U. of Georgia Math Professor Faces Sexual-Misconduct Accusations From at Least 8 Women

Two years ago, inspired by the #MeToo movement and troubled by recollections of a groping incident during her undergraduate years, Laura Anderson wrote a letter to the president of the University of Georgia.

One of Georgia’s longtime mathematics professors, she wrote, had used a massage as a pretext to touch her sexually back in the late 1980s, she asserted. She was an undergraduate math student at the California Institute of Technology, and he was a postdoc who had offered to help her study, she wrote.

“I haven’t seen him in many years, and I have no idea whether he realizes how egregious his behavior was, whether he has reformed, or whether he continues to behave similarly,” wrote Anderson, who is now an associate professor of math at Binghamton University, part of the State University of New York.

“But, given that he was a faculty member behaving this way towards a student,” she continued, “I am concerned about the well-being of women who need to work with him today, and I think it would be appropriate to make inquiries about his recent and current conduct.”

The director of the university’s Equal Opportunity Office wrote back two days later, saying her office took complaints of sexual harassment seriously, had asked around, and had received no reports of inappropriate behavior by the professor, William H. Kazez.

But as it turns out, just three weeks earlier someone had expressed concerns about Kazez, according to a lawyer representing women who have recently filed complaints against him. And even as Anderson was writing her letter, another graduate student was tangled in a relationship with Kazez that she describes now as harassing and abusive.

The university placed Kazez on paid administrative leave in March and banned him from teaching and from appearing on the campus while it investigates complaints of sexual harassment, groping, and assault brought by at least eight women, including current and former students and one faculty member.

A Georgia spokesman said that the university cannot discuss investigations in progress, but that all complaints are thoroughly investigated and penalties are imposed “on faculty and employees found to have engaged in sexual misconduct.”

Kazez, who is in his mid-60s, did not respond to requests for comment. His lawyer, Janet E. Hill, said her client denies violating the University System of Georgia’s antiharassment policy or acting illegally. His student evaluations over 30 years have been “overwhelmingly positive,” she added.

“He has empathy for his accusers, but some of their accusations have changed over time, and others didn’t happen as alleged,” she said. Criticizing his accusers in public while the case was under investigation, Hill said, would only open him up to charges that he was retaliating against them.

The investigative process, she said, “is designed to protect both their rights. He prefers to resolve it through that process rather than through the court of public opinion.”

‘This Is My Fault’

The university system’s sexual-harassment policy prohibits university employees from pursuing or having a romantic or sexual relationship with any student he or she supervises, teaches, or evaluates in any way. Sanctions for violating the policy can include termination.

Some of the professor’s accusers who talked to The Chronicle anonymously said they wanted to let other potential victims know they aren’t to blame.

A doctoral student in math at Georgia said she was taking one of Kazez’s classes in 2017 when he offered to help her study and suggested she needed a massage. During the massage, she said, he brushed against her breast.

“When he touched my breast, I told him he couldn’t do that,” she said, “and he asked, ‘If I can’t touch it, can I stare at it?’ I was so shocked I didn’t know what to do. I kept thinking, This is my fault. I should have slapped him. But I am not a person who would slap a professor.”

Over the next year and a half, she reported, the physical contact escalated to repeated acts of sexual intercourse. She was confused and blamed herself for not stopping Kazez, whom she considered a mentor.

When her boyfriend told the university’s Equal Opportunity Office, just weeks before Anderson’s letter, that Kazez had been sexually touching his girlfriend, the office asked her to come in and talk to them. Kazez persuaded her to tell the investigator, the doctoral student contends, that it was all a misunderstanding and that no abuse had occurred.

“I was scared about my career because I didn’t know how he would retaliate,” she told The Chronicle.

In January of last year, at a friend’s suggestion, the student secretly recorded a conversation with Kazez in his office. (Georgia law allows such recordings when just one party consents.) In the recording, a copy of which was shared with The Chronicle, Kazez repeatedly apologizes for his behavior and asks if there’s anything he can do to make up for it. She tells him she feels guilty for not physically resisting him and doesn’t want him to lose his job. She makes it clear she’s upset and confused.

“You aren’t to blame for my bad and totally inappropriate behavior. That’s all me,” Kazez tells her.

“I’m extremely sorry I was doing stuff that was exploitive,” he continues. “You hear all these horrible situations about men in power taking advantage of women and, oh boy, … it’s not what I want to be doing, but maybe if you’re saying that’s what I’m doing ….”

‘A Pretext for Groping’

Another complainant was a junior in 2015 when she met Kazez and he invited her, during a study session for one of his classes, to be his advisee. In 2017, during an advising session, he suggested she might benefit from a massage, she says. And she contends that Kazez touched her breast during the massage, and that the inappropriate touching escalated to sexual contact.

“It was really confusing,” she said. “I thought we were just two consenting adults who made a mistake and there’d been a terrible misunderstanding. He’s a teacher, and he won’t let it happen again.”

The student, who graduated in December 2018, was afraid that if she complained, she’d alienate faculty members in the department. “I didn’t want to make it a bigger deal than it was, and mess up my academic career.” Besides, she said, “he’s an excellent teacher, a good adviser, and really kind to me, or so I thought.”

Then she got a call from the doctoral student, who told her about her own experiences with Kazez, beginning with the massage. The graduate student had heard from someone else in the math department that Kazez’s former advisee had seemed particularly close to Kazez, so she said she had called her to find out whether she’d experienced anything similar. The doctoral student’s account “literally lined up exactly with what had happened to me,” the former undergrad said. This spring, both filed complaints against Kazez.

Both said their experiences with the professor had left them feeling even less secure about how they were valued in the male-dominated field. The graduate student took her scissors and cut her long hair short the day after recording her conversation with Kazez, she said. The former undergraduate said she had substituted baggy sweatpants and a lot of layers for the skirts and quirky clothes she used to wear.

In his defense, Kazez said the undergrad had been dressed provocatively, according to dozens of emails, documents, and recordings shared with The Chronicle.

Both women are being represented by Lisa Anderson (no relation to Laura Anderson), a local lawyer whose practice, Atlanta Women for Equality, handles sexual-misconduct cases pro bono.

Lisa Anderson is angry that the university didn’t pursue Laura Anderson’s warning about Kazez more thoroughly. “If they had listened to her, they could have prevented so much pain,” she said.

For her part, Laura Anderson is frustrated by what she sees as a pattern of abuse by Kazez.

“There are a heck of a lot of similarities,” she said. “He invites you to his place, and then says something along the lines of ‘I simply must give you a massage,’ then he uses that as a pretext for groping.

“I haven’t seen Will Kazez in 25 years, and for all I knew, he’d been leading a blameless life since then,” Laura Anderson said in an interview. “If that were the case, I didn’t want to destroy his career.”

Times have changed in the three decades since her encounter with Kazez, but not as much as she would like, she said.

“In 1988 you could harass, and there was no one to report it to. In 2017 there was someone to report it to, but they’re not going to do anything. What struck me was how much the stars had to line up” to pursue a case against Kazez, she said. The doctoral student “being astonishingly courageous, Lisa running a nonprofit, the #MeToo movement inspiring me to write this letter two years ago. It’s like the moral of the story is if you’re a sexual harasser and you’re really, really unlucky, you might get caught. Can’t we do better than that?”

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.