A University of Nevada at Reno faculty member who accused her one-time adviser, and later mentor, of sexually abusing her for years told The Chronicle on Tuesday that she had been fired.
It wasn’t the outcome Feifei Fan had hoped for when she filed a Title IX complaint against Yanyao Jiang, who recruited her from China when she was a 22-year-old recent college graduate to work in his mechanical-engineering lab.
Her firing, first reported in a local paper, This is Reno, ends a tumultuous period for the two tenured faculty members, whose employment at the university both ended on January 19, a university spokesman confirmed. He said privacy rules prohibited him from saying why they left, or whether either did so voluntarily.
Dueling Complaints
Now Feifei Fan and Yanyao Jiang work in the same department, and their tangled case is headed for a Title IX showdown.
A spokesman for Jiang said he was checking with Jiang’s lawyer and a comment wasn’t immediately issued. Jiang admitted having a sexual relationship with Fan on and off between 2006 and 2019, but he says it was consensual. He said it was she who had been harassing and threatening him and his wife after he tried to end the relationship. Fan admitted in a prior conversation with The Chronicle that she had bought a handgun for protection, but denied threatening to use it against Jiang or his family.
The university’s consensual-relationship policy “prohibits romantic or sexual relations in circumstances in which one of the individuals is in a position of direct professional power over the other.” The policy specifically states that it includes faculty members who assign grades or supervisors who evaluate an employee’s work.
Fan, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, and Jiang, who was a full professor in the department, filed Title IX complaints against each other. Those were heard in early December by an outside hearing officer.
In December 2022, Fan also filed a $20-million lawsuit against the Nevada System of Higher Education, representing the university. It accused the university of allowing Jiang to take advantage of her vulnerable state as a graduate student to trap her in what she called years of “sexual slavery.” She dropped that lawsuit and said she was planning to file another after her new lawyer had time to catch up on the case. She also filed lawsuits against Jiang and his wife, which were dismissed.
Jiang was Fan’s adviser while she worked in his lab from 2006 to 2008. After earning her master’s degree that year, Fan left to earn a Ph.D. at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She then returned to the University of Nevada as an assistant professor of mechanical engineering in 2015. Jiang was assigned as her mentor. The intimate relationship, which had continued sporadically during her absence from Reno, resumed until 2019, when he said he tried to call it off.
Their dueling complaints illustrated how messy and complicated such cases can be when one person has professional power over another, but the other appears to be giving consent.
After students crashed a ground-breaking ceremony last year to protest the university’s handling of Fan’s case, and others involving accusations of sexual harassment, the university’s president, Brian Sandoval, announced that the university was making changes in its Title IX procedures. The changes, which he said were already underway, included making the Title IX office more visible and effective.
