Harassment: A Problem of Geostrategic Proportions

On Monday morning, I got an email containing my certificate of completion for SHP-1001-WEB-FY17, California's mandatory harassment prevention training for supervisors and faculty. As a university professor, I'm legally required to complete this two-hour online course every other year. This sort of requirement is new; back in the days when I was a graduate student at Cambridge in the 1980s, some senior faculty members regularly referred to a particular women's college -- in jest, they would sometimes add -- as the "happy hunting ground." One grand old man of the academy, some of whose classes I took, left among his effects when he died an album containing dozens of photographs of young women, all sleeping in the bed in his college rooms. Something else that's new is that graying men in positions of power over younger women are being called to account when they abuse these positions. Over the past several...