[lbo-talk] RE: sexual harrassment in academia

[joanna bujes]

"Years ago, I had a chat with a Dominican woman who grew up poor in 
Brooklyn and had made it to the Harvard Law School. Her tales of what 
people said to her - "you're here only because of affirmative action" 
was the mildest form of racial taunting - shocked me. I had no idea, 
really. While I don't think that one's demographic is the utlimate 
qualification for commenting on particular issues, when it comes to 
experiences like that (or of sexual harassment), it matters."

Oh yeah. When I was on the academic job market, there was a lot of bad blood about how "women were getting all the jobs." So you'd have this situation where a woman would get an appointment in a dept where there were 35 men and one or two women, and the conclusion would still be "women are getting all the jobs."

After I got my tenure track appointment at SUNY/Plattsburgh, I was invited to an English Department dinner, where one of my colleagues stated in front of everybody that the only reason I was hired was because I was a woman. Apparently some applicant from Princeton had been passed over because of me. I pointed out that I had been hired partly to teach technical and business writing and that none of the other candidates had any experience in this field, but this was waved away.

I should add that the only place where I experienced overt sexual harrassment on the job, was in academia.

Joanna