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Comment by treis | Hacker News Reader

This guys not wrong about Title IX being kangaroo courtish. But he also had a sexual relationship with a graduate student that he advised. The fact that it happened after he de facto stopped advising her doesn't help his case much. She's still very dependent on him for recommendations and his connections for her career growth. The potential for abuse there is very high and it's not a relationship he should have engaged in.

Was he railroaded? Hard to tell when it's just one side of the story. But he's not innocent.

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The relationship happened more than a decade prior and the student’s own testimony exonerated the professor. Unless the article is lying about the details, I don’t see how he could have been anything but railroaded, especially given that, after the Title IX inquisition (let’s call a spade a spade) failed, the university launched an internal investigation in which the provost took it upon herself to prosecute the case (unprecedented) putting her employees who would judge the case in a clear conflict of interest, and the provost herself flouted the requirements to provide arguments in advance. These are among the enormous laundry-list of verifiable claims the author makes against the university. Either he is lying and should be sued for defamation or the university is abhorrent in its corruption.

>student’s own testimony exonerated the professor.

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.

According to the article the relationship was 12 years ago and they had "left campus six months before [the] relationship had begun".

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.

Look, I’m not saying it’s a good idea to date your former students, but the student in question verified that nothing inappropriate happened. They weren’t dating when she was a student barring some technicalities which would never (neither under Title IX nor the university’s own rules) constitute a fireable offense (per the article). It’s one thing to disagree with the prudence of dating one’s former student, but that doesn’t remotely validate the university’s behavior.

>student in question verified that nothing inappropriate happened.

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.

Maybe, but this is different than quid pro quo harassment or other kinds of sexual harassment which is what Title IX is concerned with. Fugrther, your scenario is implausible because she would have stood to gain very little from their relationship—her grades were locked-in at that point and her future PhD program was secure. Her employers would care very little about her masters advisor’s opinion compared to her PhD advisor. Further still, none of this justifies railroading someone out of their position.

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.

Everyone has influence over their romantic partners lives. Anyone can trash talk an ex

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.)

Sure, but not everyone can damage their ex’s academic career.

With Title IX, you can ruin someone’s career without as much as a relationship.

The whole OP was about how Title IX didn't ruin the career, but the Provost did anyway.

Agreed, but there are many other documented Title IX cases where the victims’ careers are ruined and we should also suspect a long tail of incidents we don’t hear about. It would be equally illogical to hear Susan Fowler’s case of sexual harassment and conclude that because she was on the cover of Time magazine and otherwise widely published that there isn’t an invisible minority whose careers are ruined. Further, TFA documents the Title IX inquiry as a kangaroo court, consistent with every other documented complaint of Title IX excesses; it’s not much of a consolation that it outperformed the Provost’s own kangaroo court.

Remember that the literal text of Title IX just bans sex discrimination. When people discuss "Title IX" as a concept, they're generally referring to the general attitudes towards sex and romance in American universities, where authorities are instructed and acculturated to view all but the most squeaky-clean things as extreme misconduct which justifies booting out the accused.

Title IX is a specific law. Recent trends in Left wing / feminist thought and behavior have some interaction with that, but only in the sense that they interact with everything in the University.

The full text of Title IX is a single sentence:

> 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.

Title IX is not simply an attitude though. There was a “Dear Colleague” letter from the DOJ sent to all colleges some years ago setting out guidelines for colleges to follow in enforcing Title IX.

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.

Yeah, I think we’re saying the thing. Administrators didn’t arrive at this attitude by chance; the DOJ’s positioning in combination with related activism sent a strong message that they were supposed to.

So he did wrong because of the “potential” for abuse, even though the woman involved had no complaints, and even stated that there was nothing abusive in the relationship?

Just because the relationship wasn't coerced (one form of abuse) doesn't make it appropriate. As noted, its a very bad idea to 'go there' because of the confusion of further favors (recommendations/appointments) with sexual favors. Its reasonable for an institution to discourage this kind of relationship. Just like many private corporations do.

It's called a "conflict of interest" and is simply handled by recusal.

But a Professor's recommendation is very valuable - in some industries, the only path to employment. The temptation to forego recusal is large, especially for a valued graduate student. Unequal relationships (mentor/student etc) are so full of pitfalls, they've been forbidden by many, many institutions.

What industry relies on a recommendation from a Masters degree advisor of someone who has a PhD from a different University? And even if that's true, the problem is the discrimination practiced by the employer, not the advisor. In corporations, supervisors are banned from giving recommendations for former employees, due to conflict of interest concerns.

I don’t understand these remarks. Is the idea that the victim wasn’t perfectly professional and therefore deserved this clear and overt overreach? We rightly mock “her skirt was too short” justifications for sexual assault—I don’t see how this line of argumentation differs.

Yes. You can have a professional relationship, or a sexual one. The former precludes the possibility of the latter, and the responsibility is squarely on the person with more authority to behave properly with respect to this distinction.

Does this mean that people who get married and later decide to run a business together should get divorced? Does this mean for example that the sqlite.org creators wife is evil because she is (technically) his superior, being the CEO and owner of the company he works for?

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.

> Does this mean that people who get married and later decide to run a business together should get divorced? Does this mean for example that the sqlite.org creators wife is evil because she is (technically) his superior, being the CEO and owner of the company he works for?

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...

This is somehow worse than your synopsis makes it out to be. The same standard was selectively applied to this person when compared to another dental hygienist that did the same thing. And apparently somehow it is not against the rules when dentists do it, but it is when dental hygienists do it. Sounds like a case of regulatory capture, really.

Obviously not, and this is such a strawman I won't reply further.

It is not a strawman in practice. I have provided a link to a professional organization taking such a stance and the court agreeing with them in the sibling comment, which for reasons I cannot comprehend is now heavily downvoted.

Once you re-read your own comment that denies romantic and professional relationships could/should coexist, care to explain how exactly you conclude I was attacking a strawman? I gave an example that directly contradicts your generalized assertion that I pretty much disagree with ("you can either have a professional or romantic relationship") - call it proof by contradiction - as well as mentioning further survey data that contradicts you further.

I don't need to reread my own comment. I wrote it. You have to decide: is this relationship professional or not. There are certain conditions that preclude the former. The second biggest mistake I've made professionally was not understanding this (note: I was not the person with power) and it cost me deep into 6 figures. So kindly take your trivializing nonsense of what I'm saying elsewhere.

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.

look who is attacking strawmen now.

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 said my anecdote was my personal mistake, not that is the sole basis of my opinion here.

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.

Spoken like an American. Most of Europe begs to differ.

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.

The US disagrees too, except for the certain brand of feminism that has taken over universities and partial taken over corporations.

I agree that his biggest fault was the way he handled that relationship.

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.

I remember the guidelines at one school specifically stating that relationships between undergraduates and professors are forbidden but leaving out graduate students. I imagine because your grad students are more like coworkers and it’s more likely a mutual relationship will blossom.

Oh well, more evidence on the side of keeping sex out of your work life in general.

> 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...

There's an important distinction between relationships that originate in the workplace vs relationships that originate in the workplace among people who are connected in the supervision hierarchy.

If you read the article I linked, you'll see that 22% of workers have dated their bosses and that 41% of people in workplace romances had to keep it secret (usually due to policies forbidding such relationships).

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.

Yeah, I don't buy those figures in the slightest, and further, none of that is a normative argument that it should continue. All it describes is that it's common for those in power, generally men, to abuse their status to create relationships under conflicting intentions.

No, they shouldn’t be forbidden, but yet it’s less risky for your career to just date outside of work.

> more evidence on the side of keeping sex out of your work life in general.

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.

True enough, but surely academics can at least socialize with people in another field. Or even well outside of their own lab.

Work is most of life. Banning romantic couplings from that is deeply anti-human.

Black person with a broken tail light is not innocent either, but somehow that doesn't come up in those discussions.

Maybe our personal biases play a bigger role in how much we care about about due process in a particular case, hm?

Women that come forward with iron proof are still branded problematic or difficult to work with, ending their careers and launching direct personal targeted harassment of the sort you clearly have never experienced. The idea that women have nothing to lose by making allegations is entirely at odds with what happens in reality.

I’m familiar with Susan Fowler, and I’m sure she represents many other such victims; however, I’ve also read a number of stories like TFA, and presumably they equally represent a contingency of victims. Moreover, I don’t understand why these things need to be pitted against each other as though we have to choose one horrendous injustice or another. Victimizing innocent men doesn’t help victimized women, and contrary arguments are abhorrently sexist.

Our best data on the subject suggests that very few innocent men are being victimized, to use your falsely equivalent language. An overwhelming preponderance of evidence makes clear that a non trivial fraction of men in power are serial abusers who get away with these behaviors habitually. 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.

Then point is that punishing powerless innocent people doesn't solve the problem of guilty powerful people.

What are “our best data”? The #metoo era only began in the last couple of years, and I’m unaware of a rigorous academic effort to investigate its victims to the degree that we have investigated female sexual victimization over the last several decades. And this makes sense given the portrait of fear on university campuses—no one wants to look like they’re not “part of the team” lest they be subject to their own Ordeal. We do have a number of very convincing cases of excesses which certainly persuade me about the need for further investigation.

> 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.

That you are unaware of data does not mean data does not exist. It merely means you've not cared enough about this topic to learn it.

Does this mean that you have the data, and might be willing to share?

> Our best data on the subject suggests that very few innocent men are being victimized, to use your falsely equivalent language.

"It's only happening to a few people so that's ok"? You sure that's the argument you want to make?

That certainly was true, but #metoo overturned that.

I'm not sure if this is meant to be incendiary, but there's exactly zero supporting evidence to back your assertion beyond wishful thinking. And there's innumerable counterexamples where women have had their careers ruined by men who have had an unfair power dynamic over them, after making claims of sexual harassment or unprofessional behavior, and more. The suggestion that only HIS career is vulnerable ignores the actual claims of tens of thousands of women coming forward in the last few years as part of the #metoo movement.

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