U. of Rochester’s President Resigns as Report Supports Handling of Harassment Case

Updated with details of a news conference and other information (1/11/2018, 7 p.m.), and with statements from T. Florian Jaeger (1/12/2018, 9:15 a.m.).

Just hours after a much-anticipated report was issued that largely supported the University of Rochester’s handling of a sexual-misconduct controversy, the university’s president, Joel Seligman, added an unexpected twist to the drama that has engulfed the university by announcing his resignation.

Mr. Seligman informed trustees on Thursday morning, before he or the trustees had seen the report, of his plan to step down, effective February 28. He followed up with an email to the university community a few hours after the report was released.

“It is clear to me that the best interests of the university are best served with new leadership, and a fresh perspective to focus on healing our campus and moving us forward in a spirit of cooperation and unity,” he wrote.

The announcement shocked many, coming after the release of the report, which concluded that the university was justified in finding that a professor, T. Florian Jaeger, had not violated the university’s sexual-misconduct policies.

Mr. Jaeger’s behavior toward women in his department was sometimes inappropriate and offensive, but it didn’t violate university policy in effect at the time or federal law on sexual harassment, an independent investigator concluded in the report, released on Thursday.

The 207-page report, which followed three and a half months of investigation and cost the university $4.5 million, found that some of the complaints against Mr. Jaeger, a tenured professor in the department of brain and cognitive sciences, were valid.

Between 2007 and 2011, he had four consensual sexual relationships with either prospective, current, or former Rochester students, a time when he partied frequently with students and offended some with his flirtatious behavior and sexual innuendo, it said.

Other claims, the report said, were exaggerated or could not be substantiated.

And it found no evidence that the university had retaliated against the researchers who filed a federal complaint and a lawsuit against the university over its handling of the matter. The plaintiffs argued it did so, in part, by monitoring their private emails without their permission.

“We credit that some BCS students were negatively impacted by the professor’s conduct earlier in his career at the university,” the report said, referring to the department. “Partly as a result of that conduct, but also because of the broad dissemination of the often exaggerated descriptions of that conduct, the esteemed BCS faculty has been fractured and the university’s reputation has been harmed.

“This case illustrates once again,” the report went on to note, “that a community can be damaged when public discourse on important issues fails to separate rumor from fact, to distinguish between different levels of wrongful conduct, and to apply a sense of proportionality in the consideration of how prior conduct should be remediated.”

Mr. Jaeger, who is on paid leave, issued a lengthy statement through his lawyer on Friday saying that the investigation’s findings “confirm for the third time that I did not sexually harass any students, I did not retaliate against anyone, and I did not violate the policies of the university.”

He apologized to his students and colleagues for the distress the controversy has caused.

“This report does not exonerate me,” he wrote, “but neither does it give merit to many of the worst accusations made against me. Although I disagree with some aspects of the report, I agree that I should have shown more maturity when I arrived as a 31-year-old faculty member in 2007. Over time I have addressed many of these shortcomings. I deeply regret that my former behavior made some students uncomfortable and may have discouraged them from working with me.”

Several of his accusers held a news conference on Thursday afternoon to dispute the findings that were favorable to the university and Mr. Jaeger, and to emphasize their commitment to continue their fight in court.

Many of them were advised by their attorneys not to cooperate in the investigation because it could undermine their own lawsuit against the university, they said. As a result, they argued, the report was incomplete and unreliable.

They also questioned how the report could point out so many ways that Mr. Jaeger’s behavior crossed ethical lines but not hold him, or anyone else, accountable.

“It is not acceptable to say people have behaved offensively and inappropriately with students but that no one has done anything wrong,” said Elissa L. Newport, a former chair of the department of brain and cognitive science, who is now at Georgetown University. “That is not an acceptable conclusion. Shame on you.”

The trustees also released a statement saying they have “many serious decisions to make in the days ahead” as they review the report and its recommendations, which include banning all student-faculty relationships within the same department. They offered their “heartfelt apology to anyone who was hurt by the actions of any university employee, or who felt intimidated, excluded, or harassed.”

The investigation, which included interviews with more than 140 witnesses and a review of more than 6,000 documents, was led by Mary Jo White, a former federal prosecutor. She said that she would have liked to talk with more of his accusers, but that the investigation thoroughly considered their accounts of Mr. Jaeger’s behavior and its effect on female scholars.

She also took pains to say, in a news conference minutes after the report was released, that it was important to encourage people who feel they’ve been harassed to come forward, and for colleges to have policies that protect them.

Many of the complaints against Mr. Jaeger happened shortly after his arrival at Rochester in 2007, at a time when the university’s policies did not prohibit intimate relationships between faculty members and students.

In 2014 those policies were changed to ban such relationships with undergraduate, as well as with graduate students over whom faculty members have academic authority. The investigation found no evidence that Mr. Jaeger had had any sexual relationship with any student in the department after 2011, the report noted.

In 2016, the chairman of Mr. Jaeger’s department, Gregory C. DeAngelis, warned him about the risks and conflicts of engaging in consensual relationships with students, excessively socializing with them, and talking and joking about sex with them. He also directed Mr. Jaeger to complete a training program on respectful workplace behaviors.

After completing it, Mr. Jaeger sent a letter of apology to the department’s faculty but declined the chairman’s request that he send it to students. He also apologized to three students with whom he’d been involved.

In general, the report noted, students currently enrolled in the department described Mr. Jaeger as a supportive mentor. One student said the controversy had derailed her own career after some of the professor’s critics refused to read a paper she had co-written with him.

Overall, the report found, the university handled the complaints against him fairly and appropriately, although the investigators found some areas where it fell short.

It should not have promoted Mr. Jaeger while an investigation into his behavior, which eventually cleared him of violating university policy, was underway, the report said. The university also should have been clearer about what matters should be kept confidential.

Investigating the Complaint

In a choreographed release intended to demonstrate that no one had read it in advance or been allowed to suggest changes, the report was presented simultaneously on Thursday afternoon to the university’s Board of Trustees and a committee the trustees had set up in September to oversee the independent investigation. It was posted online at the same time.

Stung by accusations that it had done too little, too late, the university brought in Ms. White, who, in addition to spending decades as a federal prosecutor and securities lawyer, headed the Securities and Exchange Commission from 2013 to 2016 under President Barack Obama.

Her charge was to investigate all matters related to the complaint against the university that was filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

A lawyer known for her “unrelenting toughness and prosecutorial vigor,” according to Fortune magazine, she was nonetheless criticized by some for not coming down harder on Wall Street corruption at the time.

The Rochester investigation found that Mr. Jaeger had inappropriately blurred professional boundaries with students, including when he rented out part of his apartment to Celeste Kidd, then a 24-year-old graduate student and now an assistant professor in his department.

She is one of nine current and former professors and students who sued the university, its president, Joel Seligman, and its provost, Robert L. Clark, in U.S. District Court.

Frustrated by the university’s not finding him responsible for violating campus policy, they took matters into their own hands, looking for “an alternative route to getting Jaeger out of BCS by making his professional life miserable,” the report said.

In a federal complaint and then a lawsuit, the plaintiffs charged that Mr. Jaeger had slept with graduate students, pressed others for sex, took them to hot tub retreats where drugs were used, asked graduate students to procure sexual partners for him, and made frequent overtly sexual remarks in professional settings.

They said he made the environment for women in the department threatening and hostile, which altered the career paths of at least 16 women who made decisions to stay out of his way.

The university, the complainants said, had disregarded their complaints against Mr. Jaeger and portrayed them as gossips and troublemakers.

Ms. White said the investigation found that, far from retaliating against them, the department and the university had supported and in some cases promoted the complainants.

In urging the complainants not to spread unfounded rumors, Rochester officials were trying, unsuccessfully, to quell a growing rebellion that was burying the department and the university in controversy, the report said.

The complainants’ public campaign, which included an open letter from outside scholars and descriptions of Mr. Jaeger as a “sexual predator,” bears some similarities to the efforts to oust Gopal Balakrishnan, a tenured professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Critics of that effort have decried the tactics as a form of vigilante justice, while others have said they are needed when universities don’t take complaints seriously.

Meanwhile, the damaging headlines about Rochester continued.

Ms. Kidd and Jessica F. Cantlon, an associate professor in the department, were among the people featured as “Silence Breakers” in Time’s “person of the year” edition for speaking out about sexual harassment.

Ms. Kidd said on Thursday that while the report validated many of the charges she and her colleagues had been making about Mr. Jaeger, “Mary Jo White took an age-old approach of trying shame me into silence and obscurity. She released many of my private messages and emails out of context and repeated flat-out inaccuracies about things I allegedly said.”

It was, Ms. Kidd said, “a classic and transparent intimidation tactic” that won’t work. “I will not apologize for any of the things I said as a student trying desperately not to anger a retaliatory, sexual predator.”

Hundreds of professors from around the country and abroad signed an open letter urging their students not to apply to the University of Rochester.

And in a letter sent on Monday to faculty members at Rochester, the Faculty Senate Executive Committee reiterated its criticism against the president for not making “forceful revisions” in university policies to ensure that people who speak out against sexual misconduct will be safe.

Faculty members and administrators must be able to work together in a spirit of respect and cooperation, the committee said, in enacting any needed changes.

Danny Wegman, chair of Rochester’s Board of Trustees, issued a statement calling Mr. Seligman a “brilliant, transformative leader … who will long be remembered for substantially expanding our academic programs and our campus, broadening our student and faculty diversity, strengthening our finances, increasing our enrollment, and securing Rochester’s place among America’s finest academic institutions.”

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.