Officials at the University of California at Santa Cruz said over the weekend that they were “deeply concerned” about allegations that a professor in the history-of-consciousness department sexually harassed and assaulted students over a number of years.
The professor, Gopal Balakrishnan, has denied the accusations, made by seven anonymous individuals whose accounts are part of a public statement circulating on the internet.
The statement described him as someone who regularly hung out with undergraduate and graduate students in bars and at parties.
The anonymous first-person accounts, which date to 2009, alleged nights of heavy drinking and drug use at which Mr. Balakrishnan was often the only faculty member present.
They accused him of sexually propositioning students and other activists, and said that some of his colleagues were aware of his behavior. They either played it down or tried to undermine the credibility of those who complained, the accusers said.
One account came from a woman who was a freshman at Santa Cruz in 2009, a year when activists occupied an administration building to protest tuition increases and to issue other demands.
“I was introduced to GB as the ‘down’ Marxist professor,” she wrote. “Students of the movement were really enamored with him, and it was a must to take his classes,” she wrote. “The upsetting thing about this was that everyone knew he was creepy to women. It seemed to be tolerable to everyone because he was a Marxist and supported the student movement.”
By Sunday the statement had drawn more than 130 signatures of support for the accusers.
Mr. Balakrishnan denied the accusations over the weekend, saying the unnamed accusers were simply spreading gossip that the university’s Title IX office, after an initial evaluation, had decided didn’t merit a full investigation.
Meanwhile, he said, a campaign of public humiliation that had begun early in the spring continued.
“This spring I was subject to nearly two and half months of graffiti attacking me in my workplace, accusing me of being a sexual predator, followed more by anonymous leafleting along the same lines, which called for a boycott of my classes, also that I no longer be invited to conferences and that my work be ignored,” Mr. Balakrishnan wrote in an email to The Chronicle.
He decided to take this year off, he said in an interview, “to be out of that environment.” He said he had no way to determine who his accusers are and doesn’t recognize any of the encounters they describe.
Mr. Balakrishnan said he believes that the same people who slid fliers under the doors of his colleagues and scrawled messages about him on the walls outside his office helped circulate the open public letter, hoping that “in the current context of national indignation around the issue of sexual harassment, they might have a better shot.”
‘A Serious Violation’ if True
The response from university officials over the weekend indicated they were willing to take another look at the complaints.
A campus spokesman, Scott Hernandez-Jason, said that if the allegations were true, they “represent a serious violation of campus policy.”
He said the Title IX and academic-personnel offices were aware of the allegations and were asking anyone with additional information to report it so they can investigate.
“Sexual misconduct has no place at UC-Santa Cruz, and we seek to hold perpetrators accountable,” he said.
The tone has changed considerably since May, when Mr. Balakrishnan said the university’s Title IX office sent him a letter saying that based on its initial inquiry, it didn’t see the need for a formal investigation. University officials did not respond to a request for a copy of that letter.
According to his online bio, Mr. Balakrishnan teaches seminars in classical political thought, philosophy, history, Marxism, and critical theory.
The statement charged that he used his position of power as a professor and influential academic “to intimidate, harass, and even assault young women and gender nonconforming people.” The statement was not specifically directed to the university, but to “the community of intellectuals, academics, radicals, and current and former students” of Mr. Balakrishnan to make clear what kinds of behavior should and should not be tolerated.
“GB’s behavior has kept women and gender nonconforming people, especially younger people with less social capital, from participating in political and intellectual spaces,” the statement read. It echoed a point emphasized by many accusers: the unmeasurable toll of professional opportunities and talent lost when women opted out rather than continue to endure the pain and humiliation of sexual harassment. The statement asked, “How many people have been pushed out of meetings, classrooms, conferences, journals, and social events” because they feared running into him?
Mr. Balakrishnan argued that it was he who had been pushed out of intellectual gatherings by an orchestrated attempt to smear his reputation.
Asked why students would spread untrue stories about him, he said some considered his manner arrogant. In the circle of politically active scholars, he added, cliques developed and rumors spread, including one, which he denied, that he had sexually assaulted one of his graduate students.
The anonymous statement said Mr. Balakrishnan and his supporters were not welcome at any event or gatherings the accusers are attending — an admonition that was echoed on Twitter.
In keeping with the Public Statement on Gopal Balakrishnan and Sexual Harassment, Gopal Balakrishnan is not welcome at Commune Editions events or spaces, which we hope to help make as safe as possible for vulnerable people.
— Commune Editions (@CommuneEditions) November 30, 2017
Among those who signed the statement were Laura Martin, a Santa Cruz graduate with a Ph.D. in history.
She said the letter signers had come together to support undergraduates who were frustrated that the Title IX complaint hadn’t moved ahead.
One of his colleagues cautioned that even as more anonymous complaints surfaced, Mr. Balakrishnan should still be afforded due process. Christopher Connery, a professor of literature, said in an email that, for some time, “there has been an organized campaign to destroy Professor Balakrishnan’s life” and that the Title IX process needs to play out.
But one of the letter’s signers, Oki Sogumi, a writer who met Mr. Balakrishnan in 2009, when she was an undergraduate at the University of California at Davis, said she isn’t holding out hope for that. The Title IX process, she contends, protects the interest of the university, not its students.
Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.
