Harassment and discrimination are still rife within universities

This story is yet another aspect of the dire relations ow running between administration and staff. Administrations are now injurious and parasitic. The situation will continue until staff and students unite in an attempt to effectively attack administration culture which quite obviously does not give a damn for university people, or indeed much for the courses they offer. They might as well be selling flavored yoghurts. The whole thing has become a commercialized enterprise involved in making money by full time employees intent on screwing the staff to the maximum extent on low pay and ephemeral contracts. Anyone who steps out of line can be easily emarginated. It is a highly efficient and sophisticated form of corruption comparable to near-Eastern political states run by oligarchies indifferent to the wellbeing of its citizens. I am sorry, but I think revolutionary tactics are the only thing left to us. We need to wait until everyone has been informed of what is going on. They need to be kicked out by force. Violence is not out of the question. Steel yourselves, find your courage, publicize what is going on, and unite. Contact me on Twitter https://twitter.com/eumenades. See also Chomsky's revealing article: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/03/the-death-of-american-universities/

The problems are real, but the report that is quoted is a bad piece of work that does a disservice to the issue. The respondents were self selected, and in no way representative of the university population. The problem is by no means restricted to male Dutch professors - there are more than enough painful examples of female or international professors who behave just as badly. The underlying cause is the increasingly hierarchical organization of Dutch universities, where academic staff are little more than ordinary employees, and where full professors (male or female) can rule their fiefdoms, given the formal regulations. Smart ones don't, but precisely academically weak ones often do, to make up for their lack of authority. The problem with the Dutch system is that it is modelled on the traditional German one, but unlike in Germany gives these professors large numbers of permanent staff who are in many respects their equals (or even academically much better), but not in power. Similarly, with PhD students, most of them are actually not students but temporary employees under the power and authority of full professsors who traditionally are the only ones allowed to supervise PhD students. Hence PhDs cannot easily escape, but are tied to their supervisor. So yes, I am sure there are some academically very successful male professors who bring in large grants and feel that this entitles them to all kinds of bad behaviour (there are indeed documented cases), but that is only the tip of the iceberg. All this is aggravated by a research funding system targeted at large projects under a principal investigator rather than individual scholars. The competition for that kind of funding often involves quite a bit of politics rather than merit.