‘I Was Sick to My Stomach’: A Scholar’s Bullying Reputation Goes Under the Microscope

For decades, faculty members in the English department at Wayne State University knew Barrett Watten had a temper. A tenured professor who specializes in the language school of poetry, Watten is an intense figure with a brooding passion for his work. Standing at over six feet tall, he also possesses an air of natural authority — in classrooms, committee meetings, and personal interactions. When that authority is seemingly questioned, according to current and former colleagues, Watten snaps.

Colleagues braced themselves for his red-faced fury, which occurred unexpectedly. These alleged altercations — with a fellow tenured English professor, the director of graduate studies, department heads, and junior-level faculty members — all followed a similar course. Watten, triggered by an offhand critique or remark, would launch into profanity-laced tirades, looming over whoever seemed to challenge him.

His temper is an open secret in the department and in poetry circles, and uncomfortable incidents piled up over the years. But in the face of institutional neglect and fear, former and current colleagues say, Watten continued teaching. He was popular among students; his classes always filled up. Faculty, fearing Watten’s hostility could be directed toward them, gave him a wide berth.

But in the spring, a group of graduate students complained about Watten’s behavior to administrators. Frustrated at what they characterized as the university’s limited response, current and former students in late April published a blog detailing years of allegations and testimonies against Watten that described him as hostile, verbally abusive, and manipulative with female students.

The blog’s accounts make up a disturbing tome of alleged misbehavior. They number in the dozens — so many that they are categorized under type of misconduct: those with corroboration, those that involved physical intimidation, those that involved retaliation, and more.

Shortly after the blog was published, in early May the university hired an external investigator to look into alleged interactions between an unnamed faculty member and students. Wayne State declined to comment to The Chronicle beyond the scope of a statement informing the English department of the investigation.

Watten, when reached by email, deferred comment to his attorney, Joseph A. Golden. Golden declined to comment on any specific allegations but told The Chronicle that he believes the university has a responsibility to protect Watten’s rights and duties as a tenured professor and employee.

There is a fine line between having an antagonistic streak and perpetuating a hostile work environment. As investigators work to determine whether Watten crossed it, faculty members and students say what it took for his alleged abuse to come to light is evidence of systemic issues that stretch far beyond one professor’s outbursts.

Unusual Attention

Watten’s temper was well-known among faculty. But he had another reputation among some students: that of a spirited teacher and a fierce mentor.

“One of the things that protected Watten was that he appeared to be a good teacher,” said Donnie J. Sackey, an assistant professor in the department from 2013 to 2018. “He might be bad to his peers, but the students loved him.”

There is a type of graduate student he gravitates toward, according to current and former students. They are mostly women, highly intellectual, and creative. He generously bestowed praise and support to these students, took them out for drinks, and established a close rapport with those in his classes. He granted their work extra attention and invited them to conferences and private dinners.

“He has a habit of latching onto female graduate students and demanding their attention,” said Molli Spalter, a graduate student at Wayne State.

That attention — which students characterized as a form of academic grooming — could be flattering, but it could also sour. Since she started the program in 2015, Spalter said she felt a sense of undue obligation to return Watten’s texts, confide in him, and meet him for drinks. She felt that she always had to acquiesce to his demands, or she’d risk losing a mentor or becoming his next target.

That experience was not uncommon. Other current and former students described to The Chronicle how dropping a course, refusing to spend time outside the classroom, or changing dissertation advisers would earn them the antagonism their professor had previously reserved for some colleagues.

In February, Spalter filed a Title IX complaint and a workplace violence complaint against Watten, claiming that he subjected her to gender discrimination.

This is the first page of a complaint filed to the Wayne State University English department by Spalter against Watten:

Then, in late April, Spalter’s partner, a graduate student named Isaac Pickell, wrote a public post on social media about Watten’s behavior.

The blog came soon after and was borne out of frustration toward Wayne State’s handling of their collective complaints, according to students. They felt stonewalled.

“I am extremely frustrated at how slow this process has been,” Spalter said, “how my complaints were not taken seriously until they were made public.”

A Paper Trail

Before the students’ blog was published, many faculty members and students believed there was no paper trail documenting Watten’s actions. While students — most of whom are women — have expressed overwhelming discomfort about his behavior to faculty members and administrators over a span of several years, few filed formal complaints until this semester, they say.

Students feared not just professional retaliation but personal confrontation and isolation in the academic circles in which Watten has existed for decades. Multiple students told The Chronicle they were advised that little could be done if a formal complaint was not filed.

Complaints, written recollections, and email correspondence reviewed by The Chronicle from five former and current students show similar patterns of alleged harassment and intimidation from Watten.

Often, students were not sure if Watten’s conduct warranted a complaint with the Title IX office, their department, or the Office of Equal Opportunity.

(Matthew Lockwood, a university spokesman, said in an email that the type of complaint dictates where it should be filed. For instance, he said, sexual misconduct complaints should go to the Title IX office, while complaints based on protected categories, like race and gender, should go to the Office of Equal Opportunity.)

“It seemed like there is no recourse for students, unless he was explicitly violent or there was an explicitly sexual issue,” said Holly Wielechowski, a graduate student who filed two complaints against Watten.

While Watten’s belligerence toward colleagues was common, allegations of his verbally abusive behavior toward graduate students were recorded in a 2009 complaint to the department by student named Marie Buck.

Buck, who received her Ph.D. from the program in 2017, left Detroit in 2014, but her name was referenced, unprompted, in interviews with former and current Wayne State faculty members. “I have so much respect for Marie because she pulled herself out of Watten’s web and broke this spell he had on students,” said Richard Grusin, former department chair from 2001 to 2008.

Buck told The Chronicle she filed a complaint to establish a record for his behavior but asked for it not to be escalated, out of fear of retaliation for her and her partner, who was then studying under Watten. Their conflict began shortly after she told Watten about her plans to transfer universities, which he strongly opposed. Buck decided to stay at Wayne State but requested to switch dissertation advisers, triggering an onslaught of frenzied communication from Watten.

“If you don’t want to provoke a reaction, don’t send provocative e-mail … if you cannot take the reaction, don’t send the message,” Watten wrote after Buck requested he stop contacting her. He left her numerous emails and voice messages, demanding an apology for her decision, and tried to schedule a meeting with her partner.

“The way academic power structures work, it prevents people from speaking out when they otherwise would have,” Buck said. “I was sick to my stomach, petrified that he knew I filed something.”

Jonathan Flatley, a professor and Buck’s adviser, said that Watten aggressively campaigned to get more advisees and prevented them from working with others in the department. While this behavior was problematic, he said, faculty could not directly take action.

A year after Buck filed her complaint, Watten lost his temper at a committee meeting and loudly berated Kathryne Lindberg, then an English professor who has since died. The event, Flatley wrote in a 2010 account, was disturbing and distressing to witness and contributed to an unsafe working environment. Multiple faculty members present and Grusin, who has since left the department, also provided accounts of Watten’s behavior to administrators, and an investigation ensued.

Buck recalled speaking to a person outside the department investigating the incident, but faculty members said they were unsure whether Watten faced any disciplinary measures. “It is hard to fire someone for being an asshole, especially when he still, all along, had lots of graduate students working for him,” Flatley said.

In 2016, Tara Forbes, a graduate student, filed a formal complaint against Watten after witnessing him verbally attack Tracy Neumann, an associate professor of history, in the hallway. The tirade, Neumann said, was prompted by her husband’s criticism of a response Watten gave during a teach-in, and Watten later turned his anger towards Forbes, she said.

Forbes filed a complaint to the English department after speaking with the director of graduate studies, and said she was contacted by the associate provost for faculty affairs. “At that point, I had a lot of pressure to withdraw the complaint, so I told the administrator that it was resolved,” she said. According to Forbes, Watten had contacted her close friends and then-roommate to convince her to withdraw the statement.

“It didn’t feel worth it to me to put other people in that position,” she said, “and my roommate felt very uncomfortable about the situation.”

Neumann did not file a complaint and said she was not aware that Forbes did until recently.

“Now knowing what I do, if I filed there would have been a paper trail,” Neumann said. “But I was more afraid he would tell someone about this run-in and it would be problematic for me, who was going up for tenure.”

At the time, a one-off encounter with a colleague, she said, didn’t seem to rise to the level of harassment. Like Buck, Neumann feared staining not only her professional record, but her husband’s. He was a lecturer and not on the tenure-track, and they were both junior-level faculty.

Crossing a Line

According to Golden, Watten’s longtime attorney, his client’s entire academic career has been controversial, and the university was aware of that when Watten was granted tenure.

“Wayne State knew about Barrett, knew about his character and his personality when he was tenured,” Golden said. “That was fine with them, but now they have their head in the sand when it comes to protecting him, a tenured professor.”

The university has not done enough to protect Watten against the slew of public allegations, Golden said, adding that he plans to file a grievance with the university on Watten’s behalf.

“Every contract has a management rights clause, and with that comes management responsibility,” Golden said. “Right now, Wayne State isn’t accepting any responsibility and has turned an academic issue with students — which should have been internally handled — to a public controversy.”

Current and former colleagues suspect that Watten always knew where the line for tolerable behavior was drawn. He was always careful not to cross that line, Grusin said.

“It appears like he’s very canny in covering his tracks or making things very difficult to prove something happened,” Neumann said. He insists on having private conversations and communicates through partners or close friends to approach those avoiding him, several students said.

University policies are written to deal with an aggressor that is more “clear cut,” Neumann said, such as perpetrators of sexual abuse or overt discrimination. Verbal aggression, especially among tenured professors, is rarely condemned, students say, and instances of intimidation are difficult to prove without a person to corroborate the account.

The American Association of University Professors defends faculty members’ extramural utterances, or the right to speak freely outside their teaching and research work. The association prizes civility and tolerance, noting that these virtues are “hallmarks of educated men and women,” but cause for dismissal has to be rooted in professors’ academic abilities — not their manner of expression.

Terms like civility and professionalism are very general and have been used to penalize faculty who espouse unpopular or controversial political opinions, said Samantha Harris, a representative for the Foundation of Individual Rights in Education, a free speech watchdog organization.

But it’s important to note that the university is a workplace and an employer, she said, and that it has an obligation to uphold academic freedom while ensuring that its work environment is productive. “Generally speaking, a civility claim against faculty that espouses political or academic views forcefully should be looked at differently than a claim against someone who was frequently berating coworkers and employees,” Harris added.

While Watten’s behavior in the department has been hostile, faculty members have resorted to ignoring it, said Sarika Chandra, a professor of English. But when it comes to student harassment and intimidation, she said, it shouldn’t be acceptable.

“Clearly, we need to do better with defining what harassment is and how to set up better procedures and processes to document these occurrences,” Chandra said.

On May 7, 18 faculty members in the English department signed a letter to the chair, dean of graduate studies, and dean of the liberal arts college asking to revoke Watten’s status as a graduate faculty member and relocate his office outside the department.

The issue, faculty members say, should not be about academic freedom of professors.

“We don’t want this conversation to be about tenure,” said Clay Walker, a senior lecturer in the department and former Ph.D. candidate at Wayne State. “This is an issue of someone who mistreats people, who abuses his power and access to students for his interest in accumulating power.”

Correction (5/31/2019, 11:15 a.m.): Donnie J. Sackey’s title is assistant professor, not associate professor. This article has been updated to reflect that.

Update (5/31/2019, 11:15 a.m.): In the sixth paragraph, we added a link to the statement from Wayne State informing its English department of the investigation into the interactions of an unnamed instructor.

Follow Terry Nguyen on Twitter at @terrygtnguyen, or email her at terry.nguyen@chronicle.com.