Imagine you are a dean, and a professor on your campus has been accused of sexual harassment. An inquiry makes it clear that you must take some action. But the situation is getting ugly and is likely to be drawn out. Maybe there’s an easier way. Maybe you can make a deal: The professor agrees to resign quietly -- and you agree never to mention the incident, especially if another university calls to check his references.
Experts on sexual harassment call this scenario"passing the harasser” and say versions of it are constantly played out on campuses. Critics of the practice say colleges have an obligation to inform prospective employers about a professor’s complete work history. Some say it may be illegal to hush up problems.
“I do not believe we should pass on people who are going to threaten the educational environment,” says Helen Moore, a professor of sociology who helped write the University of Nebraska’s sexual-harassment policy."I think it’s unethical.”
Others, however, warn that colleges may invade the privacy of a professor or defame him by passing along unsubstantiated charges to a potential employer. Moreover, they argue, the procedures that many colleges use to investigate and convict professors of sexual harassment are unconstitutional, so it’s unfair to convey those findings to future employers.
“A panel of five sexual-harassment experts is not a jury of peers. And ‘guilty until proven innocent’ is a lot different from ‘innocent until proven guilty,’” says John A. Stewart, a lawyer representing a Yale University professor who was found guilty of harassment by a university panel this fall and now is at risk of losing a job offer from the Ohio State University."In the meantime, my client’s career may be ruined.”
Mr. Stewart’s client, Jay Jorgenson, an assistant math professor, was found to have sexually harassed a freshman in his introductory-calculus course last year. The woman, who said the two of them had had a sexual relationship for two months, produced e-mail messages that they had exchanged to plan their dates. Dr. Jorgenson denied having any kind of romantic relationship with the woman, and he denied sending the e-mail.
Last March he accepted a post at Ohio State; she filed a complaint a month later. He didn’t mention the complaint or Yale’s subsequent findings to Ohio State, where he was to begin a tenure-track post this coming January. But the woman went public with her accusations in October, and now Ohio State’s lawyers are reviewing the deal, which its trustees have yet to approve.
A similar controversy broke out in October at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. After the university hired William Grange in a tenured post in theater, but before he arrived at the campus, top administrators learned that he had been demoted from a chairmanship at Marquette University in 1994 after two female students accused him of harassment. Dr. Grange denied their charges and was never found guilty. Marquette made public what it said were the terms of a settlement with Dr. Grange, but it sealed the file that spelled out the complaints against him. He began teaching at Nebraska last August.
Lawyers say colleges, fearful of lawsuits, typically pass such professors on without mentioning that they have faced allegations of harassment. In order to be rid of a difficult employee, colleges often negotiate the script of a reference that is to be read to prospective employers.
“All of this is, of course, designed to camouflage the problem for which the man or woman is resigning,” says Tom Flygare, a former lawyer for the University of New Hampshire who opposes the approach.
Some institutions, including Yale, are bound by state law not to disclose information in a personnel file without the employee’s written consent. Mr. Flygare thinks such laws protect misconduct and allow unsatisfactory performers to go from job to job."At best, they’re bad performers,” he says. “At worst, they hurt people.”
Other lawyers note that many states have been changing those laws. In Massachusetts, a college would be granted “conditional privilege” to talk about an employee to another college so long as the information transmitted was of"common interest” or"reasonably calculated to protect and further the common interest.” In other words, if the institutions don’t act with malice, they’re protected.
What the laws overlook, however, is that the two institutions don’t always have a common interest."You want to get rid of that person, and yet you know he’s going to continue his behavior wherever you send him,” explains a humanities professor at Nebraska who asked not to be identified. So how much information do you provide a prospective employer? “That’s the moral dilemma,” she says.
Nebraska has been on both the sending and the receiving ends of this scenario, she says, pointing to the case of Helmut Pfanner, who came to Nebraska from the University of New Hampshire and then left for Vanderbilt University.
At Vanderbilt, a lawsuit revealed four-year-old accusations of harassment against Dr. Pfanner and suggested that he may have had problems at previous institutions. Sabine Cramer, a former professor at Vanderbilt, sued the institution in February. She claimed that she had been denied a contract because Dr. Pfanner, who was her chairman in German and Slavic languages, was retaliating against her. He was angry, she claimed, because she had helped five female students file a sexual-harassment complaint against him. The suit said Vanderbilt had demoted him from the chairmanship and restricted his teaching after the complaints were made.
As part of the lawsuit, Professor Cramer’s lawyer has deposed officials at two of Dr. Pfanner’s previous employers -- Nebraska and New Hampshire -- believing that he may have harassed or retaliated against others during his chairmanships at those institutions. Neither institution had a record of such allegations, although women on both campuses say they complained formally and informally.
Vanderbilt and Dr. Pfanner have denied the retaliation charges, and he has denied sexually harassing anyone, anywhere. Vanderbilt would not discuss how the harassment complaints were resolved. In an e-mail message from Austria, where he is conducting research, he acknowledged that when Vanderbilt hired him,"rumors had reached the search committee of ‘my harassing’ people” at Nebraska. He said the committee had investigated and determined they were"unfounded.”
A professor at New Hampshire, who asked to remain anonymous, says she heard an administrator there talk of"praising away” Professor Pfanner to help his chances at Nebraska. Some of his former colleagues at New Hampshire say he was a divisive chairman who harassed everyone, especially women."There were moments when I was called into his office and told if I knew what was good for me, I better support him,” said Aleksandra Fleszar, now an associate professor and head of the Russian department at New Hampshire. She said he had also made comments amounting to sexual harassment. She and her colleagues say he stepped down from his chairmanship in 1985 and the next year took the post at Nebraska.
Dr. Pfanner says that, like all chairmen, he has had a few critics in every department he has led."I have never changed position because of any allegations raised against me,” he says."I have never willfully or knowingly harassed any of my colleagues or students, either sexually or otherwise.” In fact, he says, Dr. Cramer, the plaintiff in the Vanderbilt suit, orchestrated the students’ complaints to retaliate against him because he had refused to date her. Dr. Cramer calls that accusation"a joke.”
If academics took harassment as seriously as they do other forms of professional misconduct, like plagiarism, then institutions would be less likely to give misleading or incomplete references in cases where harassment has been alleged, says Mary Gray, a mathematics professor at American University. She has worked with the American Association of University Professors on its guidelines for handling sexual harassment. Professors communicate details of plagiarism charges because if they didn’t, she says,"it would come back to haunt them. It’s sort of self-preservation.”
Warning other institutions about an accused harasser should be like notifying communities when convicted sex offenders move into the neighborhood, Dr. Gray argues."The notion of institutions’ acting in a parental capacity for students is old, but I still think that institutions have some obligation not to put someone who has a propensity to harass in a situation where he can do it easily.”
To other observers, however, that kind of comparison shows how out of control the campus"sexual-harassment police” are.
“The attitude seems to be that this is some kind of pedophilia, some child-molestation business, some kind of compulsion that’s bound to recur,” says Roger Howe, a mathematics professor at Yale and one of 15 professors who have issued a letter supporting Dr. Jorgenson, the assistant professor of mathematics who was found guilty of harassment. In most sexual-harassment cases, Dr. Howe says,"my instincts would be that you’re dealing with intelligent people who crossed some kind of gray line without understanding where they were, and they understand that now and will not repeat it.”
Yale advises professors to avoid consensual sexual relationships with their students and warns that should a harassment complaint arise from such a relationship, the onus is on the professor to prove his or her innocence. Dr. Jorgenson, through his lawyer, has denied so much as holding the woman’s hand.
Mr. Stewart, his lawyer, says that in hindsight, his client probably"should have given a heads-up to Ohio State that this was cooking and explained that he was not guilty and that he would be very surprised if anything came of it.” But, the lawyer wonders, what if his client had been forthcoming and then been found innocent of the charges? Would Ohio State have had second thoughts about hiring him anyway?
At Nebraska, when top administrators learned about the past allegations against Dr. Grange, of the theater department, they say they did consider breaking their deal with him. But doing so would have meant firing a tenured professor, they explain, and they couldn’t show cause.
Despite his inclination to avoid such conflicts, Alvah M. Kilgore, associate vice-chancellor for academic affairs at Nebraska, sees both sides of these stories."What can a person do to rebuild his career if he’s never been proven guilty but is tainted for life?” he says."If I put myself in Grange’s position, and I felt that everything was settled and I didn’t have to report it because I denied it and was never proven guilty, then why would I have to say anything about it?”
But, Dr. Kilgore adds,"from the hiring agency’s perspective, I’d say it’s nice to know about that in advance.”
Jonathan R. Alger, associate counsel to the American Association of University Professors, argues against passing along unsolicited information about professors."Part of the reason you protect confidentiality is that you want to encourage people to improve their behavior,” he says.
After he was accused of harassment, Dr. Grange says he voluntarily decided to see a counselor. He now refers to it as entering"re-education.” He and the counselor agreed that he was the real victim, he says:"Nothing was sexual in anything I said or did.” He can’t remember the exact complaints, but thinks his accusers were upset by some stage directions he had given them.
His case has prompted Nebraska officials to reconsider the kinds of questions they should be asking prospective employees, especially because Nebraska’s policy prohibits search committees from calling anyone other than the references provided by an applicant.
Supporters of increased disclosure say current or former employers are unlikely to offer negative information, and so hiring institutions need to raise general questions about an applicant’s behavior.
In fact, some academics say that because of the tendency in academe to bury complaints, they operate under the theory that where there’s enough smoke, there’s fire.
“Rumors are often dismissed as falsehoods,” says Professor Moore, the Nebraska sociology professor who helped write its sexual-harassment code."But rumors are often a way of generating and circulating information that is subversive, challenging, and threatening.”
She adds:"If I knew there were rumors about an individual, I would pass them along and the hiring institution should find out the truth if the sending institution hasn’t.” She says she would act simply out of concern for students.
Some lawyers say institutions should be concerned about students’ suing for negligence if colleges give good references for professors who have been accused of harassment.
A former student of the University of Pennsylvania filed such a suit in federal court in 1994. Lisa Topol claimed that she had been harassed by her English professor, Malcolm Woodfield. Along with suits against him and Penn, she also sued Bates College, his previous employer. She claimed that Bates had known of harassment complaints against him there, yet"sent uniformly positive recommendations” about him to Penn. Professor Woodfield conceded that he and Ms. Topol had had a sexual relationship but said it had been consensual and not constituted harassment. The suits were settled confidentially.
At Yale, the case against Dr. Jorgenson was handled confidentially, too, until the woman who filed the complaint went to the press. She says she was angry with Yale’s decision to put a reprimand in his file but to allow him to keep teaching until he left the university in January. The woman, who has not been identified, declined to give her name to The Chronicle.
She claims that she and Dr. Jorgenson began dating in November 1995, when she was 17. She complained to Yale months after the relationship soured, she says, because she was angry with the way he had treated her in the end.
When their relationship began, she says, she worried that they could get into trouble with Yale, but she never considered his behavior harassment. More recently, she says, she’s become better educated on the subject. She has read The Lecherous Professor, for example."I think if Ohio State hires him knowing this, it speaks poorly of how much institutions care for their students’ safety,” she says."If you do it once, you do it twice.”
She acknowledges that Dr. Jorgenson has never been accused of harassing any other student, but, she says,"how many freshmen do you get? Should you get one gratis freshman? Or two? Or three? I think there should be a no-tolerance zone.”