My point was not to dismiss such claims but throw some sense of rationality. In the early 1980s I volunteered to be a sexual harassment counselor at the Dept. of the Army unit for which I was then working - this was one of the first attempts to develop institutional response to the problem in this country. I decided to volunteer partly because of the idiotic reactions of my co-workers (smart alec comments etc.) when the opportunity was announced. They jaws dropped when I said at a meeting that I volunteer.
The training that came with the position emphasized taking complaints seriously - because at that time they were not - but also obtaining proper evidence and documentation to make the cases stand. That was treating the problem seriously. Later on, I participated in a number of debates and discussion of the problem in an academic setting - and I must say that these were not always rational, to say the least. On the one hand, there were the "angry feminist" reaction viewing any relationship between people in the academic/business setting as a form of "harassment" - on the other hand I heard bragging (or perhaps fantasizing) about seducing this or that professor.
My impression of the US academia is that it often resembles Stalinist and Maoist practices of students being encouraged to denounce their professors on trumped up charges of "political incorrectness" of one sort or another - from "sexual harassment" to being to liberal or too unpatriotic. I often read the so-called course evaluations written by - well, judging from the language - a bunch of psychos, zealots, and crypto-nazi rednecks.
I have never completed a single course evaluation form throughout my entire graduate student career for that reason. I believe that the purpose of going to school is to learn from the professors, not to "evaluate" them, let alone using that as an opportunity for power trips. Evaluations are more often than not the US-style pseudo-populist idiocies whose only real effect is giving more power to administrators and managers.
Wojtek