More background on the 'academic harassment' issue

For more background on the issue of academic harassment, the Ogoshi case is illuminating. In this case the individual who was wronged brought a suit against the institution.

I found this article from Science reproduced in full at the Sciencemag.org site. The one thing the case shows is that even if you win a court case against a company or school in Japan, it is often hard to get any enforcement of the settlement. The article is excerpted below.

http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2001_02_02/noDOI.11663611960984166514

excerpt (see link for full text):

BEGINNING OF EXCERPT
The Job Market
Academic Harassment

By Dennis Normile

February 02, 2001

This article appears in the February 2, 2001 issue of Science magazine.

TOKYO-- For most people, winning a court case is the end of the battle. But for Kumiko Ogoshi it was just another round in her fight against discrimination and harassment in Japanese universities, a problem that many women faculty members say has marginalized them at institutions throughout the country. And victory seems far away.

Last fall, Ogoshi, a research associate at Nara Medical University, made Japanese legal history when a district court found her supervising professor guilty of harassing her in an attempt to get her to quit (Science, 27 October 2000, p. 687). The court ordered Nara Prefecture, which runs the school, to pay $5000 in compensation. But the verdict didn't have the impact that she had hoped. "There was no reflection [by university authorities] upon the significance of the court ruling," she says. "They filed their appeal the next day, and they seem to think they can just go on as they always have."
END OF EXCERPT

Academic Harassment Issue Yields Bizarre Case

Universities and four-year colleges in Japan have long been male-dominated. When higher education here began hiring more women into career track positions, it seems cases of workplace sexual harassment were inevitable. When they started recruiting more female undergraduates, professor-on-student harassment cases were also a result. With the expansion of graduate schools (to include more female professors and students), sexual harassment remains a buzzword and a reality.

However, recently talk has also shifted to harassment without an overt sexual component (if you believe that possible). The concept is a term referred to as 'academic harassment'. It is actually a higher education version of 'power harassment', otherwise more commonly known as 'workplace bullying'. And Japan is a country known for dominant groups and cliques in just about any social situation or organization dumping on minority groups, losing cliques, and individualists, although I doubt that this is unique to Japan. Still it is often thought to be rampant in higher education here, where competition for funding and staffing can be fierce and faculty are often comprised of people who are far more interested in research and accomplishments that bring acclaim, such as supervising others' research, than they are in the usually anonymous drudgery of teaching undergraduates.

This month the Times HE reports on a rather strange-appearing case in Hokkaido, the northern most part of Japan which has a lot of higher education institutions because of the abundant open land and green field sites for campus development.

This would appear to be a complex story. The university alleges the fired professors are guilty of academic harassment of students. However, is the professors' exploitation of students for research purposes that different from what other professors are doing? If so, is it a justified or wrongful dismissal? And if the professors are not guilty, is the university itself engaging in its own forms of academic harassment and abuse of power? It seems quite possible.

Read more about the case at THES online; link and excerpt below:

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=407967&c=1

>>Language of power is focus in legal action over sackings

3 September 2009

By Melanie Newman

Professors who taught dying tongue say university 'fabricated' claims. Melanie Newman reports

Three academics who were sacked by a Japanese university on charges of "academic harassment" have claimed that they were ousted for attempting to teach an indigenous language.

The professors of educational linguistics, who have asked not to be named, are bringing legal action against Hokkaido University of Education after being fired by the institution in February.<<