Most of the women, upset or confused by the incidents, didn't speak up right away.  Pamela Price was different.  Within a couple of days, Price went to her residential college dean, Eva Balogh, with her story.  Price says Balogh told her it happens all the time and that nothing could be done about it.  Before she saw her grade in Duvall's course,  Price was off to Tanzania for Yale's Junior Year Abroad Program.

When she came back from Africa in the summer of 1977, Yale was embroiled in a lawsuit.  Ronnie Alexander, three other female undergraduates and a male assistant professor had charged that the university condoned the sexual harassment of its women students, denying them the right to an equal education.  The plaintiffs said they filed the class action only after Yale refused to investigate the charges brought forward by the Women's Caucus Grievance Committee.

Alexander v. Yale made a splash that summer.  Plaintiff Jack Winkler, then assistant professor of Classics, charged that the teaching atmosphere at Yale was "poisoned" by sexual pressures.  But to many members of the Yale community, the poison was the suit, not the sex.

Yale thought the suit was ridiculous from the start.  The university argued that the existing grievance mechanism - Yale's hierarchy of masters, deans and directors - was adequate.  But Magistrate Arthur Latimer took Alexander seriously.  In his landmark decision in December 1977, he rejected Yale's motion to dismiss the case and ruled that sexual harassment is sex discrimination in education.  He knocked out the five original plaintiffs, because they were not currently Yale women students with personal harassment grievances.  (Several had graduated and one was a man.)  But he ruled that Pamela Price - who had just signed up as the sixth plaintiff - could sue Yale for discrimination.

"Yale has assumed from the beginning that this is about a grade and not an incident," says Linda Hoaglund, a Yale senior and member of the Caucus Grievance Committee.  Hoaglund and other Price supporters say Yale had a responsibility to look into not just the grade but Duvall's conduct, even though he'd left to teach at the University of Minnesota.  "What if he was a horrible harasser and was going to do it elsewhere?" asks Phyllis Crocker, a legal worker on the case.

Price's attorney, Anne Simon - Yale Law '76 and a co-founder of the New Haven Law Collective - planned to use other Yale women's stories to show that the school's approach to Price's complaint was a policy.  But Yale Counsel Doyle convinced Judge Burns, Yale Law '47, to limit the testimony to Price's Grievance.  That wiped out much of Simon's case and angered those who supported Alexander v. Yale as a class action.  "If it was an individual thing, I wouldn't be here," says Price.  "It's about more than the fact that Duvall propositioned me.  It's about all women who are sexually harassed."

The term "sexual harassment" did not even exist until 1975 when Susan Meyer and Karen Sauvigne, WWUI's founders, invented it.  Since 1975, when Meyer and Sauvigne held a speak-out about harassment on the job, a number of women have sued their employers under EEO Title VII for failing to combat harassment.

Most women in the labor force are subordinate to men in their workplaces.  On-the-job harassers use their economic leverage to exploit women sexually.  For students, the economic penalty for resisting advances is less direct than for non-compliant workers.  But the problem is still the man's sexual exploitation of an unequal power relationship.

The harassment issue has often connected sexism with racism.  Pamela Price is not the first Black woman to sue for sexual harassment by a white man.  In fact, many of the plaintiffs in workplace harassment suits have been Black women.  "With a white student they would have had a gentlemanly discussion about it," says Price.  "With me, they never even considered that.  Jose Cabranes (Yale's General Counsel) said at a press conference, 'We don't want to be told what to do by a bunch of women.'  And a Black woman?  Hell, no."

Price says she went to court not to change her grade but to educate people.  Has the harassment suit educated Yale University?  A decade after the college first admitted women, Yale's President A. Bartlett Giamatti condemned sexual harassment in his welcoming speech to the matriculated students.  But this year Yale rehired and promoted Keith Brion, the former Band Director Ronnie Alexander accused of raping her.  Assessing women's status at Yale after ten years,  Linda Hoaglund of the Women's Caucus says, "Yale hasn't given us anything.  What's a women's studies course if you have to walk in fear of harassment to get there?  What's a women's athletic program if there's the threat of the coach harassing you?  We're not saying we don't want these things.  But until harassment is dealt with, we don't really have access to them."