In academia, there is no such thing as winning a sexual harassment complaint | The postgraduate

Idyll and betrayal. Photograph: Alamy

Winning a sexual harassment complaint in academia is impossible. Not because universities never recognize loathsome abuses of power through decisive action, as in University of Miami philosophy Professor Colin McGinn's recent forced departure from his tenured position after a graduate student alleged harassment. But because there is no such thing as winning.

No complaint outcome, on paper or in the form of material support, is going to undo the damage that harassment does.

When I was 17, my college calculus teaching assistant raped me. I reported the assault to multiple university offices and the police. Yet, he went on to complete his graduate degree at our prominent university. I felt so threatened by the lack of institutional response – if he could do this with impunity, what else could he do? – that I returned a $30,000 scholarship stipend despite living below the poverty line, and left the state.

In the 11 years since, university responses to sexual harassment have improved. Yet, significant problems remain. Sadly, I know this first-hand because a professor assaulted and propositioned me as a PhD student this year.

This was, in some ways, a more prototypical harassment experience. Perhaps not coincidentally, my harasser was a tenured philosophy professor, like McGinn. Physical contact of the sort this fellow engaged in – hand on thigh/small of back and repeatedly trying to kiss me – has been ruled to constitute a hostile environment. He also mentioned possibly being able to get me funding, which, in the context of physical advances, is a classic quid pro quo. (And I don't need the funding: I have a great academic fundraising track record, and had no problem securing it myself.)

A few other professors observed some of this professor's inappropriate behavior toward me. They filed a complaint bundle with the university's equal opportunity office, ostensibly about a much broader pattern of sexual harassment. Against my express wishes, they included in their complaint the inappropriate behavior they had observed toward me as an "anonymous graduate student".

Anonymity was not meaningful in this context. I asked to be left out of the complaint for fear of retaliation and in the knowledge that it would distress me to be involved because of my previous bad experience with the complaint process. The other professors disregarded my preference. With the decision thus made for me, I eventually talked to university investigators as a "witness", and then filed a one-page form to become a complainant myself, in order to better secure my access to outcome information.

The process took twice as long as the equal opportunity office said it would. To the institution's credit, it went all the way up to the university's provost, who read the report and authorized the outcome – whatever that is. As in my previous experience, I can't access the investigation report or know the outcome beyond being informed that a policy violation was found.

The main impact of the complaint process on my life has been distress, as I predicted it would be when I asked to be left out of the matter. I have lost a huge chunk of productive time in my graduate studies as a result of this distress. When I asked for this time to be credited, so that I would have effective equal opportunity in the form of the same amount of time and funding to complete my PhD as other students who had not experienced sexual harassment and not been roped into a lengthy complaint process, a dean chided me for not immediately requesting leave after the harassment if I was going to be upset.

When I went to the university ombudsman to ask whom I should speak with about remedying this perceived inequality, rather than suing the institution, which has multimillion-dollar civil liability under?Franklin v Gwinnett County Public Schools (1992), as well as a multimillion-dollar endowment associated with the harasser that publicity in this case might endanger, and a reputation at stake, he accused me of blackmail.

Irony abounds. Blackmail is a threat to publicize information that is private, if someone does not give up material goods or services that are not owed. Taking a school to court for failing to follow equal opportunity law does not fit the bill.

Yet, shaming complainants into silence is all too easy. Who am I going to tell, anyway? What am I going to say? I won a sexual harassment complaint, insofar as a policy violation was formally recognized. I'm safe and I have a job. If I have a problem at all, this is a privileged sort of problem to have. In one narrative, it results from being attractive and intelligent; in another, from being vulnerable and naive. Either way, I'm one of the lucky ones.?

I tried to kill myself less than a week after the complaint resolved. I'm not proud of this stupid mistake, and there were lots of contributing factors. The logic of self-destruction is Gestalt: defeat and disorientation bounce off one another in the enclosed space of the broken heart, cacophonous and overwhelming. Only in retrospect can I pick out chords of the downward spiral's progression, snippets of experience that do not make what I did reasonable, but help me tell myself a story in which I can get up and move on.

I couldn't bring myself to meet with anyone at the university about the complaint for months after its resolution. Maybe I knew I needed to get stronger first. Maybe the meetings I'm finally having are not going well because I'm not yet strong enough.?

Last week, when I tried to leave the meeting with the dean who blamed me for not knowing immediately how long I would be upset when a professor put his hand on my thigh and talked funding, I discovered the door was locked.?

"Let me out," I said calmly, ineffectually jiggering the doorknob. He did.?Experience suggests it could have been much worse. He could have refused to let me out. Instead, he was embarrassed, stammering that the door had an automatic lock I must have triggered myself.

And I'm sure it was an accident. Just like the time at my undergraduate college when I met with their general counsel in the clock tower – we had much the same meeting as the dean and I, but 11 years earlier – and the elevator stopped on the way down at the 13th floor. Someone must have pressed the button before I got on, because I was alone and I didn't press it.

The doors opened and the elevator paused as if to let people in or out. But that would have been impossible, because the elevator had opened into a brick wall.?

I thought later that I must have hallucinated it, because I didn't yet understand that the flashbacks common in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which about a third of rape victims develop, are not hallucinations. They are powerful sensory experiences of things that are not there, but they are also sensory re-experiencing of real things.

So, I thought I had lost my mind, and memory is, of course, tricky, and stress will make you sick. But the higher probability than insanity, as long as I am not destroying myself, is that everything I experienced there, as here, was real. The ivory tower elevator does open out into a brick wall, sometimes. Complaining to the elevator shaft is ineffective. The only thing to do is wait for the doors to close, and continue down and out into the sunshine.

McGinn's victim isn't talking to the press, for fear of professional blowback. I won't publish my name with this essay. There is nothing to be gained, and there are many possible personal and professional costs for women to be perceived as victims or (worse) complainers.

So, while things have gotten better in the sense that it is now harder for colleges to sweep these complaints under the rug entirely, there is no such thing as winning a sexual harassment complaint in the academy. Sometimes, progress means a better form of defeat.?

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The postgraduate funding problem and three possible solutions

A slide in the number of postgraduate students will create a bottleneck in the intellectual supply pipeline, says Bob Burgess. Photograph: Images.com/Corbis

Britain is in a quandary. Decades after the decline of its heavy industry, it remains one of the intellectual powerhouses of the world – generating new ideas to solve new global problems and developing new technology to keep the economy growing. To maintain this position, however, our workshop needs a steady supply of raw material in the shape of well-educated postgraduate students. As recent reports have shown, this supply is in danger of drying up. What can be done?

The number of UK students on postgraduate taught degree courses has begun to decline after a decade of relatively high growth, according to a new Hefce report that gives an overview of postgraduate study in England and Northern Ireland. An earlier report from Universities UK, The Funding Environment for Universities, also shows the total number of students on postgraduate taught courses in the UK slid by 5 % in 2011-12.

Initially, this fall in UK and EU students was more than matched by increases in students from more economically dynamic regions outside Europe. But now their numbers have also started to slip, hit by a tougher visa regime and increased competition from rapidly growing universities overseas.

Meanwhile, last year's arrival of much higher variable tuition fees for UK and other EU undergraduates will, from 2015, make it harder for heavily indebted 21-year-olds graduating under the new system to feel they can afford to embark on a postgraduate taught course.

Any sustained slide in the number of students on postgraduate taught courses is deeply worrying, because it creates a bottleneck in the intellectual supply pipeline that ultimately produces what we might call ultra-skilled workers: our future research scientists, academics and leading thinkers educated in the humanities and social sciences. Postgraduate taught courses are a standard route to postgraduate research degrees, which are in turn essential for sustaining our world-class academic workforce.

Against this backdrop, we welcome the government's announcement of ￡75m to support postgraduates from disadvantaged circumstances, though we regret that the chancellor has found the money largely by reducing financial aid to undergraduates from such backgrounds. The government hopes that extra funding by employers and universities will raise this total to ￡100m. We hope they will rise to the challenge. The money is clearly needed – to an increasing degree the postgraduate ranks are filled by wealthier students, according to the Hefce report.

Nevertheless, even ￡100m will not be enough to keep the existing postgraduate pipeline open so we need to engage in some inventive engineering to build new supply routes.

One possible solution is to develop and adapt existing programme options. Split degrees for overseas undergraduates, where the student does a proportion of their course at a university in Britain and completes it at their home institution, have been running successfully for many years. Now, a growing number of universities are exploring split research degree programmes. Students can take this route to keep down their costs, while for institutions it can be a useful way of increasing student numbers.

Another possibility is for institutions, preferably backed by government, to persuade more employers to fund postgraduate education. Our research at the University of Leicester suggests that employers are interested in courses where they see a direct benefit to their area of activity. In the future employers may be more involved in course design and development, although this model remains to be tested.

Take a new programme Leicester is currently investigating: a taught master's in heritage studies. Large organisations that act as custodians of our past might well be interested in a heritage studies degree based largely on their own particular requirements for their employees. Under this model, the employer would pay for the modules directly relevant to the job, and the employee would pay for the rest. There might be modules in marketing and country house management funded by the employer, for example, with the employee rounding off the degree with a dissertation on a favoured topic.

A third possibility is to put the pipeline where the student wants it, by increasing the number of postgraduate degrees – both taught and research – based on distance learning. As one of the sector's biggest providers of postgraduate distance learning, we are well aware of both the challenges and the advantages of this path.

The decision to embark on any postgraduate degree inevitably disrupts one's life. Nevertheless, a degree that you can do in your own home, which fits around the working day and childcare responsibilities of mid-career workers, can be far less disruptive – if the university provides the right support. Only 13% of postgraduate taught students are studying via distance learning, according to Universities UK's funding environment report. This number could be a lot higher.

These mooted changes to the postgraduate landscape undoubtedly present a challenge to universities. But there is also little question that the existing routes to taught postgraduate and research degrees need a fresh look if we don't want our intellectual powerhouse to run out of fuel.

Professor Sir Bob Burgess is vice-chancellor of the University of Leicester – follow it on Twitter @uniofleicester

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