JM Coetzee's winning the Nobel prize for literature was announced on Friday October 3. By coincidence, that was the day the media blitzkrieg on Arnold Schwarzenegger as a world-class harasser of women was launched by the Los Angeles Times. It provoked the front-running candidate's carefully crafted public statement: "Yes, I have behaved badly sometimes. Yes, it is true that I was on rowdy movie sets, and I have done things that were not right, which I thought then was playful". A qualified apology was issued, with muscular fingers firmly crossed behind the back.

Fifteen cases were cited by the newspaper. The pattern was the same throughout. It was not Clintonian carnal "weakness" but calculated power play that Arnold indulged when he (reportedly) felt women's breasts or stuck his (muscular) hand up their skirts. Arnold was groping to win, to conquer, to kick (or failing that, fondle) ass: he was Conan the Vulgarian; the Gropinator. He had used his pre-potent position as megastar on the film set and as Mr Universe in the gym to dominate and humiliate. That's what "winning" was. He would, one apprehended, use his gubernatorial pre-eminence the same way. Did California want a man or a mouse as governor - and, ex officio, head of the Regents of the University of California?

One incident, reported by Carla Baron, a stand-in for the female lead on Twins, is typical. Baron was standing at the food service table with Schwarzenegger when the star "playfully" suggested to his own bulky stand-in that they "make a Carla sandwich"...

"With Schwarzenegger facing her and the stand-in behind, they squeezed her between them. After they separated, Schwarzenegger who had just been smoking a cigar, bent her over and pushed his tongue in her mouth. 'There was this tongue lunging down my throat. It was worse than licking an ashtray. It was like an ashtray of human flesh.'"

The profiles of Coetzee on October 3 highlighted his book, Disgrace, as his breakthrough work. It won the Booker prize (his second) in 1999, when I was on the judging panel. In addition to the literary merits, Disgrace had a particular interest. I'm a university professor of literature. Coetzee is (among his other parts) a university professor of literature. What is the book about? The newspaper profilers tended to agree (as Robert McCrum put it in the Los Angeles Times) that it "asked awkward questions about the relations of blacks and whites and men and women".

Those in the profession and the academic workplace view Disgrace in a more parochial light. I recall a notice, shortly after the novel was published in America, posted for an on-campus women's discussion group. "Come and Talk About Disgrace", it said, without any mincing of words, "The Story of a Professor who Sexually Harasses one of his Women Students and is Fired".

Crudely, that is indeed what the first half of Disgrace is about. The hero, David Lurie, is 52 (the age Arnold was, when he made his Carla sandwich) and a middlingly successful professor of communications in a South African university. He is twice separated, maritally, and has recently found sexual relations with prostitutes unsatisfactorily discontinuous. He embarks on an intense affair with one of his 20-year-old students. Scandal ensues. Lurie declines the weasel's way out - public confession, apology, and a rigorous course of "Sensitivity Training".

Believing he has done nothing wrong, he chooses disgrace instead. He is duly fired.

The reasons for Lurie's stiff-neckedness (why doesn't he just swim with the politically correct tide?) are never clearly articulated in the novel - other than as a brooding suspicion that sensitivity training courses, codes of conduct, and sexual-harassment tribunals are not the way to solve the deep-rooted, intractable (perhaps insoluble) problems at issue.

I suppose most literate adults run a private poll in their head as to who they want to win the Nobel. My vote that year would have gone to Philip Roth (too raunchy, I suspect, for the grey men of Stockholm). Roth's major recent effort is - by general acclaim - a novel of a year later, The Human Stain (2000). That book's currency will be boosted, this winter, by the release of the movie, starring Anthony Hopkins as the "lily white" African American professor of classics at Athena College, Coleman Silk.

Roth satirises American doublethink and moral timidity about race while taking sideswipes against the modern, morally policed campus and its totalitarian sexual-political correctness. The novel opens with a vehement defence of Clinton's "inappropriate" (a word Roth loathes) behaviour with (not "against") Monica Lewinsky. Bill should have put a huge poster outside the White House, Roth suggests, with the slogan "A Human Being Lives Here".

Human beings, Roth argues, also live in American universities. The environment is increasingly hostile to them.

The truly depressing feature of the Schwarzenegger allegations (as reported) is not their sophomoric crassness. That's bad; but what depresses most is the intellectual and moral poverty of the response among the various involved interest groups and opinion-forming journals. On one side (Arnold's) the line was: "high jinks"; harmless "rowdiness"; big boys will be boys. Only puritans and blue noses could object.

On the other side, women's groups (and nakedly opportunistic political opponents) elevated Schwarzenegger's groping to the level of assault, battery and pseudo-rape. The bum's a criminal and should go to jail - do not pass through Sensitivity Training, do not collect $200. Above all, do not become governor of California. Both sides are entrenched: neither talk through the issues any more than do the pro-life and pro-choice lobbies.

It's war. Last one standing wins. It's not a war whose theatre is merely, or even primarily, political. The regulation of sexual conduct; workable controls on abuse of power in relationships; issues of privacy, equality and liberty (even the liberty to do the wrong thing) are - if anything - more acute in universities and colleges than anywhere else in our society. They are such hot-button issues that, I suspect, only fiction can deal with their full human complexity. You want the low-down on these issues? Ignore those unreadably legalistic statutes; ignore the polemics; ignore the locker-room boorishness. Read, instead, a good campus novel - and if you've already read Coetzee and Roth, try Blue Angel (2000), by Francine Prose.

Believe me, the novelists know best. The best novelists, that is.