1. The Sexual Harrassment Case
An Ohio State University administrator was woken up one night by a phone call from a reporter for The Ivory Tower Times, the campus newspaper at Ivory Tower University. The reporter told him that a sexual harassment board at Ivory Tower had found X, a postdoc at Ivory Tower, guilty of sexually harassing a freshman while she was taking a class he taught. Was OSU's math department still planning to hire him? The administrator said he was hearing about this for the first time, but of course OSU takes sexual harassment very seriously.
The case became something of a hot potato. The OSU administration asked the math department to re-evaluate its decision to hire X. Because X had delayed starting the job until winter quarter so that he could continue at Ivory Tower until the end of its fall semester, OSU's Board of Trustees hadn't yet approved the offer; there was still time to take it back.
Each day, The Ivory Tower Times published more about the case and about the reactions of Ivory Tower University students to how their university handled it. My OSU colleagues avidly read the articles online, and talked to each other about the case. But my male colleagues stopped talking to me.
I wasn't on my department's Advisory Committee, but the meetings were open to all faculty and I attended as an observer. I consider fairness to be very important, and I wanted the department to handle the case in as professional and fair a way as possible. When I learned that OSU added to X's personnel file some articles from The Ivory Tower Times that disparaged X, I objected. I thought that the committee should base its decisions on facts and reliable evidence and (as I learned from my journalist father) newspaper articles should not be treated as accurate sources.
At one of the faculty meetings, an OSU lawyer sat next to me and we chatted during the breaks. He had expected the math department to quickly reverse its hiring decision (based on the information in a file supplied by X), and he was astonished that the department was agonizing over what to do. What seemed most egregious to the OSU administration wasn't as much the allegations of sex with a young student in his class, as what they considered to be evidence of lying.
The Advisory Committee eventually reaffirmed the department's support for X, with a mixed (they used the word "ambiguous") vote. The decision not to forward the case to the Board of Trustees was made at a higher level.
2. The Scene in the Parking Garage
While my male colleagues wouldn't talk to me, I did hear their conversations in the Common Room. One of the more memorable comments came from the colleague I've called
Nick Machiavell, who said, "Of course it's OK to sleep with our students. How else could a mathematician get anyone to sleep with him?"
Nick Machiavell had pushed the department to hire X. When Nick tried to convince the committee to reaffirm its support for X, he justified it by saying that X was comparable to
Gauss.
On a dark cold night, returning to campus after a colloquium dinner, Nick and I went to the dimly lit parking garage to find our cars. When I recall the scene, I envision a noir film. Nick was angry with me (because I was being neutral and open-minded about X, rather than supporting him wholeheartedly). I was angry with Nick. We had it out. I said I didn't think it was reasonable to tell our colleagues that X was Gauss, when he knew how misleading that was. Nick (actually!) said, "The end justifies the means." He added, "Of course X slept with her. Only an idiot would think he hadn't. I'm not that naive." Since X's side of the story was that he never had any sort of romantic or sexual relationship with the student, what Nick was saying was that he believed that X was lying, but wanted OSU to hire him anyway.
3. I knew what you'd think
Toward the end of OSU's involvement, I ran into my colleague "Hamlet Prince" in the hallway. He was the colleague who
should have known better.
Ham: "I don't want to talk to you about the X case since we're on opposite sides of the issue."
Me: "Have I ever told you my opinion on the X case?"
Ham answered correctly: "No."
Me: "Has anyone else told you what they claim is my opinion on the X case?"
Ham: "No."
Me: "Is it only because I'm female that you think we're on opposite sides?"
Ham: "Yes."
I was dismayed that Ham thought he could read my mind and know my opinions. What did it mean that he assumed all women would have the same opinion about this case, and that it would be the opposite of his? Did he believe that he chose sides based on the merits of the case, and that all women choose sides based on something other than the merits? Or did he expect everyone to take sides based on emotions, their own self-interest, or which (gender) of the two parties they identified with? Either way, he should have known better.
I reminded Ham that I had not taken a stand for or against X, and had spoken up only to address issues of fairness and professional behavior.
While much worse happened to me at OSU, the ostracism by my male colleagues and the conversation with Ham were the last straws. I felt sick to my stomach and knew I needed to leave OSU, the sooner the better.
4. Aftershocks
Serge Lang had strongly supported X (he sent some of my colleagues a "file" about the case), and was angry at anyone he thought was responsible for OSU deciding not to follow through on X's job offer.
A few years later, I began to hear rumors that Lang had been telling people (for who knows how long) that I spoke against X and was at least partly responsible for X's not getting the job.
The only reason I found out was that my sources felt justified in telling me, because they knew that Lang expounded at length about how he only deals in facts and evidence and thinks it's terrible to make claims about someone behind their back so that they can't respond.
I had been asking Lang to write letters of recommendation on my behalf. If he was spreading false stories about me behind my back, that was potentially a career killer.
The next time I saw Lang, I told him I heard that he had told people that I had taken a stand against X, and I asked if that was so. He said it was. I told him that what he heard was false. He refused to tell me who had told him.
Our conversations escalated, and included him yelling at me in a Berkeley math department hallway. He later told me he shouldn't have shouted at me. He also sent me letters saying my complaint that he had spread rumors without first checking with me was justified, and he regretted having done so. But he didn't apologize, and never told me his sources (who refused to confirm to him what he claimed they had told him), even though that seemed to violate his principles.
I don't know who or how many people heard Lang's fake news. I continued to meet mathematicians who had heard it and believed it, and hadn't been set straight. To this day, I don't know to what extent this hurt my career.
The mathematics community quickly rallied around X, getting him a temporary position at a research institute and eventually a tenured professorship elsewhere. They viewed him as one of their own.
