After an investigation found that Michael Landis, an assistant professor of history at Tarleton State U., had behaved inappropriately with students, he privately told well-known female historians that he had been the victim of a smear campaign.Tarleton State U.
When Tarleton State University’s student newspaper, Texan News Service, published articles about an investigation into alleged sexual harassment by Michael T. Landis, an assistant professor of history, he declined to answer questions.
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After an investigation found that Michael Landis, an assistant professor of history at Tarleton State U., had behaved inappropriately with students, he privately told well-known female historians that he had been the victim of a smear campaign.Tarleton State U.
When Tarleton State University’s student newspaper, Texan News Service, published articles about an investigation into alleged sexual harassment by Michael T. Landis, an assistant professor of history, he declined to answer questions.
When the student paper reported that the investigation had found that though he had not sexually harassed his students, his behavior was “inappropriate” and an administrator recommended that he be fired, Landis’s lawyer issued a statement. Landis had “spent his entire career as a vocal advocate for civil rights of others,” she said, adding that he “remains dedicated to the Tarleton community.”
Behind the scenes, Landis hasn’t been as quiet. Within the last month, he has sent emails to at least two historians asserting that the student paper had printed lies about him and that university administrators wanted to fire him because of his politics, not his conduct.
When Landis promoted well-known female historians on Twitter, some interpreted the gesture as an attempt to “curry favor” with them in the face of potential disciplinary action. They worried that he was using his vocal support of women and his racial-justice work to deflect responsibility for his behavior.
Landis’s lawyer, Giana Ortiz, said that her client could not respond publicly to the specific allegations, but that he “appreciates the support from students and faculty” that he’s received.
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“He maintains that his actions have, at all times, been professional and made in the very best interests of the university and its students,” Ortiz said. “Dr. Landis is formally dealing with this issue through the proper channels at the university.”
‘Dinner, Drinks & Movies’
The investigation of Landis became public in February, when the campus newspaper reported that a student had filed a complaint against him with the university’s Title IX office. The student, Renee Warner, told the newspaper that Landis had sent a text asking her over for “dinner, drinks & movies” while his wife was away. The newspaper published screen shots of the text messages Landis had sent to Warner, and said Warner had felt so uncomfortable after receiving the messages that she stopped attending Landis’s class and failed it. The newspaper said other people had made similar reports to the Title IX office.
In March, Texan News Service reported that the university’s investigation had found that Landis had not sexually harassed his students and had not created a hostile work environment. But the university’s investigator found it “troubling” that three women were concerned enough to complain about Landis, according to a letter the paper published from Dwayne Snider, an associate vice president. The investigator called Landis’s decision to invite a student for dinner, drinks, and a movie “inappropriate” and “unprofessional.” Snider recommended that Landis be fired.
In April the newspaper reported that eight women had made complaints about Landis. The women said he had invited them to come to his house or to have a drink with him. At least two said they were under the legal drinking age at the time.
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Though some historians shared the Texan News Service articles with one another last spring, the case wasn’t talked about openly, they say. While it was unclear whether he would keep his position, Landis remained active on Twitter, where he had a fairly wide following. A scholar of the Civil War, he tweeted about the removal of Confederate statues and promoted articles by colleagues about slavery and the cotton trade.
And he worked behind the scenes to preserve his reputation — or at least that’s how his colleagues interpreted it. In an email to Keri Leigh Merritt, a historian and author, Landis wrote on May 30 that he had “become aware that a variety of awful rumors” had been circulating about him. He told her that the student paper had “printed lies” about him and that the efforts to fire him were a result of his “high-profile time at Tarleton.”
“I am the first person to ever teach slavery, and the first to challenge white supremacy, both on and off campus,” Landis wrote. “The local Stephenville community hate me because I have been a vocal critic of the Confederacy and have clashed with the Sons of Confederate Veterans. In fact, the SCV launched a statewide letter-writing campaign to get me fired.”
He said that he had been told by the university not to respond to articles in the student paper, but that he did not do any of the “heinous things” he was accused of doing. (The Chronicle asked Tarleton State to confirm that Landis had been told not to talk publicly about the matter, but the university did not immediately respond.) Merritt said she’d met Landis twice, and they had collaborated professionally. She Googled him immediately after receiving his email and found the Texan News Service articles.
A historian who had never met Landis, Carole Emberton, an associate professor at the University at Buffalo, part of the State University of New York, also got an email. Hers arrived on June 24 and was much shorter, but conveyed a similar message.
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“The student newspaper has been aggressively reckless in its publications,” he wrote.
Quanecia Fraser, who was editor of Texan News Service and wrote the articles, said she stands by her reporting. She said she had made it clear to Landis what the articles would say, and gave him a chance to comment on or disprove her reporting. Fraser said she was struck by the number of complaints and the similarities between them.
“I included those accusations because it was several girls describing similar encounters with Landis,” Fraser said. “I felt the public had the right to know about these accusations.”
It Gets Louder on Twitter
Both historians Landis reached out to said they had read the student-newspaper reports and had been put off by Landis’s contact. Merritt said she was shocked to see that eight women had come forward.
“No matter what kind of work he’s doing, the abuse of power has to be called out,” she said.
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Emberton received her email from Landis after she had tweeted at him in response to a Twitter thread that he had promoted. The thread was about a man who said he’d prevented a sexual assault at a conference.
“You’ve got a LOT of nerve,” Emberton tweeted along with a link to a Texan News Service article about Landis. In his email Landis told Emberton he admired her work and was disappointed that she had such a low opinion of him.
“Basically he was trying to flatter me, saying how much he respected my work,” Emberton said.
Other historians interpreted Landis’s flattery on Twitter as an attempt to win their support.
Karen L. Cox, a history professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, responded to a tweet from Landis promoting her and other scholars. She wrote that she was “disgusted that you’d try to curry favor with respected women scholars in this way.”
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Now that I’m aware of your predatory behavior toward young female students, @DrMichaelLandis, I’m disgusted that you’d try to curry favor with respected women scholars in this way. Consider yourself persona non grata.
After seeing those and other tweets, William R. Black, a Ph.D. candidate in history at Rice University, pulled together all he could find about the Landis investigation that was public, and posted it on Twitter on Tuesday.
“I was getting the sense that there was confusion,” Black said. “People were not sure what the facts were, or people were afraid to put all the facts out there.”
Alright there’s no need to keep this inside the whisper network, it’s in the public record & people should know so they can make an informed decision. Plus I wanna highlight some things we can learn. Renee Warner was one of Michael Landis’s students at Tarleton State University pic.twitter.com/5kGSOq30tk
Black’s tweets got some attention, but Merritt said she had noticed that few high-profile male historians were responding.
It’s quite revealing how few tenured male profs have said *anything* about this abuse of power or have distanced themselves from (or even “unfollowed”) Landis.
— Keri Leigh Merritt (@KeriLeighMerrit) June 26, 2018
Some did take note, including Kevin Gannon, a history professor at Grand View University who writes for The Chronicle’s Advice section and who is active on Twitter.
It doesn’t matter how good the scholarship is, or how strong the public commitment to causes we like is, when the behavior is this reprehensible. It damages those causes, and most essentially, has damaged students. That’s beyond the pale. Full stop.
Landis’s future at Tarleton State is still unclear. A university spokeswoman declined to comment, saying that the “decisions relating to this investigation are still in the process of being made.”
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Nell Gluckman writes about faculty issues and other topics in higher education. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.
Nell Gluckman is a senior reporter who writes about research, ethics, funding issues, affirmative action, and other higher-education topics. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.
