(FORTUNE Magazine) – A mere fortnight has passed since your correspondent last sounded off on sexual harassment, and yet it is already time to retread this fascinating turf and ponder whether a certain decision in the Minnesota Court of Appeals could change everything. Or at least the rules about sex in the office. Although decided at the state level, the Minnesota ruling looks to be of significance for the entire nation if not the galaxy because it squarely confronts a question the federal courts keep ducking. Also it is the first harassment case we know about in which the fellow's dreams were admitted into evidence.

The question that keeps getting ducked: Precisely what is sexual harassment? How do you tell it from old-fashioned ''dalliance'' (the 19th-century locution of Judge Bob Bork in his big harassment opinion)? The question is not easy, as evidenced by the news from Minnesota. The party of the first part there was a 44-year-old manager employed by the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth. His job required him to supervise various students working for the college during the summer. One of the students, age 21, seems to have left her boss instantly smitten, and soon enough he was installing game whistles on her car. (A game whistle, for city folks like the present writer who had never heard of the same, emits sound waves that scare off animals on the road.) The young lady assented to the whistles when her boss expressed concern over dreams he was having wherein she would have animal-related accidents on the road. Romantic, eh? In the next act, the manager went beyond game whistles. He warranted to the student that he had strong personal feelings for her and proffered a letter that forcefully repeated this point. We learn from the court opinion that things came to a head on July 23, 1987, when he stopped at her work station -- she was then serving as a telephone operator -- and began massaging her neck and shoulder from behind. Not long afterward, she sent him a note prepared the day before. Its unromantic message: ''I no longer want to have any kind of contact with you.'' She then complained to the college, which canned the manager. At issue in the subsequent proceedings was not his job but his right to unemployment benefits: If the dismissal was held to be for sexual harassment, then he would be guilty of gross misconduct and under Minnesota law would lose the benefits. But if the firing reflected merely a belief that he had been guilty of bad judgment, he would not lose them. Was it sexual harassment or wasn't it? The usual way to find out what a law means is to look at the legislative intent, but that doesn't work with sexual harassment. As you doubtless keep hearing, sexual harassment is a violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. As you possibly didn't know, Congress said nothing at all about this subject when it passed that act. But in the Seventies, a number of lower-court decisions held that the act banned sexual harassment, and in 1980 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission stunned nobody with its own formal finding to that effect.

So why didn't the Supremes laugh this finding out of court? Stated reason: because the views of regulatory agencies like the EEOC ''constitute a body of experience and informed judgment to which courts . . . may properly resort for guidance.'' The real reason, we happen to know: because the justices didn't want any more flak from the women's movement. But still, there is this little question the federal courts keep ducking. The EEOC language, endlessly copied in other jurisdictions (including Minnesota), states firmly that what is being proscribed are ''unwelcome sexual advances.'' Note the fateful first word. Something like it obviously had to be in there or the EEOC would have been hooted out of existence for outlawing romance in the office. But in plainly implying that nonunwelcome advances are still legit, the agency has created a bit of a problem. Now the character making the advances has no way of knowing until he gets some feedback -- i.e., until after the fact -- whether he is guilty of gross misconduct or embarking on a great romance. As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow reminded us in The Courtship of Miles Standish, quite intelligent people sometimes guess wrong about such matters. This brings us back to the questions ducked by the federal courts and agencies: What is U.S. government policy with respect to advances that are predicted to be welcome but turn out to be repellent? Is that really sexual harassment? In the avalanche of dopey government literature purporting to deal with the problem of harassment, you will nowhere find answers to those questions. In Minnesota, oddly enough, the appeals court confronted those questions head on. Possibly influenced by the young lady's receptivity to game whistles, it concluded that St. Scholastica's manager ''did not understand that his attentions were unwelcome.'' This meant he was not guilty of sexual harassment (and also meant he was entitled to unemployment insurance). He was, said the judges, a victim of a ''misguided infatuation.'' Tragic, eh? Imagine what Longfellow could have done with it.