‘I Was in Danger’: What Happens When Students Harass Professors

Jody Greene thought she was unstalkable.

Greene, a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, prided herself on the professorial boundaries she had laid out for herself and often explained their importance to her 125-student lecture classes. She was their professor, not their friend, and the classroom, she said, was a space she had marked out to be the safest place.

In the fall of 2004, when Greene had just received tenure, her illusion of being unstalkable was destroyed.

For two-thirds of the quarter, a female student in her course on the 18th-century novel had been sending her borderline flirtatious emails with soft propositions. They were never direct advances, so Greene put aside her unease and didn’t tell anyone. She thought she could deal with the student on her own.

But the student didn’t stop. The emails kept coming and notes were left under her door. Eventually, they escalated into a threat of rape and death. “I know where you live,” the student wrote, according to Greene.

Most of the #MeToo conversation in higher education has buzzed around harassers who use power differentials to their advantage — be they senior scholars who harass graduate students or instructors who target undergraduates.

But sometimes power dynamics are upended, and professors find themselves vulnerable to harassment — by their students. Some students prey on professors’ fears of being disbelieved and possibly losing their jobs. Faculty members who are being harassed often don’t want to report it. If they do, they don’t know where to go for help.

Greene didn’t tell anyone. Among other things, she worried that she would be seen as having exerted her professorial power inappropriately — that she might’ve been hitting on the student. “My worry about my power made me less able to see that I was in danger,” she said.

It wouldn’t seem plausible, Greene thought, to say a student had been sending her emails throughout most of the quarter. She had never experienced this with anyone, let alone a student. And the emails were never direct advances, she said, but straddled the line between what was appropriate and what was not.

They always began with some reference to the course, and often included jocular references to particular characters in the assigned novels. Over a period of weeks they grew more suggestive, describing dreams and issuing soft propositions. Sometimes they would end with a winking emoticon. Greene saved all the messages, just in case.

A small voice inside told her something was wrong. She silenced it. “I’ve totally got this,” Greene thought. “Maybe this is someone with a little bit of a boundary problem. Maybe I’ll teach her a little bit about boundaries.”

So she pushed back, telling the student to keep all email correspondence related to the class. The student became enraged, then contrite, and then stopped writing Greene — for a while. Then the messages resumed. “She would start to write to me again about course content, and I would say, ‘This is OK,’” Greene said. “And then there would be some kind of comment or a note under my door.”

Greene pushed back, again. The student responded with an ever-escalating cycle: anger, contrition, silence, and then another email. There were about five rounds of this.

Eventually, Greene shut down the correspondence by telling the student her comments were inappropriate. That’s when the student responded that because she was “straight” and Greene was “‘clearly a lesbian’ there were no problems with her emails.” (Greene is openly queer.) Then came the threat of sexual violence and death.

“I know where you live, my brothers are in the military,” Greene said the student wrote. “I’m not a lesbian, you’re a lesbian and my brothers are going to come and rape you and set you right and then kill you.”

Greene called the Title IX office five minutes later. “I’ve made a mistake,” she said she told the office. “I’ve gotten myself into a situation with a student. I don’t want you to think I would ever do anything with a student.”

She apologized for how she should’ve seen this coming and shouldn’t have tried to handle it herself. She also immediately offered to turn over their entire email correspondence.

The Title IX officer at the time, Greene said, assured her that she had done nothing wrong and that it was a pattern of behavior that most Title IX officers were familiar with. Greene made it clear over the phone that she didn’t want to file a claim and didn’t want to come to the office. She just wanted advice.

“By the time it became obvious that I ought to do something,” Greene said. “I felt so embarrassed about not having done anything earlier that then I was doubly embarrassed.”

She was most worried about the options the Title IX officer would give her. She didn’t want to kick the student out of the class. Greene even felt protective of her. The student, Greene thought, seemed to be going through identity issues.

“As bizarre as it seems, after this student had threatened to rape and kill me, I still didn’t want them to be punished academically,” Greene said. “But I also thought the student was mentally ill and would back down when the institution, and not just me, came and said, ‘We see what you’re doing, please stop.’”

The Title IX officer presented Greene a series of options. She could get a restraining order. The office could send a message to the student asking her to desist. Or, the university could set up an alternative space for the student to take the final exam and let her know she was to have no further contact with Greene.

With only one class session and the final exam remaining, Greene chose the last option.

On exam day, the student showed up with the rest of the class. “I was feeling terrified and humiliated,” Greene said. “I was sure that the other students could tell that something was really bugging me. I guess I was having an anxiety attack, but my students were not probably expecting me to turn sheet white and start shaking in their final exam.”

One of Greene’s teaching assistants intervened and took the student to another classroom. “It all ended up OK,” Greene said. And, although they never saw each other again, the student slid one more note under the professor’s door before leaving campus that year. Greene never read it.

About once a year for the next five years, Greene would receive emails purporting to be from strangers interested in working with her. Every time, they turned out to be from the student.

The most memorable one, Greene said, was from someone at a military base in the Middle East who claimed to be working on a project related to giving literature to the troops and maybe even doing research. It was something Greene had been interested in, so she responded. But over time, the correspondence became inappropriate, and Greene recognized her former student. In other emails, linguistic puns concealed in the name of the sender were like bread crumbs leading to the student’s identity — though Greene said she would always just know it was her.

Greene would then forward the emails to the Title IX office beneath a subject line like “I did it again,” because she still thought she was doing something wrong.

The emails have long since stopped. Looking back, Greene said she doesn’t regret not pursuing tougher punishments for the student. Not hindering the student’s academic career was the only outcome Greene could live with, she said. She declined to name the student, citing her obligation as a professor.

“We feel protective of our students, many of us, particularly in their vulnerabilities, and we don’t want them to pay a high price for something that may just be a growing pain,” Greene said. “But I took that to such an extreme that I literally didn’t realize that I was being stalked until somebody threatened to have her brothers rape and kill me.”

The experience nearly drove her from teaching, Greene said. She could no longer trust her own instincts. And it made her question whether the classroom remained the secure place she had always thought it was. In a moment, it could turn into an unsafe space, Greene thought, and “I might not see it coming.”

Whitney E. Ray was a first-year graduate student in the creative-writing program at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington in 2010. She loved being in the classroom, and she was thrilled when she started her first teaching assistantship, leading a workshop section of an introductory creative-writing course. It was an intimate section. The entire class could fit around one long table.

It was hot in the early weeks of the fall semester. Ray remembers wearing short sleeves or rolling them up often, which exposed the small, black-and-white rose tattoo on her left wrist. Students, she said, get excited when they see their professor has a tattoo.

On her first day, Ray introduced herself. She was from Oklahoma, where she had just graduated from Oklahoma State University and had moved to North Carolina for the program. She was in a new place, teaching for the first time and only 23 years old.

From that first class, one student’s assignment is burned into Ray’s mind — a hypersexual poem titled “Oklahoma Rose.”

Initially, the student seemed fine. He was bright, and he even brought in coffee and bagels for the entire class. She remembers thinking it was odd for an undergraduate to spend that kind of money. In retrospect, she said, it was the first in a series of strange behaviors that would evolve into harassment.

Several weeks into the semester the student became erratic, confrontational, and aggressive. He would leave in the middle of workshops. He seemed to be struggling with some emotional issues, Ray said, but it wasn’t anything she thought twice about — until he submitted his first fiction story.

It was set in a psychiatric facility and involved sexually graphic scenes in a bathroom. It was dark, violent, and hypersexual, the kind of content Ray said she felt uncomfortable discussing in the classroom. She was also concerned that it could be triggering for other students.

Ray discussed the details of the story, as well as subsequent events, with two other teaching assistants who were leading workshops for the course. Reached by The Chronicle, those assistants confirmed her account.

Ray also shared the student’s story with her supervising professor.

“What do you think about this?” she remembers asking him. “I’m really taken aback as to how to handle this particular workshop.”

He took a look, Ray recalls, and said, “Go ahead and workshop this, it’s fine.”

She was embarrassed for even bringing it up. She thought she was being ridiculous, or “making a mountain out of a molehill.” The professor, she thought, probably “thinks I’m a sensitive girl.” And, as a new creative-writing teacher, she wanted her students to be able to share any kind of content they wanted to explore in the classroom.

Her gut feeling, though, was that this was not fine.

The class workshopped the story. She and her students were uncomfortable, she said. And the student, too, was visibly uneasy — twitchy and restless.

His unusual behavior continued. The man would bring a copy of the Marquis de Sade’s erotic works with depictions of violent sexual fantasies and read it during Ray’s lectures while intensely staring at her. She handled it by doing nothing, and she avoided making eye contact with him.

“Since my professor had advised me to let it go, it wasn’t a big deal,” Ray said. “So I just kept thinking, especially after his advice, that I was perhaps overreacting, that I was hypersensitive. You know, these are undergraduate students, not a big deal.”

One day, the student was furiously scribbling on a piece of paper during lecture. She doesn’t remember specific details, but she described it as a lewd drawing with fragmented writing that was violent and aggressive. “He sort of abandoned it,” she said, “and left the room making intense eye contact with me.”

She took the drawing to her professor and said she was met with the same reaction as before: “It wasn’t that big of a deal.”

Feeling that she might be in danger, Ray wanted tangible proof aside from a hunch. She later found it in the “Oklahoma Rose” poem.

The student had missed a few classes, including the one when the poem was due. So he went to the creative-writing department looking for Ray’s mailbox to drop off the poem, she was later told. Instead, the student found her supervising professor, who taught the large group lecture. The student handed him the poem to to give to Ray.

It was clearly written to her, she said. The professor looked at the poem, and although it didn’t use her name, it used distinguishing physical characteristics — the most obvious being her home state and tattoo.

The poem described the student’s own masculinity, she said, and was filled with a long description of things he could do to her. He also had weaved in an extended metaphor about sugar, sweetness, or honey. “It was essentially a sexual proposition,” she said.

“I think at this point my professor realized that this had crossed the line,” Ray said. “For me, however, it had crossed a line long before that.”

She read the poem in her professor’s office. She was horrified, she said, and immediately was concerned about losing her job.

Like Jody Greene and other women who have come forward with stories of harassment, Ray questioned whether she had done anything to engage the student’s interest in her. Even a family member asked her, “Did you ever meet the student outside of class?” Of course she hadn’t.

Ray never filled out any paperwork, she said. She never gave a formal report. But her professor told her the university would handle the situation from that point on.

When contacted by The Chronicle, the professor, Mark Cox, said that he was hazy on the specifics of the incident and that sensitive material is common in creative-writing courses. He said that he hadn’t been aware of the student’s staring or reading Marquis de Sade but that the poem “was personal enough obviously at that point to concern me.”

He added by email later that, after reviewing his records from 2010, hindsight suggests he should have handled the situation differently. “Today, I think I would censor him earlier and then try to make moves to get him shifted into a male GTA’s section more quickly,” he wrote. “No excuses, but it was hard to tell when things went from being a professional challenge to a personal challenge, I think.”

Initially, the student was given a warning and was pulled from her class. Then, graffiti — in the same style as the poem — was left along her usual path to class. Ray never saw the graffiti firsthand. But she said she was told later that plain-clothes detectives, whom the university had hired without her knowledge to shadow her, did see the words. They thought the student was leaving a message for her.

The student was then asked to leave the university, Ray said.

She was frustrated at being kept in the dark. “Even after the student was asked to leave the university, I was very concerned that he might find me or become violent,” Ray said. “I was afraid he would seek some kind of retribution for being kicked out.”

Nothing like that ever happened, she said, but not knowing the specifics of how the matter had been handled behind the scenes still haunts her, she said. (The university told The Chronicle that it has, so far, been unable to locate a police record of an investigation relating to Ray’s allegations.)

After the incident, Ray said, she was not offered mental-health counseling. She said she wished she’d had that kind of support to validate what she was going through, and to feel like she wasn’t alone.

She said she was never offered a sit-down with another professor to talk out her anxieties. And when she did tell a female professor that she was struggling to the point of having difficulty completing her graduate schoolwork, the woman was unreceptive, Ray recalls.

The rest of her three-year program became colored by her first-semester experience, Ray said. It affected her teaching. She was suspicious of her students. She was self-conscious and felt concerned, ashamed, and isolated.

“I thought I was marked negatively in a way, because I know a lot of professors there knew that this had happened, though no one ever spoke to me about it,” she said.

Ray said she doesn’t fault anyone, but in hindsight, she should have left and entered another program. “If that support would have been there, I think I would have been just fine,” she said. But instead, she fell into a yearlong depression.

“I remember entering spring semester thinking it was my fault,” she said. “I would dress in extremely baggy clothes. I would refuse to wear my makeup. I wouldn’t fix my hair. I wouldn’t dress normally. I would wear big sweatshirts to class.”

Ray continued to feel ashamed, and said it wasn’t until she started teaching at a different college that she finally recognized it wasn’t her fault.

UNC-Wilmington’s chief communications officer, Janine Iamunno, said the university couldn’t comment on specific details of the incident, citing student confidentiality. She wrote in an emailed statement: “There is a zero tolerance policy for harassing behaviors or activity. I can’t speak to what resources were offered to Ms. Ray in 2010. I can tell you in 2018, we have a thorough Title IX process and a variety of support resources for anyone who believes they’ve been victims of harassment including sexual misconduct.”

“No matter how much time has passed,” Iamunno wrote, “we would encourage anyone with concerns relating to harassment to contact our Title IX office.”

The dynamic between a student and a teacher is not the same as the one between an employee and an employer, Greene said. “There’s something both sacred and delicate about a student-teacher relationship, and we are negotiating in a very complex way in the classroom.”

Janet Gannon agrees. Like Ray, she said she encountered a lack of support on campus when she was harassed by a student 10 years ago while teaching at a small college in New England. As an adjunct and new professor on campus, Gannon didn’t know anyone — let alone how the college handled harassment in the classroom.

So when a student made a comment that was “really dirty and it made me sound like I wanted to have sex with everyone in the class,” Gannon said she didn’t know how to respond.

Luckily, she said, two students intervened — rebuking the student immediately — and the man never tried to harass her again. Gannon never filed a complaint. “I thought the easiest thing to do is just do nothing, which I somewhat regret now,” she said.

If the harassment had escalated, she said, she wouldn’t have known where to go for help, since the college had never offered any training in dealing with such situations.

Gannon had always thought of sexual harassment as being “the employer harassing the employee or boss harassing the person that the boss supervises,” she said. In a situation like that, she said she might have been able to go to human resources for help.

Student-on-professor harassment cases are in the minority of what institutions have been dealing with in recent months, but they are becoming increasingly common, said Saunie K. Schuster, a founding member of the Association for Title IX Administrators and a partner with the Ncherm Group, which conducts Title IX trainings and risk-management consultations.

Some students recognize the vulnerabilities that keep professors from reporting incidents, Schuster said, including their inherent authority in the classroom, which can make allegations of harassment seem less believable. “There’s almost a backlash where individuals who have felt disempowered as a result of a power differential with a professor to a student are now getting their voice and feeling their power,” she said. “In some cases, some people are exploiting that place and power and creating frightening but concerning situations for professors because they become a target of that student’s anger or affection.”

When the harassment moves beyond a classroom disturbance and rises to the point where it disrupts other students’ learning, Schuster said, “that’s when it goes outside of a professor’s scope to handle.”

Universities should respond to these types of incidents in the same way that they would any person-on-person harassment, said Eric Butler, Title IX coordinator at the University of Denver. Just because they are professors, he said, doesn’t mean they are “immune to harassment.”

Those who have been stalked or harassed engage in self-blame, Butler said. They question whether they could have or should have done something differently. Or, they minimize the severity of the situation and don’t report it.

Professors are commonly hesitant to file a formal report against a student, so Title IX officers often have to balance that unease with safety considerations, Schuster said. Reluctant reporters typically just want the problem to go away and be resolved informally without punishment for the student.

A common factor that prevents professors from reporting an incident sooner is their perceived need for tangible evidence. “If someone has evidence, maintaining that and providing it is awesome,” Schuster said. “But that shouldn’t be a burden on the person making a report.”

And the help universities can provide to victims of harassment is often communicated primarily to students. “At a lot of institutions, there is an emphasis on student-focused resources, and we tend to put these cases in that context,” Butler said. “While I think people are getting better at understanding that Title IX also protects employees, the emphasis isn’t there in training.”

“So at the end of the day,” Butler said, “you just have human beings interacting with one another.” And while Title IX officers acknowledge that faculty members are in a position of authority, he said, “the power dynamics that give rise to situations of abuse extend well beyond someone’s job title or their role at the university.”