The Site Visit Report
The Office of Discrimination and Harassment
The Site Visit Report and its release by the
University Administration has caused enormous harm to innocent members
of the Philosophy Department and their spouses and families – harm that
could easily have been prevented both by the Administration, including
both Provost Russell Moore and Dean Steven Leigh, and also by the
Office of Discrimination and Harassment. Here I shall confine
myself to the latter.
1. The Failure to Provide Crucial Information to the General Public
The Site Visit Report contains a number of extremely
damaging claims about the Philosophy Department and its members, two of
which are as follows:
“. . . it is our strong conclusion that the Department maintains an
environment with unacceptable sexual harassment, inappropriate
sexualized unprofessional behavior, and divisive uncivil behavior.”
(page 3)
“Many of the incidents of alleged sexual harassment and assault have
occurred while faculty and graduate students were socializing after
hours.” (page 7)
The general portrait of the Philosophy Department that the authors of
the Site Visit Report – namely, Professors Valerie Gray Hardcastle,
Peggie DesAutels, and Carla Fehr – have succeeded in creating by means
of such statements is of a department where there is, in the words of
one reporter, “pervasive sexual harassment” (Sarah Kuta in the Daily
Camera, February 4, 2014)
These charges are completely unjust, and both the
University Administration, including at least Provost Moore and Dean
Leigh, and the Office of Discrimination and Harassment have information
that show that this is so, and which they could have released to
prevent harm to innocent members of the Philosophy Department, and to
their families. They have deliberately chosen not to release that
information.
In the Site Visit Report, the authors say, “There
have been at least 15 complaints that have been filed with ODH [the
Office of Discrimination and Harassment] . . .” (page 5). The
authors do not provide do not tell us:
(1) How many of those complaints resulted result in formal investigations, or how many resulted in a conclusion that the person was guilty;
(2) How many members of faculty were involved in charges that resulted in formal investigations.
What are the facts here? Because of the veil
of total secrecy that is imposed by the Office of Discrimination and
Harassment, it is difficult to be completely confident here, but I
think that the information I have is reliable, and it is that, during a
time period going back to something like 2007, there have been four
formal investigations, one involving a temporary instructor, and three
involving a tenured member of the Department, but, in each case, the
same person. So only one tenured or tenure track member of the
Department has been formally investigated in the last half dozen years
or so.
Now we do now that the Office of Discrimination and
Harassment gave the site visit team full access to the personnel files
for members of the Philosophy Department. This fact was
discovered by the Daily Camera reporter, Sarah Kuta. Here is the
relevant passage from her important article on this matter:
"In their roles as consultants for the university, the site
visit
investigators had access to relevant CU employees and relevant
documents that helped them assess the climate of the philosophy
department," CU spokesman Ryan Huff wrote in an email. "As part of
their assessment, the site visit team met with the Office of
Discrimination and Harassment director, signed confidentiality
agreements and were given access to the ODH files."
Given that the site visit team had fully information
to the personnel files of all members of the Philosophy Department, we
can draw two conclusions. The first is that the site visit team
did not use information that it had, and information that leads to a
conclusion that is very different – with regard to the prevalence of
sexual harassment on the part of members of the Philosophy – from that
which readers have naturally formed on the basis of the Site Visit
Report. The site visit team, in short, suppressed information
that it had when that information would support a much more favorable
view of the Philosophy Department.
The second conclusion is that once the Site Visit Report was released
to the public, if not before, the Office of Discrimination and
Harassment was able to see that the site visit team had produced a very
negative picture, and that it had suppressed crucial information in
order to do so. At that point, the Office of Discrimination and
Harassment was morally obliged to make a public statement, to minimize
the harm that the Site Visit Report would otherwise inflict upon all of
the innocent members of the Department, and their families. The
Office of Discrimination and Harassment deliberately refrained from
acting to prevent those harms.
2. Placing Obstacles on the Road to Proving One’s Innocence
Contrary to the extraordinary picture painted by
the authors of the Site Visit Report, according to which the Philosophy
Department is a place of rampant sexual harassment, only one
tenured or tenure track member of the Department has been found guilty
of sexual harassment. The Office of Discrimination and Harassment
knows, of course, that that this is so, but refuses to disclose that
information, thereby allowing everyone to be tarred by the brush of the
site visit team. Is there, then, anything that individual members
of the Department can do to establish their innocence?
The answer is that there is. But the Office of
Discrimination and Harassment, in spite of the harm that the Site Visit
Report has unjustly inflicted upon virtually every member of the
Philosophy Department, that office does not inform people of the way
that one can clear one’s name. Moreover, it also places obstacles
in the way of one’s doing that.
Here is what one can do. One can write to
Katherine Erwin, the Director of the Office of Discrimination and
Harassment, asking for a letter indicating, for example, whether one
has ever been found guilty of sexual harassment or
discrimination. The Office of Discrimination and Harassment will
then respond, in a prompt and friendly fashion, with a letter answering
one’s question.
So if one is innocent, one’s innocence is thereby
established, right, since one can use that letter to tell the world
that one is innocent? Well, not quite, at the bottom of the letter one
will find a paragraph starting off with the following two sentences:
“This email is intended to be confidential. You may not share the
information contained in this email without the express, written
permission of the Office of Discrimination and Harassment or Office of
Labor Relations.”
Surely this is unacceptable. A person has been
slandered, the University has information that shows that the charges
are false, it provides the person with that information, but it does
not automatically allow him or her to use that information.
Indeed, it forbids him to do so. Strange behavior for an office
whose central goal should be achieving justice!
So an obstacle is placed on the road to the proof of
one’s innocence, and an obstacle that is completely unnecessary, and
for which there is no justification. Still, the footnote points towards
a solution: one can write either to the Office of Discrimination and
Harassment or the Office or Labor Relations, asking for explicit
written permission to share the information in the letter.
I decided to write to the Office of Labor Relations, thinking that,
though Katherine Erwin had been very friendly, my chances of being
granted permission might be greater if I contacted the Office of Labor
Relations. It turned out, however, that Katherine Erwin is the
Director of both offices. Once again, however, she was extremely
friendly. But also, once again, the letter had the same
concluding paragraph, starting off with the sentences, ” This email is
intended to be confidential. You may not share the information
contained in this email without the express, written permission of the
Office of Discrimination and Harassment or Office of Labor Relations.”
If, as I rather suspect, all correspondence coming out of the Office of
Discrimination and Harassment and the Office of Labor Relations has the
same concluding paragraph, bring the completion of an infinite regress,
one has information that one can use, but one cannot establish that the
information has really come from the Office of Discrimination and
Harassment!
This is not really satisfactory. This sequence of roadblocks on
the route to establishing one’s innocence, and therefore of cutting off
further harm to one’s reputation, and to one’s spouse and family, needs
to be completely eliminated, and the Office of Discrimination and
Harassment should provide any faculty member who requests such
information with a letter that the person can use in any way that he or
she sees fit.