When a Faculty Candidate Has Been Investigated for Harassment, What’s a Hiring Committee to Do?

The recent resignation of an acclaimed molecular biologist at the University of Chicago has reignited debate around sexual harassment by male professors, especially in the sciences. The Chicago case raises a difficult question: Should the university have hired the professor, Jason D. Lieb, even though the search committee knew he had been the subject of past misconduct allegations?

According to a university statement emailed to The Chronicle on Wednesday, Chicago officials received reports in November that Mr. Lieb, a faculty member since 2014, had engaged in inappropriate behavior during an off-campus event. The university began an investigation and placed Mr. Lieb on leave. After he was found responsible in January for violating the university’s harassment policy and recommended for termination, he resigned. Mr. Lieb has not commented publicly on his resignation.

Before he came to Chicago, Mr. Lieb had been investigated for alleged sexual harassment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but ultimately he was not found responsible for any violations.

Yoav Gilad, a professor in the department of human genetics at Chicago and a member of the committee that recommended Mr. Lieb’s hiring, said Mr. Lieb told the committee about the North Carolina complaint when he was explaining why he had left a job at Princeton University after just seven months. According to Mr. Gilad, Mr. Lieb said Princeton officials were upset with him for not disclosing the prior investigation.

Mr. Gilad said the committee was also aware that anonymous emails sent to Chicago’s human-genetics faculty mentioned allegations against Mr. Lieb at both North Carolina and Princeton, but Princeton officials told the hiring committee that there had been no harassment complaints implicating him there. Princeton officials would not say why Mr. Lieb had resigned, Mr. Gilad added.

The committee struggled with the decision to hire Mr. Lieb because of the questions that had been raised about his conduct, Mr. Gilad said. In hindsight, he said he wished the committee hadn’t taken a chance on Mr. Lieb. But he has lingering questions: “How do we treat a history of allegations when there’s no responsibility? What’s relevant, and what’s not? When is behavior considered a pattern?”

The Chronicle spoke with faculty members at Chicago, experts on the federal gender-equity law Title IX, and others to get a sense of how academic hiring committees vet candidates who have been the subject of sexual-misconduct investigations. Here are some key lessons:

There isn’t a standard practice among hiring committees for handling past allegations of sexual harassment.

Some colleges ask job candidates — on applications or during the interview process — about past campus-level disciplinary findings, said Anita Levy, associate secretary in the department of academic freedom, tenure, and governance at the American Association of University Professors. That kind of information might also surface in letters of reference from peers in the field, she said.

Heather Metcalf, director of research and analysis at the Association for Women in Science, said she had seen an increasing number of colleges ask whether professors have ever been involved in an investigation for harassment, regardless of the outcome.

Often, however, committees hear about such behavior only through informal channels, said Laura Lopez, an assistant professor of astronomy at Ohio State University.

That was the case at the University of Chicago, which asks candidates about arrests and felonies but doesn’t explicitly ask about campus disciplinary history, Mr. Gilad said. As part of the hiring process, he said, committee members had a series of informal conversations with former colleagues of Mr. Lieb — and those discussions didn’t set off any alarm bells about his behavior. “If nothing comes to the surface,” Mr. Gilad said, “I don’t think people are trying to dig too much.”

One proposal for improving transparency around harassment by professors has come from a member of Congress — U.S. Rep. Jackie Speier, Democrat of California. Ms. Speier plans to introduce legislation soon that would require colleges to disclose faculty members’ sexual-misconduct records when they apply for jobs at other institutions.

Many faculty members and Title IX experts say self-disclosure is the best approach.

Requiring that investigation records follow professors to different institutions, however, could create thorny privacy problems. Private colleges, in particular, don’t typically want to share personnel information, Ms. Metcalf said.

Moreover, it’s difficult to attach the outcomes of harassment cases to individual faculty members’ records, said Alexandra Tracy-Ramirez, an Arizona lawyer who worked as a Title IX investigator at two colleges. With students, she pointed out, colleges can annotate their transcripts. “Having faculty carrying around a sign that they were somehow involved in a Title IX investigation is probably not going to accomplish what we’re trying to accomplish,” she said.

Asking job candidates about their disciplinary history, Ms. Tracy-Ramirez said, gives professors an opportunity to defend themselves and to provide documentation — like an outcome letter — outlining the details of an investigation.

In general, Ms. Tracy-Ramirez said, colleges should keep better personnel records. Otherwise, when hiring committees ask for more information, there might not be any official documents to turn to.

Non-disclosure agreements can be another obstacle for such committees, said Heidi L. Lockwood, an associate professor of philosophy at Southern Connecticut State University. Some colleges require professors found responsible for harassment to sign such agreements, Ms. Lockwood said.

Hiring committees should take past harassment claims seriously, observers say, but the approach must be nuanced.

Was the investigation in question about off-color humor? Or was it an alleged sexual assault? “Given how many different kinds of behavior can fall under sexual harassment, there has to be discretion,” Ms. Tracy-Ramirez said.

It’s also important to take into account how long ago allegations surfaced and whether the professors in those cases took steps — perhaps going through a rehabilitation program or misconduct training — to improve their behavior, Ms. Metcalf said.

At Chicago the committee’s deliberations would have looked much different if Mr. Lieb had exhibited a “serial” pattern of poor conduct, Mr. Gilad said. The committee members knew only about the North Carolina investigation — which hadn’t found him responsible — and about his rapid departure, for unconfirmed reasons, from Princeton University, Mr. Gilad said.

“If you’re under investigation, and it’s concluded because there’s no evidence to support the allegations, is this in and of itself a damning event?” he asked. “Ultimately, I personally felt that it wasn’t sufficient grounds to justify not hiring him.”

Mr. Lieb had admitted during interviews at Chicago that he’d had an affair with a graduate student in his lab at North Carolina. Mr. Gilad said that while he didn’t condone that conduct, he saw it as a separate issue from sexual harassment because he believed the relationship was consensual. Still, Peggy Mason, a professor of neurobiology at Chicago, called having an affair with a student he supervised “pretty darn damning.” That knowledge, she said, “should have raised a big red flag.”

The uncertainty surrounding colleges’ procedures for adjudicating sexual-misconduct complaints makes it difficult to weigh them in hiring decisions.

If sexual-harassment investigations were conducted with “appropriate due process,” said the AAUP’s Ms. Levy, the organization would support having colleges share more information about past allegations involving professors. “Unfortunately, as Title IX is being interpreted now, it’s being applied equally to speech and conduct,” Ms. Levy said. It’s not fair for professors to face equivalent consequences — in a disciplinary sense and during future job searches — for both types of harassment, she said, so the group is being cautious.

People tend to think about sexual-misconduct cases in extremes, Ms. Tracy-Ramirez said: Either professors are falsely accused of making bad jokes, or they committed rapes and were never disciplined. Given that there’s a wide spectrum of preparedness among colleges in handling harassment complaints, she said, some hiring committees “aren’t sure whether the outcomes are correct.”

Mr. Gilad said the circumstances surrounding the allegations against Mr. Lieb at North Carolina involved a public event with several witnesses. It was reasonable to believe, Mr. Gilad said, “that if it had happened, there should be a lot of people who could confirm it.” But now, after a similar situation came to light at Chicago, he said he thinks the committee “gave too much weight to the idea that UNC concluded there was no evidence.”

It’s likely that the heightened publicity of harassment by professors will influence how colleges view job candidates with histories of complaints.

Ms. Metcalf expects more colleges to start including questions about disciplinary history on job applications. And once colleges improve their investigations of misconduct claims, hiring committees will feel more confident about the outcomes, Ms. Tracy-Ramirez said.

For Mr. Gilad, the case involving Mr. Lieb has profoundly affected his views on hiring professors with any history of harassment complaints. If he ends up on another committee that considers such a candidate, he said, he doubts he’ll support making that professor an offer.

Many of his colleagues feel the same way, he added. “We are now reflecting on the fact that we knew about an allegation, but we downgraded the importance of it because we didn’t find any support,” he said. “That mistake, I’ll never make again.”

Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.