On the heels of firing its president on Saturday night, the University of Michigan on Wednesday announced a $490-million settlement with more than a thousand people who said they had experienced sexual abuse by Robert E. Anderson, a university physician.
Anderson, who died in 2008, treated students and athletes at the university from the late 1960s until 2003, and was accused by a former student of sexual misconduct in a 2018 letter to Michigan’s athletic director. The university began an investigation in 2020 that concluded last year, finding Anderson had demonstrated a “pervasive, decades-long, destructive pattern of sexual misconduct.”
Of the $490 million the university has agreed to pay, $460 million will be disbursed among about 1,050 survivors of Anderson’s abuse. An additional $30 million will be reserved for future claimants to the lawsuit who come forward before July 31, 2023. The settlement awaits approval from the survivors, a judge, and Michigan’s board.
“We hope this settlement will begin the healing process for survivors,” Jordan B. Acker, chair of the Board of Regents, said in a statement. “At the same time, the work that began two years ago, when the first brave survivors came forward, will continue.”
Every single time another story broke, it wasn’t even the same sense of shock as before, which is really terrible to say.
News of the agreement comes days after Mark S. Schlissel was abruptly fired as president because Michigan’s board found he had engaged in an “alleged sexual affair” with an unnamed female subordinate. A third-party investigation, the board wrote to Schlissel, “revealed that your interactions with the subordinate were inconsistent with promoting the dignity and reputation of the University of Michigan.”
Schlissel’s ouster made national headlines in part because of his role adjudicating another sexual-misconduct scandal, this one involving allegations against Michigan’s former provost, Martin Philbert, whom Schlissel fired in March 2020. (Michigan settled with eight of Philbert’s accusers for $9.25 million in November 2020.)
In Schlissel’s interactions with the female subordinate, some said, he had violated a policy that he helped enact last summer in response to the Philbert case, which states that a supervisor “may not, implicitly or explicitly, initiate or attempt to initiate” an intimate relationship with a subordinate.
The president’s departure came against a complex backdrop of complaints about his leadership and months of documented tension between Schlissel and the board. The regents’ swift action on Saturday — just over a month after they received an anonymous complaint against Schlissel — turned heads, and Schlissel’s actions drew broader questions about the culture at one of the nation’s top-ranked public universities.
The Anderson settlement, advocates hope, is the beginning of a new era at Michigan, one that will allow it to move past the troubled tenures of Philbert and Schlissel and begin to fix what some are calling cultural problems at the university.
To do that, Michigan will first need to reckon with its current reality, Nithya Arun, president of Michigan’s Central Student Government, said. “The Schlissel case exemplifies how deeply rooted the culture is. If the leader of the university was himself engaged in behaviors that are within the borders of sexual misconduct, then I think we really have to do some introspection as a university,” Arun said. “There’s only so much that students and organizers can do, because the real decisions are made at the administrative level.”
Arun and other student leaders are turning their focus to the search for Michigan’s next president. (Mary Sue Coleman, who was president before Schlissel, has taken over on an interim basis, but officials have said a permanent replacement could be named by this summer. The university did not make Coleman available for an interview.) The student government has already released a list of goals it believes the new president should pursue, and Arun said it will also lobby for consistent student representation in the search process.
Rebuilding trust will need to be a major focus for administrators, said Allen P. Liu, chair of the Faculty Senate at Michigan and an associate professor of mechanical and biomedical engineering. As it stands, Liu said, “maybe there’s not enough trust in the system that people don’t go forward. Or when they do go forward, they don’t have the right outcome.”
Schlissel’s impropriety doesn’t inspire confidence, either. “Of all people, he should know” about the boundaries surrounding supervisor-employee relationships, Liu said. Indeed, much has been made of the fact that Schlissel, who as president oversaw the university’s response to the Philbert case, has now been felled by his own misconduct-related scandal.
But to conflate Schlissel’s actions with those of Philbert and Anderson is a misstep, said Liu and Claire Hao, a senior at Michigan and the 2021 editor in chief of The Michigan Daily. “I think it’s wrong to group Schlissel’s, though inappropriate, seemingly consensual relationship with a subordinate, with the clear cases of sexual assault by Anderson, by Philbert, by all of these other professors,” Hao said. In an analysis of Schlissel’s firing and the larger problems looming at Michigan she published on Tuesday, Hao listed seven faculty members (not including Philbert) who had been accused of sexual misconduct since she enrolled at Michigan in 2018.
Now that they’ve set the precedent that these things are wrong, we’re hoping to hear from them.
That much of that faculty misconduct has come to light through the media, Hao said, “reflects a failure in the University of Michigan’s reporting systems, investigatory systems, in educating its faculty and staff about appropriate conduct.” And though her former publication played a large role in exposing some of those misdeeds, Hao said, at some point the stories of faculty misconduct no longer held the same sway over her. “At least for me, every single time another story broke, it wasn’t even the same sense of shock as before, which is really terrible to say.”
Still, Hao hopes for healing for the campus community. A university administrator, who spoke to The Chronicle anonymously for fear of losing their job, said that hope may not be so far afield.
In the past few years, the administrator saw “an increasingly serious commitment to the hard work and systemic change that needs to happen to make it a more just and equitable institution,” the person said. While “Schlissel’s behavior and his betrayal of his own stated values and of this community are a serious setback,” the administrator said, the university community has a desire “to continue this work regardless of that setback, and regardless of what any one person does or doesn’t do.”
Isabelle Brourman sees this moment as an opportunity for Michigan to continue making amends with survivors. In April 2021, she and six other former Michigan students filed legal papers announcing they intended to sue the university and a former lecturer, Bruce Conforth, whom they say sexually assaulted them. She and another Conforth accuser found the Schlissel emails “triggering,” she said. Schlissel, like Conforth, had “totally abused his position to facilitate a relationship with a subordinate.” But the Anderson settlement, and the accountability Brourman said it affords for Anderson survivors, points to a chance for change, and one she hopes leads to action in her own case.
“Once you start to discipline leaders and members of the university, you’re setting a precedent. To not follow through on that precedent would be performative,” Brourman. “So now that they’ve set the precedent that these things are wrong, we’re hoping to hear from them.”
In any event, students and faculty members The Chronicle spoke to on Wednesday said, much hinges on what Michigan does next.
“The university is getting national attention,” Arun, the student-body president, said. “Every decision that’s being made is held in the court of public opinion. Millions of people are watching what happens here.”
