A professor who woke up with a student in his bed lost little more than a pay raise at one university. At another, a faculty member who held a student’s hand and sent sexually suggestive email messages was shown the door.
For more than a generation, colleges have tried to police relationships between professors and their students, but rarely is anyone happy with the results. Punishments vary widely from campus to campus, and colleges are caught in conflicting roles.
“The university has to be the prosecutor of the offender, it has to be the defense attorney for the victim, and it has to be the judge in a case in which its own interest is at stake,” says Billie Wright Dziech, a longtime professor of English at the University of Cincinnati, who wrote a landmark 1984 book on sexual harassment, The Lecherous Professor: Sexual Harassment on Campus.
Colleges have beefed up their policies and their enforcement in response to increased federal scrutiny of how they handle sexual misconduct. The scare over administrators’ culpability in the Jerry Sandusky child-sex scandal, at Pennsylvania State University, has also prompted reassessments.
Prominent cases involving charges of sexual harassment in three philosophy departments over the past year show the widespread dissatisfaction that has resulted from colleges’ handling of such cases. Fewer than 20 percent of philosophy professors are female, and women in the discipline have long complained of being mistreated, but still, the cases are emblematic of those across disciplines.
At Northwestern University, faculty members and students say administrators went too easy on a professor whom the university found guilty of sexual misconduct in 2012. At the University of Colorado at Boulder, professors accused administrators of punishing the entire philosophy department in response to a few cases of alleged harassment. The University of Miami received accolades from some female philosophers last summer when it pressured a professor to resign, but a female graduate student has filed a federal complaint saying the university put its own interests above hers by simply encouraging him to leave rather than charging him with sex harassment.
In all three situations, administrators’ actions have been met with protests: student picketing and a faculty petition, in addition to a costly lawsuit at Northwestern; a federal complaint at Miami; and criticism from the American Association of University Professors at Boulder.
“I can’t recall anything like this ever in the last 20 years of academic philosophy,” Brian Leiter, a professor of law at the University of Chicago, says of the number of sex-harassment cases in the discipline. Mr. Leiter, who directs the university’s Center for Law, Philosophy, and Human Values, publishes a popular ranking of philosophy programs, and a blog on which he comments on the discipline.
“What this means,” he says, “is women have become less tolerant of this stuff, and universities are now much more sensitive to the fact that they need to act.”
The image of a seasoned professor seducing an undergraduate is a standard academic cliché, depicted in jokes, movies, and books. Jane Gallop, a 68-year-old professor of English at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, has written about her own history of sexual relationships with both her male professors and her male and female students.
“These relationships have been going on since before any of us were alive,” says Ms. Gallop, who has said that her relationships were natural, not nefarious. In 1992, though, a female student disagreed and charged Ms. Gallop with sex harassment. Wisconsin eventually dismissed the complaint but found that the professor had inappropriately engaged in an “amorous relationship” with the student, whom she supervised, and put a letter stating as much in her personnel file.
Interactions between professors and students that start off professional and become personal have become the source of most sex-harassment allegations, say campus officials and others who deal with such issues. That’s a change from when Ms. Dziech wrote her book about lecherous professors.
Rarely, she says, do professors now tell students, “You have to sleep with me or else.” That kind of harassment, says Ms. Dziech, has virtually disappeared.
Harassment charges that evolve from professors’ getting too close to students, however, can be the hardest to police. What can seem consensual to a professor might not to a student. And what may seem right for a while to a student can later come to feel wrong.
Some professors argue that the power imbalance between professors and students means that such relationships can never be mutual.
“There should be a blanket don’t-touch policy, just as there is with doctors and analysts.”
“The more powerful the faculty member is, and the more central they are to the student’s success, the less likely there is to be any chance of consent,” says Heidi Howkins Lockwood, an associate professor of philosophy at Southern Connecticut State University, who says she was in what she calls an inappropriate sexual relationship with her adviser, but didn’t complain, when she was a graduate student 15 years ago. “There should be a blanket don’t-touch policy, just as there is with doctors and analysts,” she says.
Colleges take a range of approaches to try to stop these relationships from going too far. Some simply recommend that professors stay out of sexual or amorous relationships. Others tell professors that they must report such relationships with students they supervise and remove themselves from supervision. Some institutions have begun banning professors from having sexual contact with any undergraduates, and instructing professors who violate that ban that they can be fired.
Colleges have been stiffening their policies in part as a reaction to a “Dear Colleague” letter the U.S. Education Department issued three years ago, laying out institutions’ responsibilities in responding to sexual assault and signaling stepped-up enforcement of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the federal law barring sex discrimination at institutions that receive federal funds. Meant to prohibit sex discrimination, the law requires colleges to investigate and resolve reports of sexual misconduct whether or not the police are involved.
“This was the dawn of a new awakening,” says Saundra K. Schuster, a lawyer for the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management, which consults with colleges on sexual-misconduct investigations.
While most of the attention on campuses related to Title IX centers on problems between students, the letter also put colleges on notice that they must fairly handle students’ complaints against professors. Institutions must respond to those in a uniform way, says Ms. Schuster, one that attempts to support students who complain, stop any misbehavior, and prevent it from recurring.
Despite colleges’ efforts, sexual interactions between professors and students may seem more acceptable now, not less, Ms. Dziech says: “We are in a sex-saturated culture, which has normalized the hook-up in students’ minds.”
Meanwhile, contemporary faculty life may discourage professors from thinking about the consequences of sexual relationships with students. Individual scholars often identify more with their own discipline than with their institution, say faculty members, leading professors to feel less concerned about how their behavior might affect their university’s image and reputation.
Professors also typically have a hands-off attitude when it comes to their colleagues’ behavior and can be reluctant to call one another out even if they see what looks like an inappropriate relationship between a colleague and a student.
“We work together, read each other’s papers, debate and discuss and drink at conferences,” says Ms. Lockwood. “To censor and cast a faculty member out of the community is as serious as a decision to label a family member a black sheep.”
“With smart students, there is a sense of equality. I have stuff to teach them. They have stuff to tell me.”
Bonnie Honig, a professor of political science and of modern culture and media at Brown University, says academic culture encourages close relationships between professors and students, including collaboration and debate, which often blur the lines of authority. “There is a generationlessness to the academic setting,” she says. “With smart students, there is a sense of equality. I have stuff to teach them. They have stuff to tell me, too.”
At Northwestern, Peter Ludlow drove a female undergraduate to an art exhibit in February 2012 after she had taken his class on the philosophy of cyberspace. Soon after that evening, the student complained to the university’s Sexual Harassment Prevention Office that Mr. Ludlow, a star professor who was then 55 years old, had refused to return to the campus after they had visited the exhibit and had instead taken her to several bars, where he bought her drinks and she became intoxicated.
He took her back to his apartment, she says, where he touched her inappropriately. The next morning, she says, she woke up in his bed.
Mr. Ludlow has denied that he harassed or assaulted the student or refused to take her home, saying the physical contact they had was mutual.
But the university found that Mr. Ludlow had made “unwelcome and inappropriate sexual advances,” denied him a pay raise in the 2012-13 academic year, and stripped him of his named professorship.
The case, however, is far from over. Students and faculty members have protested, saying the university was too lenient on Mr. Ludlow. When students announced that they would stage a sit-in last term in his classroom, with placards calling for him to be fired, the professor canceled a class meeting. The university eventually removed him from teaching for the remainder of the academic year.
Mr. Ludlow, whose specialty is the philosophy of language and who is well known for his writing and teaching on cybernetic rights and virtual worlds, is due to start a new faculty job at Rutgers University in the fall, but Rutgers students have protested, and the university has refused to comment on whether his appointment will go forward.
In the wake of the Ludlow case, Northwestern has banned all sexual contact between professors and undergraduates. A university committee that handles Title IX complaints has said that Northwestern should specify that faculty members who violate its sex-harassment policies can be fired, something that is not currently spelled out.
The changes were endorsed by professors, including in an online petition, prompted by the Ludlow case, that has been signed by more than 1,600 academics and others. But the panel that handles Title IX disagreed with the petition’s recommendation that Northwestern establish an independent office to investigate sex-harassment complaints.
The university insists that, in Mr. Ludlow’s case, it did everything right. “Northwestern complied fully with its procedures, conducted a prompt and thorough investigation of all of the allegations made by the student to the university, and took a number of corrective and remedial actions in this matter,” a university spokesman said in a statement.
Mr. Ludlow declined to answer questions from The Chronicle.
Ji-Yeon Yuh, an associate professor of Asian-American history at Northwestern, says Mr. Ludlow was guilty of sexual assault and should have been fired. But institutions have an interest in avoiding assault charges, she says. “Universities want statistics on sexual assault to be as low as possible, because those must be reported,” says Ms. Yuh. “It is similar to the Catholic Church—the institution believes it’s in their interest to hush it all up.”
Jacqueline Stevens, a political-science professor at Northwestern, says colleges simply aren’t set up to handle serious cases like the one involving Mr. Ludlow. As a result, she says, the outcome is bound to be viewed as inadequate by some.
Sex-harassment offices were established to process civil violations, she notes, in part to save students from pursuing costly lawsuits over matters that don’t amount to a criminal offense.
“But what ended up happening is that these offices drew much more serious criminal complaints like this one,” Ms. Stevens says of the one involving Mr. Ludlow. “So, by handling these themselves, universities are deterring the reporting of criminal allegations and turning potential criminal matters into civil ones.”
Officials at the University of Miami may have known full well the limitations that colleges face in handling serious cases of harassment—particularly when the charges involve tenured professors who can be difficult to punish, much less fire. When a female graduate student complained in 2012 about Colin McGinn, an eminent professor of philosophy there, university officials interrupted the normal procedure for handling allegations of sexual harassment and pressed him to resign. The student had accused Mr. McGinn of sending her sexually explicit emails and texts, of touching her hands and feet, and of suggesting that they have sex.
If the charges had worked their way through the entire procedure, the university’s Faculty Senate would have had to hear the case and issue a recommendation. Because Mr. McGinn did not have sex with the graduate student, administrators at Miami were apparently concerned that the senate would find in his favor. The university’s president has the final say in such cases, but forcing Mr. McGinn out without the faculty’s approval could have caused an uproar and possibly a legal battle.
So they pushed Mr. McGinn, who is 64, to resign—which he did in December. The philosopher, whose specialty is philosophy of the mind, says Miami told him he was guilty of violating its policy requiring professors who have romantic relationships with students they supervise to report those relationships and sever the supervisory ties. But he says he didn’t believe the policy applied in this case, because the relationship didn’t involve sex.
In the end, says Mr. McGinn, who continues to write books and deliver talks, he decided it wasn’t worth the money it would have cost him to fight the university, and so he agreed to leave. He believes he was the victim of a “witch-hunt mentality.”
“Ten years ago,” he says, “this wouldn’t have been made much of. But at the moment there’s a hysteria.”
The situation at Miami may show just how ineffective college harassment policies are if officials there felt that they had to take Mr. McGinn’s case into their own hands to get the outcome they thought was right. Or perhaps they simply wanted to avoid a costly legal battle with Mr. McGinn, who may have sued if Donna Shalala, the president, had dismissed him without the faculty’s consent.
“Senior administration became involved and determined that an immediate resolution would be the most prudent approach,” Eric D. Isicoff, the university’s lawyer, said in a written statement to The Chronicle. “The entire situation was concluded over a period of only a few months and was deemed by the university to be an appropriate and prompt resolution of the matter.”
Female philosophers who have pushed for the discipline to clean up its act and be more welcoming to women applauded Miami for getting Mr. McGinn out the door fast. But the female graduate student in the case believes that in an effort to protect its own interests, the university ended up doing her wrong. In March she filed a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, accusing Miami of discriminating against her by allowing Mr. McGinn to leave rather than pursuing sex-harassment charges against him.
“Some smart lawyer said, ‘We got the guy out,’ " says Ann Olivarius, the student’s lawyer. “But he got out on a lie. There was no affair, no romance, no consent. It’s a cover-up. This was a classic case of sexual harassment.”
At the University of Colorado at Boulder, it isn’t clear how many philosophy professors have been accused of sexual harassment. A review panel of the American Philosophical Association’s Committee on the Status of Women issued a report saying the Boulder department was rife with “inappropriate sexualized unprofessional behavior.” But instead of punishing only those it found responsible, Boulder administrators shocked the department in January by removing its chairman and suspending graduate-student admissions for the coming academic year.
When the university announced its action, women in the profession hailed the decision. “It is absolutely breathtaking that they did this,” said Hilde Lindemann, a professor at Michigan State University who is chair of the philosophy association’s Committee on the Status of Women.
But both the American Association of University Professors and some Boulder professors now say the university went too far, violating principles of faculty governance and unfairly tarnishing the reputation of all the university’s male philosophers.
“It went way overboard by not only dealing with the problem people but by threatening the entire department and besmirching the reputations of many innocent men,” says Carol E. Cleland, who has been a philosophy professor at Boulder for nearly 30 years. She says she considered leaving for another university this spring because of the controversy.
The review panel found that since 2007 the university had received 15 sex-harassment complaints about philosophers at Boulder, but that the department had done little to deal with the problems. Ms. Cleland, however, says that most of those complaints involved the behavior of just a couple of professors, and that there was very little their faculty colleagues could do.
The university did punish at least one philosophy professor this year by putting him on unpaid leave after finding that he had written email messages asking a female assistant professor and a female graduate student to have sex with him, other faculty members say. The male professor hasn’t been named publicly.
As soon as students file complaints with the university’s Office of Discrimination and Harassment any investigation and other proceedings are confidential. “They blame us, and they say, you better clean this up,” says Ms. Cleland. “This is a very highly ranked philosophy department, and it’s being destroyed and damaged even though there are many innocent people.”
Michael Tooley, a professor of philosophy at Boulder since 1992, agrees, saying all of the men in the department now feel suspect.
“People wonder what will happen when they go give a talk, what are people in the audience going to be thinking about me now coming from the University of Colorado,” he says. An untenured professor at Boulder was so worried about the department and his own future, Mr. Tooley adds, that he had to be hospitalized.
“The point is to tackle this problem head-on and change the entire culture of the department.”
Bronson R. Hilliard, a Boulder spokesman, says the university responded strongly to the report of harassment because it wanted to be a “national leader” in cleaning up the philosophy profession. “This has obviously been a well-documented national problem in philosophy departments, and the dean and the chancellor felt it was time to take a definitive set of actions to set this department on the proper course,” he says. “The point is to tackle this problem head-on and change the entire culture of the department.”
Ryan Huff, another spokesman for the Boulder campus, says the university took action not to punish the department but to ensure that it wasn’t bringing in new students before problems regarding sex-harassment had been solved. While sex harassment may be the fault of individual professors, he says, the entire department in this case had a hand in the setting the tone.
“People who have committed violations of the sex-harassment policy have been punished,” he says. “But there is an overall climate concern in the department, and this is something we want to improve.”
Last month the university held an off-campus retreat for Boulder’s philosophy professors. A facilitator urged them not to keep bad behavior a secret and to call out and report colleagues who they believe act inappropriately with students.
But none of the professors will say much about what went on at the retreat. At the facilitator’s suggestion, they voted on how much of the proceedings to discuss among themselves and how much with others afterward. The vote was for secrecy.