are supposed to manage problems in this area. Unfortunately, Ralph's department chair (who could scarcely hide his smile while listening to "my side" of what he clearly regarded as a sandbox dispute) declined to take any action apart from questioning Ralph about "his side" of the matter. (It turns out that he and Ralph spoke frequently since he is Ralph's dissertation director, a fact that the chair neglected to mention to me during our talk, until I asked him about it.) I did not ask the chair to "make" Ralph take down the poster. Instead, I asked him to protect my right to a civilized, respectful workplace. I told the chair that I felt Ralph's poster was interfering with my work performance by creating a hostile and offensive atmosphere. The chair responded by saying that he felt reluctant to "police the walls" of his department. I asked the chair if he thought Ralph was behaving in a manner suited to a professional workplace. He declined to answer, and soon after left for the summer with the situation still unresolved. With the department chair's dismissal of my complaint, I had pretty much exhausted the official channels of conflict resolution at the University. The poster had been up more than two months by this time, and had been amended to include a statement by Ralph asserting that his action was protected by his right to free speech. And I heard from a number of sources that people were discussing the picture, and speculating on its meaning. Strangers asked me what I had done to warrant Ralph's behavior. My students asked me about it. So did my supervisor. A professor took a graduate student acquaintance of mine by the poster to discuss it and my "inappropriate" response to it: attempting to curb Ralph's right to free speech. In fact, the question on many people's lips was not whether Ralph was violating my rights by attempting to degrade me personally in the public building where I work, but whether I was violating Ralph's rights by seeking official channels of conflict resolution. The question of whether it is appropriate for adults to respond to other adults by putting up insulting posters in their workplaces took a backseat to investigations into how I might have offended Ralph and earned this ignominy. Consensus about Ralph's poster and my response to it, especially (dare I say it?) among men, was that I was in the wrong. I probably deserved Ralph's deliberate efforts to discredit and embarrass me where I work, and I certainly had no right to any official recourse which might impinge on Ralph's right to free speech. I draw two conclusions from my experience with Ralph, a fellow I met only once, nearly two years ago. First, I don't believe we can count on peer pressure and proper socialization to prevent harassment. Ralph's department chair was directly responsible for Ralph's socialization as a professional scholar, and he refused to advise Ralph that professionals do not resolve political differences with their colleagues by posting public insults. And if your advisor and department chair won't tell you what professional behavior is, who will? Second, I discovered that one's right to a civilized, respectful workplace is very selectively applied to University community members. Staff members have more efficient mechanisms in place for protecting workplace rights than do graduate students, who once again fall into bureaucratic abyss: we are students, not staff, but many of us also work for, and in, the University. Instead of being protected by an official code, we are subject to inconsistencies and idiosyncracies created by having to depend on individual department chairs -- who clearly take this responsibility with varying degrees of seriousness, and may have conflicting interests -- to protect our workplace rights. Elizabeth Hunt is a doctoral candidate in History and Sociology of Science from Bloomington, Indiana. One Man's Meat has appeared alternate Wednesdays.

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