After a long battle, Rebecca Humes finally has some closure. In 2002, then-director of the School of Visual Communication Larry Nighswander allegedly sexually harassed Humes. She filed a complaint with the university, which dismissed it in 2003. Humes filed a lawsuit against Nighswander and the university. The lawsuit was settled in January, and Ohio University has since modified its sexual harassment policy.
The most important change to the policy is that investigations of complaints are no longer handled within a particular college or department. Under the old policy, complaints were generally handled within the department or college and were not always fully investigated. Now, all complaints will be handled by administrators with the Office for Institutional Equity or the Legal Affairs or Human Resources departments. This ensures no complaints will be swept under the rug. According to the Legal Affairs Department, the other changes are: Complainants are no longer anonymous, records will be better kept and the three offices will meet regularly to discuss complaints they have received.
While OU has good intentions in changing its harassment policy, one thing is lacking. The administration has yet to issue a directive to university employees detailing what they are to do if approached with a complaint about sexual harassment. The memorandum need not be anything long-winded or in-depth - it could be a simple e-mail -but employees must know where to report if they hear about sexual harassment. Students receive e-mails such as this every week, detailing new parking policy and jobs in the dining halls. And in the same vein, the university must educate students about sexual harassment policy, who they can complain to and what action they can expect to be taken once they file a complaint. Nicolette Dioguardi, associate director of legal affairs, said the policy has not yet been revised or approved fully. But, as soon as it is, it will be filed on the university's Web site and faculty and staff will be notified by e-mail. But she said she was not sure about how students may be alerted to the policy.
The university can waste no time in disseminating such vital information as soon as it is discovered and broadcast it in an easy-to-understand manner. As presently outlined in the student handbook, the policy is confusing. Complainants, who have already gone through enough if they have been sexually harassed, do not need any more bureaucratic barriers in their way when trying to resolve the problem. The university must eliminate all unnecessary obstacles for complainants seeking justice and fair treatment.
Hed: The Good Doktor
Many readers of Hunter S. Thompson discover him in high school, when stoners loan around a copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and giggle at its hilarious passages of hedonistic excess. But if this is the most familiar they become with the man and his work, they miss out on one of America's greatest writers. Thompson's larger-than-life myth and his predilection for hard drugs made it easy to lose sight of his brilliant, explosive prose; his profound idealism and equally profound disillusionment; and his searing insights into the very core of the American experience. The worlds of letters and journalism are still reeling from the shocking news of his suicide last weekend.
In a way, remembering Thompson is remembering two men: His death also means the end of the road for Raoul Duke, the fiendish alter ego and violent caricature whose legend sometimes overpowered Thompson's real persona. He told the BBC in 1979 that he often wasn't sure which man -Duke or Thompson -people expected when they met him, and wasn't sure which he should be. Close readers know it was Duke, really, who went on the infamous Las Vegas tear, and that Duke was always at hand to say or do something outrageous that Thompson couldn't. In his outrageousness, though, Duke helped disguise Thompson's muted horror at the modern scene.
Long before he took his own life, Thompson's work made clear he could barely cope with the world. He spent his career trying to reconcile his personal visions and aspirations against reality, and found that reality always fell short. Thompson is supposed to have cried uncontrollably after the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, when he watched riot police beat peaceful protestors -before the police pummeled him. He worked for years in the early 1970s on a project that was to have been his masterpiece, called The Death of the American Dream
but the scope of the book and its implications were too much for him and he never completed it. In the 1980s, when he was a columnist for The San Francisco Examiner, he pined for integrity in public life but grimly pronounced its death in a piece called The End of an Era in which he lamented that the children of the 1980s -every Ohio University undergraduate -would grow up with the knowledge that rain is poison and sex is death and every politician they see on TV is a liar and a fool.
That may be. But he inspired many of those same children to be writers.
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