These high-profile sexual harassment cases just keep arriving. It’s good the issue is getting the attention it deserves, but it’s also wearying.
The latest case involves a 63 year-old Philosophy professor at a university in Florida. Apparently, the academic Philosophy profession is still a male-dominated field — men hold 80% of tenured teaching positions and there aren’t a lot of women graduate students in the field. This creates an uncomfortable gender/power arrangement. It also suggests that women are far better at planning for a future that includes actual employment.
The case in question involves texts and email messages between the professor and a female graduate student. The professor claims that his emails were simply full of “bantering,” while a friend of the woman claims that they were explicit and showed an escalating sexual nature. I’ll post a few of the messages below and let you decide:
Message 1:
“I want to see your Kant … err, his quotes.”
Message 2:
“To pee, or not to pee. That is the question.”
Message 3:
“Sometimes I wish I were Arendt-boy.”
Message 4:
“If we met in the forest and no one heard the noise we made, would it have actually happened?”
Message 5:
“Regarding up-skirt photos – Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living.”
I’m voting guilty. But it probably doesn’t matter. State budget cuts will most likely take care of this part of the problem in the end.
Seems legit to me!
I always knew you were a deep thinker Thomas!
Sounds guilty to me.