By resigning last week from the University of California at Berkeley, Geoffrey W. Marcy — the acclaimed astronomy professor found to have repeatedly violated Berkeley’s sexual-harassment policy over the course of a decade — may have helped the institution solve a nagging disciplinary problem.
But Mr. Marcy’s decision could not allay the backlash over Berkeley’s treatment of his case. Many professors and observers have decried the university’s failure to quickly dismiss the professor; some have called for the university, and other institutions, to revamp the process for dealing with similar cases of faculty misconduct.
The critics ask a simple question: Why didn’t the university do more to punish a professor it had identified as a serial offender?
In a statement after Mr. Marcy’s resignation, two Berkeley officials said they couldn’t do much else. Any further disciplinary action, they said, would have required faculty-led hearings with high standards of evidence and a three-year statute of limitations. (The complaints against Mr. Marcy concerned alleged incidents from 2001 to 2010.) The officials described such a process as “lengthy and uncertain.”
The Marcy situation ‘highlighted the urgent need to review university policies that may have inadvertently made the investigation and resolution of this case more difficult.’
Even a professor who is the subject of regular misconduct complaints often cannot be easily removed from a campus. Tenure protects many professors from quick dismissal. Their faculty peers, who are often charged with assessing whether an accused colleague bears responsibility, may view the cases as attacks on tenure. College leaders, who often don’t have the power to terminate a professor without consulting the faculty, may fear damage to their institution’s reputation. Students who experience harassment may not file complaints if they feel they have little chance of being taken seriously.
Mr. Marcy’s case echoed those themes. Students and faculty members inside and outside of Berkeley had known about the professor’s behavior for years but had discussed it mostly in private. University officials eventually conducted an investigation, but it was not made public until a BuzzFeed News report this month. And even though the university found Mr. Marcy responsible for harassment and forced him to give up any future due-process rights, the astronomer was allowed to remain on the campus.
After Mr. Marcy’s resignation, Janet A. Napolitano, president of the University of California system, announced plans to create a committee of administrators, faculty members, and students to review the system’s procedures for handling sexual-misconduct complaints against tenured professors. Ms. Napolitano wrote in an October 15 letter to the system’s chancellors and regents that Mr. Marcy’s ability to remain on the campus had “highlighted the urgent need to review university policies that may have inadvertently made the investigation and resolution of this case more difficult.”
‘An Ugly Process’
Faculty disciplinary procedures are murky at many institutions. When a sexual-harassment complaint is brought against a tenured professor, a faculty committee might be involved both in the review of the complaint and in any dismissal proceedings, depending on college policy. Terminating a tenured faculty member could require hearings and appeals that might take a full semester or longer and that are unpleasant for the complainant, who is typically questioned and cross-examined by the committee.
Some colleges channel all sexual-misconduct complaints involving employees through human-resources offices, a process that does not uphold the standards of the American Association of University Professors, said Anita Levy, associate secretary for its Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governance. To honor academic freedom, such a review should be conducted “by a committee consisting exclusively of elected faculty peers,” she said in an email.
But faculty-run proceedings are “an ugly process at times,” said Eric Isicoff, an outside lawyer for the University of Miami. He is defending the university against a Title IX lawsuit brought last week by a former graduate student, Monica Morrison, who was upset with Miami’s handling of her sexual-harassment allegations against Colin McGinn, a former prominent philosophy professor there. As a student filing a complaint, Mr. Isicoff said, “you’re walking in with the odds largely stacked against you.”
Unlawful conduct, such as a sexual assault, is a different scenario, he said. However, “when there are fringe or borderline allegations, especially ones that can be interpreted or construed in more than one way,” he said, “the faculty is going to give the tenured professor the benefit of the doubt.”
If a faculty committee recommends a punishment for a professor, the college president tends to have the final say on the matter. But pushing professors out without their peers’ approval might provoke an uproar among faculty members, and perhaps an ugly public backlash.
That’s why a “golden parachute” is a common administrative response to such situations, said Heidi L. Lockwood, an associate professor of philosophy at Southern Connecticut State University who has spoken out frequently against harassment by professors. In those cases, she said in an email, administrators might offer problem professors a voluntary severance agreement, an opportunity to resign, or assistance in finding another job, either at the institution or elsewhere.
‘It’s the oldest game in the book to say, Don’t do it again. Nobody wants to face the real truth of it.’
As part of such a secret process, student complainants might be offered minor gestures of appeasement and might be required to sign nondisclosure agreements, said Cynthia Lewis, a professor of English at Davidson College who is working on a book about professors’ harassment of students.
“The victims in these cases typically get nothing,” Ms. Lockwood added.
Miami officials successfully pushed Mr. McGinn to resign. Ann Olivarius, a senior partner at McAllister Olivarius, a law firm that specializes in workplace-discrimination claims, said she assumed that Mr. McGinn felt he would lose if he went before the institution’s Faculty Senate on harassment charges, so he resigned. Ms. Olivarius — a plaintiff in Alexander v. Yale, a 1980 case that used Title IX to establish that sexual harassment of female students could be considered discriminatory — is representing Ms. Morrison in her suit.
Still, Mr. Isicoff said, the university’s administrators had acted appropriately to bring a quick conclusion to the case. Mr. McGinn’s resignation “didn’t happen in two or three years, or never,” he said. “And there weren’t embarrassing proceedings.”
Alternatively, officials might give the professor a slap on the wrist, as many observers — including Ms. Olivarius — feel Berkeley did initially with Mr. Marcy. “It’s the oldest game in the book to say, Don’t do it again,” she said. “Nobody wants to face the real truth of it.”
But “we have to discover ways to be more stringent with faculty,” said Billie Wright Dziech, a longtime professor of English at the University of Cincinnati who wrote a groundbreaking 1984 book, The Lecherous Professor: Sexual Harassment on Campus.
Star professors, like Mr. Marcy and Mr. McGinn, “are role models,” she said. “When they get away with it, it sends the message that this behavior is OK.”
Remembering Rights
It is important, too, for tenured faculty members’ rights to be protected in sexual-harassment cases, said Heather Metcalf, research director of the Association for the Advancement of Women in Science.
“Even if the situation at hand is a really terrible one,” like Mr. Marcy’s, Ms. Metcalf said, it’s essential to remember that there will also be occasions “where someone is accused of something they didn’t do.”
The AAUP’s Ms. Levy said a subcommittee of the association is drafting a report about the “uses and abuses of Title IX” in response to “a number of troubling academic-freedom cases stemming from the apparent misapplication of institutional sexual-harassment policies.”
Despite Ms. Napolitano’s planned task force, Benjamin E. Hermalin, chair of Berkeley’s Academic Senate, said he wasn’t sure whether changes in the university’s procedures were necessary in the aftermath of the Marcy case. If the problem was how policies had been interpreted or carried out, he said in an email, then making adjustments was unlikely to deter future harassment.
‘Even if the situation at hand is a really terrible one,’ it’s essential to remember that there will also be occasions ‘where someone is accused of something they didn’t do.’
That’s not how Southern Connecticut’s Ms. Lockwood sees it. She said colleges can take clear steps to improve how they handle claims of misbehavior by professors. She recommended, among other changes, that colleges conduct harassment-specific background checks before hiring professors.
Alexandra Tracy-Ramirez, an Arizona lawyer who worked as a Title IX investigator at two colleges, said it might make sense for some campuses to create a separate committee that deals with sexual-harassment complaints against faculty members. That body could involve professors, she said, but it could also include people who are specially trained to deal with sexual misconduct and an expert investigator from outside the institution.
Ms. Dziech criticized the statute of limitations that applied to the allegations against Mr. Marcy, saying there shouldn’t be any such limit. “All of the reliable research says that it takes years and years, often, for people to come forward and talk because of the stigma attached to it,” she said.
Given the factors at play, it’s perhaps understandable that institutional leaders want to tread cautiously. But in highly charged sexual-misconduct cases, some advocates say, risk aversion doesn’t work. College leaders, Ms. Dziech said, “have to stop worrying about who’s going to sue us or countersue us.”
