Sexual harassment and violence in universities

gettyimagesbank

By Scott Shepherd

I can't imagine that many people were surprised when The Korea Times reported earlier this month findings by Kyung Hee University, showing that 60 percent of the alleged perpetrators of sexual abuse in its graduate school were professors.

Obviously, the data is unlikely to show the full picture. The sample isn't representative and there are likely many more of these types of instances that are never reported. Sadly, with this kind of crime, the true extent of the problem will probably never be known. Nonetheless, the survey paints a clear picture: there are professors who behave atrociously.

The Kyung Hee University report came out the same week that I attended my own university's mandatory annual sexual harassment and violence training session. The training is run by the government and all staff and faculty at the university are required to participate.

It was a two-hour PowerPoint presentation on Zoom, and it was, to say the least, boring. The vast majority of the participants, including me, had their cameras off. Of those who kept their cameras on, I saw several who seemed to be sleeping.

Who can blame them? In the history of the world, has a PowerPoint presentation ever saved a single person from sexual harassment or assault? Will would-be predators, having idly daydreamed through a few slides, suddenly veer from their course?

When you compare how awful the problem is with how lazy and unimaginative the government's approach to sexual harassment and violence education and prevention is, what can you feel other than anger? Given their approach, it's hard to believe that the central government really sees this as a priority.

Unfortunately, it seems that, in any institution with stark power imbalances, sexual abuse is possible, and perhaps even likely. This connection between a power imbalance and sexual violence has been demonstrated all over the world in a great variety of settings ― universities, unfortunately, included.

I suppose that up to now, the system has simply trusted professors not to abuse their power. On an individual level, that may well make sense, and I certainly trust all the professors and staff members I work with. However, on an institutional level, simply hoping for everyone to be honest and nice is plainly a stupid, if not downright negligent, policy.

Compounded by a mixture of various inequities and poor administrative policies, the problem is as bad in Korea as it is anywhere.

One issue is that, more so than in many other countries, professors in Korea just have so much more power than their students. Part of this is clearly a product of the country's history: in the context of the Korean veneration of teachers, professors are the highest form of teacher who are at the peak of the education pyramid. Moreover, professors here tend to be older and male ― and of course old men carry the most privilege in Korean society, even today.

This system is designed to keep students in awe of their professors. Most obvious is the absurd fact that many professors here include "effort" and "attitude" in their calculations of students' grades, as if we're grading young children. I can't think of a better way to encourage discrimination, favoritism and abuse of power.

The point of university grades is to give, as accurately as possible, a fair assessment of the ability and output of a given student. While, of course, there's no Platonic ideal of what a particular grade looks like, marks should be given as objectively as possible.

Moreover, for some unfathomable reason, grading is not done anonymously. This lack of anonymity on the behalf of students is unforgiveable in 2021. The technology to anonymize students' submissions has been available for years and is widely used elsewhere in the world. Implementing it here would be a simple step to protect the integrity of the whole system from accusations or actual instances of discrimination and favoritism from occurring during grading.

Worse still is the government-mandated "grading curve," which dictates a maximum percentage of students who can be given a particular grade in any given course. If an instructor has two students with roughly equal grades and abilities and one of them needs to go into a lower grade band, who will that professor pick? While the grading curve is intended to combat grade inflation, it actually encourages instructor bias and the abuse of power. There are much better and fairer ways of avoiding grade inflation. For instance, it would be possible to set up oversight systems where instructors from different universities double-mark samples of each other's grading to ensure fairness and equity in the provision of marks. Thankfully, during the COVID-19 pandemic, grading according to the government-mandated curve has been suspended, but it should be abolished forever.

These steps on their own will not stop sexual harassment and violence from occurring in universities, obviously. There are clearly more complex issues of gender, age and status inequality at play. We must also not forget that the problem is in the end caused by individual actions and immoral choices on the part of actors.

However, as part of a wider reform of university administration and culture, a change in the way grades are awarded would go some way in limiting the power of professors and reducing the fear students have of complaining against them. Ultimately, a range of safeguards and reporting mechanisms must be implemented and strictly enforced, in order to ensure the protection of university students and staff alike. Surely any serious efforts ― any at all ― would be better than the annual PowerPoint presentations that we have at the moment.

Scott Shepherd is a British-American academic. He has taught in universities in the U.K. and Korea, and is currently assistant professor of English at Chongshin University in Seoul. The views expressed in the article are the author's own and do not reflect the editorial direction of The Korea Times.