Sexual Advances as Manifestations of Power in Graduate Programs

Sexual relationships between professors and their students are frequently considered taboo, given the implicit power differential between professors and students. The situation between professors and their graduate students becomes even more complex because of their ongoing, close relationships. In faculty-graduate student relations, the potential for coercion is greatly increased but perhaps so subtle that students may fail to recognize facultyinitiated sexual advances or relations as sexual harassment. According to Keller (1990, p. 30), the power differential is such that "what appears to be an adult, consensual, and private relationship may actually be the product of implicit or explicit duress." Society has yet to fully agree on a definition of sexual harassment, let alone find an effective way of identifying and eliminating it. In 1980, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission produced a legal definition that was affirmed by the Supreme Court in 1986; The law says that any unwelcome or unwanted sexual attention or conduct is sexual harassment if a job, raise or promotion depends on the employee's response or if his or her work performance is affected. Researchers who have studied harassment in academic settings, however, have noted that achieving agreement on what behaviors actually constitute harassment under what circumstances is one of the most difficult problems in such research because the relationships between students and faculty are often not as clearly delineated as those in the workplace (Fitzgerald & Ormerod, 1991). Universities have developed their own definitions of sexual harassment and placed them in faculty handbooks to alert professors to the problem (Cole, 1987). In the academic setting of a university, Somer (1982) pointed out that most definitions of sexual harassment include "some concept of coercion or the misuse of differential power" (p. 31). Indeed, Rush (1993) suggested that sexual harassment in mass communication is still unacknowledged and misunderstood, and it is often entwined with "political power harassment." Sexual harassment, which happens to both men and women but predominately to women (Fitzgerald et al.,1988), is viewed not in terms of sexual misconduct but in terms of power misuse (Bingham, 1991; Paludi et al., 1990; Payne, 1993). Studies show that harassment is often a man's attempt to gain and/or maintain power (Bowker, 1993). An organizational model of sexual harassment suggests that power and authority relations are inherent in the hierarchical structure of organizations such as universities, thus providing the opportunity for sexual harassment (Paludi et al., 1990). Moreover, the potentially close social association between professors and their graduate students suggests that sexual harassment is less likely to be defined as such: Like rape victims who know their attackers, students who experience sexual harassment may be subject to having the validity of their stories questioned (Weber-Burdin & Rossi,1982). Answering Rush's (1993) call for further research on sexual harassment in mass communication education, the purpose of this study was to explore its presence in U.S. and Canadian communications graduate programs, what effects such behavior has on graduate students who experience it, and how power manifests itself in relationships among graduate students and their faculty. Literature review The incidence of sexual harassment-in a variety of forms-has been welldocumented in universities. In studying the forms of sexual harassment on university campuses using a nationwide sample of college women, Till (1980) found that their responses fell into five general levels: (1) generalized sexist remarks and behavior; (2) inappropriate and offensive but essentially sanction-free sexual advances (those in which students were not punished for their lack of response); (3) solicitation of sexual activity or other sex-related behavior by promise of rewards; (4) coercion of sexual activity by threat of punishment; and (5) gross sexual imposition or assault. …