Professors’ power tilts cases in academia
Grad students fearing for careers stay silent
Last month, Kimberly Latta alleged in a Facebook post that, when she was a graduate student at UC Berkeley in the mid-1980s, a visiting professor forced her to have sex with him, upending not only her studies but shaking up her entire career.
“I could see how absolutely upsetting and disturbing it was,” said Michael Harrawood, a fellow graduate student of Latta’s at UC Berkeley who is now a professor at Florida Atlantic University. “I actually think it really, really impacted her whole future as an academic.”
As women across the country come forward to share their stories about sexual misconduct, the relationship between faculty and graduate students has emerged as one of the ripest for abuse, with heralded professors quietly wielding major influence over the trajectory of their students’ lives.
“That’s who you look up to for a recommendation,” said Annie Clark, co-founder of the group End Rape on Campus. “It’s not
talked about enough.”
Now women are exposing the perils of that power imbalance. Last week, a former Stanford University graduate student, SeoYoung Chu, told this news organization how a sexual assault at the hands of her professor, Jay Fliegelman, sent her fleeing the university and left her questioning her future. Latta and others from around the country have also stepped forward, inspired by hearing the experiences of other women.
“I remember being paralyzed and terrified,” Latta, now a therapist in Pennsylvania, recalled during a phone interview. “I kind of remember myself floating near the ceiling and looking down and escaping it that way.”
As a new report on sexual harassment of graduate students by faculty in the Journal of Legal Education points out, professors help students submit research for grants and build contacts in a close-knit academic community where a reference, good or bad, can make or break an entire career.
Graduate students often
work closely with a single adviser, so raising a complaint can derail their job prospects.
“These women have been told … they have something greater to lose,” said Maha Ibrahim, a staff attorney with Equal Rights Advocates, a San Franciscobased civil rights organization.
According to a forthcoming report in the Utah Law Review that cites data from the Association of American Universities, about one in 10 female graduate students at major research universities say they’ve been sexually harassed by faculty. More than half of cases involve alleged serial harassers.
But where women who experience sexual harassment in the workplace often develop supportive “whisper networks” over years, graduate students by nature are just passing through their schools. Where, say, a manager who is a serial harasser is likely to become known among employees, the same is not necessarily true among students from year to year.
In a blog post, Latta wrote, “It is … about the unacknowledged power to intimidate and abuse that professors wield over students. It is about the men who harass female graduate students and the women who cover up for them or look the other way.”
Complicating all of this is the fact that until recently many in academia considered it acceptable for professors and graduate students to have sexual relationships.
Franco Moretti, the professor Latta accused of assault, said his relationship with her had been consensual.
“I did meet Kimberly Latta during my visit at Berkeley in 1985; we went out to dinner together one night and back to her apartment where we had fully consensual sex and I spent the night. I did not rape her, and am horrified by the accusation,” he wrote in an email. “In the weeks that followed we saw each other occasionally, including at her initiative, and remained on good terms until the end of my stay at Berkeley.”
Moretti, who did not respond to a follow-up request to speak by phone, later taught at Stanford University, where he remains a professor emeritus, before retiring last year. Stanford said it is looking into the allegations.
A formal complaint was
never filed against Moretti in the incident. But when schools do open formal complaints, according to the Journal of Legal Education report, the prospect of losing tenure is so threatening to the accused, they often pursue legal action against their accusers longer than people in other industries. And, if an accused professor brings money and status to a university, schools may be inclined to downplay allegations.
In the Fliegelman case, Stanford said nothing publicly but glowing things about him and his work despite the fact that the university had quietly suspended him for sexual misconduct with a graduate student in 2000.
It wasn’t until Chu, now a professor in New York, went public with her story in November that the university acknowledged its actions against Fliegelman.
Clark sees the fact that these dynamics are even a topic of discussion today as a sign of progress, however glacial. “People might have looked at them and said this is normal,” she said. Now, not so much.
“I was tired of being silent about it,” Latta said. “Maybe we can actually make a difference this time.”
As stories like Chu’s, Latta’s and others have come to light, schools, including UC Berkeley and Stanford, have made a point of noting that they’ve improved how they handle such cases in recent years.
UC Berkeley spokeswoman Janet Gilmore wrote in an email that the school has bolstered its Title IX policies, with “more support systems for survivors, and greatly expanded prevention and response efforts in which those found in violation of policies are held accountable.”
Yet in what it has framed as an attempt to be fair to the accused, the Trump administration has rolled back Obama-era Title IX guidance that advocates for said protected victims. In the coming months, as lawmakers finally begin a long-anticipated attempt to rewrite the nation’s higher education laws, campus sexual assault policy could shift dramatically.
Regardless of policy, Clark would like to see more education happening in the early years, before boys turn into men in the workforce or academia.
From Hollywood to the Ivory Tower, “all of these dots are connected,” she said, “and nothing is going to change until we do something earlier.”