How a Department Took On the Next Frontier in the #MeToo Movement

The seminar slogged into its third and final hour, and Julia M. York’s mind churned.

The meetings were designed to help new graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin navigate complex demands: research, publishing, teaching. So far, York could handle scholarship in the prestigious integrative-biology department just fine. It was the environment that had weighed on her for months.

On that Wednesday last spring, two longtime professors — both men — spoke in a conference room in an aging campus building. About a dozen first-year students, twice as many women as men, listened as the professors discussed their research. But York was preoccupied. The women in the department had stories.

The professor who stared at a graduate student’s chest while crossing paths in the hall. The texting during a female job candidate’s lecture. The visiting speaker who opened a talk by describing the students in the room as “beautiful women.”

The sorts of behaviors that can be awkward to talk about and hard to define. The #MeToo movement had helped create a space for those conversations, but it doesn’t mean colleges have figured out how to deal with behaviors that aren’t black or white.

It’s one thing to crack down on overt harassment and assault. Offhand remarks and uncomfortable moments are another story. They might not be illegal, but they have consequences. Over time, they weigh people down and make women question their place in the academy.

So why aren’t we talking about this? York remembers thinking.

She had grown frustrated by the silence. She had a choice to make, one that could have implications for the department and even her career.

If she didn’t say anything, could there be any prayer of cultural change? If she spoke up, would faculty members make it hard for her to finish her degree? If she failed, would these conversations be dismissed for years?

The most effective thing to do in graduate school is to keep your head down, York knew. But she felt compelled to make whatever difference she could. It’s a process, she would later think, that’s almost self-destructive.

York, sitting in that seminar, decided that she had heard enough. She raised her hand.

Moving to Texas had been a hard transition. It’s not that York wasn’t accustomed to new places and new people. She grew up in Alaska, and before her graduate program, she had already taught English in Paraguay, attended university in Vancouver, researched geese in North Carolina, and studied abroad in Sweden. Outgoing and adventurous, she had built many communities over time.

Many of those were in academe, as early as childhood. Both her father and grandfather were professors. At 12 years old, she started carrying traps onto the mossy tundra to help her father capture squirrels and study hibernation. She walked from burrow to burrow with a fanny pack that held carrots and a knife.

But when she got to Austin in 2016, she suddenly felt alone. The professor she worked for as a lab technician rarely invited her to socialize with the rest of the department. She tried to meet people elsewhere, attending Sierra Club meetings and volunteering with the local Hillary Clinton campaign.

She thought young people could make a difference on political issues. She ended up folding pamphlets in silence.

The first spark of connection came out of pure coincidence, after she found an older graduate student’s credit card abandoned on a city sidewalk. When York returned it, they chatted. Soon she was invited to hang out with students, near campus beehives and greenhouses under the Texas sun.

She called home. “The universe provides,” York told her mother.

After she began her Ph.D. in the fall of 2017, York learned more about the department’s environment, its quirks, its flaws. She learned about the sorts of challenges that women face in the academy. About rumors that faculty members treated female graduate students differently from the men. About the times when male professors made sexist comments and no one said anything.

And she learned about the whisper network. Older students had a warning: There’s this professor in the department. Don’t work with him. Don’t go anywhere alone with him.

In the meantime, she saw story after story in the news about university employees accused of harassment or inappropriate romantic relationships, some of them at Austin. She came to believe that campus policies aren’t designed to reduce discrimination against women; they’re designed to protect the institution.

She began to think differently about weird interactions that had happened in her own life. Comments and small moments that she had brushed off.

York felt many of her peers were reluctant to discuss these issues inside the department building. They seemed worried about how professors would perceive them if they spoke out or organized. That was not York’s instinct. She practically grew up in academe, and she felt more comfortable taking risks.

As she sat in that seminar for first-year graduate students, where those two professors were talking about the difficulties of success in science, she listened. But she was thinking, too.

York is a white woman. Robert K. Jansen and Thomas E. Juenger, two white men, hadn’t addressed the idea that your identity can set you back even further. She had grown tired of whispering.

“It’s more difficult for women,” she interjected, her hand in the air.

Jansen and Juenger were taken aback. According to York, they said something like, “Oh, it’s so much better than it used to be.”

Well, York thought, it’s not good enough. There was an uncomfortable silence.

It wasn’t the first time York had had versions of this conversation. Yet, to her, it appeared that these two professors had not been having them. As York and several of her peers made their concerns known, the men didn’t have much to say.

Jansen and Juenger don’t remember the exact language York used. But she hadn’t really asked a question, Juenger said. So they looked at each other, he recalled, wondering how to respond.

As the discussion continued, one student said she felt that the scientist whose lab she worked in treated her differently than her male peers, the professors recalled. But, Juenger thought, each program within the department has a graduate adviser who handles conflicts. How would he know about those disagreements?

“For us not to respond,” Juenger said, “we were somehow not being forthcoming.”

Jansen had previously been department chair for 16 years. In the seminar, he said, he tried to highlight the gender diversity of his faculty hires. He now wonders if he should have been more sympathetic to the students’ complaints. But he was unprepared.

“These are first-year students,” Juenger added. “They’ve been in Austin for a semester. And they were expressing a lot of feelings. They were clearly upset.”

Leaving the class, York wasn’t upset. She felt excited, realizing that the more she spoke up, the more the women around her did, too. “I think I’m just over it,” she said. “I don’t want to hear these comments anymore. I don’t want to feel like I’m being treated differently. I don’t want to see the other women in the room not speaking.”

A few days later, Claus O. Wilke was studying up.

Wilke, who’s chair of the integrative-biology department, already had a pretty good handle on the institution’s sexual-misconduct policies. But after York spoke up, one of the professors leading the first-year seminar had asked him to address the students. He wanted to feel prepared.

Definitions of sexual harassment and assault? Check. Reporting allegations of misconduct? Got it. Campus resources? No problem. “I really knew the content of the Title IX web page,” he said.

York wanted answers to more difficult questions. Sexual misconduct is one thing, but making someone feel uncomfortable isn’t necessarily a violation of university policy. How does a department handle incidents that don’t technically break any rules? How can a student come forward without escalating the situation? What about the broader imbalances that women face that can’t be blamed on an individual?

She acknowledged that faculty members like Wilke might not have all the answers. They’re not counselors, they’re professors. They’re not mediators, they’re scientists.

But Wilke has experience with moving between distinct worlds in academe. He came to Texas in the mid-2000s as an early-career theoretical physicist. At Austin, he could not only work in a biology department but could eventually lead one.

So, in some ways, it made sense that as chair he would push his colleagues to grapple with topics they perceived as out of their lane. They weren’t hostile to talking about sexism, inclusion, and making the department more welcoming. For many of them, the issues just weren’t at the forefront of their minds. The subjects seemed distant from what they’re at Austin to do: their science.

Wilke, now in his fourth and final year of his first term as chair, has started to think about his legacy. The department employed roughly three dozen scientists, and the percentage of female faculty members had hovered just below 25 percent for a few years. But more than half of his new hires so far are women, one of the biggest lasting impacts of a department head. “I would not want to go down in the books as the chair who only hired white male faculty,” he said.

As chair, though, he also had to maintain the status quo in many ways, keeping the department in line with university rules. Students wanted him to share more information about professors in the department who faced misconduct allegations and how Title IX investigations were progressing, and he couldn’t. When faculty members were found responsible for harassment, decisions on punishment were largely out of his hands.

Whether Wilke liked it or not, he was the establishment, and York was the insurgent.

When York heard that the chair planned to visit the first-year seminar, those tensions were laid bare. Oh, God, she thought to herself. This is what happens when you try to bring up these conversations and they bring the administration down on you and tell you to shut up.

Back in the classroom the following Wednesday, Wilke began outlining the landscape of university sexual-misconduct policies. York interrupted, her hand back in the air.

“This is not what we’re talking about,” she told him.

Once again, York and her peers had caught a professor off guard.

York knew the definition of sexual harassment. She wanted to talk about being a good bystander in meetings, in classrooms, and at lectures.

Wilke, who often talks about the #MeToo movement with fellow chairs, wasn’t blind to the issues she was raising. The problems could be broader, too. He believes that it’s the job of the department’s faculty to educate all of its graduate students, mentor them, treat them well, and help them emerge on the other side with a Ph.D. and solid career prospects. “I don’t think we always manage to do that,” he said.

But he sat in a tricky spot. He would have to juggle the many personalities on his faculty and get them on board with any plans. Ultimately, he came up with what he saw as a manageable goal: making it comfortable to talk about the uncomfortable. That meant not bombarding his colleagues with emails and demands to complete new training. It meant repeating the message gently, over and over.

He wanted to create a culture in which the people without power could raise their concerns to the people, like the chair, who could do something about them. “We can’t always know,” he said. “Our job is to be able to listen and allow people to be able to speak.”

So at the end of his 45-minute visit to the graduate-student seminar, he told the group: Get organized and figure out what you want to do. Tell me how I can help you.

In her bouncy scribble, York wrote “GOALS” in the middle of a whiteboard in black ink, drawing out five arrows that raised different issues. She and her fellow first-year students were gathered in a conference room in late April to plan their next moves.

She stood before about eight students, and the mood was upbeat. The group had developed close friendships over their first months as graduate students.

They were quick to share ideas, riffing off one another’s suggestions. They highlighted easy steps they could take and longer-term goals. York kept up at the whiteboard. When sexist comments make students feel uncomfortable, whom should they approach?

They considered proposing an implicit-bias training and picking one person in the department to receive complaints. They wanted data on students’ perceptions of the department and considered an anonymous survey.

Later, after the survey was circulated, it would bring forward unsettling stories.

Like this one: A woman said that as she walked to her lab once, a faculty member stared at her chest, shamelessly, for a full minute. She considered what she wore — a T-shirt — before realizing that was beside the point. The behavior was inappropriate. “It made me feel angry and objectified,” she wrote.

Or this one: A male adviser kept his distance from female graduate students, another response said. But he befriended the men, talking about science and becoming collaborators. “I see where he’s coming from, to some extent, but I think it’s really easy to maintain boundaries while also being friends and having a healthy mentor/mentee relationship.”

There were comments, too, about how women shoulder the burden of improving the culture. When the same female faculty members must take that on, “they can’t get as much work done,” one person wrote. “They are spending a significant portion of their time dealing with these incidents.”

Looming in the meeting were allegations against Sahotra Sarkar, a professor who had a dual appointment in integrative biology and philosophy. Sarkar was found responsible for violating Title IX policy after complaints that he propositioned students to pose nude for photos, among other things. He was placed on paid administrative leave while the complaints were investigated, in 2016, and then he was suspended for a semester, public records show.

Sarkar, who has denied the allegations against him, did not speak with The Chronicle for this story. He said in an email that he was “surprised and reluctant to be drawn into the present dispute,” given that years had passed since the complaints, one of which dated back to 2000.

Several students heard talk that he had been suspended at some point. But they didn’t know much else. That lack of information bred distrust within York and others.

One first-year student brought up the Sarkar case in the April meeting, York recalled. The student said she felt confused, because the warning to stay away from the professor when he returned came from a fellow graduate student, not through official channels. That’s wrong, York remembers thinking.

Philip S. Queller, then a first-year graduate student, attended the meeting to show solidarity, listen, and help consider a path ahead.

Queller is a white man. Before the meeting, he had started to understand the burdens faced by people who don’t look like him. He shared an office with three female graduate students, and sometimes during the workday, they would spin their chairs away from their desks to talk. The topics were polarizing: concealed carry, kneeling football players, alt-right speakers coming to campuses nationwide. And, sometimes, the department’s climate.

The room itself showed the weight of navigating the department for women and people of color. The walls around Queller’s desk were almost bare. Kelly J. Wallace, then a third-year graduate student, had plastered her corner with posters from research symposia and a cardboard sign she carried at the Women’s March. “Angry black woman,” it said in red and black. Behind her computer screen — the desktop rotated through motivational slogans, including “Be happy anyway” — sat small bottles of essential oils to keep a stress-free environment.

In the April meeting, Queller remembered the lesson he’d taken away from those office conversations: “This isn’t something that we can solve if there are only women in the room.”

He left the gathering feeling optimistic but unsure. The group came up with important ideas — there were action items written on one side of the whiteboard — but it was just first-year graduate students having the discussion. Queller knew how difficult any cultural change could be, and he wasn’t sure how the ideas would be realized. Or even whether they would be.

By May, York had moved beyond casual brainstorming with her fellow first-year students. She was no longer the person who raised her hand, asking questions. She stood at the front of the room, answering them.

Taking the pulse of first-year students wouldn’t suffice if York wanted to bring ideas to the faculty. She wanted other allies. So she organized another gathering — this time, inviting the roughly 90 Ph.D. students of all years. They showed up in droves, carrying enthusiasm, sure, but also the questions that come with experience.

They wondered if the first-years knew what they were getting themselves into, and they didn’t want their junior colleagues to waste their energy. Administrators at Austin already specialized in this work, so why should students divert attention from their science?

Wallace, the third-year graduate student, sensed their uncertainty. But she felt that staying on the sidelines, as a woman of color in science, was never an option. To her, the stakes of improving the department’s climate were personal.

Wallace had a hero in science from an early age — NASA Flight Director Eugene F. Kranz. Instead of being an astronaut, she wanted to sit behind the table, planning for success. Today, one of Wallace’s science heroes is Maydianne C.B. Andrade, whose research on female spiders who kill and eat their mates after or during copulation made waves in the 1990s — and who has spoken openly about unconscious bias in academe.

Wallace had identified two possible paths for her academic career — she dreamed of landing a faculty job, but she also could imagine working as an administrator. Solving these problems, then, would be crucial to her professional advancement.

Before the meeting, she, too, had considered ways to improve the department’s climate. Wallace could tick off the groups that had been formed, including a diversity and inclusivity committee on which she served, and science events in the local community.

There was a graduate-student bill of rights, which outlined expectations of professors’ responsibilities as mentors — an issue that students several years into the program cared about deeply. Wallace and a fellow graduate student had been considering starting a lunch discussion group for women, just as she learned of York’s efforts to have a departmentwide conversation.

Wallace recalled that, at the meeting, another graduate student suggested that telling faculty members that they have to go through training could be seen as accusatory. Instead, that person suggested, students could take the training first.

Other graduate students had different concerns. One person wondered if the students had bitten off more than they could chew or if they could sustain the momentum. Another feared that faculty members would dismiss the survey or become defensive. A third recognized that cultural issues are entrenched, and questioned how far the first-year students could get.

At the meeting, York talked about concrete goals. First, they would survey the students to provide data on culture to the faculty. She aimed to hold a training on bystander intervention. They could advocate for updated department facilities, including gender-neutral bathrooms and nursing rooms.

The audience here was more cynical than the first-year student gathering, York recalled. She felt nervous to present her ideas to students she respected.

But some were impressed. “They were taking charge of this meeting,” said Emlyn J. Resetarits, then the graduate-student liaison to the faculty. “I think most people were happy to jump on the bandwagon.”

Sensitivity training, Wallace knew, wouldn’t solve the department’s problems, let alone academe’s. When Wallace tried to visualize her academic future, she knew that even if she were hired to a department exclusively on her merits, she could be considered a “diversity hire.”

After the May meeting, as she left the room, Wallace hoped that the students would move from ideas to action — which she knew meant including the faculty. She was optimistic; both the conversation itself and the high attendance felt fortifying.

Meeting with the graduate students as a whole conferred more legitimacy on York’s efforts. The campus would empty over the summer months, with some labs, professors, and graduate students clearing out to field sites to focus on their research. In the fall, York and Wilke, the chair, planned to talk to faculty members about the uncomfortable moments that had happened and how to respond in the future.

No one knew how professors would react. Or what getting it right would look like.

At the September faculty meeting this semester, Wilke wanted to tell his colleagues that their department had a problem. But the news wasn’t all bad.

He briefed the 25 or so faculty members in attendance on what they were about to see: the results of the department-climate survey that graduate students had conducted.

“Do you feel welcome in the department and at departmental events?” Yes, for the most part, according to a colorful pie chart projected at the front of the room. On a scale of 1 to 5, from “yes, completely” to “not at all,” about 90 percent of the roughly 60 graduate students who completed the survey clicked 1 or 2.

Wilke started with the good news intentionally. What came next wouldn’t be as rosy.

Forty-two percent of the respondents were dissatisfied with the department’s culture. Thirty-seven percent had felt uncomfortable “due to comments or actions related to gender” by someone affiliated with the department. Half felt that “other members of the department or visitors to the department are treated differently based on their gender.”

Wilke, a self-described introvert, had fretted about how to frame the problem for his faculty. There had even been an intense debate over who should present the survey results. In the end, he decided to do it himself. Otherwise, he said, “it could result in a student becoming a target for somebody.”

As he talked, he didn’t want to sound accusatory; professors might feel blamed. He wanted to emphasize that improving the environment was a collective effort. It certainly helped, he said, that the students had conducted a survey and compiled quantitative data. Scientists like numbers.

He wanted to focus on how graduate-student morale influences the way the department runs and its ability to recruit. The Ph.D. program has mostly female students. The university pours money, time, and resources into preparing them for careers in science. If they leave academe because they had a bad experience at Austin, that’s a waste. And it means that male-heavy departments will stay that way.

Less than a quarter of Austin’s integrative-biology faculty are women. Norma L. Fowler worked her way up the ranks when there were even fewer women than there are now. She can name every female colleague she’s had at Austin, because she hasn’t had very many.

Having listened to her female students, both undergraduate and graduate, over the years, Fowler has heard it all. She felt proud of York and others for saying enough is enough. But she knew the true pace of progress: Three steps forward, two steps back.

It was significant, though, that the topic was openly discussed at a faculty meeting, she said. She’s known about the subtle sexism. It seemed to her that some of her colleagues didn’t. A few openly asked: What are we talking about?

Fowler is matter-of-fact about having to go back to the very basics. “That’s where you start,” she said. “Until people know that it’s a problem, nothing can happen.” She doesn’t blame the men in the room for not being aware; it wasn’t their lived experience.

At one point, Michael J. Ryan tried to make the problem more concrete. The professor recounted an event that graduate students had wrestled with for months.

Ryan, who studies animal communication and sexual selection, had invited a prominent professor to lecture to his class in the fall of 2017. It was Robert L. Trivers, a noted evolutionary biologist whose work had influenced Ryan’s research. Trivers, who wrote a blurb on Ryan’s recent book, A Taste for the Beautiful: The Evolution of Attraction, agreed to speak and looked forward to visiting Ryan, who had been severely injured in an accident.

Trivers started the lecture by speaking off the cuff. He said he was glad to see that Ryan was “recovering well.”

“He’s in good spirits, and I attribute that in part to the fact that he’s surrounded by beautiful women,” Trivers remembered saying.

And then he continued his talk. The students were uncomfortable, and so was Ryan. No one called the comment sexist. Ryan hoped no one had heard it. He had no idea what to say in the moment.

The remark sounded like “nails on a chalkboard,” he later said.

Trivers now says he had intended to compliment the students’ “inner beauty.” If he’d understood the sensitivity of the moment, he would have used slightly different language. Yet he did not feel “tortured” by it.

“I said ‘beautiful women,’ " he said. “There was an ambiguity there if you want to get your mind all heated up. But I can assure you I was not saying they had a nice shape or pretty face, not at all.”

In retrospect, Ryan wished he had stepped in. He wished he’d had a phrase to pull out of his pocket that would make clear that the value the department placed on its graduate students had nothing to do with their appearance. Perhaps something like: “Well, more importantly, Bob, they’re brilliant, hardworking scientists who happen to be women.” He hoped the bystander-intervention training that York proposed would change that.

When Ryan discusses the importance of a welcoming academic environment, he often mentions his daughters. Behind his desk sits a small picture of a purple flower that one of his daughters made when she was a girl, years ago. Near his office door, another daughter, now an adult, had sketched his face in intricate chalk detail, laugh lines, beard, and all.

Ryan believes things have improved in the department since he arrived decades ago. He was happy to join its diversity committee over the summer. In faculty meetings, he said, women often used to feel as though male professors were interrupting them: “We’ve become sensitive to that now.”

Still, he worries about striking the right balance in this moment of change. He sees a whole range of issues at hand that merit attention. Some of it is serious misconduct. Sometimes it’s more like, “Keep your eyes from roaming.”

He fears that failing to eliminate these burdens could drive talented women out of the field. But he worries that overregulation could impede scientific discovery by restricting interactions between colleagues.

For the students, the incident in Ryan’s classroom stung. It showed the issues they’d discussed for months playing out with real people, in one of their classrooms. The moment felt unresolved.

Starting her second year of graduate school, York felt exhausted. The hardest choices were where to focus her energy and time. She couldn’t help noticing how much was left to do.

In the fall, she bristled as she walked through the department’s hallways. More women than men work on the first floor, she said, but the first-floor women’s restroom has just one stall.

Why, she asked, is it so “shockingly difficult” to change the men’s restroom to a women’s, and make the existing women’s restroom gender-neutral?

“We cannot possibly look at a urinal,” she said, feigning horror by covering her eyes. (Wilke said the university is in the process of identifying possible changes to campus bathrooms.)

She felt stressed, too, about mentorship opportunities, not to mention possible blowback from disgruntled faculty.

No one knew what would happen when these moments again emerged in real life. But then York heard that Trivers, who had made the comment about “beautiful women,” was set to come back to Austin, in a visit that had been scheduled months prior.

Trivers’s return put York’s work to the test. Wilke questioned whether his visit was appropriate, given the department’s recent conversations.

Ryan asked the graduate students in his lab if they wanted to hear from Trivers again. They said yes. Then Ryan talked to York. Many other students disagreed, she told him.

Ryan felt their opinions were more important than his own. But he needed to talk to Trivers, his longtime friend.

Trivers won’t forget seeing the email from Ryan, flashing across his phone: “Dear Bob,” it began. “I’ve got bad news for you.”

Trivers will still speak at Austin, but not at a public lecture. He will talk only to a smaller group of faculty members and students. He doesn’t blame Ryan. He blames the university, which is “caught up in this thing,” because several professors have recently been accused of sexual misconduct.

Trivers said he preferred that students who raised concerns about his visit not attend. He said that he believes sexual misconduct is wrong, but that he doesn’t see how his “beautiful women” comment amounted to anything more than discomfort. “Using the criterion of uncomfortable — it’s a feeble criterion,” he said.

But to York, Ryan’s decision to listen to the students was a victory. Small, but meaningful: “We’re tired of people coming here and making us uncomfortable,” she said. It showed that professors like Ryan and Wilke would care and consider their perspective.

Ryan strongly supports the free flow of ideas in the academy. But he said everyone should feel comfortable in the working environments. He doesn’t think Trivers meant to offend anyone. At the same time, Ryan said, “we all have to learn a different way of interacting.”

In murky waters, that learning will take trial and error. York doesn’t know exactly where her activism will go from here. She and Wilke are reluctant to characterize what’s happened so far as great progress.

But few question that, in some important ways, the department has evolved. The survey helped professors see the scope of the problem. Many of them took an unconscious-bias test. A planned bystander-intervention training would, hopefully, teach people to speak up.

Slowly, as the message repeats gently, over and over, it has begun to sink in: There’s a continuum of inappropriate behavior. Combating it all is important.

As the department has changed, so has York’s role in it. She’s no longer lobbing questions at professors or merely organizing among students. She’s a respected voice, a consultant to the faculty. Even more striking to York is her new position among her peers, as an adviser, confidant, and representative: “That’s a little scarier and more overwhelming.”

Changing a culture is, of course, an unwieldy process. Some challenges are especially imposing: questions that dog the discipline, the academy, society as a whole. Few here have a clear picture of what success even looks like. Failure — that’s easier to imagine.

When York spoke out, she knew what she risked. But the department adapted to what she had to say.

Lindsay Ellis, who reported from Austin, is a staff reporter. Follow her on Twitter @lindsayaellis, or email her at lindsay.ellis@chronicle.com.

Sarah Brown, who reported from Washington, writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.

Correction (11/12/2018, 3:45 p.m.): Because of an inaccurate summary provided by the University of Texas at Austin in response to a public-records request, this article originally misstated the details of a case involving Sahotra Sarkar, a professor at Austin. He was initially placed on paid leave while the complaints against him were investigated, not on a half-time leave of absence without pay. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.