This post was co-authored by current COGSIP chair Caroline Bishop and former COGSIP chair Jason Nethercut and endorsed by the other members of the committee.
In light of recent high-profile reporting on instances of harassment in our field — and the equally high-profile denials that such harassment has taken place — the Committee for Gender and Sexuality in the Profession wants to remind the constituency of the SCS that this sort of harassment is not an isolated incident. In 2019, our committee released a report on the survey conducted by the SCS on sexual harassment within the field of classics. The results were sobering. Repeated sexual harassment and discrimination is a fundamental problem in our field, and it regularly goes unpunished. Furthermore, power differentials are at the core of our field’s sexual harassment problem, as harassment regularly takes the form of tenured faculty’s predation of their students and non-tenured colleagues.
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