What the Phyllis Schlafly honorary degree says about Wash U. (Our first guest submission)

This post was submitted by Durba Mitra. Durba is a 2005 graduate of Washington University in St. Louis and currently a doctoral student in history and public health at Emory University. Private comments for Durba can be emailed to diversehybridbloggers@gmail.com. They will be forwarded to her.

Sometimes I feel nostalgic for my alma mater, Washington University in St. Louis. In this moment, when Washington University is, ironically, awarding a woman who does not believe in women getting degrees an honorary doctorate, I am feeling less than nostalgic. This award reminds me that, as a student, I was completely left out to dry by an institution that employs progressive rhetoric in order to cover its anti-feminist core.

Phyllis Schlafly, who will be celebrated by Washington University this coming commencement, is the ridiculous anti-feminist mouthpiece defended by conservative women for her ability to protect a woman’s right to be exploited. She speaks the “truth” on sexual harassment, arguing that “sexual harassment on the job is not a problem for virtuous women.” It is not surprising that an institution like Wash U that feigns an interest in women’s rights feels that it is a “bipartisan” gesture to celebrate a woman who single-handedly prevented the passing of the Equal Rights Amendment through language that argues for the “rights” of women. It is precisely these easily malleable words-rights, equality, bipartisanship- that has allowed old institutions like Phyllis Schlafly and Washington University to continue discrimination under the guise of equal opportunity and freedom.

When I was a senior in college at Washington University in St. Louis, I filed a sexual harassment suit against a professor for inappropriate behavior. My sexual harassment suit was the first sexual harassment suit ever to go to Washington University’s committee, the group of Washington University administrators and professors who were organized to address the charge of sexual harassment in the confines of the institution. This professor, a man who constantly harassed his female students and slept with a student who he was at that point teaching, threatened my status as a student because I knew of his sexual indiscretions with undergraduates. Yet I was given no institutional space to contest his empowered position. I submitted a written statement to the university. In the hearing addressing my accusation of sexual harassment, the professor responded to my statement with any possible defamatory information he could conjure up to undermine my credibility. Yet he himself did not deny certain actions he had taken, including taking condoms out suggestively during a one-on-one meeting between us in his office.

The statement put out by the committee after the hearing accused me of something similar to Schlafly’s statement on sexual harassment. While the committee recognized that the professor had acted grossly inappropriate, it simultaneously accused me of bringing the situation upon myself. Further, while the committee agreed that the evidence I presented revealed that this professor behaved in grossly inappropriate ways, they emphasized that my own academic difficulties, including a late assignment to a professor, demonstrated that I was an untrustworthy woman. I was not “virtuous” enough, in Schlafly’s words, to make the charge of sexual harassment stick. The professor was let off with a mild reprimand, and in the course of the committee’s statement, I was reprimanded as well for being an unworthy accuser. The professor was NOT fired; he was only prevented from closing the door when he met with undergraduates. I, on the other hand, became a closed case for the university, which was more afraid of its liability than the safety of its women students. Undergraduates were not warned of his behavior, and he continued to teach until he left the university one year later.

I give you all this autobiographical narrative to push current protests that demand the revocation of the awarded degree for Phyllis Schlafly The outrage and protest directed at Washington University for the award to Phyllis Schlafly must attempt not only get her award revoked, but to ask serious questions to an institution that was willing to make an offer like the Schlafly honorary degree in the first place. It is apparent that Washington University is an institution that has voluntarily extended the contempt for women I experienced as an undergraduate through a symbolic gesture that reinforces the idea that women are second-class citizens. My small moment of institutional failure is symbolic of many ‘prestigious’ universities which bask in their ethical approaches to equal opportunity, ”non-discrimination,” and academic freedom while institutionally reinforcing a violent conservatism strategically couched in the rhetorical contradictions of these all-important ideals.

I am embarrassed and ashamed to be a graduate of an institution that celebrates the systematic disempowerment of women in order to cover its ass, through threats of liability or conservative donorship. But it is not be me who should be ashamed; it is Washington University, which has demonstrated through this episode that it is an institution that has no intention of living up to its own ideals.