Dangerous to joke about ‘Lingerie’

The International Studies Association has rejected the appeal of a professor who was found responsible for violating its code of conduct after he jokingly requested that an elevator in a conference hotel be stopped at the lingerie department.

Richard Ned Lebow, a professor of international political theory at King’s College London, responded by saying he would meet with his lawyer on Thursday and expects to file a defamation lawsuit. Lebow, who had threatened to sue the association unless it found in his favor, did not immediately respond to a question about who exactly he’d sue.

The association’s lawyer, in a letter dated Tuesday, relayed its decision that no steps would be taken against Lebow if he offered an "unequivocal apology" to Simona Sharoni, a professor of women’s and gender studies at Merrimack College who filed a complaint about the incident.

If he does not apologize, the letter said, the association will issue a formal, private letter of reprimand.

In an email to The Chronicle on Wednesday, Lebow made it clear he had no intention of apologizing.

The incident that sparked the uproar happened in April in a crowded elevator during the association’s annual conference at a Hilton in San Francisco. Sharoni said she had offered to press the buttons for the floors where the elevator’s occupants, who she said were mostly male conference attendees, wanted to get off.

Lebow asked for the women’s lingerie department, and others in the elevator laughed, she wrote in her complaint. Lebow has disputed details of her account, but conceded joking about being let off on the lingerie floor.

When he learned she was upset, he said, he tried to resolve the dispute informally, as he believes the association’s conduct code encourages. He wrote Sharoni an email saying he wasn’t trying to make her uncomfortable or to insult women. He suggested that Sharoni, who was born in Romania and raised in Israel, might have misconstrued his remark. And he said that it was a "standard gag line" when he was growing up, in the 1950s, to pretend to be in a department store and ask the elevator operator for the hardware or lingerie department.

In an email after the uproar began, he told The Chronicle that Sharoni was "trying to impose her definition on my words, take needless offense, and use it as an excuse to make a complaint and put a chill on free speech and humor."

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