He Violated Sexual-Misconduct Policy. He’s Back in the Classroom. What Should the University Do Now?

In 2017 an essay written by a former graduate student dropped like a bombshell in the University of Texas at Austin’s English department.

The former student, Jenn Shapland, wrote in The Arkansas International about an unnamed professor who “first came on to me (after me?) in an email early in the semester I took his required class, telling me ‘You write like a dream.’”

They flirted by email and started having sex, Shapland wrote. Then, it ended, and she questioned the power imbalance between herself and the professor.

It soon became clear that Shapland was referring to Coleman Hutchison, a tenured associate professor in the department. An investigation ensued. Ultimately, Hutchison — who did not respond to multiple requests for comment — was punished for not reporting the relationship with Shapland and also for making inappropriate comments to current graduate students. This semester, he’s back in the classroom.

Now, two years after the #MeToo movement shook Hollywood and echoed across the world, cases like Hutchison’s are playing out across academe. Professors are found to have done wrong, but their actions aren’t deemed sufficiently bad to warrant dismissal. They stay in the community, which prompts questions like the ones that Texas is now wrestling with: How can a professor, a department, and an institution properly account for the harm that’s been done? What happens when an administration’s decision on a professor collides with students’ demands?

In Austin, students’ anger is boiling over. Undergraduates are staging protests and calling for more transparency, more accountability. They aren’t focused only on the people whom they see as bad actors, but on the larger systems that they believe fostered them. Meanwhile, the English department is left to deal with the fallout.

‘Most Unpleasant Situation’

Eleven current graduate students were interviewed as part of the investigation into Hutchison’s behavior, which was conducted by the Office for Inclusion and Equity and the Office of the Vice President for Legal Affairs. Four of the students said they had experienced behavior by Hutchison that was “inappropriate and sexual in nature,” according to the report, which was obtained by The Chronicle and first reported by Splinter News.

One graduate student said Hutchison would ask if she had worn heels to a meeting for him, told her she was beautiful, and asked questions about her romantic history. Once, the student told investigators, Hutchison said he had slept with someone of a similar heritage, and mentioned oral sex. She told investigators that she did not feel “victimized,” but knew she was being treated “inappropriately.”

Other graduate students said they’d heard Hutchison make comments about scholars’ attractiveness and how he wanted to date certain people, the report says. He was also accused of talking that way about another professor in the department.

Hutchison told investigators that he didn’t recall making the comments about sleeping with someone who resembled the student, or about oral sex. He also said that he avoids commenting on anyone’s attractiveness and that he had “never made sexually charged comments, but recognizes he can be a flirtatious person, but is very careful with regard to students.”

Ultimately, investigators found that Hutchison had failed to report his relationship with Shapland and that his comments to students violated part of the university’s policy on sexual misconduct.

Last June, Hutchison was barred for two academic years from supervising graduate students by himself, from consideration for promotion to full professor, and from appointment to any administrative or leadership position. He was not put on leave or barred from teaching.

Maurie McInnis, the provost, also required Hutchison to participate in “one or more discussions” with associate deans about “appropriate interactions and boundaries with students,” she wrote in Hutchison’s letter of reprimand. He was also ordered to develop a plan to manage “professional working relationships with students in the future.”

In a message addressed to “colleagues,” Hutchison said he wanted to apologize for “my part in this most unpleasant situation.” He also apologized for making anyone uncomfortable. He’d be taking a break, he said, from the graduate classroom.

‘Students Were Confused’

Though Hutchison had been disciplined, that wasn’t the end of the story. The English department’s communication about his case wasn’t specific or particularly helpful, graduate students have said, so they talked about what had happened in whispers. For some students, it’s been exhausting, emotionally, to support one another. They don’t think that the department’s leadership has reckoned with the harm that Hutchison caused, or that it has prioritized the students with whom he interacted.

At the same time, Hutchison’s colleagues have tried to plot a way forward. Elizabeth Cullingford, chair of the department when Hutchison was investigated, acknowledged the distrust between graduate students and faculty members in a July 2018 letter to alumni that she shared with The Chronicle. (She declined to be interviewed.) A meeting she’d held with graduate students went poorly. “Students were confused, upset, and in need of reassurance,” she wrote, “which I failed to give.”

Still, Cullingford said in the letter, she and other faculty leaders had tried to be “proactive” in repairing the damage. The department formed a student-led climate task force and held Title IX workshops, among other things.

Other faculty members grappled with what they thought of Hutchison’s behavior. How much damage had been done? And what would it mean for him to reintegrate into the community?

Gretchen Murphy, an English professor, took on some of those questions when she wrote an email to graduate students in May 2018, a copy of which was forwarded to The Chronicle by a graduate student.

What Hutchison did “seriously damaged this graduate program,” Murphy wrote. His behavior “created a culture in which some, maybe all, students viewed every interaction with him — and with faculty in general — as potentially sexualized.”

But, Murphy said, from another point of view, Hutchison had sexual relationships with consenting adults. (The university did not ban relationships between faculty members and graduate students whom they teach, advise, or evaluate in any way until 2017.)

Murphy, who did not respond to interview requests, said in the email that there might be things she didn’t know, But she had a good deal of sympathy for Hutchison, and a good deal of anger.

“We are all going to have to figure out a way to interact as a community,” she wrote, “where he is a member.”

‘We Weren’t Telling Them’

The department’s conversations about the Hutchison case mostly took place behind closed doors. (Every professor contacted by The Chronicle either declined to comment or did not respond.) But undergraduates have forced it into the spotlight.

At first, Hutchison was scheduled to return to teaching undergraduates in the fall of 2018. The classes were canceled. Due to “the public nature of the discussion around his case in the media,” university leadership was “concerned about the effectiveness of the teaching environment,” Joey Williams, director of communications in the provost’s office, said in an email. Hutchison was given nonteaching assignments that semester and in the spring of 2019.

Now he’s teaching this fall, and student protests have erupted.

In recent weeks, students have staged a series of escalating protests with varying demands. Some want Hutchison and Sahotra Sarkar, a professor of integrative biology and philosophy who was also accused of misconduct and found to have violated university policy, off the course schedule. Others want them fired.

The student government has also taken up the mantle, introducing a resolution urging the administration to remove Hutchison and Sarkar from the spring course schedule.

Praveena Javvadi, a student leader who co-authored the resolution, told The Chronicle that it’s a matter of safety. She understands that the university’s leadership must satisfy different groups. Student leaders “really are trying to understand the provost,” she said, “but it’s also our job to represent students.”

And the provost says she’s listening.

McInnis told The Chronicle that conversations with students illustrated how a lack of understanding about university procedures “can actually create a great deal of uncertainty and maybe even fear.”

“Particularly in terms of the outcomes, they didn’t know because we weren’t telling them,” McInnis said.

So the university is hiring a team of outside experts to review its Title IX policies and deal with those concerns. The university is also assembling a working group of faculty, staff, and students to work with those experts. Students asked for a universitywide report on Title IX matters related to faculty members, McInnis said in a letter to the campus. “We agree more information should be available.”

Right now, McInnis told The Chronicle, the university uses the term “sexual misconduct” to cover a wide range of behavior. Somewhere along that spectrum, she said, “is the place where we might appropriately draw a line for termination.”

The campus needs to have that conversation, she said. It also needs to talk about the possibility that people can make mistakes, learn from them, and be given a chance to change.

‘An Intimacy Business’

On other campuses, cases involving professors who were found to have violated sexual-misconduct policies are playing out with similar dynamics. At New York University, students have been protesting Avital Ronell’s return to the classroom. Ronell, a high-profile professor of German and comparative literature, was found by the university to have sexually harassed a graduate student, The Chronicle previously reported.

Earlier this semester, the graduate-worker union and NYUtoo, a campus advocacy group, circulated an open letter calling for her ouster. They also demanded reforms of the process for reporting Title IX violations, and are seeking to dismantle the structures that give tenured faculty members and administrators so much power over graduate students.

Since then, students have canvassed the campus with fliers and organized demonstrations. In response, the university said that it would begin producing an annual report on sexual misconduct at NYU and pilot a restorative-justice program sometime in 2020. “These were the only demands they substantially engaged with,” Zach Rivers, a graduate student, said in an email, “but we’re considering them very strong wins.”

At the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities’ Humphrey School of Public Affairs, students demanded policy changes when two professors were suspended, then returned, after they were found to have “more likely than not” violated university sexual-harassment policy, the student newspaper, the Minnesota Daily, reported.

“We are not going to fire our way out of a sexual-misconduct issue in higher education,” Laura Bloomberg, the school’s dean, told the newspaper.

Though university leaders talked about the situation during public forums, some students wanted earlier notice of either the allegations or the investigations’ results. “At the end of the day, a school is there for students,” Stephanie Hallgren, a student, told the newspaper.

To Peter F. Lake, a law professor at Stetson University who writes about Title IX, the current climate feels kind of “swirly.” Different campus constituencies find different levels of conduct permissible, or potentially forgivable. “It’s just going to take time in the cooker for this thing to find its way to a place that’s sustainable,” he said.

But misconduct of some kind, he said, is pretty much guaranteed. Higher education “is an intimacy business,” he said. “We get to know people really well.” When operating an intimacy business, “you’re going to have people crossing the lines.”

What’s important to understand, said Kathryn B.H. Clancy, is that the people calling for “cancel culture” and the people pushing back against it are both right, because these cases depend heavily on the context in which they play out. Clancy is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She co-wrote a 2018 report for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on the prevalence of sexual misconduct in those fields.

There are unrepentant people who’ve caused harm for so long that they no longer deserve a platform, Clancy said. There are also people who have done something seemingly less severe, who are mortified by it, and who have worked hard, in public and private ways, to understand their wrongdoing, she said.

But the bigger question, Clancy said, is not, Are we allowing people to go back to work after they’ve caused harm? Rather, she said, we should ask, Has the environment they’re re-entering changed in any way to stop them from doing it again?

If institutions rely only on punitive measures, then they miss the “broader cultural permissiveness” that made the misconduct possible in the first place, Clancy said. And that will probably allow similar behavior to recur. It’s easy for a university to agree, for example, to change the words on a policy, she said. It costs nothing.

“What we need to ask,” she said, “is can we get them to do something that actually hurts a little?”

Right now, at Texas, students are demanding measures that might do just that.

“They’re asking a lot of hard questions,” said McInnis, the provost. “And we are open to listening to those and considering all of those as we go through our external review.”

Emma Pettit is a staff reporter at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pettit@chronicle.com.