Students Accused a Colorado Professor of Harassment. Now She’s Been Placed on Leave.

The students said it sometimes started with intensely personal text messages and requests to meet off-campus. The conversations might veer into graphic details about the professor’s sex life. The allegations reported to investigators even involved cases of kissing and touching.

The accusations against Amy C. Wilkins, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Colorado at Boulder, describe a pattern of sexual harassment and inappropriate conduct that spans more than a decade.

Wilkins, who did not respond to repeated emails and phone calls from The Chronicle, was placed on paid administrative leave on October 1, banned from the campus, and ordered not to contact seven people while university officials investigate.

The interim chair of sociology, Herbert H. Covert, referred all inquiries about Wilkins to a university spokesman. Several of her colleagues in the department declined to comment or did not respond to emails. The campus spokesman confirmed her leave but said he could not release further details “due to personnel privacy laws and policies.”

According to sources close to the investigation, Wilkins is being investigated for sexual misconduct and harassment of people she supervised, in part by pressuring students to engage in inappropriate sexual conduct and conversations.

Interviews with a half-dozen former sociology students at Boulder paint a picture of a scholar who enjoyed having a coterie of fans who shared her interest in issues surrounding sexuality and gender.

Wilkins’s position, from 2014 to 2016, as director of the graduate program in the sociology department, gave her power over students’ teaching assignments and academic progress. So even if they weren’t direct advisees, students couldn’t afford to cross her, the students said.

Wilkins is not the first sociologist accused of being on the wrong side of the #MeToo movement.

Over the summer, the spotlight was on Michael Kimmel, a professor of sociology and gender studies at Stony Brook University. Kimmel, who has been accused of sexual harassment by former students, delayed accepting an award from the American Sociological Association to allow those who felt he’d mistreated them time to file complaints. That news, along with recent controversies surrounding sociologists at the University of Texas at Austin and other institutions, have prompted soul-searching in sociology circles about the best ways to avoid abuses of power within entrenched academic hierarchies.

Concerns over such dynamics exploded this year when a New York University professor of German and comparative literature, Avital Ronell, was suspended for a year without pay after being found responsible for sexually harassing her advisee, Nimrod Reitman.

Ronell has denied harassing Reitman, saying the florid, campy emails the two exchanged were just the way she speaks, and that he’d never seemed bothered by them.

Reading a piece in The Chronicle that unpacked how Reitman said he felt obligated to return Ronell’s affections was “a huge turning point” in one former Colorado student’s decision to come forward. “Here’s a university showing they understand he had to act certain ways with her because of the coercive nature of the relationship,” the former student said in an interview.

Consent or Coercion

Sometimes the lines between consent and coercion can become blurred, as one woman said she found out when she willingly entered into a relationship with her professor. It’s only looking back more than a decade later that she questions how much agency a 20-year-old junior really had in taking a course from a professor she looked up to and wanted to impress, she said in an interview. The former student asked not to be identified, because she feared both personal and professional repercussions.

The university’s conflict-of-interest policy has, since 2005, banned intimate relationships between faculty members and students over whom they have “direct evaluative authority.”

“Amorous relationships between parties of unequal power greatly increase the possibility that the individual with the evaluative responsibility, typically a supervisor or a faculty member, will abuse her/his power and sexually exploit the student or employee,” the policy states.

The former student met Wilkins in the fall of 2006, when she was a junior sociology major hoping to go on to earn a doctorate. It was Wilkins’s first semester teaching at Boulder.

In written remarks she read to investigators, the former student said she found the professor “smart and tough, maybe the smartest and toughest person I’d ever met.”

She would chat with Wilkins after class about feminist-sociology topics, and started dropping in on her during office hours. That’s where Wilkins first kissed her, she said.

“I felt guilty and thrilled and confused, worried about her job and her family … but excited about this kind of attention from a badass and confused how things developed so rapidly and why me,” she wrote in her statement.

The relationship “intensely skyrocketed” during her class with Wilkins, she wrote. It became physical, she said, and Wilkins talked with her about her sex life. They watched movies together, traveled together, went to clubs, and exchanged emails in which the student expressed “intense longing and desire, which is now embarrassing to read.”

When gossip began circulating about them during the student’s spring class with Wilkins, her professor became more distant, the former student said. Eventually, Wilkins began telling her she couldn’t understand how anyone would think they were intimately involved.

The former student said that she wound up feeling crazy and creepy, and that Wilkins was making her feel like “an obsessed jackass.” She took an extended leave from the course and finished it late.

The next year, she said, she noticed another of Wilkins’s students “WAY involved and always around her. I felt angry that she might be repeating the cultivation of worship, dangling love and sexuality and cool-status and affection and intellectual stimulation.”

Looking back, the former student wrote, “Young me needed someone to say, Hey, this isn’t O.K., a person in power has betrayed you and then abusively manipulated you, and you have options if you want and need.”

She never did go to graduate school. “This experience burned me on the academy forever,” she said in an interview with The Chronicle.

Fears of Retaliation

Wilkins isn’t the only faculty member in the Boulder sociology department who has faced complaints in recent years. Patricia A. Adler offended some students by staging a gritty classroom skit about prostitution in a course about deviance. Controversy over how her case was handled further fractured the department.

A climate survey conducted in 2016 by a collective of sociology graduate students at Boulder found that fears of retaliation for reporting problems were widespread. Some 85 percent of the 35 graduate students surveyed said they were concerned that they’d face retaliation if they filed a sexual-harassment complaint against a faculty member. That was up from 78 percent the year before.

As “mandatory reporters” under the university’s harassment policy, graduate students worried that any complaints about possible harassment could trigger a Title IX investigation that could jeopardize their careers. They wanted a process within the sociology department to air concerns or questions without feeling they’d become pariahs if it blew up into scandal.

“We felt graduate students needed protections because there were obvious power imbalances with people who could ruin your career,” said Nnenia Campbell, who received her doctorate in 2016.

Complicating matters was that Wilkins was not only director of the department’s graduate program at the time but also chaired the committee being asked to create an internal complaint process. Meanwhile, she was the target of some of the stories that students were circulating about inappropriate behavior. A former graduate student and advisee who asked not to be identified because she feared retribution said the professor tried to engage her in discussions about Wilkins’s own sex life.

“There were a couple of instances when I made it very clear with body language and avoidance that I didn’t want to hear about it,” the former advisee said.

A friend, she added, confided in her that Wilkins was inviting her to meet up in bars and that “she experienced a lot of stress and anxiety and wasn’t sure how to draw the line” when she felt that her position in the politically divided department was already precarious.

Mary A. Robertson, who earned a Ph.D. from Boulder in 2014, said that even though her area of focus, which includes the sociology of sexualities, sex, and gender, overlaps with Wilkins’s, she avoided working closely with her.

“When I came in, I was advised by my graduate-student mentors and to some extent faculty not to work with her,” she said.

Robertson, who is now an assistant professor of sociology at California State University at San Marcos, said teaching about sexuality without inadvertently offending someone isn’t always easy. That makes it all the more important, she said, to avoid treating advisees like buddies and oversharing personal information.

The relationship between a doctoral student and adviser is “an intimate personal relationship, and that’s OK,” she said. Like other former graduate students interviewed, she said she wished there were a way, short of filing a complaint that could lead to a Title IX investigation, to let someone know that a given behavior was discomfiting.

Some sort of restorative justice process, in which the accused person apologizes and agrees to make amends, could catch problems before they spiral out of control, Robertson said.

“If, over six years of working as a colleague with someone, somewhere along the line she crosses boundaries, what redress do you have” that isn’t going to get someone severely sanctioned? Robertson asked. “That’s a terrible burden to put on anyone, especially a graduate student.”

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.