How should professors found responsible for sexual harassment be punished? How can colleges encourage victims — often graduate students who work closely with their harassers — to come forward? On Tuesday a panel featuring two scholars, a member of Congress, a university official, and a journalist tackled those questions and others about harassment in the sciences and in academe more broadly.
The panel, which took place at the University of California at San Francisco and was broadcast on Facebook Live, was hosted by Rep. Jackie Speier, Democrat of California, who in January drew attention for taking a stand against sexual harassment in the sciences, in a speech on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.
“Right now we claim to have a fair playing field in academia,” Ms. Speier said during her opening remarks on Tuesday, “but men are playing on beautifully groomed grass while women are relegated to AstroTurf.”
Her comments touched on the recent cases of Geoffrey W. Marcy, an astronomer formerly at the University of California at Berkeley, and Jason Lieb, a molecular biologist formerly at the University of Chicago. Both resigned in the past year after facing harassment accusations.
Here’s a look at three themes discussed during Tuesday’s panel.
How to punish harassers
Ms. Speier is drafting legislation — which she calls the No Funding for Sexual Harassers Act — that would require universities to notify federal funding agencies when institutional panels find faculty or research staff members responsible for sexual harassment. Agencies would then be able to take that information into account when awarding competitive grants, though they wouldn’t be required to.
“It’s public money that is being wasted when publicly funded scientists are harassing their trainees rather than training their trainees,” said Janet D. Stemwedel, chair of the philosophy department at San Jose State University, who was a member of the panel.
Ms. Speier’s idea drew praise from Linda Shore, executive director of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, during a question-and-answer session after the panelists spoke. “Universities won’t deal with these people if they’re the rock stars in their funding landscapes,” Ms. Shore said.
Universities won’t deal with these people if they’re the rock stars in their funding landscapes.
She suggested that one finding of responsibility for harassment could cause a professor to lose federal funding for one year. If inappropriate behavior turns out to be a pattern, she said, that punishment could be extended.
Ms. Stemwedel said scientific societies could also punish professors found responsible for sexual misconduct by saying they’re not welcome at annual meetings. “We can decide that having harassers treated as normal members of our professional community undercuts what we’re trying to do,” she said, “and it hurts our relationship with the public that we depend on for money.”
How to support victims
Reporting harassment becomes much easier if a critical mass of victims can connect, said Sarah Ballard, a panelist who publicly identified herself as a victim of Mr. Marcy’s last fall. Ms. Ballard, who’s now a postdoctoral fellow in astrophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said she felt more comfortable coming forward once she learned that Mr. Marcy’s behavior had affected multiple female students.
“I want to urge, in other fields, the fact that it only takes a few people,” Ms. Ballard said. When she chose to speak out publicly, she added, she had “explicit support from professors — from male professors.”
If a graduate student alleges that her faculty adviser harassed her, campuses could offer that student a temporary adviser as an interim measure, said Sheryl Vacca, a senior vice president and chief compliance and audit officer for the University of California system. Ms. Vacca, who was on the panel, also leads the California system’s task force on sexual assault.
If there’s no appropriate substitute on a particular campus, Ms. Stemwedel said, other scholars in the discipline could help the student connect with a new mentor. She said that’s happened on occasion in philosophy, which has grappled with a wave of sexual-harassment cases in recent years.
Roger Bland, a professor of physics at San Francisco State University who identified himself as a friend of Mr. Marcy, suggested that there should be a way for students to report even minor incidents of discomfort to campus officials without filing a formal Title IX complaint.
How to improve the investigation process
Nanette Asimov, a San Francisco Chronicle reporter who appeared on the panel, said she had written about four high-profile sexual-harassment cases at Berkeley in the past year. There’s a clear common thread among them, she said: “The ties between the harassers and the people who are meting out the discipline are too close.” The people who decide on a punishment tend to be colleagues of the harasser — possibly even friends, she said.
The ties between the harassers and the people who are meting out the discipline are too close.
Neither campus officials nor departments should have anything to do with harassment investigations involving professors, said Jessica Kirkpatrick, a data scientist in California, during the Q&A session. She was also a complainant in the investigation against Mr. Marcy; while she was not harassed by the astronomer, she said, she observed him behaving inappropriately with an undergraduate while she was working toward her astrophysics Ph.D. at Berkeley.
“There need to be objective, outside-of-the-university ways for us to report this behavior and to oversee this behavior,” Ms. Kirkpatrick said.
On the other hand, Ms. Vacca said, bringing in outside investigators to deal with possible university-policy violations could move the campus process closer to a law-enforcement system. “It’s important to keep in mind that we are not a court of law in a college setting,” she said.
But it’s crucial, Ms. Vacca said, that universities have consistent standards for handling harassment complaints.
Sarah Brown 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.
