A professor is suddenly gone. Now what?
In July 2022, emails to their longtime adviser bounced. Then came an email from Tracy Johnson, dean of life sciences, who wrote that that Priyanga Amarasekare, a tenured professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California at Los Angeles, was suddenly “on leave” through the end of the coming academic year.
For Tanner Dulay, Rosa McGuire, and Madeline Cowen, three graduate students whom Amarasekare had been advising and mentoring, and who had written papers with her, the email started a chain of confusion and frustration.
At first, the students hoped that their adviser was OK. Dulay, a fifth-year doctoral student, said the Ph.D. students couldn’t understand why their adviser would disappear, not say anything, and leave them in the dark.
In August 2022, Johnson wrote to the students, in one of many emails shared with The Chronicle, that their professor would no longer be able to advise them.
The students pieced together some reasoning for Amarasekare’s absence through news accounts and word of mouth. In 2022, after a dispute with her colleagues, Amarasekare was suspended for a year without pay or benefits. Her salary was docked by 20 percent for two years after that. She was banned from communicating with students; going to her lab, or anywhere else on campus; and getting access to her National Science Foundation-funded research.
The Chronicle sought comments on the punishment from Johnson and from Michael Alfaro, chair of the department of ecology and evolutionary biology, but got no response.
The university issued this statement: “The success and well-being of our graduate students is of the utmost importance to us. Generally, when graduate students encounter challenges as they work toward their degrees, including when their faculty adviser is unavailable, we prioritize the student’s academic needs and make every effort to support the continuation and completion of their research and their degree.”
Amarasekare has criticized what she sees as discrimination against minority faculty members. In 2020 she set up an email list for faculty members in her department, accusing it of denying her the same promotion and leadership opportunities that white men had received. Her supporters say she’s being punished for the blunt way that she’s criticized colleagues and department policies.
Last year a faculty committee found her responsible for violating the university’s Faculty Code of Conduct. The Academic Senate’s committee on privilege and tenure recommended written censure and a potential pay cut if the alleged violations continued.
When she was suspended, in 2022, Amarasekare had the three Ph.D. students and about a dozen undergraduate research assistants. She also served on the dissertation committees for two of those doctoral students. For the graduate students who have worked closely with Amarasekare for years, finding a new adviser has been difficult.
While the university told the students to work with Alfaro, the department chair, they were skeptical. Their doctoral research was specialized work, they argued, and no one else had the expertise to supervise them. Dulay said that they had been “forced assigned” to other faculty members, but mostly they were left to do their research on their own.
Additionally, in September 2022, undergraduate research assistants discovered that the locks had been changed in the lab housing Amarasekare’s NSF-funded research. Later, the undergraduates were allowed in the lab but had to be supervised by one of Amarasekare’s graduate students. So Dulay, McGuire, and Cowen had to expand their own mentoring work.
McGuire said that the time she had spent advocating for Amarasekare’s return, and the lost access to her research lab, had delayed her graduation plans.
On July 1, 2023, the day Amarasekare’s suspension ended, Dulay emailed his former adviser, but the messages still bounced. Dulay and the other grad students emailed Johnson to express their frustration about the lack of transparency and explain why it was important to meet with their professor. Johnson later replied that Amarasekare could advise students about dissertations, conferences, and in a few other ways, but all contact would have to be remote. And students couldn’t talk about “personnel matters as they relate to Dr. Amarasekare,” read the email.
Read about the consequences of a professor’s disappearance on her graduate students, in our Katie Mangan’s story.
