Below is a story I wrote before the #metoo movement. I delayed making it public, first because I wanted to deal with feedback I got from some of the people involved, and later because I don't like jumping on bandwagons (including the #metoo one). But it's hard to understand my OSU experience without knowing this story, so here goes.
About five of us number theory faculty were standing in front of the elevators inside the entryway to the Ohio State math department, right after I started my new job as an assistant professor in 1984. I didn't know who Y was when he approached us and started talking to me. It was hard to understand him due to his heavy accent, but he seemed to be asking me to go to his office sometime to have sex with him. I pretended that I thought he was joking, and laughed it off. So he got more and more explicit, to make sure I understood. I felt that he and the experience were slimy, sleazy, and unpleasant.
I didn't find the unwelcome and crude pass to be surprising. I had been a student at Harvard, Cambridge, and Princeton (I joke that all of my higher education was at single sex colleges, but not the sex that I was), so I was used to this sort of behavior. What surprised me was that he did it so openly, in earshot of my male colleagues. As soon as he left I asked a young colleague if he had heard what Y said. He said he hadn't. When I told him what Y said, he thought it was funny. While I no longer remember whether he actually said "relax and enjoy it", I felt as if he had. I asked A, a senior professor in the group, who the man was, and he identified Y as a senior professor in a different field.
Y's behavior toward me continued, at a low level. I wasn't concerned about myself (at least, that's what I told myself at the time). I had learned as an undergrad how to go into "repulsion mode" (as I like to explain it: they didn't call us "Radcliffe bitches" for nothing!). I did what I could to avoid Y. When I took the elevator, I kept my bicycle between myself and anyone who might get on later, to keep Y at a safe distance. If he was already in the elevator, or waiting for it, I carried my bike up or down several flights of stairs, to get to or from my office, rather than get on the elevator. I told myself it was good exercise.
What I was concerned about was that he would harass students, or visiting mathematicians from other universities who came to give a talk in one of the seminars. Y didn't seem to care whom he accosted; I don't think he knew who I was when he approached me. I didn't want others to get the treatment that I had gotten, or to be left with a bad impression of the math department. My goal was for it to stop.
I didn't know how to achieve that, so I asked some of my tenured colleagues. I learned that other women had been harassed by him. Retaliation, ridicule, or apathy were the results they expected if they made an issue of it, so none of them had. B, a tenured woman, told me "Alice, you could make a complaint, but that would hurt your chances of getting tenure." C said "European men are like that. There's nothing you can do about it." A, the male senior professor I had spoken with, laughed. He believed me, but didn't take it seriously. None of them was willing to do anything themselves, or to stand by me if I did something. And they thought that telling the department chair would do more harm than good. At best, I would become the laughing-stock of the department. At worst, it would end my career.
If I had thought that filing an official complaint would do some good, I would have done so. I considered explicitly telling Y that I found his advances unwelcome and unwanted and that I thought others would feel the same way. But my conversations with tenured faculty led me to believe that Y would retaliate against me and hurt my career, and that no one would protect me.
A few years later, after we had a new department chair, I heard that the chair's secretary complained that Y pinned her against a filing cabinet and kissed her. The department chair warned Y that there would be repercussions if he didn't stop.
Y began to shun me and other women. That seemed like an improvement. One good department chair can make a difference.
I learned that the secretaries referred to Y as "the Packwood of the Ohio State Math Department", referring to the Oregon politician who resigned from the U.S. Senate in 1995 when on the verge of expulsion due to an alleged pattern of making unwanted sexual advances.
A, B, and C went on to leadership positions in the university. I like all of them, and I believe them to be good people. But when I looked up the leadership chain to see where to go for help with such things, I didn't look to them.
B and I rehashed the subject of Y one day over lunch at the faculty club. She said that if she had to do it over again, she would still have given me the same advice that doing anything about it would hurt my career, and she defended her decision to keep quiet when harassed herself. I asked B if it was sexual harassment in the legal sense, given that the people Y harassed hadn't explicitly told him that his advances were unwanted. She nearly rose from her chair in anger and said "Of course it was sexual harassment!"
More recently, I told B that I was writing this story about Y. She was very encouraging, and said that I could add from her: "Most of the men I knew also warned women to stay away from him. People outside the department also knew that he was infamous, either because of rumors or because of what had happened to their female students."
Many years later a friend told me that she had complained about Y when she was a postdoc at Ohio State, not long after I arrived there. The department chair announced it to some of the faculty, referring to her as a young female faculty member but not giving her name. Since I was the only tenure-track woman, they probably thought it was me. So any retaliation that might have happened probably did (could that explain some of my colleagues' behavior towards me?). The moral I drew from this is that if you're at a place where people retaliate, they'll probably treat you badly whether you speak up or not. So you might as well speak up.