Last year, student activists at New York University reached a conclusion. A professor who’d harassed a graduate student was returning. And that was untenable.
A university investigation had found that Avital Ronell, the high-profile professor of German and comparative literature, had sexually harassed a former advisee. Her conduct was “sufficiently pervasive” to alter the terms and conditions of the student’s learning environment. She’d been suspended for a year without pay.
When Ronell’s return was imminent, student groups mounted an offense. They wanted her gone. But they also wanted more, like reforms in the Title IX reporting process, an annual report with information and statistics on all Title IX complaints, and a restorative-justice option for dealing with sexual misconduct. “It’s a labor issue,” one graduate student told The Chronicle at the time, a violation of graduate students’ rights as employees to be “forced to work in environments with people found guilty of sexual harassment.”
The university agreed to a few changes but not enough, by frustrated students’ standards. In December, they confronted Ronell in a hallway. “We will not tolerate sexual harassment at NYU,” said one protester, according to a video of the interaction. “This is all allegations without proof,” Ronell replied before a security guard led her away.
The group that led the confrontation, NYUtoo, takes its name from the #MeToo movement, which over the past two years has seen success on college campuses. Victims of sexual assault are more likely to come forward, and more likely to be believed. That’s created momentum: Now students, concerned faculty members, and their allies are demanding more stringent regulation of bad behavior. They want to broaden the scope of what’s forbidden. They want perpetrators to suffer lasting consequences. And they want accountability not just to the person harmed but to the community.
Perhaps most difficult of all, they want colleges to evolve from policies that punish harassment to a culture that prevents it. “It doesn’t matter how many pieces of paper you have saying you care about this stuff,” says Kathryn B. H. Clancy, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, who has researched sexual harassment. “What matters is whether you really are creating conditions that are intolerant of bad behavior.”
The #MeToo movement is a slow burn that caught fire. Founded in 2006 by Tarana Burke, a civil-rights activist, the hashtag went viral on social media more than a decade later when news outlets reported stories about the movie producer Harvey Weinstein’s alleged sexual assaults, including rape.
An avalanche of allegations against other celebrities and then politicians followed. But by that time, higher education had already been grappling with sexual misconduct and related issues for years.
What became known as the Dear Colleague Letter, issued by the Obama administration in 2011, laid much of the groundwork. It put colleges on notice that the federal government would hold them accountable for properly investigating sexual-misconduct cases and ensuring that campus environments didn’t impede students’ access to education. Institutions were now responsible for their cultures in ways they hadn’t been before.
Around that time, campus activism ratcheted up. Students publicly criticized what they saw as willful blindness to the issue of sexual assault. Terms like “acquaintance rape” and “affirmative consent” jumped from campuses into the public lexicon, paving the way for #MeToo.
Clancy says the reception of two research endeavors about sexual harassment and assault released just four years apart shows a shift in attitude. In 2014, she and three colleagues published the results and analysis of an online questionnaire sent to field scientists in PLOS ONE, showing that nearly two-thirds of them had been sexually harassed. It got media attention, Clancy says, but was written off by some as mere service work even though the researchers had consulted subject-matter experts and put the study through the Institutional Review Board at Illinois.
In 2018, under the banner of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Clancy was on a committee that co-authored a landmark report. It found, among many other things, that half of women in science experience some form of harassment. It was a watershed moment. By then, more people were recognizing harassment as a real, serious issue, Clancy says. Today, plenty of people still don’t believe women or victims of any gender, she added, but it has gotten harder to say so publicly.
That’s created a space, says Clancy, for advocates “to start to push.”
One push is to expand the scope of what behavior is considered unacceptable.
At Illinois, a committee that took on faculty sexual misconduct concluded in September that the definition in the existing policy was too limited: It didn’t outright prohibit many types of behavior that might not rise to the level of creating a hostile environment or are quid pro quo, but are still harmful. The committee recommended changing the policy so that it would prohibit not just sexual harassment as defined by Title IX, but also “related improper behavior.”
That includes “any unwelcome sexual, sex-based, or gender-based conduct occurring within or having an impact on the workplace or academic environment, regardless of how it is conducted (physically, verbally, in writing, or via an electronic medium) and regardless of the genders of the individuals involved.”
In investigating reports of violations, the report noted, “due consideration” will be given to an individual’s rights to free speech, expression, and academic freedom.
The task force made 64 recommendations in total. Some of those recommendations — like adding resources to the Women’s Resources Center — were put in place immediately, says Bill Bernhard, the vice provost for academic affairs. Recommendations that involve policy changes will take more time because they must work through set campus processes, like involving the faculty senate. But this isn’t a report that will just sit on a shelf gathering dust, he says.
Committee members say they’re proud of what they accomplished but caution that policy changes aren’t enough to stoke broader institutional transformation. Changes in climate and culture are also vital. After all, a climate of “perceived intolerance of sexual harassment,” the report says, “is the most powerful predictor of decreased levels of sexual harassment within an organization.” Robin Bradley Kar, a professor of law and philosophy who chaired the committee, likened it to a tangle of yarn. If you pull one piece, it won’t untangle. You’ve got to work on all the strands at once to get somewhere.
Some colleges have even banned relationships between faculty and grad students.
Campuses are also restricting behavior that was long considered acceptable. Years ago, romantic relationships between faculty members and their students were not thought of as particularly exceptional. But students, especially, have questioned the inherent power imbalance that exists between the person writing a letter of recommendation and the person who needs it.
At Cornell University, a policy that governed consensual relationships between students and faculty members was vague, buried in the faculty handbook, and had been unrevised for years.
After months of committee work, in May of 2018, Cornell’s president, Martha E. Pollack, endorsed an outright ban on faculty relationships with undergraduate students, and on relationships with graduate or professional students when the faculty member exercises direct academic authority over the student or is likely to in the future.
Some colleges, like the Berklee College of Music, have gone farther and opted for outright bans on relationships between employees and students — undergraduates or graduates. Last year, Princeton University extended a 2016 ban on romantic and sexual relationships between faculty and undergraduates to graduate students. “Students should be treated by faculty as scholars, not as potential sexual partners,” Abby Novick, a graduate student, told the Princeton Alumni Weekly.
Not everyone agrees with blanket restrictions. Brett A. Sokolow, president of the Association of Title IX Administrators, says it’s important to consider a campus’s context. For example, at a community college, students and faculty members are often adults who are very close in age. In many ways, he says, an outright ban is “infantilizing of adult students.”
As awareness about harmful behavior has grown, so, too, have calls for holding bad actors to a new level of accountability. A slap on the wrist will no longer do. Among the loudest in the chorus is BethAnn McLaughlin, a neuroscientist who founded #MeTooSTEM. It started as a social-media movement and website where survivors shared their stories and, over two years, became a nonprofit that provides advice, microgrants, and care packages to survivors.
McLaughlin wants the scientific organizations that fund research and bestow expertise to start holding offending members responsible for their actions. She started a petition in 2018, imploring the National Academy of Sciences to revoke memberships of people who’ve been sanctioned for sexual harassment, assault, and retaliation. In 2019, the National Academy announced that members voted to change its bylaws. Membership could now be revoked for sexual harassment or other unacceptable behavior. Critics say they dragged their feet.
McLaughlin and others also called on the National Institutes of Health to stop giving training grants, travel funds, and sponsored talks to people with a history of sexual misconduct. “My personal philosophy is that things are going to change when laws and money change,” McLaughlin says. “And NIH has the money.”
In February of 2019, the NIH apologized, saying it has taken too long to “acknowledge and address the climate and culture” that has caused such harm. “We are concerned that NIH has been part of the problem,” the joint statement said. “We are determined to become part of the solution.”
The NIH launched a working group focused on changing culture to end sexual harassment. They held listening sessions and came up with a broad range of recommendations, including that the NIH should create a process that treats professional misconduct, including sexual harassment, as seriously as research misconduct. The group also recommended excluding researchers with a “confirmed finding of sexual harassment” or other misconduct from participating in NIH study sections or advisory councils and committees for a “determined period of time.” Between January and November of 2019, the group reported, 12 principal investigators were replaced, and 55 people were removed from peer review after NIH inquiries.
When it comes to known harassers, a question the NIH gets a lot is, Why not just take grant money away? But the organization wants to make sure that by removing the money or replacing the principal investigator, they aren’t harming the targets of the harassment, who are often the same people who are supported by that grant, says Carrie D. Wolinetz, the acting chief of staff and associate director for science policy. The working group recommended that the NIH develop procedures for “bridge funding” for targets and other affected people.
Lawmakers, too, have sought to impose more lasting consequences. Bills reintroduced last year in the U.S. House of Representatives would, among many things, fund sexual-harassment research and require universities to report if a research professor has engaged in “discrimination on the basis of sex” to all federal agencies that have awarded the institution competitive research and development grants in the past 10 years.
And at the state level, Texas passed a slew of campus sexual-misconduct laws last year. One of those laws will require colleges to notate the transcripts of students who are ineligible to re-enroll because of a serious disciplinary code of conduct violation, including sexual assault.
Chris Turner, a Democratic state representative, co-wrote the bill after learning that some Texas students expelled for committing sexual assault were able to enroll at new institutions without those colleges knowing what had happened.
The bill died during the 2017 legislative session. He credits its success last year to several factors, including the #MeToo movement and increased awareness about sexual misconduct.
Mostly, he says, the bill is a testament to the advocates who shared their stories with lawmakers. “I just can’t underscore how important that is for survivors to use their voice,” he says, “if they are comfortable doing so.”
Sofie Karasek had used her voice. A co-founder of End Rape on Campus, she wrote in The New York Times in 2018 about becoming disillusioned with punitive justice — firings, expulsions, and occasionally prison sentences. When she was assaulted, at 18, going through the proper university channels made Karasek feel “betrayed, angry, and unvalued. It was worse than the assault itself,” she wrote.
A better system is needed, one that prioritizes both justice and healing, Karasek wrote, and “not one at the expense of the other.”
Restorative justice is one such system. It has many models, and practitioners say it only works when it’s what the victim wants. But a central tenet is a “collaborative decision-making process” that includes harmed parties, people who caused harm, and others, writes David Karp, director of the Center for Restorative Justice at the University of San Diego, in The Little Book of Restorative Justice for Colleges and Universities. Together, they seek a resolution that includes acknowledging responsibility for the harmful behavior and repairing the harm caused to individuals and the broader community.
Not everyone thinks restorative justice is the right approach. In 2018, the University of Rochester embarked on a restorative-justice process after a tenured professor, T. Florian Jaeger, was found responsible for inappropriate behavior. The idea was to have circles of students and faculty and staff members talking about how the ordeal affected them and what it will take for them to feel better.
A faculty member told The Chronicle at the time that she was skeptical. The program seemed like another university effort to “restore Jaeger” without actually dealing with the consequences of his behavior.
But a well-known case at a Canadian university shows promise. In 2014, female students at Dalhousie University’s Faculty of Dentistry learned that their male colleagues had posted offensive material about them in a private Facebook group. In the aftermath, 29 students participated in a restorative-justice process, including 12 of the 13 men in the Facebook group.
“Having endured such a public fracturing of our class community and many of our personal relationships, our focus throughout the process has not been to return to normal but to create a new ‘normal’ for the future,” the participants wrote, together. Through the process, “we learned that saying sorry is too easy,” wrote the male members of the Facebook group. “Being sorry, we have come to see, is much harder.”
People think restorative justice is “soft,” says Mary P. Koss, a professor of public health at the University of Arizona who has piloted restorative-justice projects. “But the reality is, it’s hard. It’s hard accountability.”
However, she says, few colleges and universities have broadly embraced restorative-justice practices. They believe that their adversarial processes “check off all the boxes on the guidelines,” Koss says.
It remains to be seen whether colleges will wade further into those waters, past the threshold of what they’re required, by law, to provide.
Not everyone is happy about the direction #MeToo is taking. Critics of the movement think public opinion — and college decision makers — now automatically side with the accuser to the detriment of due process. And they argue that the punishment frequently doesn’t fit the crime.
Recent protests have drawn such criticism. In December, activists showed up at the home of a University of Texas at Austin professor and shouted that he was a predator. The professor, Thomas K. Hubbard, who studies pederasty, was not an accused sexual harasser, but had reportedly described sexual relationships between adult men and teen boys as “learning experiences.”
Hubbard was escorted to safety by the police while a group of protestors who call themselves Fire the Abusers filmed. A university spokeswoman called the behavior “unacceptable.” Hubbard’s home was vandalized and he received physical threats, the spokeswoman, Shilpa Bakre, said in a statement. “Students have the right to contest specific ideas, but threatening anyone’s safety violates the law and university standards of conduct.”
Critics also questioned the choice by NYUtoo to confront Ronell in the hallway. The professor “made some mistakes and she paid the price,” Christina Sommers, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote on Twitter. “Your fanatical vigilantism is far worse than anything she was accused of doing.” (Ronell is reportedly taking a leave of absence.)
When news broke that Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., a clinical law professor at Harvard, had agreed to be part of Harvey Weinstein’s defense team, students demanded his dismissal as residential dean. More than 50 current and former Harvard law professors signed an open letter, telling Harvard that Sullivan’s resignation would be “inconsistent with the university’s commitment to the freedom to defend ideas, however unpopular.”
One of them, Jeannie Suk Gersen, wrote an essay in defense of Sullivan and the role he would play in a fair judicial process. “When defense lawyers do their job, one effect is to make it harder for the government to impose suffering on their clients, whether innocent or guilty,” she wrote. “This is a notion that most liberal Americans like, when we talk about mass incarceration or the war on drugs. It is often less comfortable, in the context of #MeToo.”
But survivor advocates say they want a fair process for everybody, too. When Title IX proceedings are under fire, they point out that the rules of engagement for civil procedures are different than for a criminal trial. Innocent until proven guilty is a tenet of the latter, not the former, says Elizabeth Tang, a counsel for education and workplace justice at the National Women’s Law Center. But that notion is often brought up as a red herring, she says, and is purposefully misleading.
Alexandra Brodsky hears some good faith questions about how we can address sexual harm in a way that’s fair to everyone. But Brodsky, a staff lawyer at Public Justice, says she also sees a hysteria about risking the futures of young men just by trying to hold them accountable for their actions.
Yes, some advocates demand draconian consequences, says Peter F. Lake, a law professor at Stetson University who writes and talks about Title IX issues. “Am I surprised that the guillotine is operating regularly at the French revolution?” he asks. “Not in the least. There’s so much potential energy that’s been building for so long, and it needs to release.” A lot of women, he points out, were driven out of academe, and no one paid any consequences.
Years ago, “faculty members were untouchable,” says Sokolow, president of the Association of Title IX Administrators. “That shifted.” Professors have told Sokolow that they’re afraid to be alone with a student who is a different gender, or that they’re wary to take on mentorship opportunities because they could be accused of something.
“All of that is an overreaction,” Sokolow said. “But from people who never had this on their minds at all, it’s an amazing shift in consciousness.”
But just as advocates are working to broaden the definition of sexual misconduct and respond more forcefully to it, new rules due any day from the U.S. Department of Education will push in the other direction.
Among other things, the proposed regulations would require colleges to hold live hearings and allow cross-examination when adjudicating sexual-misconduct cases, narrow the definition of sexual harassment, scale back the role of “mandatory reporters,” and end the requirement that institutions investigate off-campus complaints that occur outside of institutional activities. (The Education Department declined to comment.)
“Don’t think for a minute that these are centrist rules that balance rights between the parties,” Sokolow says. “This is a full shift of Title IX priorities to accused students and away from the emphasis in 2011 of protecting reporting parties.”
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and her colleagues are furthering a narrative that Title IX has gone too far, and that institutions need to be protecting men and boys, says Tang. But what the National Women’s Law Center sees on their intake forms, she says, contradicts that stance. Instead, it’s survivors who are being punished for coming forward.
Tang says these rules will require institutions to dismiss a vast majority of the complaints they receive. And that, she says, has nothing to do with the supposed goal of due process.
What the regulations will accomplish is a silencing of survivors, says Morgan Dewey, the former communications director for End Rape on Campus. But they’re resilient. If the worst happens, they’ll create community healing outside of their schools, because they won’t be able to trust those institutions as much as they once did, she says.
And, Dewey adds, the movement will fight tooth and nail to continue to be heard.
Sokolow agrees. In the past few years, he says, we’ve seen the pendulum swing. We’ve seen a president and Supreme Court nominee, both accused of sexual assault, emerge unscathed. Combined with the new regulations, he says, there’s a huge backlash brewing.
Nicole E. Allen, a psychology professor at the University of Illinois, has worked in the field of gender-based violence for decades and studies complex systems. So for Allen, right now feels exciting. It’s a moment in time where it seems like change is possible.
But change, Allen also knows, is fickle. Universities are complex organizational systems that don’t just bend because of a new policy or two.
She just hopes that in 10 years, people won’t look back and think, Damn. We had this catalyzing moment. And nothing came of it.
