Professor accused of harassment suspended

BERKELEY >> A professor of East Asian studies has been suspended from UC Berkeley for two years after investigators found he sexually harassed a student by bringing up sex in repeated conversations, a university spokesperson said Wednesday.

Alan Tansman will be off work for a year without pay and then on a previously scheduled sabbatical. During those two years he will have only limited access to the university, meaning he “essentially cannot be on campus,” the spokesperson, Janet Gilmore, said in an email.

Tansman engaged in “unwelcomed verbal conduct of a sexual nature that was found to be sufficiently severe that it created a hostile environment and interfered with a complainant’s study and work,” Gilmore wrote. The San Francisco Chronicle first reported the suspension, citing documents it obtained.

The harassment occurred between 2007 and 2009, Gilmore said.

Tansman, who is a professor in the the arts and humanities division, has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, Gilmore wrote.

Tansman could not be reached for comment, but Gilmore wrote that the professor agreed to the suspension in negotiations with the university to settle the matter shortly before it was to be heard by a tenure committee of the Academic Senate.

The suspension comes four years after acclaimed astronomer Geoff Marcy resigned from the university in 2015 after it was found he had sexually harassed graduate students. The investigation found that his groping and kissing of students went on for years.

In 2017, the University of California released records to news organizations detailing 124 sex abuses cases across its 10 campuses between 2013 and 2016. They included a French professor who wrote over 300 poems professing his love to his graduate assistant, a cancer researcher who sent sexually explicit jokes to colleagues, and detailed sexual assaults. Roughly 35 percent of the cases were brought by students. The majority came from university employees.

Berkeley released records in 19 cases, including an assistant men’s diving coach who asked athletes for sex, and the dean of the university’s Boalt Hall law school, Sujit Choudhry, who was found to have sexually harassed his assistant. He was forced out as dean, but allowed to keep a tenured professorship. His assistant was paid $1.7 million to settle her lawsuit against the university.