Harassment Can Drive People Out of the Academy. Here Are 3 Ways Colleges Can Fight Back.

[Updated (11/21/2019, 2:46 p.m.) with response from a University of Washington spokesperson.]

Twenty-five years ago, Lisa Schubert was a promising Ph.D. candidate at the University of Washington, thrilled to be working with an adviser and mentor she idolized, whose scholarship inspired her own.

The first time he brushed against her, five years after they had begun working together, she thought it must be a mistake. When he later kissed her and pulled her into his lap, she knew it wasn’t. After struggling for months to ward off his advances, she finally dropped out of the Ph.D. program she’d nearly finished and sued both the university and her adviser. Today, she teaches pre-college English at a local community college and still wonders how her career might have turned out if the adviser she’d considered almost a father figure hadn’t turned on her.

She wasn’t planning on telling her story when she sat in the audience this week at a breakout session of an “action collaborative” tackling sexual harassment. The joint effort had been organized this year by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, but its mandate swept across all of higher education. It brought together leaders from more than 60 academic and research institutions to develop and share strategies for preventing and addressing sexual harassment. The first public meeting was being held at the University of Washington, which had asked Schubert to serve on a committee brainstorming strategies to contribute to the effort.

She felt that her presence there was a sign that the university was trying to do better by victims of sexual harassment. But the strategy the national presenters were offering — a restorative-justice process in which the accuser and accused share their feelings with others affected by the harassment — was hard to wrap her head around.

“Having your mentor — the person you most want to be like in life — turn on you and want a sexual relationship … I don’t know how a restorative process can be enough,” she said during the question-and-answer session. Graduate students naturally trust and want to please their professor, she said. “For me, that was forever blunted. I just couldn’t do that anymore.”

Schubert signed a nondisclosure agreement with her former adviser, who she’s not allowed to name. He “paid me some money to keep me quiet” before he moved on to two more universities and eventually retired, she said. Washington offered her a free year of graduate study in a different department and a promise that it would strengthen its harassment policies, she said. But suffering from depression and post-traumatic stress, devastated that no one in the department had defended her, she was through.

Her story provided a relatable face to the cautionary tales shared by the 350 participants who gathered here for the action collaborative’s first public summit. Another 350 or so followed along online. Several panels featured sexual-assault survivors who described their frustration and anger at not being believed or seeing justice served.

A report published last year by the academies found that between 20 and 50 percent of female students and more than 50 percent of female faculty and staff members in STEM disciplines reported being sexually harassed while in academia. The report, Sexual Harassment of Women: Climate, Culture, and Consequences in Academic Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, describes how many of these women are driven from academe and what can be done to create the kind of environment where they’ll want to stay.

During the meeting, campus leaders pledged to ask more questions and share more information to avoid “passing the harasser.” They vowed to double down on support for foreign graduate students whose advisers control not only their educations and livelihoods, but their visa status.

Among the takeaways were three main themes.

Sexual-harassment victims need to be protected from retaliation.

The accused professor might spread rumors that the accuser was trying to sleep her way to good grades, making others in the department reluctant to come to her defense for fear they might suffer the same treatment. (Since the vast majority of sexual harassment cases involve male offenders and female victims, those pronouns are used here, but speakers pointed out that gay and other non-gender-conforming students are disproportionately harmed by such behavior.)

Fearing further “slut shaming” or other acts of retaliation, the accuser might write the professor a friendly email after the attack, which could later be used as evidence the encounter was consensual. When someone withdraws a complaint or fails to follow through on it, it’s sometimes because she feared retaliation.

Courtesy of Jennifer J. Freyd

Jennifer J. Freyd, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and a visiting scholar at Stanford Medical School, said fear of retaliation is a major reason that, in a recent study, only about 6 percent of University of Oregon graduate students who said they’d been sexually harassed reported it to the university. She said that’s typical of what she’s found nationally.

Her research team coined the term Darvo to describe how sexual offenders might respond to accusations against them. The acronym stands for Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. It refers to how offenders might accuse victims of perpetrating false accusations against them, making some blame themselves and even drop their cases.

Freyd, whose research has focused largely on what she calls institutional betrayal, recently started what she calls the Project on Institutional Courage to highlight effective ways some colleges and universities are tackling sexual harassment.

Faculty members can also become targets. Brooke Mascagni said she suffered retaliation for advocating on behalf of students who complained of sexual harassment while she was an assistant professor of political science and gender studies at Texas A&M University at Kingsville.

Mascagni, who was at the conference representing a group called Faculty Against Rape, said the retaliation included getting placed on eight committees one academic year, which prevented her from finishing a journal article that would have strengthened her tenure case. She was also assigned a class that met at 8 a.m. the same day she had an evening class. She lived 45 miles from campus, which meant a 14-hour day.

Universities should look for ways to shrink the power differential between graduate students and advisers.

Some universities are experimenting with having multiple mentors or advisers so one faculty member doesn’t have complete control over a graduate student’s funding, research focus, and professional reputation.

“If you have one mentor and you rely on that mentor, you have no one you can fall back on if you need to separate from that relationship,” said Maria Lund Dahlberg, a program officer at the National Academies who works on effective mentorships.

The single-mentorship model leaves graduate students vulnerable to abuse but is so firmly entrenched in higher education that it’s hard to change, said JD DiLoreto-Hill, a doctoral student in public policy at the University of Arkansas and the director of social-justice concerns for the Association of Graduate-Professional Students.

“This is how grants function and academe operates,” he said. “When a student has the incredible courage to come forward, the university has to decide between the faculty member who’s bringing in all the money and the student.” Faculty members often jealously guard their advisees’ time and discourage them from working outside their departments or with other labs, he said.

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute uses cadres of trained advisers who are all required to have conflict-resolution plans in case their advisees raise concerns. The national institutes also advise academic institutions to consider having departments, rather than principal investigators, distribute research money.

Both offenders and victims need to be carefully reintegrated back into classrooms and labs.

Protests often erupt when those who have served punishments for sexual misconduct return to the classroom. A restorative-justice process, which brings together those who have offended with those they have hurt, can help smooth the transition, said Duke Fisher, a trained facilitator who completed a lengthy intervention at the University of Rochester, where T. Florian Jaeger, a tenured professor of brain and cognitive sciences who was found responsible for inappropriate behavior, returned last year after a semester of academic leave.

“When exile may not be possible,” Fisher said, “how do we reassemble as a community? How do we put the pieces back together?”

Skeptics question whether a restorative-justice approach, particularly when it’s done instead of a more formal adversarial process, is letting offenders off easy. But Mary P. Koss, a professor of public health at the University of Arizona who published the first national study of sexual assault among college students in 1987, says that’s not the case.

Koss, a pioneer in the field of restorative justice, said that when she was sexually harassed as an associate professor at a previous institution, she sued in federal court, but “lost because at that time you needed to demonstrate that your career had been harmed, so you got punished for being a survivor.” Thirty years later, she’s still traumatized by her failure to get justice.

“I would have been extremely happy to have a restorative plan of accountability placed on those people who hurt me. I hope we can move beyond this idea that it has to be adversarial or it’s soft.”

As Schubert listened to a session on restorative justice, she admitted that it would have been satisfying to have her pain acknowledged and her story believed by those in the department who stopped talking to her when rumors began circulating.

She wonders, 25 years later, “why in the world no one at the university stood up for me.” She enjoys her work at Edmonds Community College outside Seattle, but bristles at the fact that because she never finished her Ph.D., she can only teach pre-college classes.

Still, she’s heartened that when she went back to Washington’s Title IX office recently to demand evidence of the changes the university had promised it would make in its procedures, it took her seriously, inviting her to the table to help hold them accountable.

Victor Balta, a campus spokesman, said the university appreciates Schubert’s willingness to share her experience and provide input as it continues to strengthen its harassment policies. One goal, he said, is making its reference procedures “more transparent and proactive.” Those policies were criticized after a former athletics administrator moved on to another unsuspecting college after being found responsible for sexually assaulting a student. The university is also considering whether to remove nondisclosure clauses except in cases when a survivor requests confidentiality.

The “action collaborative’s” meeting began and ended with remarks from Washington’s president, Ana Mari Cauce, who told her own story of working with a graduate adviser who she learned, after she arrived at Yale University, had a reputation for sleeping with students.

“While I wasn’t his target, the environment he created made it harder for all of us to do our work,” she said. The University of Washington is committed, she said, to doing everything it can to rid the campus of a systemic problem that “does lasting damage to survivors and drives talent out of the academy.”

Correction (11/22/2019, 1:47 p.m.): An earlier version said that Mary P. Koss, a professor of public health at the University of Arizona, was sexually harassed while she was a graduate student. The harassment happened while she was an associate professor at a previous university.

Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.