Higher education has long been dogged by the “pass-the-harasser” phenomenon, in which employees found responsible for sexual misconduct have been allowed to quietly depart their colleges, only to be hired by other campuses who knew nothing of their misdeeds. Sometimes the misconduct continues.
That is slowly changing. California is the latest state to consider enacting a law that would require colleges to contact job applicants’ current or past employers to ask about policy violations. Assembly Bill 810, part of a larger package of anti-harassment legislation, has been passed by the state’s lower chamber and is now in the Senate.
The new California bill comes as many institutions, across the country, have taken voluntary steps to improve their due diligence when screening job applicants.
“There’s been numerous examples of this ‘passing the harasser’ happening in California,” said Assemblymember Laura Friedman, the bill’s sponsor.
Under the proposed law, those applying for academic, athletic, or administrative positions at state-funded colleges and universities would have to allow those institutions to check with their previous employers for any substantiated allegations of misconduct.
Applicants in California are already required to disclose such cases, but the state, until now, has lacked the ability to verify those statements.
Job applicants who were previously found to have committed sexual harassment would not automatically be barred from employment, and they could explain the facts of their case if they feel they were wrongly accused.
“It doesn’t say that a university can’t make their own decision,” said Friedman, who previously chaired the legislature’s subcommittee on sexual-harassment issues.
The important thing, the lawmaker said, is that California’s colleges will know about these issues prior to any final hiring decision.
People are getting a lot more careful about who they hire, what kind of background checks they do.
Friedman’s bill mimics existing rules at the University of California at Davis. In an emailed statement to The Chronicle, Binnie Singh, the university’s assistant vice provost for academic affairs, said the rules give administrators “heightened confidence that we are hiring faculty who adhere to the highest standards of academic conduct.” Following the policy “takes considerable effort on the part of Academic Affairs staff,” Singh added.
Peter Lake, a law professor at Stetson University, in Florida, said American higher education has witnessed numerous scandals related to sexual harassment and sexual abuse. These scandals can be “potentially catastrophic” for a college in terms of legal costs and damage to its reputation.
As a result, Lake said, there are widespread efforts to add more due diligence to the hiring process.
He called California’s proposed law “the more-visible tip of an iceberg that’s actually floating around” in higher education.
“People are getting a lot more careful about who they hire, what kind of background checks they do,” Lake said.
Washington State lawmakers enacted a first-in-the-nation “pass-the-harasser” bill in 2020, and updated it last year. The bill is similar to California’s, and also requires that campuses keep a record of employee misconduct and disclose it if another campus asks.
Washington State Rep. Gerry Pollet, who sponsored both the original law and its revisions last year, said he was spurred to action by a front-page Seattle Times story about a high-ranking athletics administrator who was accused of sexually assaulting a University of Washington volleyball player when he gave her a ride in his truck.
The university investigated and found the allegation credible, the Times reported, but the administrator was nevertheless able to land a vice president job at a private college in Arizona less than a year after resigning.
“The hiring institution had no clue,” Pollet told The Chronicle. “And the University of Washington hadn’t felt obligated to tell them.”
Increased vetting can come at a cost. Implementing the Washington law cost the state $1.7 million over the first two years, to pay for centralizing human-resources departments to respond to background-check requests from other colleges, Pollet said.
Although Pollet considers Washington’s law to be a resounding success that has deterred predators away from his state, he said some colleges from other parts of the country simply don’t respond when Washington institutions request information on prior sexual-harassment cases.
These colleges might insist that a public-records request be filed for this information, which could take months to be processed, he said. And unless the job applicant contacts that former employer to speed things up, this delay could cause the applicant to not be considered for the job.
Pollet said if California passes its proposed law, it could help. “If California is asking, I think that, nationally, institutions will become much more responsive,” he said.
