This post is the first of a series of stories that, taken together, might help explain why I decided to take early retirement from UCI. These narratives are based on emails and other contemporaneous documentation. My point in posting these stories is to say "This happened. It shouldn't have. Can you learn something from it, so you can prevent such things from happening where you are (or at least not be complicit)?"
"Never take anything outside the department"
I was put on the Graduate Admissions Committee during my first year on the faculty at UCI. At the meeting to decide who gets into the PhD program, a committee member (who was himself originally from China) suggested that we not admit one of the applicants since the female Chinese applicants just want to come to the U.S. to find a husband and get married. I protested, but no one on the committee backed me up.
Later in the meeting, the committee chair referred to a grad school applicant as a "girl". When I quietly said "woman", he rolled his eyes and gave another committee member a look as if to say "isn't she nuts?"
At that time, UCI's School of Physical Sciences had a wonderful Equity Advisor, under the auspices of UCI's ADVANCE grant. ADVANCE was a National Science Foundation program for gender equity in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. One of the Equity Advisor's roles was to inform hiring committees about best practices, so I thought she might have some helpful ideas.
Without naming names, I emailed her my concerns about what was said at the meeting, and asked if there was anything UCI's ADVANCE program could do to inform the Physical Sciences faculty about good practices for graduate admissions and hiring.
Cc'ing her reply to the two "ADVANCE Chairs", she suggested that the four of us brainstorm about what could be sent out that might be helpful.
The ADVANCE Chair in math, whom I'll call G, turned out to be a good friend of the chair of the Graduate Admissions Committee. G was incensed that I had criticized her friend (albeit without giving his name).
Some of the faculty routinely got together for lunch at outdoor tables. One day after lunch, G asked me and the Dean to stay behind. G told the Dean that I was out of line for involving the Equity Advisor. She said that she talked to her friend, the committee chair, and he "is not sexist". And our colleague's remark about marriage (which she hadn't witnessed) "was a joke". She said such issues shouldn't be taken outside the department. She told us that she had asked the Equity Advisor not to send any advice to the admissions committees or department chairs.
I was mortified at being angrily berated in front of my Dean.
The Dean was confused because the Equity Advisor had only discussed the issue with him in general terms, and hadn't named names or even told him it had anything to do with the math department. It wasn't from me or the Equity Advisor, but from G at that moment, that the Dean learned what department it was, and the names of the Admissions Committee chair and member.
The Dean told us that people can say whatever they want. You can't fire tenured faculty, so there's no leverage. There aren't enough resources to have lawyers tell us what we can and can't do; lawyers are expensive and charge by the hour. What was said wasn't illegal, and he couldn't do anything about it.
He gave as an example that he could tell G he was going to kill her; that's not illegal, but killing her would be illegal. I told him I thought that death threats are illegal, but he disagreed.
Postscript:
I continued to join the outdoor lunches, until G told me I wasn't welcome since people didn't like it when I disagreed with them. One colleague explained to me later that I violate the hierarchy by not agreeing with older colleagues. Interestingly, those older colleagues praised and admired certain much more junior colleagues (their eventual successors in the department's power dynamic) when they disagreed in harsher ways than I ever did.
I'll add that I like both G and that Dean. I think they were doing what they thought was right. This story reminds me how important it is to develop a culture with good leadership, in which faculty and administrators are trained about best practices and professional behavior.