Mediation provisions in harassment policies deny the social, political, and economic nature of the systemic degradation of women in the academy. Mediation is, from the institution's perspective, the preferred method of "resolution."⁹ By persuading us to enter into informal mediation, the equity office safeguards the status quo while appearing to resolve the "dispute." Mainly, this tactic deflects the university's responsibility to engage with the harassers onto the women who are being harassed. We did not want to borrow our rights, put our report up as collateral, trade off on our harassment or permit the administration and its officers to hide behind us for protection from male hostility. We did not want to informally engage with the threats.

Once it was clear we had no intention of protecting the administration from taking action against systemic discrimination, sexual harassment and retaliation, further attacks were launched against us. The administration demonstrated its toughness by interrogating us about the circulation of the report, requesting the names of all students who had copies, and indicating to us via the press that it was prepared to give the EMTF the due process investigation into the CCC they were demanding. ¹⁰

Meanwhile, the equity office still sought to discover the level of public support. The names of women who would "back us up" were requested in order to establish where the faculty women stood on the issue. It was not sufficient that all the department female faculty (all untenured) supported the report and had written that the April 8, 1993 threat of legal action against one of them made it impossible for any to participate in departmental business. Anyone who does move at this point to back women up risks more than credibility, as did the CCC and those who spoke to the committee, and the eighteen letter writers whose reports were listed in the appendix. This "evidence" was never given credit, and through sexist replacement and erasure those complaints became the allegations for which the committee "had no evidence. "¹¹

Delay/suspension

The EMTF continued to press for an investigation into the CCC and the validity of its report. We were forcibly "mediated" at this stage by an "internal review process" which included an equity officer. When the report of Andrew Pirie and Marilyn Callahan suggested an educational approach with the EMTF and the involvement of the equity office for some consultation and workshops with experts, the EMTF threatened to take further actions that would involve the investigators and the university.