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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 ha

• leephillips 6y ago
  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?
  • JoeAltmaier 6y ago
    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.
    • sukilot 6y ago
      It's called a "conflict of interest" and is simply handled by recusal.
      • JoeAltmaier 6y ago
        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.
        • sukilot 6y ago
          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.
    • throwaway894345 6y ago
      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.
  • jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago
    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.
    • rndgermandude 6y ago
      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.
      • smnrchrds 6y ago
        > 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-hygienist-loses-licence-for-treating-wife-ruled-as-sexual-abuser.html https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2019/09/13/dental-hygien...
        • DangitBobby 6y ago
  • deleted 6y ago
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• sukilot 6y ago
  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.)
  • Finnucane 6y ago
    Sure, but not everyone can damage their ex’s academic career.
    • throwaway894345 6y ago
      With Title IX, you can ruin someone’s career without as much as a relationship.
      • sukilot 6y ago
        The whole OP was about how Title IX didn't ruin the career, but the Provost did anyway.
        • throwaway894345 6y ago
          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.
        • SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
          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.
• preponderances 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victim_blaming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victim_blaming
  • mmm_grayons 6y ago
    The idea of "victim blaming" presupposes that the lady in question is a victim, an assumption that is not supported by fact.
    • sneak 6y ago
      More to the point: > In my case, not only was I not permitted to cross-examine my accuser, I was eventually informed that there was no accuser, a nonsensical claim eventually disproved by the documentation I received when my ordeal was over. My anonymous accusers did not even include the person I was supposed to have harassed. And when she was interviewed during the course of the investigation she denied that I had ever harassed her. Perhaps he is lying, but this is not the first criticism I have read of Title IX along these lines.
• csa 6y ago
  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.
• projektfu 6y ago
  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.
  • ggreer 6y ago
    > 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-Hits-10-Year-Low-According-to-CareerBuilders-Annual-Valentines-Day-Survey http://press.careerbuilder.com/2018-02-01-Office-Romance-Hit...
    • jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago
      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.
      • ggreer 6y ago
        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.
        • jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago
          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.
• underpand 6y ago
  z
  • jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago
    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.
    • throwaway894345 6y ago
      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.
      • jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago
        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.
        • sukilot 6y ago
          Then point is that punishing powerless innocent people doesn't solve the problem of guilty powerful people.
        • throwaway894345 6y ago
• deleted 6y ago
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• throwaway894345 6y ago
  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.
  • treis 6y ago
    >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.
    • nullc 6y ago
      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.
    • throwaway894345 6y ago
      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.
• clusterfish 6y ago
  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?