The Site Visit Report

    Two Violations by the Site Visit Team of their
Agreement with the Department of Philosophy


1. One Violation of the Site Visit Agreement

The “Site Visit Process and Expectations” document that the site visit team sent to the Philosophy Department contains the following sentence: “The Team will not provide the report to institutional administrators, though the Site Visit Team may discuss its initial findings in broad terms with administrators during the site visit itself.”  Accordingly, even if, contrary to fact, the site visit had been requested by both Dean Steven Leigh and Provost Russell Moore, while the site visit team could then have released the site visit report to the Dean, it still could not have released it to the Provost, since the Provost is an institutional administrator, no matter how narrowly that class is construed.

    Why, then, did the site visit team violate the conditions governing site visits set out in the “Site Visit Process and Expectations” document?  I leave it to others to speculate about this.

2. Comparing Some Site Visit Program Documents

 In thinking about this first violation, and also the second that I am going to describe, it is useful to compare the following three passages from Site Visit Program documents:

(1) From a section entitled “Confidentiality” in the “Site Visit Process and Expectations” document that the Philosophy Department received:

Further, the Site Visit Team will not communicate the details of what is learned about the Department as part of the Site Visit process to people outside of the Department. The final report will be directly provided only to the Department. The Team will not provide the report to anyone outside the Department, including deans, unless the visit request is made by a dean, in which case only that dean will be provided the report. The Team will not provide the report to institutional administrators, though the Site Visit Team may discuss its initial findings in broad terms with administrators during the site visit itself.

(2) From a section entitled “After the Visit” from a previous description on October 14, 2013, of the Site Visit Program

After the Visit:

The team will write a report for the Department Chair, detailing the findings of the visit and offering practical suggestions on improving the climate for women. The Chair is encouraged to share the report with the rest of the department.

(3) From a section entitled “After the Visit” from the current description of the Site Visit Program, and a description that was archived on February 9, 2014, when the site visit team presumably realized that they had problems:

After the Visit:

The team will write a report for the Department Chair (or whoever requested the visit), detailing the findings of the visit and offering practical suggestions on improving the climate for women. The team will maintain strict confidentiality about its findings and will send the report only to the person(s) requesting the site visit.

    Notice, first of all, that the revised “After the Visit” description allows for an institutional administrator – such as a provost – to request a site visit, whereas the “Site Visit Process and Expectations” document that the Philosophy Department received explicitly prohibited that: “The Team will not provide the report to institutional administrators, though the Site Visit Team may discuss its initial findings in broad terms with administrators during the site visit itself.”

    Second, notice that the revised “After the Visit” description explicitly allows for site visits to be requested by multiple persons, referring as it does to “the person(s) requesting the site visit,” whereas there is no such mention of the possibility of a site visit being requested by multiple persons in the earlier “After the Visit” description.

3. A Second Violation of the Site Visit Agreement: Who Requested the Site Visit?

Given the apparent hostility of the Administration, the Philosophy Department wanted to have a site visit where the results would be confidential, with a report to be made available only to members of the Department, and the following paragraphs in the “Site Visit Process and Expectations” document appeared to provide us with that assurance:

Further, the site visit team will not communicate the details of what is learned about the Department as part of the Site Visit process to people outside of the Department. The final report will be directly provided only to the Department. The Team will not provide the report to anyone outside the Department, including deans, unless the visit request is made by a dean, in which case only that dean will be provided the report. The Team will not provide the report to institutional administrators, though the site visit team may discuss its initial findings in broad terms with administrators during the site visit itself.

Confidentiality as described above will only be broken if required by law. If a site visit team Member has good reason to believe that illegal behavior (e.g. sexual harassment or sex discrimination) is taking place, and this behavior has not yet been reported and addressed, the site visit team will report this alleged behavior through proper institutional channels, and may need to identify those allegedly engaging in and victimized by this behavior. Reports may also be subject to freedom of information requests.

    In requesting the site visit, the Philosophy Department believed, then, that the Site Visit Report would be given only to the Department.  Two members of the site visit team, however – namely, Professors Valerie Hardcastle and Peggy DesAutels – have claimed that the site visit was requested not only by the Philosophy Department, but also by Provost Russell Moore and Dean Steven Leigh, and the latter have also claimed that they requested the site visit.  (The third member of the site visit team – Professor Carla Fehr – has neither affirmed nor denied this claim, to my knowledge.)  What then is the truth about this very important question?

3.1 My Correspondence with Professor Valerie Hardcastle

In an attempt to get to bottom of this, I wrote to Professor Valerie Hardcastle, since she was the leader of the site visit team. In her response to my first letter about this, she claimed that the request for a visit was made by three parties, namely, the Provost, the Dean, and the Department of Philosophy. Professor Graeme Forbes, however, is able to supply a paper trail covering the site visit invitation made by the Department, along with the document that the Department received from the site visit team, containing the paragraphs just quoted. This led me to write back to Professor Hardcastle, with the relevant part of my letter being as follows:

As you’ll see from the document I’ve attached, and which Graeme Forbes sent along to us, there is no reference to any threefold request from the Department of Philosophy plus the Dean and the Provost. I take it then, first of all, that there must have been some later document that you sent along to Graeme, before the site visit on September 25-28, indicating that the Site Visit Report would go to the Dean and the Provost, in addition to the Philosophy Department, and on which Graeme then signed off, and, second, that there must also have been correspondence that you received from Provost Moore and Dean Leigh, also prior to the site visit on September 25-28, in which both the Provost and the Dean explicitly put in a request for a site visit, explaining that the visit was then being requested by the Dean, the Provost, and the Department of Philosophy.

I am therefore writing to ask if you could send along the relevant document that was sent to Graeme, along with Graeme’s letter signing off on the new arrangement, together with the relevant correspondence involving the Dean and the Provost.

    Professor Hardcastle, in turn, replied as follows:

With all due respect, I am not going to engage in this conversation with you. We promised confidentiality for the entire process and, from my point of view, that covers all correspondence from everyone connected with the visit. You should recall, however, that when we met with you, we did indicate who would be getting the report, and that list included your Dean and Provost. You should also realize that because Colorado is a sunshine state, all your Dean or Provost had to do to get the report was ask your Chair for a copy, if he were the only one to receive it. Furthermore, the report, once issued to your university, is subject to FOI requests by anyone, since you are a public institution. But I’m sure you know all this.

I do understand your being upset at having the report released to the media and being released at a timetable not of your choosing. This might be an issue to discuss with your dean and your provost. But, perhaps, tracing the details of agreements and who did what when and why is not the best way to move forward at this time.

    I then replied as follows:

Let me try one final letter. I’ve once again attached the document Graeme Forbes sent along to us, and in which there is no reference to any threefold request from the Department of Philosophy plus the Dean and the Provost. My question is whether there is some later document that you sent along to Graeme, before the site visit on September 25-28, indicating that the Site Visit Report would go to the Dean and the Provost, in addition to the Philosophy Department, and on which Graeme then signed off.

If there is such a document, and such a letter from Graeme Forbes, then please send those along the Graeme. Doing so cannot violate anyone’s confidentiality in any way.

    With this change in my request, the confidentiality point was no longer relevant.  That did not, however, prevent Professor Hardcastle from appealing to it yet again:

Perhaps I was not clear in my note below. All correspondence is confidential. There are no exceptions. The site visit report itself, of which you have a copy, indicates for whom the report was made. Everyone during the interview process was also informed regarding who was getting copies of the final report, including you. Frankly, it is completely disingenuous for you to be claiming, at this late date, that we were not supposed to give the report to your Dean and Provost, or that you were caught off-guard when the report was given to upper administration, and you know this.

    This response strikes me as extremely weak.  The basic point here is simply this. The Philosophy Department believes that the site visit team violated the agreement that we had made with them.  If there were a later document that had been sent to Professor Forbes before the site visit occurred, and that he signed off on, Professor Hardcastle could simply have forwarded those two items to Professor Forbes, as I requested in my final letter.  But she did not do so.

    What is clear, then, is that Professor Hardcastle responded in a very negative and uncooperative way.  That behavior made little sense if the documents in question actually existed.  It seemed unlikely, then, that Professor Hardcastle had any such documents, in which case it would be false that anyone other than the Philosophy Department requested the site visit, which in turn implies that the site visit team violated the agreement that it had with the Philosophy Department in a second way.

3.2 My Correspondence with Professor Peggy DesAutels

Given the stonewalling approach that I had encountered in my correspondence with Professor Hardcastle, I saw little point at that time in writing to the other two members of the site visit team.  Over time, however, I had come to feel that I needed to reply to the Site Visit Report, and in a detailed way.  I therefore decided to write to Professors Peggy DesAutels and Carla Fehr.  After explaining that my purpose was not to rehash the issue with them, I went on to say:

My reason for writing is rather that, having seen the impact that release of the Site Visit Report has had upon a number of my colleagues and their families, and especially its devastating effect upon some untenured members of my department, I have decided to release, in the relatively near future, my own response to the Site Visit Report.  Among the issues on which I shall touch is the question of whether the site visit was or was not requested only by the Philosophy Department. I am therefore writing to ask whether either of you wish to add anything to what Professor Hardcastle said in her correspondence with me, or whether the three of you would like to make a joint statement on this issue.  In either case, I would be more than happy to post that material on my website, since, given that I shall be criticizing the site visit team on this matter in the document that I’ll be posting on my website, I very much want the people who read my statement to have equal and immediate access to a full and accurate statement of the site visit team’s view of the issue.

Professor Fehr did not reply to my letter, but Professor DesAutels did, albeit briefly:

Dear Professor Tooley,

As a Site Visit team member, I agreed to keep all details tied to the visit confidential.  I am not at liberty to discuss this with you.

All my best,

Peggy DesAutels

    My reply, in turn, was as follows:

Dear Professor DesAutels,

Thank you very much for your quick response to my letter.

I am, however, a bit puzzled by your response.  You say, “As a Site Visit team member, I agreed to keep all details tied to the visit confidential.  I am not at liberty to discuss this with you.”  How is it that your confidentiality agreement prevents you from discussing anything with me, but allows you to make the following post on the Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog?

http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2014/02/colorado-faculty-were-told-apa-committees-report-would-not-be-made-public.html

Philosopher Peggy DesAutels (Dayton) writes:

As director of the APA CSW Site Visit Program, I am the person who makes the initial arrangements for all visits.  In my communications, I send the following document to whomever is arranging the visit.  Please note that in the "Confidentiality" section, it states that the "Dean will receive the report if the Dean requests the visit".  This is the exact copy of the "APA CSW Site Visit Process and Expectation" document I sent to CU's department chair prior to the visit (and the to the Chairs of upcoming departmental visits).

As you can see at the very beginning of the Summary of the Report, released by CU, in the "Background" section, this visit was requested by CU's Provost, Dean, and Department of Philosophy.

This sentence can be found in CU's summary of the Report at the end of this article: http://www.dailycamera.com/ci_25035043:

"In April 2013, the American Philosophical Association's Committee on the Status of Women was invited and approved to conduct a full review of the climate for women in the department.  The invitation to conduct that review was issued by the philosophy department, Dean Steven Leigh of the College of Arts & Sciences, and Provost Russell Moore."

*******************************************************************************

Best regards,

Michael Tooley

    At that point, our correspondence ended, as Professor DesAutels, rather than replying to me, wrote to the External Interim Chair of the Philosophy Department, copying me in, as follows:

Dear Professor Cowell,

I am requesting that you take over communications with the Site Visit Team if, as Chair of the Department, you wish to communicate with us.  I will not be replying to Professor Tooley (although he is copied on this request.

All my best,

Peggy DesAutels

Once again, then, I had encountered a stone wall.

3.3 My Two CORA Requests

In Colorado, one can request public documents under CORA - the Colorado Open Records Act.  Accordingly, I decided to submit two CORA requests, asking to see, respectively, all of the correspondence, both written and email, between Provost Russell Moore and any of the three members of the site visit team, between January 1, 2013, and February 17, 2014, and similarly, all of the correspondence, both written and email, between Dean Steven Leigh and any of the three members of the site visit team, between those same two dates.

    The results of those two CORA requests – which I have posted on this website – were that there had been no correspondence between any of the three members of the site visit team and either Provost Moore or Dean Leigh prior to November 18, 2013, the day when the site visit team send the Site Visit Report to Professor Graeme Forbes, Provost Russell Moore, and Dean Steven Leigh.

    Compare this with what was said at the very beginning of the statement issued by the University of Colorado in the document “Summary of Report by the American Philosophical Association to the University of Colorado Boulder” on January 31, 2014:

Background

In April 2013, the American Philosophical Association’s Committee on the Status of Women was invited and approved to conduct a full review of the climate for women in the department. The invitation to conduct that review was issued by the philosophy department, Dean Steven Leigh of the College of Arts & Sciences, and Provost Russell Moore. That review was conducted in late September 2013. The report from that visit was submitted to the University in late November.

    Given that neither Provost Moore nor Dean Leigh corresponded with any member of the site visit committee before November 18, and that the site visit took place on September 25-28, the conclusion must be that there is no evidence to support the claim that Dean Steven Leigh and Provost Russell Moore requested the site review.

4. Five Responses

 In response to the charge that the site visit team violated its agreement with the Philosophy Department in sending the Site Visit Report to Dean Steven Leigh and Provost Russell Moore, five very weak responses have been made, and will probably be repeated with the release of this document and the accompanying correspondence. So let me set those out now.

4.1 Professor Hardcastle’s ‘Forewarned’ Defense

This first response is that the Philosophy Department was told at the time of the site visit itself that the Site Visit Report would be given to Dean Steven Leigh and Provost Russell Moore.  But how does telling someone in advance that you are going to violate an agreement with him or her make it permissible to break the agreement?

    This response is so weak that one might well think that I am attacking a straw man. But here is what Professor Hardcastle says in her second reply in my correspondence with her: “You should recall, however, that when we met with you, we did indicate who would be getting the report, and that list included your Dean and Provost.”  Then in her third letter to me, Professor Hardcastle says, ”Everyone during the interview process was also informed regarding who was getting copies of the final report, including you.”

    Professor Hardcastle is claiming, then, that it was announced by the site visit team at all of their meetings that the Site Visit Report would be sent to the Dean and to the Provost, as well as to the Philosophy Department. This claim struck me as very suspicious, since in the case of the meeting with full professors, the information that the Report would be given to the Dean and the Provost emerged only at the very end, when Graham Oddie asked, as the very last question when the meeting was breaking up, who would get the Report.

    Consequently, I checked further, and I found, first of all, that this information was not conveyed to the Head of the Department, Professor Graeme Forbes, when he met with the site visit committee.  For if it had been, it would not have been something that he would have forgotten, since it would indeed have been the proverbial ‘thunderbolt from the blue’. I have also been told that there was no announcement that the Report would be sent to the Dean and the Provost either at the site visit team’s meetings with the members of the Climate Committee, or at their meeting with women professors.

4.2 Professor Hardcastle’s Freedom of Information Defense

Professor Hardcastle also advances a second possible response in the same letter:

You should also realize that because Colorado is a sunshine state, all your Dean or Provost had to do to get the report was ask your Chair for a copy, if he were the only one to receive it. Furthermore, the report, once issued to your university, is subject to FOI requests by anyone, since you are a public institution. But I’m sure you know all this.

    So here the argument is that if I have made an agreement with you to give certain information to you and no one else, but it is possible for someone later to get that information from you by a Freedom of Information request, then it is morally permissible for me to break my agreement with you and give the information to anyone I want.

    In addition, however, it is one to say that the Dean or Provost could have gotten a copy by, for example, making a request under the Colorado Open Records Act, and quite another thing to say that they would have done so. Even in the best of times, for an administrator to procure a document in that fashion, when the document was one that initially could not be given to anyone but the Chair of the Department, certainly looks like a very dubious public relations exercise. What would you do if the Chair refused?  Would you begin exercising legal proceedings?

    I am not an administrator, but if I were, I wouldn’t go that route. I would ask to talk to the Chair about the report, and ask if he or she would tell me in general terms what the Report had said, and what sort of action one needed to take to deal with problems that had been identified.

    In addition, however, it is not the best of times for Provost Moore and Dean Leigh, since they have been in the midst of an affair involving Sociology Professor Patricia Adler, where various groups, including the ACLU and AAUP have argued that the Administration has been guilty of defamation of character, violation of academic freedom and due process, and of attempting to intimidate Professor Adler into resigning. Had the Philosophy Department refused to pass on a copy of the Site Visit Report, it seems very doubtful that the Administration would have wanted to enter a battle on that front.

4.3 The ‘Confidentiality’ Response of Professors Hardcastle and DesAutels

Here is how Professor Hardcastle puts this response, again in the same letter: “We promised confidentiality for the entire process and, from my point of view, that covers all correspondence from everyone connected with the visit.” Similarly, in the one letter that Professor DesAutels wrote specifically to me, she says, “As a Site Visit team member, I agreed to keep all details tied to the visit confidential.  I am not at liberty to discuss this with you.”

    This is an interesting interpretation of confidentiality.  In my third letter to Professor Hardcastle, I asked her, if the site visit team had sent Professor Graeme Forbes a revised “Site Visit Process and Expectations” document, indicating that the Site Visit Report would be sent to Dean Leigh and Provost Moore, to send a copy of that document to Professor Graeme Forbes, along with his letter signing off on the altered arrangement: “If there is such a document, and such a letter from Graeme Forbes, then please send those along to Graeme. Doing so cannot violate anyone’s confidentiality in any way.”  But Professor Hardcastle apparently has a stronger concept of confidentiality, according to which it prohibits sending a person a copy of his or her own correspondence, since in her third and final letter she says, “Perhaps I was not clear in my note below. All correspondence is confidential. There are no exceptions.”

    What about the appeal to confidentiality with regard to correspondence between the site visit team, on the one hand, and the Provost and the Dean, on the other?  The appeal here is almost equally bad.  Consider the situation.  The Provost and the Dean have claimed that they requested the site visit; the Philosophy Department claims that only it requested the site visit.  If the Philosophy Department is right, the Provost and the Dean are not telling the truth.  If the site visit team has correspondence from the Provost and the Dean in which they requested a site visit, the Provost and the Dean would surely like that correspondence to be made public, to establish their innocence. Consequently, the site visit team could greatly assist the Provost and the Dean by writing and asking for their permission to release their correspondence. But the site visit team, for some reason, is not willing to do this.

4.4 To Fund an Action Is to Perform that Action Oneself

Another possible response – which I read somewhere, but have not been able to locate – is that since Dean Leigh and Provost Moore provided funding that made the visit possible, that is in itself to request the visit. So when one provides money to one’s children so that they can ask some, quite possibly unspecified friend if he or she will go to the movies with them, one is oneself asking that person to go to the movies with one’s children.  This is an interesting conception of what it is to make a request.

4.5 The ‘Collaboration’ Defense

A final possible response involves an attempt to strength the ‘funding’ response by saying that not only did the Administration provide funding for the site visit, it also “collaborated” with the Philosophy Department.

    Here one needs to begin by asking what form that collaboration took.  In particular, what did the collaboration involve beyond supplying some funding? One answer is that the Administration also approved of the Department’s requesting a site visit, and that it approved of the Department’s using the funding in question to help to cover the costs of the site visit.

    But none of this amounts to the Administration’s actually requesting the site visit.

   What Provost Moore and Dean Leigh need to claim, then, is that they asked the Philosophy Department to include a request for a site visit on their behalf along with the Philosophy Department’s own request.

    What is one to say about this? First of all, if the Philosophy Department had written to the site visit team submitting a request for a site visit both from the Department and on behalf of Provost Moore and Dean Leigh as well, then the site visit team would have sent, to Provost Moore and Dean Leigh, a “Site Visit Process and Expectations” document. But we know from the responses to my two Colorado Open Records Act requests that they were never sent such a document.

    Second, even if such a request had been made by the Philosophy Department, as I indicated at the very beginning of this document, the site visit team would have been in violation of its agreement with the Philosophy Department by sending a copy of the Site Visit Report to the Provost, in view of the following sentence in the “Site Visit Process and Expectations” document: “The Team will not provide the report to institutional administrators, though the Site Visit Team may discuss its initial findings in broad terms with administrators during the site visit itself.”

    Third, Professor Graeme Forbes has given me access to all of the Department’s correspondence with the site visit team.  At no point did the Department make a request on behalf of either Provost Moore or Dean Leigh for a site visit.

    Finally, if either Provost Moore or Dean Leigh had asked the Philosophy Department to make a request on his behalf, the Philosophy Department would certainly not have agreed to submit any such request: given the hostility towards the Philosophy Department that the Administration had already exhibited, the Philosophy Department would only have requested a site visit if the resulting report was going to be released only to the Philosophy Department.

5. What If the Dean and the Provost Had Requested the Visit?

The site visit team, Provost Moore and Dean Leigh all claim that three parties requested the site visit – the Philosophy Department, the Provost, and the Dean – and that, for that reason, the site visit team could quite rightly give copies of the Site Visit Report to all three parties. I have just argued at length that it is false that the site visit was requested either by the Dean or the Provost.  Suppose, however, that I am mistaken about this.  Are the members of the site visit team then innocent of all charges?

    The answer is that they are not, since in sending the report to the Provost, they would still have violated the following condition: “The Team will not provide the report to institutional administrators, though the Site Visit Team may discuss its initial findings in broad terms with administrators during the site visit itself.”

6. Who Are the Guilty Parties?

Clearly, the site visit team, consisting of Professor Valerie Hardcastle, Peggy DesAutels, and Carla Fehr, violated, in the two ways indicated, the agreement set out in the document “Site Visit Process and Expectations.”  But what about Provost Russell Moore and Dean Steven Leigh?  After all, the site visit team sent the Site Visit Report to them “[a]t their request.”

    But here one has to keep in mind the responses to my two CORA requests, for they show that there was no correspondence between the site visit team and either Provost Moore or Dean Leigh prior to the letter that Professor Hardcastle sent to them and Professor Graeme Forbes on November 18.  This means that the site visit team did not send them the “Site Visit Process and Expectations” document, and I therefore think that it is unlikely that Provost Moore and Dean Leigh were even aware of that document. If so, they were not aware that, given that they themselves had not submitted a request for the site visit, the Site Visit Report should not be distributed to anyone other than the Philosophy Department.

    It seems to me likely, then, that what happened was that at the time of the site visit – September 25-28 – Provost Moore and Dean Leigh, not being aware of the agreement between the Philosophy Department and the site visit team, naturally indicated that they were very much looking forward to reading the report, and the site visit team, for some reason known only to them, failed to inform Provost Moore and Dean Leigh of the agreement with the Philosophy Department.

7. Why Does This Matter?

Finally, I can imagine someone asking whether these violations really matter.  Am I not simply trying to divert attention from the damaging but accurate content of the report?  The full answer to this will emerge when I release my response to the Site Visit Report itself, where I shall argue that the Report paints a radically unsound picture of the Philosophy Department.  For the moment, however, let me make three points.

    First of all, a number of other departments may be considering inviting a site visit. They should know that they need to seek complete clarity about whom the visitors will share their report with. The confidentiality guarantees on page 4 of the “Site Visit Process and Expectations” document are, as the Philosophy Department here found out, worthless. All it apparently takes is for some administrator to remark, at the time of the site visit, “Oh, we invited you too,” and the visitors will eagerly regard themselves as freed from their prior commitment to the department.

    Second, someone reading the Site Visit Report and with no other source of information is likely to form a negative view of the Philosophy Department, given the Site Visit Report's veneer of authority (apparently from the American Philosophical Association, no less). The only countermanding piece of evidence such a reader possesses is that the Department did at least request the site visit, and so it may not be quite as bad as the Report portrays. But then the reader is told by the site visit team that the visit was also requested by the Dean and the Provost, at which point it is very easy to think that the Dean and the Provost ordered the Department to request it as well – they are, after all, in a position of authority. So the only evidence that the Report's account of the Department is rather awry is undermined.

   Finally, and most important of all, the public release of the Site Visit Report by the Administration has caused great harm to the Philosophy Department, to its members, to both our recent Ph.D. graduates and our current graduate students, and to the families of all of us. Thus, in the case of the former, the public release of the Site Visit Report by the Administration has caused great harm to the reputations of members of the Philosophy Department, the overwhelming majority of whom are completely innocent, and, in so doing, it has damaged the relations of people here with philosophers everywhere.  But more important still, it has caused great distress and suffering for the families of members of the Department, damaging their relations with friends and neighbors, who have no way of being sure about who is innocent and who is guilty.

   The public release of the Site Visit Report has also had a devastating effect both upon our current graduate students and also on our Ph.D. graduates who are currently on the job market, both male and female.  In both cases, morale is very low, with people seriously worrying about their job prospects, either now, or in the future. Thus, if one is man, may it very well not be the case that one’s job’s prospects are seriously harmed because someone on the selection committee thinks it is risky to hire a man whose degree is from a place where sexual harassment is rampant, and where even those who do not engage in sexual harassment themselves are guilty of being complicit? If one is woman, with letters of recommendation from a philosophy department that is supposedly characterized by rampant “inappropriate sexualized unprofessional behavior,” might not someone on a selection committee wonder whether one’s especially glowing letters of recommendation may not be based in some cases on something beyond one’s academic achievements?  

    I suspect that, in response to this, the site visit team will probably say, as Valerie Harcastle so caringly said in a passage I quoted earlier,

    You should also realize that because Colorado is a sunshine state, all your Dean or Provost had to do to get the report was ask your Chair for a copy, if he were the only one to receive it. Furthermore, the report, once issued to your university, is subject to FOI requests by anyone, since you are a public institution. But I’m sure you know all this.

    But the fact is that the site visit team facilitated the public release of the Site Visit Report by sending copies to the Dean and the Provost.  As I discussed above in section 4.2, if the site visit team had not sent copies of the Site Visit Report to the Dean and the Provost, it is very doubtful that the Dean and the Provost would have resorted to a CORA request to get a copy of a document that initially could only be released to the Chair of the Department, since that would be a bad public relations exercise at the best of times, and once the affair involving Professor Patricia Adler became public, it was very far indeed from the best of times for Provost Moore and Dean Leigh.

    In short, it is possible that the Dean and the Provost would have procured copies of the Site Visit Report, which then would have gotten released to the public, but I don’t think that is really very likely.  At the very least, then, the site visit team’s sending copies to Provost Moore and Dean Leigh greatly increased the likelihood that the document would become public, and thus greatly increased the likelihood that great harm would be done to the overwhelming number of members of the Philosophy Department who are totally innocent of any wrongdoing, and to their families.

Summing Up

There are excellent reasons for concluding that, contrary to what members of the site visit team and members of the Administration have claimed, the site visit was requested by the Philosophy Department, and by it alone, and thus that the site visit team violated its agreement with the Philosophy Department by sending the Site Visit Report to Provost Moore and Dean Leigh. In addition, even if the site visit had been requested by the Dean and the Provost, the site visit team would still have violated its agreement with the Philosophy Department by sending the Site Visit Report to the Provost.

    If this is right, then, by their actions, the members of the site visit team greatly increased the probability that the Site Visit Report would wind up in the hands of the public, thereby greatly increasing the probability that many completely innocent individuals – faculty, current graduate students, recent Ph.D. graduates, and all of their families – would suffer serious harm, as has in fact occurred.
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