The Cornell administration should be commended for recognizing that the sexual harassment procedures of the Office of Equal Opportunity (OEO) are seriously flawed and badly in need of revision. The OEO is the primary campus advocate for minorities and women and their special interests. In addition to this role, they have been assigned the task of investigating complaints brought mainly by their constituency groups. In developing their own procedures for doing so, the OEO bestowed upon themselves the functions of investigator, prosecutor, judge, jury and, in effect, executioner. The conflicts of interest inherent in such an arrangement are obvious, and the revised procedures make only minor inroads into this assault on fairness and due process.
But the root of the problem is assigning these complaints to the OEO in the first place. This is akin to the unthinkable scenario of appointing the prosecuting attorney to serve also as judge in criminal cases. To appreciate the built-in bias of this arrangement, imagine a criminal court judge who is assigned to preside over the trial of a man accused of raping the judge's daughter. By analogy, the OEO is assigned the role of "judge" in the "trial" of persons accused of sexually harassing the very people whose interests they are supposed to represent and defend! If the university is truly interested in eliminating conflicts of interests, it will have to find someone other than the OEO to adjudicate these cases.
This "someone else" should be obvious: the Office of the Judicial Administrator. This office has the primary role of investigating and adjudicating ALL violations of the Campus Code of Conduct (Policy Notebook for Cornell Community 1995-96, page 66). It has no built-in constituency groups and should, therefore, have no inherent conflicts of interest where complaints are concerned. And it already has a set of codified procedures which would require relatively few revisions to ensure reasonable due process. If the university is serious about fairness and justice in the handling of sexual harassment cases, it will uproot them from the OEO and transplant them into the Office of the Judicial Administrator, where they belong.
James R. Aist, professor
Department of Plant Pathology