In a World of Tenure and Promotion, Demotion Is a Murkier Matter

Last week, Yale University stripped a medical professor, Michael Simons, of an endowed professorship after university petitioners expressed “disgust and disappointment” over the honorary position because Simons had been found guilty years before of sexual harassment.

In the #MeToo era, a few cases, like that of Simons; Avital Ronell, a New York University professor of German and comparative literature; and Gopal Balakrishnan, a historian at the University of California at Santa Cruz, become highly visible. But scores of faculty disciplinary actions, not only for alleged harassment but for financial improprieties, favoritism, plagiarism, substance-related misbehavior, and other matters, never reach the public. The path to sanctions, demotion, or firing is a winding, subterranean one of private hearings.

At some colleges, small committees made up of senior tenured professors issue confidential reports to provosts or presidents. Those reports may include fact-finding and recommendations for consequences. Serving on a disciplinary committee involves a hefty workload and is “very uncomfortable,” says William G. Tierney, a professor of higher education at the University of Southern California who was on such a panel for three years and reviewed several cases.

“Sitting in judgment of one’s peers whom you may see on campus every day is difficult,” he says, and the selection of the committees is delicate in itself. “You are looking for fair-minded individuals who can balance the evidence, who are not thought of as pro or con toward the administration, faculty, or the topic itself.”

At other colleges, there might be no such committees, with sanctions left entirely up to the provost.

Colleges are required to report serious crimes like rape or molestation to law enforcement, even if the college also takes actions of its own. It is the other vast majority of cases, those in the gray zone — alleged misbehavior that is grave but not heinous — to which committees and administrators bring their judgment to bear. Even when union grievance procedures or faculty handbooks codify the processes, administrators have a lot of leeway.

“If it involves a faculty member,” says Donald E. Heller, provost and vice president of academic affairs at the University of San Francisco, “I’m the ultimate arbiter of what the punishment should be.”

Committees and administrators weigh transcripts and sometimes listen to lawyers for both the university and for the accused. “It takes on the tenor and feeling of a trial,” says Tierney.

Committee members are tight-lipped. “I’ve never talked with any of my colleagues about serving on that committee,” Tierney says. Even in harassment cases, says Heller, a student victim might not know the results of the inquiry because of confidentiality in personnel matters.

Sanctions, From Minor to Extreme

Once committees and administrators determine the severity of the infractions, they may consult guidelines, like those from the American Association of University Professors, to help them determine whether minor or severe sanctions are appropriate. A minor sanction might be a letter of reprimand in a professor’s file, says Anita Levy, senior program officer in the AAUP’s department of academic freedom, tenure, and governance. Severe sanctions could include, for example, a music professor’s being suspended without pay, forbidden from giving lessons in his department studio, prohibited from attending faculty meetings, kept from using the college email system, or even barred from the campus entirely.

“We recognize,” says Levy, “that in the end the administration will have the final say,” but AAUP expects “that the judgment of the faculty be respected.”

Ben Trachtenberg, an associate professor of law at the University of Missouri who has also served on a disciplinary committee, says that it is crucial to consider what the accused did, what his or her history has been, how the college has treated similar cases, and how he or she has behaved since first accused. Consequences should not be based, Trachtenberg says, on “whether a lot of people write a note saying he’s a wonderful fellow or he’s terrible and the president should fire him. That is just a matter of fair practice.”

However, Trachtenberg says, in considering whether the accused should be getting new appointments and honors, it may well make sense to consider those community views, just as you would in hiring someone fresh. “There will be situations,” he says, “where the rule breaker can reasonably be given greater responsibility down the road.”

Yale Case Smolders for Years

In the Yale case, the university’s Committee on the Status of Women in Medicine battled for years to have Simons stripped of the Robert W. Berliner professorship of cardiology. The medical school recently did, but then quickly conferred a new one, the Waldemar Von Zedtwitz professorship. Yale said that it was not a new honor but the transfer of an old one. Critics didn’t buy that.

In misconduct cases, “we often hear something along the lines of ‘But their work is great!,’” Claire Bowern, a professor of linguistics at Yale and chair of its Women’s Faculty Forum, writes in an email. But that “does not excuse personal behavior.” The harm to the lives and careers of students and junior colleagues isn’t “canceled out by an abusive senior researcher’s truly fabulous research article.” Endowed professorships, she writes, “aren’t a right; they reflect who a university holds in high esteem as academic leaders.”

Paula Kavathas, a Yale professor of laboratory medicine and immunobiology, a member of the university’s Status of Women in Medicine executive board, and a former chair of the Women’s Faculty Forum, says the “outcry on this has sent a clear message that the community does not want to tolerate sexual misconduct ... as it was in the past. And it was tolerated in the past, I can tell you.”

Simons, beyond being stripped of the endowed chairs, also resigned as chief of cardiology and was removed as director of the Yale Cardiovascular Research Center. He lost the Von Zedtwitz professorship after an open letter signed by more than 1,000 people claimed that, in Dean Robert Alpern’s handling of the Simons case, he “showcased the value he places on prestige and funding above safety and a positive, thriving working environment, not only for women but for the faculty in general.” In response, Alpern has said that he removed Simons from the chair “out of concern for the community’s well-being.”

In an email, Alpern writes, “I do believe we at Yale have good tools for dealing with faculty who do not follow our standards of conduct, and we are always looking for ways to improve them. ... Our disciplinary processes and imposed penalties are confidential and, as a result, the community is often not aware of the imposed penalties.

“I strive to achieve academic success for our institution and for our faculty,” Alpern writes, “but I certainly would never let that interfere with maintaining a healthy, inclusive, and fair climate.”

Simons could not be reached for comment.

The Universitywide Committee on Sexual Misconduct that heard Simons’s case was formed in 2011 to hear all cases rather than individual schools’ handling their own. That process, intended to be fairer, was in response to a 2009 “Report of the Yale University Women Faculty Forum Council on Sexual Misconduct at Yale.”

The rigorous hearings are essential, says Kavathas, who has been at Yale for 32 years. She remembers when she was an assistant professor in the 1990s and a graduate student wanted to do a rotation in her lab. The student was wary because a faculty member who worked nearby had been stalking her. Kavathas informed that faculty member’s chair, but “there were no real consequences other than a conversation,” she says. The student dropped out of graduate school after her first year, and Kavathas “always wondered if that was a factor.”

Disciplinary cases become more heated, says Tatiana Melguizo, an associate professor of education at the University of Southern California, in situations where the faculty, students, and alumni mistrust the administration.

Committees and the college community should not rush to judgment, she says. However, “deans and presidents are so focused on the prestige, the money, and these star professors that bring millions in funding from NIH and NSF that they forget about their mission sometimes, and they forget about the values, and that’s when institutions start to lose the moral fabric.” Faculty and students “become the Greek chorus, reminding deans what to do.”

Alexander C. Kafka is a senior editor and oversees Idea Lab. Follow him on Twitter @AlexanderKafka, or email him at alexander.kafka@chronicle.com.