Ordeal by Title IX
quillette.com
quillette.com
Was he railroaded? Hard to tell when it's just one side of the story. But he's not innocent.
I really do not like such generalizations. Yeah, when there is a direct supervisor/underlying professional relationship and a romantic relationship develops, then things can get murky. And yeah, there is potential for supervisors to abuse their status to attempt coercing the other person, sure. And this has to be carefully considered and recognized so such abuses can be detected early and stopped. That still doesn't make any and every professional relationship that turns into a romantic one "wrong". The number of romantic relationships that originate from workplaces is 15-25% depending on survey and locale; I wouldn't call all those people "wrong" (or at least half of those people).
Moreover, this guy from the article didn't even have a professional and romantic relationship at the same time. He had one then the other.
Definitely not, but the rules are sometimes written in a byzantine manner. This example is from Canada:
Dental hygienist loses licence for treating wife, ruled as ‘sexual abuser’
https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2019/09/13/dental-hygien...
Obviously not, and this is such a strawman I won't reply further.
You can have a professional relationship, or you can have a romantic one. One often starts before the other, and that's ok so long as consent and power are balanced through that progression. But blending of the two under ambiguous circumstances enables horrific abuse, and I won't pretend otherwise just because people fantasize themselves as the boss that gets to date everyone attractive in their office.
You had a bad experience, and I am sorry you did, honestly. I had my fair share of "bad dating" but never directly in the workplace so I can only relate to a degree. As I preemptively agreed, yes, power imbalances can lead to problems and abuse, and people need to be mindful of that and prevent or at least stop it.
But still, that doesn't mean you get to run around trivializing the meaningful and loving relationships many many other people have as "wrong". Or get into the personal attack space by implying people who disagree with you such as myself just fantasize about abusing subordinates. wtf
I've seen enough both personally and in the data to know what's real here. It's not some sort of injust crusade against otherwise healthy workplace relationships.
Granted, this took place in the US, with use mores, but surely we can recognize that this is a value judgement rather than a clear rule with no room for reasonable disagreement.
And what do you say to all the people who are happily married to (or happily divorced from) to supervisors at work? People like Melinda Gates and Mackenzie Bezos? Saying that people can only date people of the same social status is dangerous classism. (And no, Bezos isn't going to go out an meet an assistant at some other company to marry.)
> No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.
When people refer to Title IX offices, investigations, or practices, they're not referring to a part of this sentence, but to the administrative structures that have been set up around it.
The implicit threat was they would be sued by the DOJ if they didn’t put those procedures in place. Yes, the law as passed by Congress is a single sentence, but the law as enforced by courts includes not only that sentence but also rules and regulations put forth by unelected government agencies. https://www2.ed.gov/print/about/offices/list/ocr/letters/col...
Those rules in the “Dear Colleague” letter have just been replaced by the DOJ with a new regulation promulgated under the Administrative Procedure Act, which also has the force of law despite greatly expanding on the single sentence of law passed by congress in Title IX.
1. Starting it so soon after he was officially off the hook looks really suspicious. This shouldn’t matter in a legal sense, but it does in a professional sense. He should have waited at least a year, or better yet just not do it. It was inviting trouble.
2. Regarding recommendations, imo he has to tell her that he can no longer vouch for her professionally if they get involved (professional recusal). Anything else would appear unethical if not actually be unethical. If the (former) student was not ok with that, then no relationship. I think that this holds true in non-academic situations as well.
3. I think that there is no doubt he was railroaded. He was put in a situation in which he could not be professionally responsible —- he couldn’t talk to anyone at the school for over a year. He ultimately had to leave a job over something that should have at worst been an official warning. The only way that this outcome was possibly reasonable is if he had been warned before and conveniently forgot to mention that fact. If someone follows the letter of the rules and then ends up jobless because of it (from a tenured position no less), then the issue is with the rules rather than the faculty member. If they want to prevent imbalanced professional power relationships, then they can simply ban relationships with current or former students. If that type of ban is not legal, then he should not be able to have his tenure rescinded.
The changes to Title IX had good intentions, but the implementation has had way too much collateral damage for it to be considered an unconditional win.
Oh well, more evidence on the side of keeping sex out of your work life in general.
Although online dating is growing, around 1/3rd of workplace relationships result in marriage.[1] It seems like forbidding such relationships would make people worse off in general.
1. http://press.careerbuilder.com/2018-02-01-Office-Romance-Hit...
This behavior is extremely common and –dare I say it– usually quite healthy. Banning it doesn't stop it. It just turns everyone into hypocrites.
Unfortunately for academics, there seems to be no line between work and life - professional acquaintances are often social ones and vice versa. How do you meet a mate outside of academics when all of your time is spent there?
As a non-academic who knows a lot of academics, I do not envy this arrangement in the least.
> Your argument boils down to "people pointing out the sexism are the REAL sexists" which as you might expect, is not convincing to the rest of us.
Innocent men by definition aren’t sexists, and my point was that arguments to treat them as such (based on the idea that innocent men are responsible for the violations of guilty men by virtue of their common gender) is patently sexism. Maybe that’s not the point you were making; I just wanted to head that off in advance because frankly I’m sick of these disgusting lines of argumentation.
"It's only happening to a few people so that's ok"? You sure that's the argument you want to make?
The problem is that's not possible. Her testimony would be the same if:
(1) Their relationship was consensual.
(2) She didn't want to have one but feared retaliation for saying no.
(3) She didn't want one but thought it would help her career if she slept with him.
That's the problem with these types of relationships. Until we get a truth detector we can't ever really know.
Had (2) been a factor at the time it wouldn't have been now, and (3) doesn't sound likely given that they'd already left the campus.
It's not like she's gonna say:
"Of course I just banged him to help my career. Have you seen him? Dude's hideous."
So again, she can't verify that nothing inappropriate happened because we can't trust that her testimony is honest.
Title IX guidance is horrendous and it leaves a trail of victims in its wake. I don’t understand the desire to impugn these victims and distract from the pressing problem. I guess I strongly disagree with the idea that we should punish someone because they might have done something wrong in the utter absence of evidence. Which is to say, I’m opposed to injustice.
Maybe our personal biases play a bigger role in how much we care about about due process in a particular case, hm?
Universities may have crossed the Rubicon in terms of becoming farcical entities. Bloated bureaucracies, commodification of faculty and students, financial structures based on questionable lending practices, focus of form over function (like in this story), and a big bag of other misaligned incentives make me think that universities don’t have a bright future (at least in their current form).
The author of this story is no angel — he certainly should have been more careful with that relationship with his former student in several ways. That said, I can’t really see that he did anything worthy of destroying his career. This was just another case of modern-day witch-hunting.
He's missing the obvious "systems" answer -- the current culture is to investigate every suspicion, and human nature is to suspect that where is smoke there is fire. The drastically lower bar for investigation -- fine on its own, but then combined with the assumption that accusations likely have some merit (even if they are merely notifications, not accusations!), leads to "guilt by slippery slope".
It's the same thing that happens with "mandatory reporting" for child abuse, and the same thing that BLM and similar complain about with overstrict policing.
Still, there's much that's public about it. Surely some rules are desirable.
If anything, the Obama change made things more consistent. Civil hearings use preponderance, and criminal use a higher standard.
You’re pretending that means “require criminal standard of evidence”.
See the problem?
Due process doesn't mean running a trial or decision-making process in the particular way that US courts do, rather it means running such a process in some fashion that is consistent and reasonable. Personally, I believe that it is extremely important to maintain due process in our trials and procedures.
In this case the author fundamentally has two complaints. The first complaint is that when he was accused of a Title IX violation, the procedure was so unreasonable and so biased against the defendant that winning cost him $27,000 and an entire year of no contact with his university and no response to the charges (thus destroying his reputation). The second complaint is that he was slated to receive an extremely harsh punishment (loss of tenure and being fired) for what he considers a rather minor violation (having a consensual relationship with a former student who was technically still associated with the university). All told, I agree: the ultimate outcome (him resigning) may be reasonable, but the process for reaching it clearly was not.
So this seems like a situation where there is a vested interest in conducting lots of these investigations.
Before revealing he had a relationship with his student, he gives a bunch of innuendo that he was only fired because he mentioned opposing some kind of affirmative action in a hiring committee, but he doesn't prove that was why and doesn't give the committee "due process" to defend themselves.
The vast majority of people in this country are hired at will and don't get anything like a long trial to stay on and are subject arbitrary firing with no real due process. It is the norm in employment rather than a new trend (unless you are unionized), but professors have just been protected from it by tenure. But it isn't a new trend that tenure doesn't protect you if you sleep with or have a relationship with a student. It's the one thing everyone with tenure knows isn't covered by tenure.
For example, under Title IX if your colleague shows up with a black eye one day and says they got it from their roommate then you are required to report it to the university.
The process sounds kafkaesque in his telling, but most people subject to at-will barely get any process at all when they are fired.
This may be the rule at a lot of places, but it is very rarely implemented, and these relationships are typically just overlooked.
The scandalous thing about the case in which something was done was that he was supervising both his wife and his lover. He ended up divorcing his wife and marrying his lover. That was the level it took to get an official warning. He retired a few years later, with no negative impact on his career (he was promoted after the incident).
Do firings happen over these types of relationships? Sure. Is that the modal response? Very much no in my experience.
This closes the loophole where someone could report something casually to a faculty member, and nothing happens, which is a tragically common problem.
What strikes me as overreach about the black eye scenario (which is used in orientation/training for University staff as an example of something that needs to be reported under Title IX) is that a) the black eye is the result of some type of abuse and b) a non-University relationship suddenly falls under the purview of Title IX just by being mentioned to a University employee.
Is that good?
I have a few teachers and professors in my family, and get to hear stories about tenured professors and the antics they get into. According to them, there's one thing that tenured professors know they can't do and that is sleeping with their students.
> A bunch of innuendo that he was only fired over it because he mentioned opposing some kind of affirmative action in a hiring committee, but he doesn't prove that was why and doesn't give the committee "due process" to defend themselves.
The author ran to a rag that would publish his story without doing any investigative journalism behind it. He knew the audience would take what he claims at face value, and low and behold, that is what's happening.
This isn't even just to protect the student, and I expect that the rule was originally developed when universities didn't care about the potential for the student being abused: it also causes a potential for unfairness to everyone else, especially when the relationship is clandestine.
Academia is somewhat unusual in that relationships within research communities and universities need to be allowed, are rather common and accepted, and often even need to be accommodated by universities. Strict restrictions on them at some universities in the past actually caused serious problems at times. Many situations are accepted, so long as they are appropriately handled, even when there are close professional connections involved, and even, sometimes, between faculty and graduate students, when the student isn't their student.
But sleeping with your students has always been a deadly sin in academia. And this appears to be a case of someone trying to argue that, while he slept with his student, she wasn't really his student at the time. That's a difficult argument to make.
IANAL, but I’m pretty sure not speculating about someone’s motives (and indeed not even identifying them) in some piece of Internet criticism is different than sentencing them without due process...
In contrast he got paid to do nothing for 14 months. He painted things as Kafka-esque, but for a typical worker it would be a huge improvement over arbitrary firing for any reason.
Maybe we should have more due process for losing your job, but his situation is so much better than what the vast majority are at risk of, in terms of protections, that it should be near the lowest priority to worry about.
The idea of a bureaucracy like university administration controlling the love life of the professors is ridiculous IMO.
The so-called sex-negative feminism that forms the ideological bed for most of it, is in it’s heart very puritanical
Here is a list, mostly of such stories: https://reason.com/tag/title-ix/. A common theme is consensual drunken sex in which one party expresses regret at some later time and reports the other party. Title IX defines “consent” such that drunken sex cannot be “consensual”—drunken sex is rape per Title IX guidelines. If this sounds dramatic, please give that link a read; this is the most charitable interpretation.
The interesting thing about this “drunken sex is rape” interpretation is that logically it would imply that if both parties were drunk, then they’ve raped each other. Of course this is ridiculous, so universities either decide that the man is guilty (presumably in a “Believe all women” sort of way) which is ironic in that Title IX ostensibly prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex. Another way in which universities resolve this dilemma is by assuming the first to report is the victim and the other party is the rapist. There are probably other universities who elect not to address the dilemma at all and are happy with the mutual rape interpretation.
In all cases, this seems per puritanical to me.
EDIT: I forgot my favorite example—the Northwestern University feminist professor whose Title IX criticism was deemed to be a Title IX violation. Criticizing Title IX is a violation of Title IX, but you still have a swath of people arguing that Title IX is a Very Fine Law (indeed the law is fine; the guidelines are problematic).
This was a complicated story. But the real issue is a third-party can bring up an issue that happened years ago--even if the primary person involved was ok with it--just because you did or said something they didn't like. This retaliatory complaining should never be allowed or encouraged. If you don't report something immediately, you shouldn't be able to bring it up years later.
Consensual sex is not a crime, and there are no circumstances in this case that would warrant maximum available punishment for the lowest possible violation of this policy according to the university's own range of possible punishments. This is a witch hunt that never cared about any facts, in all likelihood they just wanted to fire the guy for his political opinions.
We don't know that he would have gotten the maximum penalty under the policy, as he didn't exhaust the appeal that his contract gave him a right to. He resigned and wasn't fired.
People working at-will can be fired without any reason. 14 months PTO would be a godsend to them.
He resigned because the process was consistently of a kangaroo court variety. He did get the "sentence" to be fired so there is no need to speculate what would have happened if he didn't resign. There was no point to continue to the one last step because there was no reason to believe that it would be any more fair than the numerous previous steps.
You're just finding excuses for his unfair treatment because you don't like the guy or what he did. If a similarly unfair process was applied to a professor you like and respect, you'd be screaming in disbelief at how it's unfair. "Prominent civil rights activist loses tenure", instant 5000 points on HN. And so if you don't care about an unlikeable guy getting a fair process, then I guess you only care that people you don't like are punished by whatever means gets the job done, and that's not something to be proud of. Our society strives to be better than petty tribalism even if the legal protections against that aren't always there.
One might equally say "HN should not allow linking to Huffington Post" which I don't honestly know if that is linked to with any frequency but I wouldn't be opposed if it did. It is valuable to know what people are thinking and to see what people are discussing.
The private machinations of rationally acting rational actors acting in accordance with the terms of their voluntary associations seems to be something that quillette would support.
For example, they wouldn't support the assertion that a manager at McDonalds conduct a trial where evidence, chain of custody, jurisprudence, and counsel for the defendant be guaranteed before firing an employee.
In fact I bet they have published numerous pieces asserting the exact opposite, consistently, in the past.
But here we are, criticizing a university for firing an employee.
I guess their internal logic is not consistent and freedom only apply to job creators, and not "THE LEFTIST ACADEMIC ELITE".
If there is an inconsistency, it’s that the folks who love reducing everything to power dynamics are somehow not analyzing this as a clear-cut case of powerful university administrators abusing their considerable power over an employee. I mean, the provost made the unprecedented move of prosecuting a case that her underlings were adjudicating and flouted the requirement that she present her argument a week in advance. The author provided lots and lots of verifiable supporting evidence.
The majority of people in the market the university cares about think that professors who bang their subordinates should be railroaded out the institution.
The power dynamics bit is the best part. The voluntary collective of rational actors known as "the university" can choose to ignore violations of unjust policies (the absolute authority given the assent of the managed) the same way jurors can choose to ignore violations of the law though jury nullification.
Freedom includes the freedom to bend the rules and have an arbitrary and subjective number of people nod in agreement, thus making it "Okay", no?
If the above statement is not true, then literally, in the literal dictionary definition of the the word "literal" every single aspect of society will have to be destroyed and rebuilt from the ground up.
Should parents who take tax deductions (PuBLiC FuNdInG) for children perform an Oxford-style debate to discuss the merits whenever they tell their kids to brush their teeth and go to bed?
If the government gives you money, it is yours. No strings attached that you didn't agree to before receiving the money.
The government has two options, give money with no strings attached to consumers and let the market work, or give money to institutions with conditions.
Clearly universities are not consumers, but institutions, so your silly analogy breaks very quickly.
It's sad that officials in the Dept of Education can put in place such an egregious system, which is literally designed to infringe on people's rights, and not face any consequences. Like so many things at that level, there are expectations for officials to act properly and protect our rights, but when they don't, there is no specified punishment.