What Happens When Sex Harassment Disrupts Victims’ Academic Careers

Seo-Young Chu used to be known as Jennie. She was a young Ph.D. student studying early American literature and culture at Stanford University, with Jay Fliegelman, an influential scholar and teacher both on the campus and in the field.

While Ms. Chu was his student at Stanford in 2000, Mr. Fliegelman raped and abused her, she says. The university investigated, suspending him for two years after he was found responsible for sexual harassment. Ms. Chu moved across the country, enrolled in the English Ph.D. program at Harvard University, changed the focus of her studies, and decided to go by her Korean name.

“I wanted to be a new person,” she says. “That’s how much in denial I was.”

After finishing her Ph.D., she landed a tenure-track position at Queens College of the City University of New York, where she is now an associate professor in the English department. But the experience changed her and the course of her career. At Harvard, she left behind research on children’s literature and focused on science fiction. In job interviews and on campus visits, she was occasionally asked if she was connected to what happened with Mr. Fliegelman. The questions made her anxious, but she answered them and assumed she’d lost that particular job opportunity. She was applying during the recession, when the job market was particularly bad, but she wonders if her experience had anything to do with why her search lasted three years.

“Those kind of moments have pierced my life again and again over the years,” Ms. Chu says.

Mr. Fliegelman died in 2007. But when Ms. Chu is teaching now, she’s still haunted by the memory of a professor who hurt her while telling her he controlled her career.

“I’m constantly wondering, Am I abusing my power? Am I saying something that will make a student uncomfortable?” Ms. Chu says. “I don’t know whether it’s good or bad being that kind of teacher. I think I’m overly distant at times, because I don’t want any student to feel like I’m too close.”

Stories like Ms. Chu’s have surfaced recently as part of the #MeToo movement, in which people in seemingly every industry are sharing their experiences of sexual abuse by people in power. Dozens of professors, many of whom are revered in their fields, have been called out for misconduct. Those who say they were the victims of such behavior are demanding that colleges end a longstanding problem. They’re motivated by anger that some abusers have gone unpunished — and fear that those people will hurt others.

Academics and others who have spoken out about experiencing sexual harassment or assault also speak of long-term repercussions to their careers. Students and former students describe carving paths that would allow them to avoid certain professors. Some, like Ms. Chu, say they changed the focus of their research, while others left higher education altogether. These losses can be devastating for the individuals involved. When their potential contributions as researchers, teachers, or leaders are squashed, what else is lost?

“Each individual makes choices that make sense in the moment to keep themselves safe, and that leads to big cumulative effects,” said Kristen S. Gorman, a graduate of the University of Rochester’s department of brain and cognitive sciences. They might not apply to their first-choice program because of what they heard about a professor or decide not to write a chapter of their dissertation in order to avoid working with him. Some skip out on conferences or networking events or drop out of academe altogether, disillusioned by what they’ve seen. Their departures dampen the impact of efforts to put people from underrepresented populations in the pipeline.

‘I Was Proud of Myself’

Ms. Gorman speaks from experience. She said she made decisions about where to study and what research to pursue in order to avoid certain professors. She contributed to a complaint with the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission that was filed in August against Rochester and T. Florian Jaeger, a professor who was accused of harassing female graduate students. The complaint alleged violations of state and federal civil-rights laws, such as Title IX.

She worked with Mr. Jaeger early in her time at the university, but she said that after he showed up uninvited to grad-student social gatherings, made a pass at her, and made belittling comments, she decided to avoid him. Ms. Gorman didn’t pursue the research that would have involved collaborating with him, and she told her adviser that she didn’t want Mr. Jaeger on her dissertation committee. When she had questions that involved complex statistical analysis and computational modeling, Mr. Jaeger’s areas of expertise, Ms. Gorman instead asked his graduate students for help. She never reported Mr. Jaeger, but after she had graduated, when former colleagues asked if they could name her as someone a Title IX investigator could contact, she agreed.

“I was proud of myself,” Ms. Gorman said. She was proud both because she had managed to avoid him and because of the research she was able to accomplish. But she said that she missed out on computational training by avoiding Mr. Jaeger and that the scientific contributions she was able to make were different as a result. And she wonders whether the decision she and others have made to quietly accommodate an uncomfortable situation is having a broader impact on who persists through her field.

In an email on Thursday, Mr. Jaeger’s lawyer, Steven V. Modica, said his client was surprised by Ms. Gorman’s account. Mr. Jaeger does not recall making belittling comments or a pass at her, but does remember inviting her to give a guest lecture in his class, which he said she did. “My client holds Dr. Gorman in high regard as a researcher and teacher,” Mr. Modica said. He noted that an undergraduate student who had been a research assistant of Mr. Jaeger’s wrote a letter in Rochester’s student newspaper praising him. She recalled him as a good teacher who is “caring but stern, honest, and fair.”

Ms. Gorman’s experience at the University of Rochester was not the first time she thinks sexual harassment blunted her educational opportunities. She decided not to apply to two different graduate schools, she said, because she had heard that her potential adviser at one had “trouble dealing with female students,” and that another had sexual relationships with in the department. The “whisper network,” a system of quietly shared information on whom to avoid in various departments had seemed at the time like an important tool for survival but now looks to have enabled bad behavior.

Hundreds of faculty members signed an open letter saying they “cannot in good conscience encourage our students to pursue educational or employment opportunities at the University of Rochester.”

Two Responses to Harassment

As a graduate student, Ms. Gorman said, she attended a workshop that was meant to keep women in the STEM fields. There she was instructed on how to negotiate, prepare for an interview, and apply for funding. She also attended lectures aimed at women, but she said that broader attempts to improve gender diversity fell flat, especially when others wouldn’t acknowledge the negative consequences of sexual misconduct.

Ms. Gorman is now an education program specialist at the University of Minnesota, where she helps faculty members in the STEM fields with their teaching practices. She said her decision not to pursue a career as a brain researcher was complicated and not tied one specific person or incident. But she wonders whether she would have had a more positive impression of academic life had she felt better about the culture within her department.

Research has shown that while it’s not uncommon for graduate students to become less interested in careers as scientists as their training progresses, the issue is more acute for women and underrepresented minority students.

Kimberly A. Griffin, an associate professor of education at the University of Maryland at College Park, was a co-author of one such study about biomedical-science Ph.D. students. She said that female participants in the study who experienced harassment had one of two responses: They ignored it or they left the academy.

“Experiences with sexual harassment were a larger part of an unwelcoming climate that marginalized women and made them feel unwelcome,” she wrote in an email. “In some cases, this did translate to less interest in faculty careers or academic research.”

Kim M. Cobb, a professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said that in many academic departments, male faculty members’ relationships with their graduate advisees or students are open secrets. That never works out for the student, who often must leave the field because their relationship with their main advocate is compromised.

“If you have a conflict of interest with someone, you can’t pretend to serve that student’s professional goals anymore,” she said. A romantic relationship, she says, presents a conflict of “gargantuan proportions.”

The other students and faculty members within a department or lab also feel the effects of sexual harassment, Ms. Cobb said. They may be forced to pick sides or stay quiet about something they know violates university policy. That dynamic, Ms. Cobb added, doesn’t help keep women in higher education.

Nell Gluckman writes about faculty issues and other topics in higher education. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.

Clarification (12/7/2017, 10:10 a.m.): This article has been updated to more specifically describe a complaint filed against the University of Rochester and a professor who was accused of harassing female graduate students.

Update (12/7/2017, 4:09 p.m.): This article has been updated with a comment from Mr. Jaeger’s lawyer stating that his client’s recollection of his interaction with Ms. Gorman differs from the account she provided to The Chronicle.