I would like to apologize for the language I will be forced to use in talking about an environment on university campuses all across North America. It is an environment of sexual harassment, rape, and violence against women students.
In The Varsity this past week, the idea that women are being sexually harassed (raped, but just don’t say the word-it’s confidential) by their male supervisors has leaked out, spread itself out across the front page, become exposed. But do you think anyone will care, beyond the moment when they might feel surprised or pretend to be surprised? I wonder how many people read the article-the whole article.
If you are eating your lunch quietly by yourself in Robarts cafeteria, it is disrupting to be reminded that the environment in which you live and study is a place where young women try to kill themselves when their older male professors tell them they are stupid or give them a bad mark on an essay. You do not want to think about what it means when you go to your history class and the women all dress up and wear makeup so that their male professor will like them and think they are beautiful or special.
Violence and oppression take many forms. There is a certain kind of violence and degradation involved when my professor tells me I look nice today, that the colors I am wearing look nice. Imagine reversing that situation. Could I tell him that? Wouldn’t it be “out of line” to comment on how he looked or dressed? What is it that gives these men the feeling of power, the confidence that they can address women, their students, in a way that implies subtly that he has the right to say what he wants, to look at them whatever way he wants. When my professor tells me this, I wonder to myself: does this thing make me feel valued as a person, respected as his equal?
A friend of mine in the past two weeks almost dropped out of school because her professor failed her on an essay and told her that she was “a waste of time” and “a gross injustice.” He used such comments to degrade and humiliate, to dominate my friend and make her feel absolutely incapable of succeeding in a male-run, hyper-competitive, hierarchical institution of “learning.” This is an environment in which people try to kill themselves. Is that serious enough?
Violent interactions become normalized and accepted, natural. It is natural for my professor to criticize my essay, my work, my person. It is natural for me to admire and worship my professor-for me to think he is “hot”, for me to have a “crush on him.” Countless numbers of women friends have told me these things, confided to me and to each other how “brilliant” and “sexy” their male professors are. It would be surprising if these male professors were not aware of this dynamic.
I could name names, but this is not a witch-hunt. I will name names when I file individual complaints. But this will not do anything to change the power structure within the university where students are terrified of addressing or criticizing their professors. When I cannot hand in my paper on time because I have to work to pay rent I do not want to have to beg my professor for reprieve, to become the victim so that he or she will feel sorry for me. This does not create an environment of trust or equality-of respect.
I say these things because the university environment, an environment that should be critical and challenging, does not have to be a place of fear and punishment, a carceral institution-prison-like, totalizing. If you escape, you are consigned to low-wage labor, the service industry.
I say these things because the university environment does not need to be dominated by fear and punishment. It can be changed.
Professors and students can work together to change the structures of power within the university, so that libraries are not patrolled by security guards and CCTV cameras, so that there are more student and professor communal spaces, so that students have more of a voice in all affairs on campus.
