My Morning: The Final Chapter

On Thursday, two students somehow feel entitled to have relations in your office.  You interrupt their passionate paroxysms.  He cries sexual harassment.  And wolf.  And for his mother.  She cries.  And cries.  And cries.

Come Monday, the Sexual Harassment Police call you to "talk" about "the incident."  You are asked to participate in a "fact-finding interview."  You ask the investigator what this about and are informed that its purpose can be discussed it in detail on Friday.  An hour later, you send the investigator an email asking for more information and the response contains nothing but a link to your employer's sexual harassment policy.

On Wednesday you call the Sexual Harassment Police to confirm the time of your "fact-finding interview."  The person who answers the phone informs you that your "hearing" will occur on Friday at 10:00 AM.  "My hearing?!?" you interrobang.  Only polite-like because you're from the South and in the South one interrobangs politely.

Given this sequence of events, would you suppose that the student had followed through with his threat to file a sexual harassment complaint against you?  The patently spoiled student swore a blood oath.  The investigator stonewalled you.  The secretary sprung a hearing on you.  Things had spun out of control. 

So you don't sleep well . . . and when you muster some winks you dream about tar and torn down-pillows.  You imagine yourself covered in the first feathering of countless young birds and everyone (denuded fowl included) points and laughs at you.

You wake from these dreams dripping sweat and craving chicken.  (You are determined to give those stripped striplings the what-for they so richly deserve.)  So you wouldn't sleep that much.  You would occupy the couch and watch terrible movies while your wife slept soundly in the bedroom.  You would fear the hounds this indulged undergraduate loosed upon you.  You would fear the investigator who refused to divulge details.  You would fear your shadow and inadvertently damn New England to another six bitter winter weeks.  Don't deny it.  You would . . .

. . . and in doing so you would involve yourself in the monumental misunderstanding that has been my life for the more than a week now.  Today I have been thoroughly detenebrated.  (Not defenestrated.  In this house only cats are defenestrated.  And only by other cats.  And in good fun.  Except for the defenestrated feline.  Who was fine.)  I have seen the errors of my cynical ways because today I learned that sometimes people are not out to destroy all I hold dear with hot tar and serious plumage.  Turns out no one filed a complaint.

Turns out the Sexual Harassment Police wondered whether I wanted to file one.  Why couldn't the investigator have told me this over the phone last week?  Why all the cryptic comments about coming in to discuss it?  Apparently that's protocol in sexual harassment cases.  The investigator prefers to question faces over voices.  The investigator also cannot fathom how I would think a complaint had been filed against me. 

From the perspective of the investigator, I had cancelled Friday's meeting and lawyered up as prelude to filing suit against the university for creating an environment in which I could be harassed.  When I lawyered up, they consulted their lawyers and all of this is nothing more than the result of an initial but fundamental misunderstanding: I took the student's complaint seriously because we live in a litigious culture.  The investigator thought I would have some common sense about the situation.  From there our attempts to aid each other according to the policies which bind us both were doomed to fail. 

What I want to know from you good people is whether 1) I have lost faith in humanity and need to learn to love my fellow man again or 2) treated this situation with admirable cynicism.  Sadly I seem to feel both options equally compelling.  But then I'm still swimming in suspect ambiguity and haven't learned my lesson.  I need to learn my lesson. 

And sleep.  All day.  And all of the night. 

[This melancholia has been brought to you by Wilco's Kicking Television, John Vanderslice's Pixel Revolt and Wolf Parade's Apologies to the Queen Mary.  Excellent albums all.  Music to despair your humanity to.  What more could you ask for?]

Comments

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Comments are sometimes important, esp. when they're authored by the Man in Charge. Now, I present to you the info. I didn't include in the above post alongside the reasons I didn't:

I had to leave out some elements to avoid naming names. It's one thing to mock myself for my cynicism, another to drag another name into it. Basically, the chair of my department called me--wait, CALLED ME AT HOME ON A SUNDAY-- to request a meeting on Monday at 11 AM. When he got to campus, he cornered the head of the Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity and asked her what the hell was going on. She said I had lawyered up and was planning to sue the university. He informed her that I had lawyered up because they had popped a hearing on me and I thought (quite sensibly) that this escalation represented a witch hunt. She said she had no idea why anyone would have told me that I had a "hearing" on Friday, but that they had had a temp all last week and she was, shall we say, dim beside the dimmest bulbs on the tree...so when I got there this morning, my chair told me that I wasn't in trouble and that they only wanted to know whether I wanted to make my millions by filing suit against the school, i.e. whether I'd been harassed and was going to file a complaint.

[Jon McGee]

Oh, man. What a fantastic end to this saga.

I would have done the same thing. I don't know if I would have hired a lawyer, but then again, I never fully consider the consequences of anything.

I gave up on humanity a long time ago, mostly because it is now so reasonable to assume that someone could get you in trouble for their having sex in you office. At least your department head was on your side. Huzzah! One point for humanity.

I think the lesson we should all take from this is: If ever caught having sex in someone else's office, just threaten them. That'll stun 'em long enough that you can get away unscathed. Although you may have to pay for your girlfriends therapy.

[Springboard]

#2

You did good; better than most. And the Chair of your department sounds like an ok person. Which is rare 'moungst chairs.

Cheers

[Walter Wadiak]

Good news, Scott! I'm so glad. Incidentally, though, since you bring it up, I honestly don't get this Wolf Parade mania. I like "It's a Curse," but the rest of the album seems pretty morose. Don't be sad, Scott!

[Josh]

Mazel tov, Scott. I had a brief acquaintanceship with your dept head and some of his students when he headed a dept at JHU years ago, and he struck me (and them) as very good people, for all that some found his demeanor remote.

Much cause for gratitude: had a single person working for the school been a knee-jerk advocate of the consumers --er, undergrads-- things could have been more stressful yet.

[Rich Puchalsky]

I'm sorry that you had such a bad week. As for the lesson -- hmm. Something about the hermeneutics of suspicion, perhaps? Living in America encourages caution verging on paranoia, because this is a sick society obsessed with surveillance and punishment -- that's what all those tortured-Iraqi pictures illustrate, and the theme has a distant echo in many of the comments on this incident (yes I know I've said this too often). Being an interpreter of texts makes you more likely to react to hints of things going on under the surface. But most often, nothing is really going on under the surface. And even when something is, casual harassment mostly works through the ability to cause a particular kind of reaction rather than in actual damage as such. That knowledge doesn't do much good when your reaction is pretty much uncontrollable, but sometimes it helps.

[NotMe]

I have to say, I totally would have been in the same position as you. Freaking out, because especially in a university environment, young people who are embarrassed can take their indignant righteousness to ridiculous levels. Glad to hear that it worked out all to the good for you. :)

[nnyhav]

It's yet another false dichotomy: Given institutional strictures, and the fundamental misunderstandings which these foster, admirable cynicism is prerequisite to faith in humanity and loving your fellow man.

[Stephen]

Thank goodness, Scott! On the bright side, if you yourself are feeling litigious, maybe this could be the solution to your funding problem for next year.

[MT]

Absolutely par for the course. But this shows why the blithely optimistic lead happier lives.

[MrsVeteran]

For what it's worth, I've worked in academia, and my father made it a career, so I've got stories for days.

Professors have been sued for making a student "feel bad" by telling them they were wrong when they gave a wrong answer in class.

One kid's daddy was a lawyer, and he wanted to sue because little Billy (not his real name) got a C and the department didn't respond to his paperwork contesting the grade by some deadline and the grade wasn't changed automatically.

Is getting a sexual harassment charge filed on you because some students broke into your office to have sex and you accidentally caught them possible?

I'd say so.

I would have lawyered the hell up big time.

Big. Time.

MV

[Phalamir]

You did the right thing. From my experience as a grad student, the general totempole of university life is: 1)the guy who gave $20 billion to the football program, 2) administrators, 3) faulty dedicated to non-stop butt-kissing of (2), 4) students, 5)staff, 6) bugs, 7) those bugs' crap, 8) TA's. To make any assumption you won't be fired in any disciplinary proceeding - even one you brought against a student - is the height of folly; a couple hundred bucks for a lawyer is well worth not having your career ruined because you're the expendable one in the university's eyes.

[Beth Black]

Okay, so how did the sex police even hear about the incident? We need some more reporting, here.

[Dr. Virago]

Pretty much what everyone else says. It all sounded so ominous I certainly don't fault you for lawyering up. But I'm relieved to hear that it was all turned out OK for you.

And btw, I *heart* Wilco, but yeah, they can make you extra cynical and paranoid. Although...have you seen them in concert since Tweedy went on the wagon? He's all cheeful and shit, and he jokes with the audience. It's kind of weird, actually.

[Rich Puchalsky]

"Okay, so how did the sex police even hear about the incident? We need some more reporting, here."

Maybe Scott will report on that. But it's easy to construct plausible scenarios, even ones that involve no attempted wrongdoing by anyone. Scott said that someone forwarded his original blog post to the Office of the President of the university; maybe this was actually done because the forwarder thought that someone specific there would think it was funny. That person skims it, sees the magical word "harassment", and forwards it to the Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity just as a busy, don't-have-time-for-this-so-let's-send-it-to-the-right-office kind of thing. The people there read it and think (because it their job) "Why, this grad student could sue us for providing a hostile environment; we left his door unlocked when we dumped furniture there." So they set up an appointment, but don't really want to say exactly what about because if Scott hasn't had the idea of suing, they don't want to give it to him, they just want to see if he has a problem. And so on from there.

[KaliAmanda]

Wow. I think I would have been less polite through it all, but I'm from New York...

[Coelecanth]

It's not about cynicism or love for your fellow man. No, it's much, much bigger than that. It's about the entropy, chaos and the heat-death of the universe.

Humanity is the only known force that consciously fights entropy. Well some of us anyway, certainly not me personaly as I know a mug's game when I see it. The primary expression of this is horniness, a very powerful thing indeed. It has to be to fight the second law of thermodynamics.

It's no wonder this all spiraled weird and wacky: you'd been made a catspaw of one of the two fundamental forces of the universe. As an unwitting agent of chaos I think you got off pretty lightly.

The only reasonable thing to do now is avoid filing, jigsaw puzzles and any form of housework for the next little while. You served entropy well, no sense in risking further attention.

[John Flood]

You were perfectly correct to take a cynical view. Kafka may be dead, but his spirit still haunts us, poor thing.

[Steff]

Not option 1). Never option 1).

[Ancrene Wiseass]

I think your assumptions were perfectly reasonable, given the tendency of some brattishly spoiled undergraduates to witlessly pursue "official channels" of all types when their egos get hurt. And given that your meeting was called a "hearing," too.

I'm glad it worked out as it did, though!