Ibix
Science Advisor
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Did anyone except me actually read the IHE article you linked? I keep citing it in support of my position, and I'm not seeing any counter-citations. Anyway, it's titled "We all felt trapped" and says that Harbi "was pushed to participate". Neither of those sounds particularly consensual to me.HomogenousCow said:Again I feel like you're implying something unreasonable here. People are making it sound like he raped a student or something, when in fact it was completely consensual. (We haven't read any evidence of the contrary)
Authority figures and experts (people in positions of power, however limited) need to be careful how they make requests because, unless they take pains to clearly communicate otherwise, the recipient of the request is likely to hear "...or I'll withdraw my support". The most sympathetic reading I can make of the situation is that Lewin made requests without realising the implied threat. The problem is, even if he didn't realize it, someone else did - and wrote MIT policies against staff-student relations. So "I didn't realize what I was doing would be a problem" is a tough sell for him. In fact, you yourself provided a link to harassment law and quoted: Harassment can include “sexual harassment” or unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical harassment of a sexual nature. At the least, we've got unwelcome sexual advances (they felt trapped and pushed into it) and requests for sexual favours (naked pics).
And that really is my last word on the topic. Unless someone can come up with another source of information, I really cannot read Lewin as anything other than exploitative. Intentional or not, he had every opportunity to know better.