Harassment Policy Muzzles Free Speech

Impeccably liberal Santa Monica isn’t the sort of place you’d expect to find a controversy over sex and free speech. Or at least you wouldn’t have in the days before political correctness.

During a public speaking class at Santa Monica College, student Jon Abkar gave an anatomically specific speech describing oral sex.

His talk was too much, even for some Santa Monicans. A woman in the class complained to the college equal opportunity/diversity officer, Jo Ann R. Fielder. But her complaint wasn’t against her classmate, the speaker. It wasn’t long before the class professor learned that he was under investigation--for sexual harassment.

I think of sexual harassment as using your power as a boss, a teacher or even a co-worker to coerce someone into having sex or as a means of humiliating that person with conversational references to sex. The key element, in my view, is coercion, the misuse of power.

At Santa Monica College, however, the definition of sexual harassment is so broad that it’s virtually unlimited. A brochure, distributed to the faculty Thursday, said sexual harassment includes words “of a sexual nature” that have “the purpose or effect of unreasonably interfering with an individual’s education or work performance or which create an intimidating, hostile or offensive educational or working environment.”

That tent is big enough to cover anything.

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I learned of the controversy from the Corsair, the Santa Monica College newspaper, which splashed the story on page one under the headline “Speech on oral sex results in harassment complaint.”

I found the target of the complaint, Professor Ed Gallagher, in his small office in the Letters and Science building. He’s been teaching for 41 years, 19 of them at SMC, and in all that time has never been involved in anything like this.

Gallagher is a genial man, a union activist and a popular faculty member respected enough by his colleagues--women and men--to be chosen communications department chair.

He said that he believes the classroom is a place “where we are able to face new ideas or outrageous ideas.” He tells his students that they are free to leave if they are offended by a speech’s content.

He never knows what students will say until they begin their talks. That was the case when the student gave his speech on oral sex, though afterward Gallagher told the young man privately, “The subject was unworthy of you. I thought you should have given a speech on a subject of more value and less sensational.”

I couldn’t reach the student who complained but she told the Corsair newspaper that she felt the speech created an atmosphere of sexual harassment.

Equal opportunity officer Fielder told Gallagher that a student had complained of sexual harassment in his class. Gallagher went to Fielder’s office and they talked for two hours. He said Fielder asked why he didn’t stop the student in mid-speech.

“I believe in free speech,” he replied.

In the end, he said, Fielder told him he had created an atmosphere in the class that made it impossible for the student to continue in the class, “a hostile sexual environment.”

But she also told him the school would not file any charges against him. And when I talked to Fielder, she explained that “in the context of what’s written [in the Corsair story] you can’t classify it as sexual harassment.”

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Obviously Fielder would like to bury the controversy.

But it won’t say buried so long as that incredibly broad definition of sexual harassment remains part of the college district’s policy statement.

It makes everyone in a classroom a potential thought-control cop. If you have a grudge, if you feel offended, you can file the irrevocably damaging charge of sexual harassment against a professor or a student, and the investigatory wheels will begin to turn. In Gallagher’s case, the definition was used to try to make him accountable for somebody else’s words.

Any classroom speech remotely related to sex could get a teacher or student in hot water. Take, for example, this: “Thy breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies.”

Would the thought-control cops, probing the sinister events in a biblical literature class, accept as a defense the fact that these erotic words are from the Song of Solomon?