California colleges can’t seem to stop harassment. Lousy online training isn’t helping

I recently completed my public university system’s annual online sexual harassment training. It required that I be logged in for at least 120 minutes, as if finishing faster meant I hadn’t spent enough time considering how harassment affects people’s ability to learn and work in a university — as if I were unaware that the chancellor of the California State University system resigned over mishandled harassment allegations against a top aide while he was president of Fresno State.

Just months earlier, my own university’s president stepped down over a mishandled investigation of an athletic trainer’s abuse of student athletes as well as retaliation against employees who asked officials to do something about it.

I, too, have had firsthand experience with sexual harassment in my academic discipline.

University employees have taken online training for years, but it hasn’t prevented controversies over mishandled harassment. If we want to do better, we’re missing crucial details.

University Title IX offices function primarily to protect institutions, not the targets of harassment. Annual training merely ticks a box on a compliance checklist, doing little to ensure that universities are free of harassment, that harassers will be removed or their targets protected.

Institutional betrayal is common for those who report harassment even if officials find in their favor.

Students who report harassment often experience significant disruptions in their education. They can expect faculty members they trusted to side with their harasser — and even frame the issue as a matter of principle. They may see their harassers heralded as talents the institution can’t afford to lose — and may notice that their own talents become completely dispensable. These students, even more than their harassers, risk being accused of hurting the school’s reputation because they spoke up rather than accepting harassment as the price of admission.

Online harassment training doesn’t typically mention that you probably know someone who has been a target or that harassers can escape your notice because most don’t continuously harass everyone they encounter. Most harassers don’t engage in inappropriate behavior when their friends, colleagues and supervisors might witness it.

These trainings don’t tell you how many students and staff have left universities because they were harassed. Granted, that’s difficult to quantify given how many of us never officially reported our harassers.

Online training doesn’t describe how survivors of harassment still carry the experience with us. It doesn’t mention that sharing your experience could make it the one thing you’re known for.

It’s encouraging that academic leaders are being held accountable for mishandling harassment and that faculty sometimes reconsider their reflexive support of luminaries who harass. I know that who I am in my professional community is not defined by what my harasser did to me. But that harassment structures how I experience my professional community.

I doubt compliance-driven online training could capture what survivors of harassment in academia know. It’s time for university leaders to listen to survivors and protect institutions by making them inhospitable to harassers. It’s time for them to stop wasting our time with training videos that convey no sense of what and whom we’re losing.