University Sexual Harassment Policy

Q: What should sys admins do about nude pictures and displays of nude pictures in public terminal rooms? Is a special rule banning such pictures and/or displays needed? So what should a sys admin do? Your university almost certainly has a written policy on sexual harassment, that policy almost certainly details the sexual harassment enforcment procedure. It is very unlikely that an ordinary university department or staff person is authoritized by the school to enforced the sexual harassment policy (by, for example, expelling students from the computer system or by searching for *.gif files).

A: The problem is not the pictures themselves, but rather their display. By way of analogy, your library likely contains thousands of nude photos (many academic libraries, for example, subscribe to _Playboy_). The existence of these pictures on university property is not harassment because no one is compelled to keep looking at the pictures. If that same _Playboy_ pictures, however, were *displayed* in a university office or lab where employees or students must work, the person displaying the picture might be guilty of sexually harassing a person in the office or lab. Likewise the *display* of nude pictures in a public terminal room (or university office) might be found to be sexual harassment. 1) Find out if your university's "sexual harassment" officer thinks that public display of nudes is, in more situations, sexual harassment. If so, post notices

that public display of sexual material is *likely* a violation of the school's sexual harassment policy. Quote the policy and the opinion of the university's "sexual harassment" officer. 2) If anyone engages in what appears to be sexual harassment, * warn them informally (at your discretion) * charge them with sexual harassment (or tell the harassed person how to charge them) following your schools's sexual harassment procedure. Note you are not creating a new rule; rather you are helping to explain the University's existing rule. This is important because it is very difficult to create and enforce a good sexual harassment rule.