To Avoid More Scandals, Cautious Departments Swap Drinking for Hiking

As soon as the prospective graduate students visiting Northwestern University’s philosophy department reached the top of Chicago’s lofty John Hancock Center, the cocktails began to flow. Later that evening, everybody had dinner at a prominent professor’s high-rise apartment, where the partying continued well past midnight.

Those raucous recruitment weekends were once routine in the department. But the big, boozy nights are over. Now prospective students spend an early evening with professors at a local Thai restaurant. No one orders alcohol, and the director of graduate studies often brings her children.

That is the new reality as colleges are increasingly vigilant about sexual harassment. When a well-known philosopher at Northwestern, who had hosted the party at his apartment, was pushed out of the university after a female graduate student filed a high-profile complaint of sexual misconduct, the department examined not only his behavior but also its context. “These events all provided a really easy opportunity for nonprofessional relationships,” says Jennifer Lackey, director of graduate studies in the department.

Northwestern’s philosophy department is hardly the only one making changes in response to problems of sexual harassment, which have arisen repeatedly in the discipline. Following a series of allegations that led to the departure of three male philosophers in the past two years at the University of Colorado at Boulder, that department eliminated a faculty/student mountain retreat in favor of more daytime, family-friendly activities, including hikes, teas, and visits to a farmers’ market. New York University’s philosophy department has instituted rules on how people should behave with one another in formal settings — “be nice,” no eye-rolling or making faces, no laughing at other participants — in the hope that a new sense of respect will govern all interactions between professors and students.

The moves show how male-dominated disciplines especially are trying to professionalize their culture and reduce the possibility of sexual harassment. While colleges now provide prevention training to most employees, philosophy departments are promoting larger changes in how faculty members and students relate to one another.

Departments that have faced allegations also have been trying to hire more female professors. Some believe that may help shift the balance of power, making the environment less conducive to harassment.

“The problem is a mixture of hierarchy, a characteristic underpinning all of academia, plus the heavy male demographics of some fields,” says C. Megan Urry, a professor of physics and astronomy at Yale University. That field, too, has grappled with harassment, notably at the University of California at Berkeley and the California Institute of Technology.

Individual faculty members, typically women, have also taken action, publicly condemning accused harassers, refusing to publish with men who have been the subject of complaints, and steering young female scholars away from them — at conferences, for example.

Academic meetings pose enough concern that Ms. Urry used her position as president of the American Astronomical Society to make a point. At last month’s gathering, she described in a speech “what it felt like to be a young woman thinking people are interested in your work, and coming to this meeting, finding yourself on the receiving end of romantic attention.” She recalls telling fellow astronomers: “You are not here to find a date.”

For the first time that Ms. Urry can remember, there was no after-party at the astronomy meeting. A bar bash one night, advertised on small cards handed out by organizers, had been a tradition. It was at one of those events that a prominent Berkeley professor’s conduct became the subject of a harassment complaint.

“We spoke with the people who organized the parties,” says Ms. Urry, “and they agreed to never do it again.”

While the newly professional environment seems wise, some scholars worry that when professors and grad students can’t have a drink together, something is lost. The heightened attention to harassment makes some academics leery of socializing with graduate students at all. The cynics wonder why any man would mentor a woman and risk accusations of sexual harassment.

“There is a very conservative strain now in philosophy, and the conservatism manifests itself in thinking that sex or alcohol and even friendships between people are awful,” says a former graduate student at Boulder. “They shouldn’t be thought about or talked about.”

The philosophy department at Georgetown University used to hold events where professors and students drank together — and engaged in great discussions, says Rebecca Kukla, a professor there.

“I was resistant to seeing that culture change,” she says. “I felt it was integral to being a healthy philosophy department that we all socialized together.” But she gradually realized that those gatherings also sometimes led to inappropriate behavior.

“We now go out in small groups for coffee,” she says. “That makes me a little sad, but I came to see that the previous situation was just a hopeless hotbed for power dynamics.”

Hikes and Teas

Cheryl E. Abbate welcomes the new social opportunities at Boulder. She joined the department as a graduate student last year after studying at two other universities. The hikes and teas with professors make students feel like part of the community rather than “second-class citizens,” she says. “I’m very, very impressed.”

At the same time, Ms. Abbate has gone out for drinks after class with small groups of grad students and professors. “That’s very healthy, too, because people are able to relax and engage in conversations they wouldn’t have had if they were sitting in the classroom,” she says. “I’ve had great ideas that have inspired papers.”

As social life shifts in some departments, a few more-senior female professors are speaking out publicly, and personally, to highlight the problem of sexual harassment and support younger women in the field.

Janice Dowell, at Syracuse University, described in an interview this spring on a philosophy website being raped 20 years ago by another philosopher she still sees at meetings. “One reason I have for coming forward is to try to force people to recognize problems exist,” she told The Chronicle. “My hope is that, because I’ve been in the profession long enough to have gained the trust of many colleagues, the skeptics are forced to recognize that assault and harassment really do happen.”

That role has turned Ms. Dowell into a vigilante of sorts. She initially refused to publish in the Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Contextualism, due out next year, because she had “a lot of independent evidence” that a male philosopher who had also been asked to contribute was harassing women in the field, she says. She told the editor, Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa, about her concerns, and he confirmed that the other philosopher’s work would not appear in the volume.

Neither Ms. Dowell nor Mr. Ichikawa would name the male philosopher, but in other cases, female philosophers have named men online who they say are responsible for harassment and assault.

After Thomas Pogge, a Yale University philosopher, was accused of sexual harassment by a former grad student, a prominent Princeton University philosopher, Delia Graff Fara, shared her experience on a philosophy blog. When she was an undergraduate at Harvard University, and Mr. Pogge was a visiting professor there, she met with him to talk about her senior thesis and left when he started rubbing her thigh, she wrote. The account stunned fellow philosophers in part because Ms. Fara is not known to be an activist on the issue.

Women in astronomy, too, are trying to deliver some straight talk about — and to — men in the discipline. Joan T. Schmelz, deputy director of the Arecibo Observatory, in Puerto Rico, and a former chair of the American Astronomical Society’s Committee on the Status of Women, gives advice in speeches and on the Women in Astronomy blog about what’s acceptable behavior and what’s not.

“With a young scientist at their poster session,” she says she tells male colleagues, “make sure you talk about their science. You shouldn’t comment on their personal appearance or their clothes, and don’t make stupid jokes. Think of your office, your lab, and your classroom as a professional environment. These are not places where you should engage in frat-boy behavior.”

Needed: More Women

New rules and opportunities for interaction — plus a little vigilantism — may help. But to create an environment where women feel more comfortable and are perhaps less likely to be harassed, some academic departments also are recruiting more female professors.

The University of Miami’s philosophy department ran a job search in which the names and genders of the applicants were kept confidential. Only after the search committee had a list of 50 candidates were their genders revealed. The department ended up hiring a woman, who started during the past academic year.

“Unless you have enough critical mass in the department, it is going to be hard for issues important to women to emerge,” says Otávio Bueno, department chair at Miami, where three out of 15 full-time philosophy professors are female. The effort to recruit more women there has come in the wake of sexual-harassment charges by a female graduate student against the well-known professor Colin McGinn, who left the university in 2013.

After its problems, Boulder’s philosophy department was interested in hiring a female chair to start this fall. But disagreement and tension lingered over how much of a problem harassment had been. Two of the three candidates on the shortlist for the job were women, but the department ended up hiring the only man.

Elisabeth A. Lloyd, a professor of philosophy with an endowed chair at Indiana University at Bloomington, says she was asked to apply for the post. “They said they were looking for someone like me, a chair who was a feminist who could do something to help the department recover its reputation that had been damaged by the three firings,” she says.

But not everyone at Boulder was on board, and she fell short of making the final list. While three women in the department and some men favored Ms. Lloyd for the job, others say they were unimpressed and voted against her.

As Ms. Lloyd sees it, Boulder “is an example of a department where resentments over these issues are very vivid.”

David Boonin, who was chairman until this month, says the department’s level of civility has improved in the past year. “But,” he says, “there is still a lot of work to be done.”

Robin Wilson writes about campus culture, including sexual assault and sexual harassment. Contact her at robin.wilson@chronicle.com.