A storm in an elevator: two words that rocked academe
“Ladies lingerie.” You’ve got to be careful what you say when you’re in a crowded lift and a professor of gender studies is standing by the floor buttons asking what floor you need, said Katherine Timpf in the National Review. But Richard Ned Lebow, a 76-year-old professor of political theory from Kings College London, was not careful. “Ladies lingerie,” he called out to Simona Sharoni of Merrimack College, Massachusetts, as they descended in an elevator during a conference held by the International Studies Association in San Francisco last month. Professor Sharoni was not amused. “All his buddies laughed,” she wrote in a subsequent complaint to the association, but she and the woman standing next to her failed to react. “I’m still trying to come to terms with the fact we froze and didn’t confront him.”
That elevator joke has now snowballed into an international incident that is rocking academia, said Katherine Mangan in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Hearing his conduct was under investigation, Lebow emailed Sharoni to assure her “he had no desire to insult women”; he’d merely been invoking a “standard gag line” directed at lift operators in the 1950s. But though “strongly opposed” to the “exploitation of women”, he still felt her complaint was “frivolous” and was certain the association’s ethics committee would feel likewise. Wrong. Not only did it rule that he had violated its code of conduct, it found his dismissal of her complaint as “frivolous” to be an even “more serious violation” and has demanded he make an “unequivocal” apology. Lebow has refused to do so.
So was Lebow being outrageously sexist, asked Rich Barlow on WBURFM, or was Sharoni blowing a trivial offence out of all proportion? I can’t understand why she didn’t approach Lebow privately, rather than immediately file a grievance procedure, but then again, even if he did feel her complaint was “frivolous”, why didn’t he do the polite thing and say “sorry”? The days of women having to stay silent in the face of sexist remarks are thankfully over, said Ruth Marcus in The Washington Post. Even so, count me with Lebow. “Not every stray statement by a 76-year-old man warrants a resort to disciplinary procedures... For goodness’ sake, let’s maintain a sense of proportion and civility as we figure out how to pick our way through the minefield of modern gender relations.”