As of Friday, Janice Harper was no longer an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. In a lawsuit she filed last spring in chancery court in Knoxville, Ms. Harper says her colleagues turned against her and the university denied her tenure after she complained of sexual harassment by a popular male lecturer.
But the case isn’t that simple. Since Ms. Harper originally complained about the lecturer, in October 2007, she has faced some bizarre accusations herself, including a graduate student’s claim that Ms. Harper talked about plans to make a hydrogen bomb. That claim, says Ms. Harper, touched off a 2008 investigation by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the FBI,although Ms. Harper denied ever making the remarks.
She says that the federal investigation—which her lawsuit contends has never resulted in any charges against her—forced her to abandon her research, on the health effects of depleted uranium, because she could no longer protect the anonymity of her subjects. Depleted uranium is a waste product of nuclear weapons and reactors, and Ms. Harper’s research has concerned its effect on people and the environment.
The federal investigation has cost Ms. Harper her academic career, she says, because she has been unable to find another university job. “It’s like being accused of molesting children,” she says of the accusation that she was plotting to build a bomb.
Ms. Harper’s lawsuit, which the university just had moved from state to federal court, accuses the institution of overreacting by taking the graduate student’s complaints to the FBI, and of carrying out a gender-discrimination and retaliation campaign against her. As the professor’s problems have unfolded over the last couple of years, according to the lawsuit, her colleagues at Knoxville have steadily distanced themselves, calling her mentally unstable.
Deck Was Stacked
Meanwhile, a faculty panel that investigated Ms. Harper’s appeal of her tenure denial said in a report it issued in June that the university had treated her unfairly. Administrators had told Ms. Harper they rejected her tenure bid because she was not collegial enough and because she did not have letters of support from appropriate and impartial scholars from outside the university, her lawsuit says.
But the faculty panel called those “pretexts.” It said the deck was stacked against Ms. Harper from the beginning by people who wanted her gone.
“The outcome was decided by all parties in the university hierarchy long before the tenure application was ever filed,” says the report.
In a written statement, the university’s chancellor, Jimmy G. Cheek, said the university had done nothing wrong. “The university did not discriminate against, retaliate against, or otherwise treat Dr. Harper unlawfully,” Mr. Cheek said. “The university considered Dr. Harper’s tenure application on its merits and decided that she had not fulfilled the criteria necessary for an award of tenure.”
Ms. Harper, who is 51 and came to Knoxville in 2004 after working on the tenure track at the University of Houston, says all of her evaluations were fine until she complained about the male lecturer, who still teaches at the university. The anthropology department, which has no tenured female faculty members, was hostile to women who spoke out about gender issues, she says.
“I was on the forefront of change and trying to get women hired,” she says. “I was an outspoken woman in a department that did not have a history of having outspoken women.”