Many have welcomed with great optimism the uprising of a long due public discussion about sexual harassment of women in our western societies. A discussion that has obtained a relevant visibility mainly through social media platforms. Despite the previous history of the Me Too campaign, that was started years ago by Tarana Burke, it wasn’t until the introduction and later popularization of the #MeToo hashtag by actor Alyssa Milano that the campaign became an authentic global social subject. That reality might create the fantasy that is possible, only by means of social media activity (and even activism), to have a transformative impact in the public sphere. That fantasy has created different forms of slacktivism that sometimes are even damaging for long term engagement initiatives. It is critical that the social media discussion can produce echoes in the main institutions of our society in order to produce an authentic transformative movement. And one of the fundamental institutions that should contribute is academia.
There are a variety of mayor challenges for an academic participation in the debate about sexual harassment of women. Academia is starting to address the occurrence of such attacks inside its institutions and the extent of it, even when now we are more prepared to predict it, is still disturbing. A survey started by professor Karen Kelsky “Sexual Harassment In the Academy: A Crowdsource Survey”  has shown in a very objective way an image of the spread of the problem. While fostering many of the most radical feminist thinking on one hand, academic institutions, specially the most stablished ones, are also one of the most reluctant to change their traditional organization structures. That traditionalism that frequently is a fundamental feature to keep an image of prestige has also helped to perpetuate power dynamics that are deeply structurally patriarchal. Sexual harassment becomes then an inevitable result of such dynamics.
Along with addressing that internal situation, how can academia participate in the current debate and provide support for an authentic social movement? This challenge has to do fundamentally with the temporality of contemporary social discussions. It seems like we are living in a world where there is no space for a slow building of problems. It seems that the superficial speed of social media has completely taken over any possibility of political discussion. We are getting used to dealing more with opinions than with ideas. People don’t believe in facts. There is no time to develop participation beyond the instantaneous production of comments. But in practice, even when media is taking over reality, there are processes outside of its realm—processes of thinking and of social action that matters for real people. The need of an active participation of academia in the public discussion has to do with the possibility of shaping a debate that matters to more than socially relevant individuals. There is a constant tendency to shift the focus of attention towards women that belong to a privilege status in terms of their influence and knowability. But the issue affects more invisible sectors of society, and their stories are also important.
As the digital activism expert Jen Schradie states, we need to “bring back the organization” as supporters of an authentic social movement. Even when there is a crisis of trust in the institution’s ability to help public interest campaigns, their support and even the creation of new ones is essential for authentic transformations. That is still a relevant lesson that the Civil Right Movement can teach us.`
Cultural and social processes of change have a variety of rhythms but to accomplish real effects usually takes long periods of time. Despite what the everyday accumulation of information might show, it is hard to change value systems in a culture that has built itself around patriarchy. There is a gap between what we see in our media feed (which tends to show us what we already accept as politically correct) and the actual state of the discussion in different sector of our societies. The extent of visualization of personal stories on harassment is unarguably playing a transcendental role in shaping and changing our views, but further continuations of the debate should follow in other formats of social interaction. We need to understand the actual phenomenon of the #MeToo as an important event in the history of feminist’s fight, a fight that is providing the language for the ways in which we are even being able to talk about specific issues. Without that long history, in which universities had played a fundamental role, we couldn’t be even able to articulate a discourse about gender relations, including sexual harassment. And luckily that language will keep evolving to give us more tools to orient ourselves in the current and upcoming discussions. •