How Sexual-Assault Accusations Against a Professor Brought Paranoia to His Campus

To his many fierce critics, Gopal Balakrishnan is a sexual predator whose behavior has too long been tolerated by the University of California at Santa Cruz. To some others, he is a victim of vigilante justice — a scholar whose treatment of women may at times have been inappropriate or offensive, but who doesn’t deserve to be physically threatened and professionally shunned.

Caught in the middle of the debate over Mr. Balakrishnan’s behavior is his university. Santa Cruz officials had initially concluded that there wasn’t enough evidence of misconduct to launch a Title IX investigation against him. Now they’re taking another look amid an aggressive campaign by the professor’s accusers to expose and exile him. Threats of physical violence have sprung up on social media, prompting a few sympathetic colleagues to worry about his safety — and their own.

The furor swirling around Mr. Balakrishnan, a professor of the history of consciousness, illustrates the challenges universities can face when an accused professor has a target on his head.

Vague or anonymous accusations that could topple a Hollywood mogul or media star overnight aren’t likely to pierce the protective armor of a tenured professor, who is usually entitled to an investigation and hearing. That can frustrate those who want to see justice meted out swiftly.

Last month more than 130 researchers signed an open, online statement accusing Mr. Balakrishnan of sexual harassment and assault. The signatories vowed to shut the scholar and anyone who actively supports him out of “any events or gatherings where we are present.”

The letter included accusations made by seven anonymous people. The most damning alleged that Mr. Balakrishnan had climbed into bed with a visiting scholar after an alcohol-fueled party and returned, after she rebuffed him, standing naked next to her bed. If others hadn’t been in the house, she wrote, she is certain that “Gopal Balakrishnan would have raped me.”

The other letters allege that he drank and did drugs with young women, hitting on some of them. They repeatedly refer to his reputation as a serial harasser.

Mr. Balakrishnan, who is on leave this academic year, has characterized the accusations as gossip and said he doesn’t recognize any of the encounters described.

“They want to destroy and defame you and hope you will slink away,” he said in an interview on Thursday. “The fact that this is so manifestly hearsay and they don’t even try to conceal it makes me wonder why so many academics and literary critics have signed on to it.”

The controversy surrounding him has taken a heavy toll on humanities scholars at Santa Cruz, who are deeply divided over the way his case has been handled.

Last spring, after graffiti and leaflets labeling Mr. Balakrishnan a sexual predator were circulated, a group of faculty members from his department and the department of literature released a letter condemning the anonymous messages.

“In an attempt to justify vigilante tactics, the leaflets impugn campus procedures for handling sexual harassment,” it said. “Such a campaign threatens us all — faculty, staff and students alike — insofar as it seeks to condemn by rumor, insinuation, and repetition.”

That prompted a rebuttal from the feminist-studies department. “We do not believe the tactics of graffiti and leafleting are acceptable,” the statement read. “However, guerrilla tactics are often employed when other means have not resulted in change or action.” The letter urged faculty members to be more supportive of students who complain and to avoid intimidating or retaliating against them.

A Santa Cruz scholar penned an anonymous letter to the dean of humanities objecting to the threats, contained in the open letter circulating on the internet, to shun anyone who supported Mr. Balakrishnan.

“This letter, like the graffiti before, not only presented no evidence, it did not even make a concrete allegation,” the scholar wrote. “It literally suggested that undergraduate students are entitled to see him removed from his job because they have heard unsubstantiated rumors about him, and consequently feel uncomfortable with his presence.”

The university’s interim Title IX officer, Cherie A. Scricca, said in an interview that she has been reaching out to people who signed the letter and urging others to come forward if they have “direct knowledge of” or “experience with” the alleged harassment.

“We try to make it clear that we’re not interested in rumor,” she said. “And we try not to stoke any of the potential rumor mill that’s out there.” But separating rumor from reality is challenging, she said, when few people are willing to talk to her without a guarantee of confidentiality.

Ms. Scricca said she can’t make such a guarantee. People accused of sexual misconduct have a right to “meaningfully respond” to the allegations, she said. Anonymous reports make it difficult to do so.

Frustrated by the university’s response so far, the authors of the open letter said that Mr. Balakrishnan “and anyone actively supporting him should not expect to be welcome at any events or gatherings where we are present.” That could apply to conferences, poetry readings, or other professional events.

‘Confronted and Destroyed’

The threat of professional and social isolation is enough, some researchers interviewed said, to make them reluctant to publicly defend Mr. Balakrishnan. But the online threats have, at times, been more menacing.

In screenshots of Facebook discussions by local activists and scholars that were obtained by The Chronicle, one graduate student declared: “We’ve gotta rip the rapist piece of shit around whom this shitstorm has formed into little pieces.”

Another reader added: “A serial abuser of women should be confronted and ‘destroyed.’” A local poet wrote that she’d been asked whether the accused rapist had ever been stabbed, because his behavior had had that effect on others. Another poet said sexual predators, like Nazis, should be “punched in the face,” a reference to an infamous, videotaped assault on the white nationalist Richard Spencer. A former undergraduate activist was enraged to hear that someone was circulating an academic paper Mr. Balakrishnan wrote. “Who, “the activist wrote, “is circulating his stuff at this moment? I seriously want names.”

Mr. Balakrishnan said he’s unsure what to expect when he returns to campus next year.

“I can endure the social awkwardness and isolation, but in this milieu, there are a handful of crazy, violent people,” he said. “I can’t completely put that out of my mind.”

If the reactions on Facebook seem extreme, it helps to understand that many of his fiercest critics are self-described radicals with whom Mr. Balakrishnan has joined for years in protests and demonstrations on campus and across the Bay Area. An activist and Marxist scholar himself, Mr. Balakrishnan has socialized with the same groups that have now devolved at times into warring cliques, according to area several activists who asked not to be identified. Such internecine feuds create a sense of paranoia that makes people afraid to speak out, they said.

That paranoia also makes the work of investigating complaints extremely difficult, Ms. Scricca said. “It has the potential, quite frankly, to chill future reporting and stymie some of our information gathering.”

The chill, of course, blows both ways. Accusers are reluctant to come forward if they fear that they won’t be believed or that their careers will be jeopardized — a problem that has long kept victims of sexual misconduct suffering in silence.

Social media, with its ability to shield identities and fire up groups of people, provides a tool for collective action. The #MeToo campaign opened a floodgate of complaints that has emboldened victims to speak out.

But at what point, some wonder, can naming and shaming veer off into bullying?

Kenneth Westhues, a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Waterloo in Canada believes that the most strident attacks directed at Mr. Balakrishnan fit the pattern of workplace mobbing, a topic he has dedicated much of his career to studying.

He describes it as “an impassioned, collective campaign by co-workers to exclude, punish, and humiliate a targeted worker.” It often involves isolating someone from supporters by making them afraid to speak out on their behalf, Mr. Westhues said. People tend to form workplace mobs, he said, “if they don’t feel the administration is going to respond to their concerns fairly, promptly, and justly.”

Branded as Difficult

When the accusations against Mr. Balakrishnan surfaced, Santa Cruz was already stinging from its response to a report of sexual assault. Last January, the University of California system agreed to pay $1.15 million to a former student on the Santa Cruz campus who said that a professor had raped her the day before her graduation, in 2015.

The faculty member, Hector Perla Jr., an assistant professor of Latin American studies, resigned the following year. The victim said the university had failed to act on previous complaints about his predatory behavior. The university countered that it had acted quickly, putting him on leave immediately.

Janice Harper, author of “Mobbed! A Survival Guide to Adult Bullying and Mobbing,” understands the frustration of having sexual-harassment complaints ignored. She also knows what it’s like to be the target of angry colleagues.

She was fired in 2009 from her position as an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville after years, she said, of being ostracized by her peers. The problems began when she accused a popular male lecturer of sexual harassment. She said that she was branded as difficult, mentally unstable, and uncollegial and, that based partly on a student’s complaint, she was investigated by the FBI.

Ms. Harper said she was struck, in reading the accusations against Mr. Balakrishnan, by how many relied on “conjecture about his motives and intents.”

It reminded her of her own experience. A student once told Ms. Harper that she had heard so many rumors about the professor, who studied the health effects of uranium, that she had become convinced Ms. Harper was plotting to build a hydrogen bomb.

Cleared by the FBI, her academic career nonetheless ended in tatters.

It remains to be seen what Santa Cruz will determine about Mr. Balakrishnan’s sexual conduct. The accusations, if found to be true, would represent “a serious violation of campus policy,” according to a university spokesman. Mr. Balakrishnan said that whichever way the university comes down, the stain on his reputation will be hard to erase.

“I’m confident that over the long term, my work will be given the credit it deserves and this will pass,” he said, “but in the meantime, it’s shot my professional life.”

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.