Erased: ending faculty sexual misconduct in academia: an open letter from women of public affairs education

• Published in: Public management review 2021-06, Vol.23 (6), p.797-801
• Main Authors: Young, Sarah, Wiley, Kimberly
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Education; Graduate students; Human rights; Misconduct; Sex crimes; Sexual harassment; Teaching; Victimization; Women
• ISSN: 1471-9037; 1471-9045
• DOI: 10.1080/14719037.2021.1895576

The #MeToo movement is descending upon the walls of the ivory tower. The day of reckoning has come for academia to end teaching staff1 sexual misconduct. As women of public2 and third sector3 education, we demand to be heard. The issue of teaching staff perpetrating sexual misconduct is prevalent within academia, and more specifically, in graduate education programmes. In the United States (U.S.), 24.2% of women and 15.6% of men report being sexually victimized as undergraduates on a college campus in just the last two months (Jouriles et al. 2020); and, one out of every ten female graduate students report being sexually harassed by a member of the teaching staff (Cantor et al. 2020). This problem is not just isolated to the U.S. The Australian Human Rights Commission’s (2017) National Report on Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment at Australian universities found relatively similar numbers with 21% of students reporting being sexually harassed in a university setting, with about 7% being victimized by teaching staff (p. 48).