“There’s no crying in baseball.”
“There’s lots of crying at the SCS.”
As part of this year’s joint Society for Classical Studies COGSIP/WCC (Commitee on Gender and Sexuality in the Profession and Women’s Classical Caucus) panel, Eidolon’s editor-in-chief, Donna Zuckerberg, gave a talk entitled “How to Be a Perfect Victim.” In it, she discussed the impossible double standard that victims of harassment face: if you take the online threats and abuse too seriously, you’re considered whiny and hysterical; if you use humor as a coping mechanism, you’re accused of not treating the issue with enough gravity. If you engage in public scholarship or respond to your trolls, you’re asking for it; if you delete your Twitter, you’re giving them what they want.
After enduring months of harassment for an Eidolon article calling out the alt-right’s appropriation of Classics, Zuckerberg was alternately criticized and celebrated by fellow scholars for her performance of victimhood; at one point, a colleague told her she was a “rockstar” because she had received death threats, something Zuckerberg referred to as the “absolute trump card for determining you’re the victim.” Lucky her. We need, as Zuckerberg should not have needed to point out, to stop policing how victims of harassment behave. Instead, it’s time to work together as a community to prevent fellow scholars from being silenced.
Throughout the Harassment in Academia panel, as well as in the subsequent WCC workshop “Resist Together: A Practical Guide to Combatting Harassment in Classics,” one question constantly resonated: what can we do to help? There may not be a perfect victim, but can there be a perfect bystander?
Be aware.
As Classicists are finally becoming willing to publicly admit, harassment occurs in our discipline, and it occurs a lot. In a 2016 WCC-UK survey presented by Fiona McHardy, 32% of respondents had experienced discrimination, mostly gender stereotyping, and 80% of these people identified as female. 22% of respondents felt sex or gender discrimination affected their career progression, particularly discrimination faced as parents or caretakers. 50% of respondents had experienced mental health problems. McHardy noted that young women, women of color, and the LGBTQ population cited double or triple discrimination. Awareness should be both macro and micro, such as pairing discussions of systemic problems in the discipline as a whole with personal care towards marginalized groups within our own institutions. As Barbara Gold, SCS Vice President for Professional Matters, reminded us, we should be “hyperaware of what those who lack power are subjected to and what little recourse they have.”
Speakers disclosed personal experiences of harassment from all stages of their careers, sharing stories from grad school (and the odd jobs many grad students hold outside of academia) to the interview process to positions as junior and contingent faculty to tenure. No one at any level is immune to the problem, although junior scholars are at particular risk; according to Regina Ryan, a lawyer who spoke at the WCC workshop and founded Discrimination and Harassment Solutions, LLC, 62% of victims across all fields leave their job within two years.
Harassment looks different to senior faculty, as Rebecca Futo Kennedy pointed out, than to early career scholars, for whom being excluded from a departmental email, research opportunity, or mentoring relationship can be a critical blow. “Being a woman in a grad program or early career stages,” she said, “often means enduring becoming a sexual target of our faculty.” We can’t measure the loss — to individuals and to the field — of those who left Classics because of abuse. But we can try to prevent it from happening in the future.
Be annoying.
Those in privileged positions have a responsibility to amplify the voices of those who are not. Talk about harassment and abuse, loudly and on whatever platforms are available to you. Some people might think this is annoying. Talk to them even more! As Patrice Rankine, Dean of Arts and Sciences at the University of Richmond, said, “There is a fallacy from silence.” We need to be careful not to minoritize issues of abuse as a “women’s problem,” but affirm that these issues are the responsibility of every scholar and institution.
Rebecca Futo Kennedy took an active role in crafting a harassment policy on her campus even as an untenured faculty member; when the university failed to act in accordance with the policy, she badgered HR, sending weekly emails and confronting deans in the hallway. “Putting my head in the sand hasn’t stopped it,” she said. “Putting my hand up hasn’t stopped it … Sometimes you really have to blow something up to get them to do anything.” Badgering is extra effective when you can utilize the power of collective voices.
Document everything.
Panelists speaking from an administrative and legal perspective emphasized the importance of reporting and documenting every small instance of potential harassment that you witness. This applies to those who experience harassment as well as those who witness it; the burden of documentation, which takes time and mental energy, should not rest on the victim. Even if the first behavior does not constitute a legal violation, it might warrant disciplinary action — or at least a warning.
Beginning a paper trail early ensures that, if the behavior escalates later, you can provide clear evidence of a persistent pattern of abuse. University faculty are often compelled to report complaints of harassment, either to a superior or to HR; a “complaint” can be as small as a circulating rumor of bullying or an inappropriate comment at a departmental dinner. “Even if it is not legally actionable,” Rankine said, “there is now a record that says ‘be careful.’”
Bear the burden.
If you’re a bystander or witness to abuse, you occupy a privileged position. You can ignore the behavior, while the victim cannot. McHardy encouraged us to avoid bystander apathy, which involves, unfortunately, taking some initiative. Proactively reporting and documenting questionable behaviors yourself helps relieve some of the burden from others who are less protected.
Rankine shared a case study in which a romantic relationship between two faculty members of different ranks might create a hostile work environment or favoritism that unfairly disadvantages other junior faculty. The panel also discussed scenarios in which a Jewish colleague complained about a meeting scheduled during Rosh Hashanah, or a mother’s childcare schedule was consistently ignored in the arrangement of departmental meetings.
In these cases, even if the decisions were made out of ignorance, the burden of educating routinely falls on the victim. Bystanders need to step up and take on this labor themselves — creating a departmental calendar that includes faculty religious and personal obligations, for example. This kind of action takes a lot of time, energy, and gumption, but, as Rankine pointed out, “Sometimes what we have is a range of more and less sucky alternatives.”
Comfort in.
If you know someone who is a victim of harassment, it is easy to feel at a loss about how to respond. Zuckerberg provided some actions to take: contact the person to verbally express support and sympathy. Tell them you’re sorry about what happened to them. Send lots of heart emojis. If the person wants a public statement of support, offer that, but some people may prefer to remain as private as possible. If the person does want public support, it can be helpful to reorient the conversation away from harassment and back towards the person’s work: “Going back to the work can remind the scholar that they are more than their harassment.”
It’s important to educate both your students and yourself about the risks and rewards of public scholarship. It can be a great platform for grad students, who are used to writing for a tiny audience, to reach more people. Despite the risks, Zuckerberg “hate[s] the idea that people are frightened away from engaging in public scholarship by trolling.” Proactively creating a supportive community can help embolden scholars to fight against abuse, from microaggressions to serious threats.
Zuckerberg pointed out the importance of microaffirmations, as Helen Morales described, kind words spoken “in response to the little stings and barbs that push you out.” Personally telling a speaker one thing you liked about their talk, for example, or affirming colleagues’ research ideas can establish a positive support system that reminds us all why we’re in the field. These reminders are increasingly important in the face of negative revelations about latent misconduct that are just now coming to light. As Kennedy reflected in her introduction, “#Metoo in academia has really just begun. I think our reckoning is coming.”
Like perfect victims, perfect bystanders do not exist — they are too busy preempting, noticing, acting, badgering, and caring to simply stand by. We can be doing much better than we are right now. In advance of the Annual Meeting, the SCS released a Harassment Statement geared towards creating an environment “free from harassment, bullying, and intimidation directed towards any attendee”; next year, Gold aims to require all conference attendees to agree to abide by the statement before registering. It is our collective responsibility to make sure policies like these have teeth, by sustaining environments that refuse to tolerate harassment and abuse — within the field, at the Annual Meeting, and in our own departments and classrooms.
Tori Lee is the Assistant Editor of Eidolon. She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Classical Studies at Duke.
