Outside a lecture hall at the Center for Twentieth Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, members of Students Against Sexual Harassment protested Jane Gallop, an English professor who had organized the conference then in progress, "Pedagogy: The Question of the Personal," and who had recently become the focus of sexual harassment complaints.

The Pedagogy conference was seen as a response to two recent sexual harassment controversies, both of which involved male instructors. In one, an art professor was suspended after attempting to deflect allegations that he had a sexual relationship with one female graduate student by citing a letter from another in which she insisted that her affair with him had been a "positive" experience. In another, a ceramics professor was fired after not contesting charges that a kiln overheated and suffered damage while he was engaged in sex with a female student. Critics of the conference claimed that many of its lectures could be seen as sanctioning "eroticization" of the classroom to the point of creating a "hostile environment." Lecture titles included: "I Walk the Line: The Body of the Graduate Student TA [Teaching Assistant] in the University"; "Discipline, Spectacle, and Melancholia in and around the Gay Studies Classroom"; and "On Waking Up One Morning and Discovering We Are Them: Power and Privilege on the Margins."

Graduate student Dana Beckleman, a lesbian, accused Gallop, her dissertation adviser at the time, of having creating a "hostile work environment" with flirtatious comments and physical advances. When Beckleman ultimately rejected the overtures publicly, she claims Gallop retaliated by making her graduate student work increasingly odious, ultimately forcing her to change her academic direction. When Beckleman first inquired of Gallop's intentions, "She said it was pedagogical strategy. She wanted to seduce her students to learn. And so I thought I was engaging in the latest hip and trendy, cutting-edge theoretical act by flirting..." It is worth pointing out that Gallop is married to another UWM professor.

Gallop's 1988 book, Thinking Through the Body, contains a chapter entitled "The Student Body" where she describes how while she herself was a grad student she had "a series of affairs with thirty-six year old men (at the time I was in my mid-twenties) ... all unavailable men, some married, some otherwise unavailable—a certain Oedipal insistence which this paper interprets." In the same book Gallop argues, "Pederasty is undoubtedly a useful paradigm for Classic European pedagogy. A greater man penetrates a lesser man with his knowledge. The student is empty, a receptacle for the phallus; the teacher is the phallic fullness of knowledge."

Beckleman contends her professor's strategy "crossed from a theoretical act to a physical act" at an event entitled, "Flaunting It: The First National Graduate Student Conference on Lesbian and Gay Studies," hosted by UWM. "She stood up and said, 'I'm excited about this conference because it is about graduate student's sexual preferences, and my sexual preference is graduate students.' That night, a group of us went out and she came on to me..." Beckleman said Gallop kissed her and touched her.

The following day, Beckleman delivered a paper to the conference which she considered a strong rejection of the professor's behavior: "I don't have a problem f***ing Jane Gallop as long as she practices safe sex. After all, she is merely another woman. But I do have a problem f***ing my dissertation adviser." Beckleman maintains that the flirtations continued and "she told me sexual fantasies... even after I thought I had publicly handled it." The dedication to Gallop's latest book, Around 1981, reads as follows: "To my students—the bright, hot, hip (young) women who fire my thoughts, my loins, my prose. I write this to move, to please, to shake you." It was not until complaining to the school's affirmative action office that Beckleman learned of the university rule that forbids faculty-student sex.

Beckleman, while still engaged in the complaint against Gallop, was relieved to be done with school. "Graduate school is strange enough in terms of the paranoias and anxieties it creates in people about achievement. And then you have this added factor. Here you are, trying to prove yourself as an intellectual and someone says, 'I'm not interested in your intellect, I'm interested in your body.' "

Professor Gallop eventually published a book in defense of her actions, titled, appropriately enough, Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment. In it, she admitted that her relations with the two students who accused her had always been "personalized and sexualized," but this did not constitute sexual harassment because harassment, properly understood, means discrimination, and a feminist like herself cannot be said to discriminate against other women.

One of the two dissertation advisors Gallop herself slept with as a graduate student was asked to write a blurb to promote the book. The teacher did so by apologizing for having been "unprofessional, exploitative, and lousy in bed." The publisher, Duke University Press, declined to use the blurb.

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