Three graduate students sued Harvard University on Tuesday over the university’s handling of sexual harassment allegations against anthropology professor John Comaroff. The students claim that Harvard knew that Comaroff had a history of sexual misconduct at his previous university, and they hired him anyway. Harassing professors moving from one university to another has become a problem that academics label “pass the harasser.”
The students’ complaint targets Harvard’s process for investigating their claims of misconduct, as well as the university’s decision to hire Comaroff. The students accuse Harvard of a “failure to protect students from sexual abuse and career-ending retaliation” and say that student complaints against Comaroff, which date back to 2017, were largely ignored. The accusations state that the university’s Title IX office admitted in 2019 “that Harvard had known about Professor Comaroff’s behavior for years.” Last month, Comaroff was placed on unpaid leave for the spring semester for violating the college’s sexual harassment and professional conduct policies. In a statement on his website, Comaroff denies any harassment or retaliation.
Among the other serious allegations in the 65-page complaint, the students allege that Harvard knew about Comaroff’s predatory behavior when they hired him. “From 1979 to 2012, Professor Comaroff worked at the University of Chicago. Graduate students and faculty there considered Professor Comaroff a ‘predator’ and a ‘groomer.’ At least one of them warned Harvard about Professor Comaroff while the university was considering Professor Comaroff’s candidacy. But Harvard welcomed him anyway,” the complaint alleges. Comaroff’s lawyers say, “Professor Comaroff was never the subject of any Title IX or other complaint at the University of Chicago.”
The reality of what happened in Comaroff’s case remains unknown, but, in general, academics label it “pass the harasser” when someone accused of sexual misconduct moves from one university to another. The issue is not new, and, in 1996, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported it was “constantly played out on campuses.” By 2019, “pass the harasser” was called higher education’s “worst kept secret.”
The Pass The Harasser Problem
Universities may have an additional incentive to pass the harasser. Susan Fortney, a law professor at Texas A&M University, says that passing the harasser happens in the private sector, but the tenure system in universities may exacerbate the problem. It’s harder to fire someone who has tenure, so universities may have incentive to encourage predators to move on.
Even if a university has honorable intentions, it may be limited by its interpretation of privacy laws. Fortney says university employees are often concerned about liability exposure and the extent to which they may run afoul of privacy laws and expose themselves to defamation. Therefore, they’re typically reluctant to share negative personnel details.
Solutions To The Pass The Harasser Problem
After inadvertently hiring professors with a history of sexual misconduct, the University of Wisconsin and the University of California, Davis were inspired to make changes to their hiring policies. For example, in 2018, UC Davis began asking candidates for tenured positions to waive their privacy and allow their current employer to share any past harassment findings. Any applicant who did not agree to the waiver would not be considered for the position. A spokesperson for UC Davis reported that applicants with a harassment finding aren’t automatically rejected because the university wants to give people a chance to “learn from past mistakes.” For the same reason, the university only asks for records going back eight to ten years.
Washington became the first state to enact legislation to combat the pass the harasser problem in higher education. The law, which covers post-secondary schools in the state, is similar to the UC Davis policy and also requires post-secondary schools have a procedure for disclosing information about candidates once it is requested. The law’s author, Gerry Pollet, told the Seattle Times he was inspired to propose the bill after a former University of Washington athletic executive became vice-president of another college without a finding of sexual misconduct following him.
Susan Fortney believes that pass the harasser is a national problem and therefore should be addressed on a national level. Therefore, she proposes that sexual misconduct screening for job candidates should be part of the university accreditation process. Universities typically receive accreditation by an agency recognized by the U.S. Department of Education, and accreditation ensures that the school meets certain quality standards.
Accreditors would merely need to ensure that the university is screening final job candidates to determine if they have been subject to misconduct findings. Universities that don’t screen candidates would not obtain accreditation. Current accreditation standards already address issues relating to faculty hiring and keeping the campus safe. “A new accreditation provision dealing with hiring inquiries relating to misconduct could logically fit under existing standards related to safety, ethics, and faculty hiring,” Fortney writes in the California Law Review.
It’s About Transparency
Fortney’s goal in advocating for change isn’t to keep someone with a history of misconduct allegations from every working again. Instead, she says it’s all about transparency. “It's not as if this is some kind of blemish that will keep you from getting another job. It's just a matter of transparency, and you should be accountable and be able to respond to what's happened in the past and why it won't happen again,” she describes.
In the case of the allegations against Comaroff, the students allege that Harvard was made aware of his previous misconduct at the University of Chicago and simply ignored the warnings. Fortney’s proposed solution to this problem would make universities aware of previous misconduct—what they do with that information would be up to them.
