For U. of Virginia’s Miller Center, a Reckoning in the #MeToo Era

Around sunset one day last October, a group of well-dressed men and women walked across the University of Virginia’s Lawn to the Colonnade Club, a charming social space housed in a pavilion that dates back 200 years, to the university’s founding.

It was a gathering for the Miller Center of Public Affairs, a nonpartisan affiliate of the university devoted to the study of U.S. presidents and the promotion of civil dialogue. The guests of honor that night were the members of the center’s Governing Council, mostly wealthy white men, who oversee and are the financial lifeblood of the organization. Now some of those same generous donors are said to have perpetuated a culture of sexual harassment at the Miller Center, where women say they have been professionally undermined and inappropriately propositioned.

After cocktails at the Colonnade Club that night, Renee Branson, associate director of the center’s fund-raising arm, sat down for dinner at a circular table near an intern, a young woman. They were joined by J. Ridgely Porter III, a lawyer and a council member. He put the women on edge, Branson says, peppering the conversation with sexual innuendo and suggesting that they join him for drinks at his hotel room when the council next met.

In the wake of the incident, Porter was forced off the council.

The dinner — at which another council member offended a woman at his table — has become a flash point for the center, which more than four decades after its founding is in crisis. In August, yet another male council member resigned for making offensive comments in an email. On top of that, three scholars in recent months have either quit or turned down appointments with the center, citing outrage over the appointment of a former Trump-administration official whom they see as a mouthpiece for the president’s racially charged rhetoric.

Headquartered in Faulkner House, a stately structure of white columns and red brick that was the home of a U.S. senator near the turn of the 20th century, the Miller Center embodies and promotes a gentility in keeping with the old Virginia brand. Although it aspires to be a serious shaper of public policy, it is also known as a bastion for Charlottesville retirees, who soak up symposia on politics and the presidency. It’s the sort of environment where, when a council member offered last year to take the female staff shoe shopping, some people told him it was a good idea.

With its own governing board and its own money, the Miller Center prides itself on fierce autonomy. Recent events, however, have led some to question whether the center is too distant from the progressive mores and social awareness that are prevalent in the university.

Now the center is being plunged headlong into the 21st century, forced to confront incidents of casual sexism and cultural insensitivity within its ranks. It is a moment of reckoning that compels scholars, council members, staff members, and administrators to confront their own part in a culture that is described by some as a “towel snapping” environment, frozen in a bygone era.

Crossing a Line

For Branson, the Colonnade Club dinner was a breaking point. In the past, she says, she had cringed when Porter commented on her clothes, suggested she had lost weight, or asked whether she still worked out with her boyfriend.

At the dinner, Porter crossed a different line.

It started, Branson says, with a proposal that she and the intern at their table travel the world with an elderly friend of Porter’s. The catch was that they would need to help him in the shower, lest he break a hip. Later, Porter made another proposal, Branson says. When the council next met in Washington, he suggested that Branson and the intern join him and another council member in a hotel room to “get drunk and have fun,” Branson recalls.

Avoiding a scene, Branson turned her back to Porter and talked with the intern, eventually telling her she could leave early as the dinner wound down. The intern, whom Branson declined to identify, “said thank you and picked up her bag and left.”

That night, Branson told her supervisor about the incident. Porter was told not to attend the council’s sessions the following morning, and he resigned his position at the urging of Eugene V. Fife, the council’s chairman at the time.

Porter, reached by phone at his home recently, told a Chronicle reporter that he could not talk because he had “a meeting right now.” Then he hung up. When the reporter called back, someone picked up the phone and hung it up again.

At the same dinner, another female staff member complained about Michael Castine, who had served on the council for about a dozen years and works as a headhunter in New York for financiers. The staff member, citing privacy concerns, spoke with The Chronicle about her experience in mostly general terms on the condition that her name not be revealed. (She declined to name the council member, but Castine acknowledged to The Chronicle that it was him.)

As the council member was saying goodbye, the woman said, he made “an inappropriate comment about my physical appearance.” The woman declined to elaborate on what was said, and Castine would not discuss the matter on the record.

The university’s Title IX office, which handles cases of harassment, lacks jurisdiction to formally investigate council members, who are considered third parties because they are not UVa employees or students. An evaluation panel, however, reviewed the allegations against Castine and determined that, if true, his actions would not violate Title IX policy, according to a university spokesman. He has since completed his term on the board, and there is no indication that he was forced out.

In Porter’s case, the panel determined that the allegations, if true, could be considered prohibited conduct, the spokesman said.

Wesley P. Hester, the spokesman, did not name either council member, whose identities The Chronicle independently confirmed.

In the wake of the incidents, the council adopted a new code of conduct that emphasizes the center’s opposition to discrimination and harassment. Additionally, there are plans for a formal assessment of the Miller Center’s climate and culture.

The woman who complained about Castine said she was satisfied with the center’s response. She said that the culture is improving, but that work remains.

“I will be the first to recognize and acknowledge that there are some issues that the Miller Center staff and leadership need to deal with, and we shouldn’t shy away from them,” she said. “Just because I feel like my incidents were addressed in an adequate way doesn’t mean everybody feels that way.”

‘Shoe-Gate’

The dinner wasn’t an isolated incident. By last fall, it had become clear that there were problems among the governing council’s two dozen members.

Douglas A. Blackmon, who had been sitting within earshot of Porter at the dinner, wrote an email the next morning to William J. Antholis, the center’s director and chief executive, casting the council member’s behavior as part of a troubling and predictable pattern. This felt like “shoe-gate,” Blackmon said, which was in-house shorthand for a previous incident involving Fred W. Scott Jr., a philanthropist, who was another member of the council.

Six months earlier, Scott had offered to organize a shoe-shopping spree for women on the center’s staff, a proposal that several women said was sexist and inappropriate.

Blackmon, who hosted a televised interview show for the center, wrote to Antholis that Porter had “clearly had too much to drink” and had made the women around him visibly uncomfortable. The center needed to rein this in, he said.

“I’m sorry if this sounds like ‘I told you so,’” Blackmon wrote, “but recall that not long ago in a management meeting, I said the question wasn’t whether an elderly board member or major donor would again come in the building and do something inappropriate along these lines, but whether MC leadership would handle such an incident more effectively than after ‘shoe-gate.’”

He continued, “This is not something to let slip by.”

In a recent interview, Antholis said the center is taking its problems seriously, pointing out additional training on harassment and discrimination for council members and employees alike. He also cited the promotion of women at the center, where they have historically been underrepresented in key leadership roles.

“I’m certainly not proud of the incidents,” Antholis said, “but I’m proud of our response, which has been prompt, serious and focused.”

What has mostly been an internal struggle spilled out publicly in September, when Politico first reported on the “shoe-gate” incident.

Scott, who had proposed the shoe shopping, wasn’t just any council member. He was a deep-pocketed donor whose family name graces UVa’s football stadium. He is the sort of person upon whom the center has relied to maintain its independence from the university, an arrangement made possible through a steady stream of donations and a nearly $80-million endowment — a nest egg larger than that of many colleges.

When some women complained about Scott’s proposal, he delivered a mea culpa to them by email.

Behind the scenes, however, he sang a different tune. In an email to Fife, he wondered “what set them off,” taking issue with the sort of identity politics that he suggested might have informed the women’s objections.

“Women don’t like to be put into groups,” Scott mused, unless they involve “lunch, coffee, children, etc. No men allowed.”

In a strange non sequitur, Scott went on to observe, “There are no United White People College Funds or White Students’ Alliances or Men Against Drunk Driving. Even at a ‘tolerant university.’ "

“Some people just like to stir up trouble,” he continued, and such people ought not be promoted.

Scott, who resigned as the email was about to become public, declined an interview request.

To some at the Miller Center, these recent incidents of indiscretion signal a deeper structural problem that dates back to its founding. William I. Hitchcock, a historian at UVa, said the center had been set apart by design from both the university and Washington, D.C. The aim, he said, was for the Miller Center to be untainted by both the liberalism of higher education and the intense partisanship within the Beltway.

But the arrangement had another consequence as well, Hitchcock argued: The Miller Center has been walled off from the University of Virginia’s more recent efforts to grapple with its exclusionary history and promote greater cultural awareness. These recent controversies, he said, suggest that some members of the Governing Council have been particularly cocooned.

“You have an elite, wealthy donor class that wants to associate itself with an elite alma mater but is skeptical of social change and the agenda, as they see it, of academia as a whole,” Hitchcock said. “Even though the individuals are of good heart and good will, they get caught in an institutional culture that is kind of stuck around 1965, unfortunately. Because that’s when most of the board members’ political and social attitudes were developed.

“There is really no cross-fertilization,” he continued, “between a very changed university setting and a quite unchanged Miller Center.”

Controversial Hiring Decision

The Politico article was another jarring public controversy for the Miller Center, which was still grappling with the fallout from a decision two months earlier to appoint Marc Short, a former legislative-affairs director in the Trump administration, as a senior fellow. The move sparked outrage. Two historians, Hitchcock and Melvyn P. Leffler, ended their affiliation with the center in protest, saying Short had contributed to an erosion of civil discourse and embraced “racist and misogynistic” rhetoric. (Blackmon, who recently turned down a new appointment as a senior fellow, also cited the Short hire.)

For much of the public, the Short controversy was a first introduction to the Miller Center, a small but respected research institute that, among other things, archives the secret White House recordings of presidents, including Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. The center has seven full-time faculty members. Additionally, more than 70 people are employed by or are affiliated with the organization as researchers, staff members, fellows, or fund raisers for the center’s separate foundation.

This boutique enterprise has, within the past few months, been thrust into the fiery politics of the moment. That can be an unpleasant space. The Miller Center is accustomed to examining knotty political and cultural issues at some theoretical remove, but now it’s confronting harassment, bias, and discrimination within its walls.

Inside, the mood is tense and the emotions are raw, people there say. The center is in damage-control mode, at once eager to get out of the limelight and to project a public image of seriousness about its problems.

Employees, including women who say they have experienced harassment, were told in a recent meeting that there is little upside to speaking with reporters. For some, this advice only feeds the perception that the Miller Center puts a priority on protecting its brand and reputation over transparency. It feels to some like “shoe-gate” all over again, when the center at first dealt quietly with an inappropriate donor and changed course only when the public-relations problem grew too severe.

Antholis rejects this view. “No board member gets a pass simply because they support the center financially,” he said.

He had not seen Scott’s email, in which the council member admonished “trouble” makers, until just before it was published by Politico, according to a news release from the center. Fife, the former council chairman, has said that he, too, did not recall receiving it.

‘Towel-Snapping’ Atmosphere

Not long after Antholis became the Miller Center’s director, in 2015, Brian Balogh met him for lunch at Peter Chang, an Asian restaurant in Charlottesville. Balogh, a history professor at the university, wanted to talk about the organization’s “towel-snapping, frat house” environment, as one woman had described it to him.

In the preceding weeks, four women had approached Balogh independently to talk about the center’s culture, he said. Their complaints were not particularly specific, but they pointed to general concerns about the lack of women in leadership positions and a vaguely sexist atmosphere in the male-dominated organization.

Antholis appeared to take the concerns seriously, Balogh said, and he has made the promotion of women a priority. At the same time, the “shoe-gate” incident made Balogh and others question the center’s progress. Particularly disturbing, he said, were emails showing that people within the center had gone along with Scott’s shopping-trip idea.

Antholis says he recognized from the start that there were problematic dynamics at the Miller Center, particularly with regard to race and gender.

“I did not come in hearing that there was a harassment culture,” he said. “I’ve certainly heard that since. What I did hear and noticed myself early on was a culture dominated by forceful and authoritative men, and that there was an underrepresentation both in the scholarly ranks and at the senior leadership level of women and minorities. And I have tried my best to address both of those things.”

Now a dam has opened, prompting men and women at the Miller Center to replay incidents that, particularly in the #MeToo era, are rendered more clearly problematic. Nicole Hemmer, an assistant professor of presidential studies at UVa, took to Twitter recently with a thread about her time at the center, describing it as a place where “I’ve experienced more harassment than anywhere else I’ve worked.”

Hemmer highlighted a panel, in 2015, on which she felt diminished by a colleague. “Thinking about that moment now, three years later, still leaves me flushed,” she wrote. “After the panel, I sat in my car and cried. But in the moment, pinned in place by the publicness of it all, I simply laughed it off.”

Hemmer did not name the offender, but a video of the event can be found online. In a discussion on “Media, Technology, and Partisanship,” Hemmer’s fellow panelists joked that her reputation had been sullied because she combined traditional scholarship with journalism and podcasting. That was all good-natured ribbing. But then Blackmon, the center’s former television host, jokingly implied that she had lost her credibility because of some sexual dalliance. He asked Hemmer “where exactly in the building” she was when she lost it.

Laughter ensued.

The video provides a striking portrait of how, in a public and professional setting, slights of this kind can go unchallenged and even be validated with laughter. Everyone laughs, including Hemmer, whose discomfort is barely betrayed moments later when she takes a long drink of water.

Hemmer’s tweets broadened the focus of the Miller Center’s cultural problems, which had to that point been laid at the feet of a handful of council members. The public narrative, while embarrassing, was a manageable story about a few old men who were out of touch with the times. They were relative outsiders. But Hemmer’s testimony complicated the story, pointing to the everyday experiences of women in the center who were casually demeaned by their own enlightened colleagues.

However vaguely, Hemmer had implicated men who considered themselves her allies. They were complicit in her experience or oblivious to it, and now they had to face that. Blackmon, watching the video, said he was taken aback.

“I now know that what I intended to be a light-hearted quip in keeping with the moment was instead very painful for a colleague who I respect enormously,” he wrote in an email to The Chronicle. “I could not regret more deeply having done that, and I recently wrote her to apologize. What I said then was in no way a reflection of my views of her work as a scholar and public intellectual, which has been simply extraordinary.”

A former editor for The Wall Street Journal, Blackmon is best known for his Pulitzer-Prize winning book, Slavery By Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (Doubleday, 2008). His own insensitively on the panel, Blackmon said, was a reminder that a scholarly focus on bias and oppression does not exempt a person from perpetuating those same problems.

“Just because one cares passionately about these crucial issues, or has worked on them for decades, doesn’t mean you’re immune from making a mistake,” he wrote. “And when we do, we have to take them seriously and try to repair any injury.”

Balogh, who moderated the panel and considers Hemmer a close friend, said he cringed when he revisited the video. There he was, laughing along with the crowd. Maybe it didn’t register in the moment. Maybe it was awkward to call out and easier to let slide. Either way, Balogh said, “I’m embarrassed by my own reaction.”

At the time of the incident, Hemmer was new to the organization. She worried that complaining could jeopardize her advancement, she said. What’s more, she didn’t think it would do any good. There were implicit signals, she said, that suggested “you could complain, but nothing is going to change.”

By coming forward about her experiences, Hemmer hoped to signal to the center’s leadership the depth of the problem — forcing the issue into the public square, where it could not be ignored. She never expected, though, to be attacked for telling her story.

Blowback on Twitter

Most of the people who read Hemmer’s tweets expressed solidarity and sympathy. There was one notable exception. A newly created Twitter account, originally dubbed Charlottesville Observer, started poking at Hemmer’s story, questioning why she would not call out Blackmon by name, and suggesting that she had tarred the entire Miller Center when her beef was really with a fellow scholar.

The Twitter account, which was later renamed Feminist Observer, unearthed the video of the panel — which Hemmer had not posted herself — and posted a clip of the group laughing together. Tagging all of the panelists and several Politico reporters, the person behind the account asked who was responsible for the center’s sexist environment: “The institution? The joke-teller? Those who laughed? #metoo.”

Shaken, Hemmer emailed Antholis and six other people, mostly in leadership or communications, along with UVa’s Title IX office. The tweets, she said, read like the work of an insider.

“This is an effort to call into question my motive and my integrity and, I believe, to make me think twice about saying more about my experiences,” she wrote on September 8. “I have little doubt that this attempt comes from within the Miller Center.”

Alice W. Handy, current chair of the Governing Council, responded with an assurance that the center would promptly “address these issues.”

“I too believe that we have important work to do at the Miller Center and that the level of distrust currently prevailing is corrosive and impedes our accomplishing that mission,” Handy wrote.

A few hours after Hemmer sent her email, the tweets targeting her were deleted. Hemmer had confided in only a few colleagues about the disturbing messages, and now the account appeared to be covering its tracks. “This strongly suggests,” she wrote to Antholis, “that I was right to suspect the person behind the account was connected to the Miller Center.”

Antholis told The Chronicle that he could not speak to the specific case, which is now the subject of a Title IX inquiry, but he acknowledged broadly that tensions are running high, and that a dearth of trust is a problem at the Miller Center.

“In a healthy organization, people resolve their differences within the organization and feel comfortable raising them with senior leaders or other channels,” he said. “And on these issues, the fact that some people have not felt that is something that we need to correct so that people feel comfortable reporting through the right channels.”

The jury is out, however, on whether a deep cultural change is possible.

“There are optimists who say this is a moment of reckoning, where we are going to turn this around,” Hemmer said. “There are others who are doubtful.”

In her Twitter thread, Hemmer acknowledged that her own view of the workplace had changed. There was a time, she said, when she advised colleagues to “grow a thicker skin.” Now she’s not so sure that’s the answer.

“We don’t all need harder shells,” she wrote. “That shouldn’t be the price of admission for women engaging the public. Or for women just going to work every day.”

Jack Stripling covers college leadership, particularly presidents and governing boards. Follow him on Twitter @jackstripling, or email him at jack.stripling@chronicle.com.

Correction (10/12/2018, 12:45 p.m.): This article originally misspelled the surname of a faculty member at the university. He is Brian Balogh, not Balough. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.