The Site Visit Report
What Are the Facts, and
Why Have They Not Been Released?
The Site Visit Report presents an extremely negative
picture of the Philosophy Department at the University of Colorado at
Boulder. A number of people who have read the Report, and who
have no inside knowledge of the Department, have observed that while
the Site Visit Report is full of negative charges, there is a dearth of
supporting facts. There is no indication, for example, of how
many members of the Department have been found guilty of sexual
harassment. Nor is one told how many bullies there are.
Similarly, the Site Visit Report refers on page three to “the national
reputation of the department as being hostile to women” and then on
page four to the Department’s “reputation in the international
philosophical community for being extremely unfriendly to women,” but
no support is offered for the claims that the Department has a national
or an international reputation for being hostile to, for being
extremely unfriendly to, women. (A number of Google searches that I did
on this ‘hostility towards women’ claim – done before the Site Visit
Report became a public document – all drew complete blanks: that claim
was nowhere to be found.)
What are the facts, and why have they not been released?
Consider, specifically, the extremely important case
of sexual harassment. A reader of the Site Visit Report is likely
to conclude that sexual harassment is rampant in the Philosophy
Department. Thus a newspaper article, written by an admirable
reporter who is completely dispassionate, and not at all sensational,
is entitled “CU-Boulder reports pervasive sexual harassment within
philosophy department.” One of my colleagues, sitting in a coffee
shop, heard a conversation between two people sitting at a nearby table
who were talking about sexual harassment in the Philosophy Department,
and one of the people said, “They must all be doing it.” Another
colleague, talking to someone he had just met, mentioned that he was a
philosophy professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and was told,
“Shame on you!”
The facts as regards sexual harassment, however, are
these. Only one member of the Philosophy
Department has been found guilty of sexual harassment, and that in two
cases. That person was punished both times, and in the second
case, the punishment was not one that could plausibly be perceived,
contrary to what the Site Visit Report tends to suggest, as “a slap on
the wrist” (page 9): it involved, among other things, one semester’s suspension without pay.
So why have the facts not been published? The
problem from the Department’s point of view is this. All
complaints against faculty are filed with the Office of Discrimination
and Harassment. The Philosophy Department has, however, no access
to the personnel files of its members, and so it is extremely difficult
for the Department to make confident statements about what complaints
there have been, and what the outcome was. The Office of
Discrimination and Harassment, by contrast, could provide purely
statistical information, but refuses to do so, claiming that doing so
would somehow violate confidentiality. Provost Russell Moore and
Dean Steven Leigh could also do so, as could the External Interim
Chair, Professor Andrew Cowell, but none has done so. The only
information that anyone who has access to the personnel files has
provided – and if one were cherry picking with the goal of finding the
single piece of information that casts the Philosophy Department in the
most unfavorable light, this would definitely be the piece – is that in
the case of the Philosophy Department, going back, it seems, to 2007,
fifteen reports concerning members of the Philosophy Department have
been submitted to the Office of Discrimination and Harassment. Thus,
none of the people who have access to those personnel files are willing
to answer any of the following questions, even though the questions are
purely statistical, and the answers would not violate anyone’s right to
privacy:
(1) Of the fifteen reports that were filed, how many took the form of actual complaints?
(2) Of those that took the form of complaints, how many were immediately set aside as not worthy of investigation?
(3) Of the complaints that were investigated, how many were resolved
informally, rather than giving rise to a formal investigation?
(4) Of those that were formally investigated, how many led to a
conclusion, based on the preponderance of evidence, that it was more
likely than not that the person was guilty?
The refusal to provide such statistical information
is, given the release to the public of the Site Visit Report, extremely
harmful to the Philosophy Department, to its members, to their
families, and to both our recent Ph.D. graduates and our current
graduate students. But in spite of that, no person who has access
to the purely statistical information is willing to make it public.
A meeting will be taking place in the near
future between the Philosophy Department and a representative of the
Office of Discrimination and Harassment, and a number of us plan to
argue very strongly both that there is no justification for the refusal
to provide such statistical information, and that this policy is
extremely harmful. I fear, however, that the Office of Discrimination
and Harassment, along with members of the Administration who have
access to that information, such as Provost Moore and Dean Steven
Leigh, will be completely unmoved by the harm that has been done, and
will remain resolutely inflexible on this matter.