Four female graduate students at the University of Minnesota filed a sexual-harassment suit against all six tenured members of the Scandinavian studies department, five men and one woman. When one of the professors inquired into the charges against him, he discovered that he had given a narrow, "patriarchal" interpretation of Isaak Dinesen's work, of not having read a novel a student deemed important, and of having greeted a student in a less than friendly manner—failing to smile.

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