>Maybe I'm missing some vital background information on Frank Scott
>but how exactly does one "qualify" to make a judgement concerning
>sexual harassment?
Having had some experience of it, perhaps?
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.
Doug
--I think some of the negative reaction to sexual harrassment claims has come from the cases where it was plain that the charges were exaggerated, to put it mildly, or outright false. At the University of Hawaii from 1993, I can recall 3 cases right off the top of my head that were transparently false accusations and they did a fair amount of damage to other claimants of sexual harrassment. This article in George Magazine ( http://www.fact.on.ca/newpaper/go9909.htm )does a good job reporting the kickoff case, the other two, one occurred in the soc. dept, where i was at at the time, a case where a student made the most detailed and bizarre allegations of sexual impropriety against a 70 year old prof. and his t.a. She made a big boo-boo though, the t.a. was an out of the closet gay and his officemates were feminists who had seen the interactions between this student and the t.a. and denounced her as a fraud (which she was). The prof refused to ever let the woman in the office before the accusations were made, since he suspected she would be a potential false accuser, so all his interactions with her took place in front of witnesses in the hallway or in the classroom. Another truly bizarre allegation of 'harrassment' came from a gay would be radical student leader who egged on a prof. at a public meeting...he cursed the prof...and the prof shouted at him, "you say fuck you? yeah, ok..." and proceeded to look like he was going to undo his belt (so said the student, whose claims were hardly reliable)...This developed into a big time speculatio as to whether or not the student had been 'harrassed' or 'raped' (he felt he had been threatened with rape...intimating that was like being rape...)...It was a classic case of post-modernist cultural politics gone whacko....The case was, of course, dismissed...
Now, the positive here is that due process kept profs from being unjustly fired or penalised, but there is a price to be paid from the publicity from such cases too....
steve