Law's Presence, Law's Absence: Reporting Stories of Employment Discrimination in the Academy

Abstract

I wrote most of this article before October 2016. The news has brought to the fore points made in scholarship on sexual harassment, including that people do not complain, that sexual harassment is widespread and ordinary in some work settings, that legal settlement contributes to allowing problems to go unaddressed, and that sexual harassment is experienced well beyond the high-profile settings that made the news in the fall of 2016 or winter of 2017. Political science most recently finds itself in the professional press in contests over individual stories of sexual harassment as unwanted sexual attention and the use of professional power (Gluckman, 2018). The New York Times's 2017 reporting of sexual assault by Harvey Weinstein (Kantor and Twohey, 2017) sparked the spread of #MeToo, a term that an African-American woman had first deployed years earlier (Vagianos, 2017). The term relies on framing a wrong but often without the law. Before the fall of 2016 and the spread of #MeToo, law and decisions by administrators in higher education had generated reporting about the academy. Generated in part by law and decisions by administrators in higher education, sexual harassment reporting about the academy predated the fall of 2016. This article concerns that earlier reporting and the way that sexual harassment as unwanted sexual attention can crowd out other ways of seeing law in employment problems and other ways of interpreting employment problems without relying on law.