As the physics department continues its investigation of sexual harassment, faculty members said any hostility is not exclusively a gender issue but an expression of a climate problem throughout all of physics.
Concerns about the department's atmosphere surfaced nearly two years ago when complaints of sexual misconduct resulted in legal action. Meanwhile, the department has struggled to address these and similar incidents, as it continues to seek an appropriate course of action to deal with gender issues and collegiality in general.
"Ranging from overt sexual harassment progressively to insidious climate issues, I think it is clear that in the past certainly we've had problems in that whole range," said Harold Baranger, chair of physics.
A gender relations committee, comprised of physics faculty, has met for the past year to investigate the climate in the department and formulate solutions. So far, their primary goal has been to create a dialogue about sexual misconduct.
"The most important thing is just not being afraid to discuss those kinds of issues-the ones that have sexual undertones-any more than we are afraid to talk about how handwriting is too small on the blackboard," said Roxanne Springer, an associate professor and member of the committee.
Dean of Natural Sciences Berndt Mueller, who was chair of the department when some alleged incidents took place, has remained out of the process to avoid a conflict of interest between his allegiances in the physics department and his role as an administrator. He said, however, that the department has "addressed these issues in a way that they have not been addressed before, as climate issues rather than incidents."
Yet despite their progress, members of the department said they have been disappointed by a lack of administrative support. "Some sort of advisory committee would certainly have helped us a lot," Baranger said. "It's really been a complete vacuum."
In summer 2000, William Chafe, dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, created a standing committee to address the physics gender climate as part of a settlement for a sexual harassment suit involving a member of the department.
The committee-known as the Bryant Committee and comprised of three faculty members throughout the sciences-spent a year collecting information on specific incidents of harassment and this year, the Bryant Committee has been charged with evaluating the department's gender climate as well.
Chafe said the Bryant Committee still exists, although Linda McGown, a member of the committee, said she was unsure when the group had last met. McGown, also a professor of chemistry, added that most recently, she has informally advised department members on how to proceed.
She praised the actions taken so far. "It's been a true grassroots effort to make fundamental changes in the department," she said.
In late February, faculty members passed a resolution without objection constructed by the internal committee regarding appropriate behavior. The resolution takes a preventative stance on sexual harassment. "It is not sufficient for a faculty member to assume that he/she is behaving correctly as long as the student does not complain," the statement reads.
A list of goals adopted at the same time also includes similar provisions, such as developing "a detailed protocol for addressing alleged or suspected inappropriate behavior even in the absence of a complaint."
Several in the department have reacted negatively to the new guidelines.
"I'm angry and I'm not the only one that's angry," said Professor Emeritus Lawrence Evans, who said he is worried the code of conduct would be used to further personal vendettas rather than to prevent harassment. "The resolution is too vague to be positively useful and not too vague to be possibly negative," he added.
Others argue still that the department has overreacted to what amount to only a couple of complaints. Baranger met with faculty and graduate students throughout March to distribute a list of alleged incidents of sexual harassment over the past decade.
Evans and several other faculty members and graduate students have argued that the list's claims are either minor or unsubstantiated.
"When you go through these one by one, this list is just like Joe McCarthy's 1950s list of communists in the State Department," Evans said. "They're getting the climate they want-where people are afraid to be around them."
Department leaders acknowledge that some of the definitions adopted are somewhat extreme, but argue that such a reaction is necessary.
"In any correction, there's got to be an overshoot," said Henry Weller, director of graduate studies. "Then you finally find a middle ground."
Graduate students said the way the department has dealt with sexual harassment and its climate is getting better, but some worry that the focus on gender discrimination may be masking other departmental problems-such as a lack of communication, poor advising, jumbled power structures and geographic dispersion among the Physics Building, the Free Electron Laser Laboratory and the Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory.
"It's possible that the department has put everything under the umbrella of gender problems because it's easier than admitting that there is an endemic climate problem," said fourth-year graduate student Kevin Chalut.
Even as faculty address gender climate, they are beginning to recognize the department's atmosphere is not destructive only to women. "When I look back at the most egregious harassment cases, they were not gender related," Mueller said.
Plans to change the gender relations committee to a general climate committee are being discussed in the hope that greater cohesion will alleviate any lingering hostility.
"The gender problem is an exaggeration of the larger climate problem," Weller said. "We realize that fixing the gender problem is tied to fixing the larger problem."
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