How Will We Attain Gender Neutrality If Professors Can’t “Nuture” Grad Students By Coming On To Them?

Paul links below to a post in which Colin McGinn becomes the latest affluent white guy to discover that if women are being excluded from certain jobs it’s their fault. But perhaps even more remarkable is the post that McGinn was piggybacking off. It would be hard to mount a less convincing defense of McGinn than McGinn himself has, but Elizabeth Sheldon comes really close. Fortunately, she saves me a lot of work by refuting her core argument herself:

…there was no due process and an immediate assumption of guilt. [This is the very next sentence, I swear! –ed.] I am sympathetic to Colin’s choice not to pursue an inquiry by the Faculty Senate Committee as he believed that the ruling would be overturned by the administration despite their findings and lack of evidence.

So, there was no due process…because McGinn chose to resign rather than avail himself of the due process offered by the university’s procedures. Right.

Also, the presumption of innocence is the requirement of a court of law, not the general public. When someone credibly accused of wrongdoing resigns (as opposed to being fired) and writes some self-justifications in which he compares himself to a bunch of vastly more accomplished people to justify his behavior as opposed to denying it, I am in fact inclined to presume his guilt. The quality of the defenses offered by Sheldon can only strengthen this assumption.

I don’t blame Colin; I served on a grand jury and all that the prosecutor had to say was ‘kiddie porn,’ for the jury to vote guilty regardless of evidence.

I know the Florida criminal justice system is a little odd, but if the grand jury she served on could deliver a guilty verdict it’s much more screwed up than I thought. I’m also afraid I’m going to need more than highly confused random anecdotes before assuming that people accused of child pornography are always convicted irrespective of the evidence.

It is my understanding that there were none and the administration could not find any evidence to support the claims of innapropiate correspondence, when taken out of context, beyond the two e-mails.

“Apart from the evidence at that one crime scene, there’s no evidence that O.J. Simpson ever killed anyone.” Also, “taken out of context” is the first refuge of anyone defending the indefensible. Without an argument for why the context matters, it’s irrelevant.

–the punishment far exceeds the ‘crime’ Colin has been accused of.

He wasn’t “punished.” He resigned. Since he didn’t go through the process he was afforded it is impossible to know if firing him would have been disproportionate. I will say, however, that the sexual harassment of students is a very serious offense. Exploiting a power relationship in that way violates the trust essential to a teacher/student relationship. And the offense is even worse in the context of a field in which women are greatly underrepresented. Treating students as objects of sexual desire enforces gender subordination, period.

there is an immediate assumption of abuse of power due to Colin’s position and sex but a graduate student is an adult, not a powerless victim. She consented to be his RA and understood the subject matter.

I just…wow. First, there’s this always irritating use of the phrase “powerless victim.” It is in fact entirely possible to be a free moral agent and a victim of wrongdoing at the same time. The fact that the student is an adult is completely irrelevant to the charges, as is the fact that she consented to be his RA. Neither her adulthood not her agreement to assume RA responsibilities entails consenting to be subject to unwanted sexual advances that abuse a power relationship (and, moreover, violate the rules one has agreed to work under.) The subject matter is, again, irrelevant; adults are perfectly capable of conducting research into human sexuality without a supervisor informing his student that she is the object of his sexual desires.

And as to the general implication of this argument that a faculty member is not in a position of substantial power over a graduate student because they’re both adults…I trust that to re-state the argument is to refute it.

–anonymity. Not one party involved, except Colin, has publicly been named, not even the commentators to this blog.

Yes, I cannot imagine why the young woman in question would wish to remain anonymous. With people like McGinn and Sheldon being prominent figures in the field* she wishes to pursue, how could she imagine that there would be negative repercussions?

My final comment as a manager who hires (and fires) recent graduates is this: NN has learned that if you are terminated for not performing the work that you were hired to perform, you can always sue your employer. Happens every day.

Oh, gawd. Yes, the bog-standard argument that has always been made against workers’ rights — the ever-present threat of workers without resources filing too many frivolous lawsuits! Clearly, we just need to give untrammeled arbitrary power to supervisors lest anyone try to defend their rights. And the fact that McGinn resigned rather than try to clear his name is all the more reason to assume that the charges against McGinn are without merit, because…look David Brock wrote a really interesting book about Anita Hill!

[*UPDATE: As commenters note, Sheldon isn’t an academic philosopher, let alone a “prominent” one; I regret the error.]

I’ll just let Sheldon’s final sentences stand on their own, with only a little snarky highlighting to emphasize the absurdity:

The chain of events highlights the sad fact that in our pursuit of a gender neutral academia, which is a laudable goal, professors such as Colin McGinn who sought to nurture a female student, had such unforeseeable results from which nobody benefits.