Simona Sharoni, “College Professor, Author, Public Speaker, Curriculum Innovator, Facilitator, Activist,” Professor, Women’s and Gender Studies, Merrimack College.
The Chronicle of Higher Education describes how a professor of Gender Studies was triggered by a standard “travelling-in-an-elevator” joke, leading to big trouble.
The fuss started when Richard Ned Lebow, a professor of political theory at King’s College London, and Simona Sharoni, a professor of women’s and gender studies at Merrimack College, ended up in the same crowded elevator during a conference at a Hilton in San Francisco last month.
She said she offered to press the floor buttons for people in the elevator, whom she described as mostly conference attendees and all, except one other woman, white middle-aged men. Instead of saying a floor, Lebow smiled and asked for the women’s lingerie department “and all his buddies laughed,” Sharoni wrote in a complaint, the details of which he disputed, to the association later that day.
“After they walked out, the woman standing next to me turned to me and said, ‘I wonder if we should have told them that it is no longer acceptable to make these jokes!” she said in her complaint.
Sharoni, who wrote in her complaint that she has experienced sexual harassment in academe in the past and was shaken by the incident, said it took her a while to figure out that Lebow thought it was funny “to make a reference to men shopping for lingerie while attending an academic conference. I am still trying to come to terms with the fact that we froze and didn’t confront him,” she wrote.
After glancing at Lebow’s name tag, Sharoni says she went back to her hotel room to check out the association’s code of conduct. She then wrote to Mark A. Boyer, the association’s executive director. He forwarded the complaint to the group’s Committee on Professional Rights and Responsibilities, which determined that Lebow had violated the conduct code.
Obvious craziness, but what can you expect when colleges and universities hire professional neurotics to teach whining and complaining in special Grievance Studies departments?
GoneWithTheWind
It seems to me that having gender studies or black/hispanic/other studies in college is both a waste of time and money and not what college should be about. Perhaps there is a legitimate reason to study these things but every unbiased observer would tell you that these classes are all bullshit and made up “facts”. They are little more than the neo-KKK in college graduation gowns. There is no oversight, no control and no intellectual honesty. They attract teachers who are shams and charlatans and attract students who are biased and hateful. To what end? The only goal seems to be to promote hate and distribute misinformation with a side order of destroying the lives of anyone who doesn’t toe the line. Colleges should rid themselves of these hate groups.
Dick the Butcher
Truly, 12 billion bullets may be insufficient.
Seattle Sam
Years ago pathetic people like her lived in anonymity as old spinsters in a retirement home. Now they can become a martyr for “the causeâ€. Kind of like the old days in the USSR and China where you got status from The Party for denouncing your neighbor as a reactionary.
Boligat
Guys, always remember to finish every sentence with “I need a new bra.”
Spurt Reynolds
She’s just bitter that no man wants anything to do with her. Enjoy the life you’ve made or haven’t made.
Seattle Sam
For people like that the biggest enjoyment in life is making others as miserable as you are.
Steve Gregg
This is what happens when universities legitimize ideological fads. Gender studies is the intellectual equivalent of Marxist studies. The entire feminist movement was started by Communists like Betty Friedan to open a new front against capitalism in America, as part of the Popular Front strategy to undermine from within.
I would be more against gender studies if it weren’t so self-defeating. I suspect that the typical employer reading the resume of a newly minted gender studies major would bust out laughing. That leaves gender studies degree-holders to staff coffee shops, recycling plants, and little-visited used book shops full of feminist diatribes. That frees them to do what gender studies trained them to do: bitch about everything.
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