Columbia Business School
Columbia University was investigating three harassment cases involving male professors at its business school simultaneouly in 2014, including an allegation that a Columbia Business School professor had sex with a female student in his faculty office. All told, the university’s EOAA office probed four separate harassment cases at Columbia Business School alone that year.
In testimony highly damaging to both Columbia University and finance professor Geert Bekaert, who is accused of sexual harassment, retaliation and career sabotage by a former junior faculty member at the business school, the former director of the university’s Equal Opportunity & Affirmative Action (EOAA) Office conceded the office was understaffed and overwhelmed by the cases it had to handle. He said he was juggling 15 to 20 cases at the time he was investigating a complaint from a junior faculty member, Enrichetta Ravina against a senior tenured finance professor Geert Bekaert.
Michael Dunn, who investigated all four harassment complaints at Columbia Business School, told a courtroom yesterday (July 16) that he found in favor of the male professors in each case, concluding that none of the alleged complaints violated the university’s policies and that the profs accused of wrongdoing did not require disciplinary action of any kind.
THE UNIVERSITY’S ‘INVESTIGATIONS’ APPEAR SUPERFICIAL AND HIGHLY LIMITED
Michael Dunn investigated four separate incidents of harassment at Columbia Business School in 2014
Dunn, who left Columbia in June of 2015 and now works as a Title IX coordinator for St. Mary’s College in Maryland, left the unmistakeable impression that his investigations were superficial, highly limited, and incomplete. For his investigation of allegations brought by junior faculty member Ravina, he conceded that he only interviewed Ravina, Geert Bekeart and a research assistant and graduate student who immediately admitted that she was “biased” in favor of Bekeart who she described as a “father figure” and who would serve on her dissertation committee. The student, Nancy Xu, had stopped working on the collaboration between Ravina and Bekeart in December of 2012, long before the relationship openly devolved into a bitter dispute.
Dunn got involved with the Ravina in July 18 of 2014, just two months after he had closed his last harassment case against Bekaert made by an MBA student who claimed she was repeatedly harassment by the professor and threatened by him. But it took Dunn almost four weeks before he even sat down to interview Ravina about her charges on Aug. 12.
Even before interviewing Ravina, Dunn showed little concern for the seriousness of the charges. In a July 25th email to his boss, Melissa Rooker, he wrote: “The sexual harassment concern seems fairly contained, that he insisted a junior female colleague go out to dinner with him and that the woaen felt there was more to his invitation. As you may recall, we had a case with this respondent in the spring, so it may require a heightened response.”
BEKAERT REFUSED TO SAY WHETHER HE HAD PHYSICAL CONTACT WITH HIS JUNIOR MENTEE
Before interviewing Bekaert for the first time on Sept. 19th, nearly two months after being contacted about Ravina’s complaint, Dunn told CBS Vice Dean Janet Horan in an email on Sept. 15 that he didn’t see a strong case for an allegation of sexual harassment in violation of university policies. When he finally sat down with Bekaert four days later, he told the court, the professor failed to answer his question over whether he ever had physical contact with Ravina. “He did not provide a definitive no answer,” said Dunn.
Ravina claims Bekaert began hitting on her soon after they agreed to collaborate on several research projects in 2008. She alleges that he slid his hand down her back to her butt in a taxi, attempted an unwanted kiss on the stoop outside her New York apartment, grabbed her hand at a mid-town bar, leered at her breasts in his office. She claims he often pursued inappropriate conversations in which he allegedly talked about his troubled marriage, asked her if she had a live-in boyfriend, told her about an affair with a stewardness who wanted to get an MBA at Columbia Business School, and discussed pornography and prostitutes (“They keep men out of trouble,” Ravina claimed he told her. “They are important to satisfy a man’s sex drive.”) Bekaert, for this part, denies every having had a romantic interest in her and believes her accusations are part of a con job to explain her failure to do the work that would have gotten her tenure (see Columbia Business School’s Shocking #MeToo Trial).
Dunn, however, said he felt that Ravina was honestly expressing her opinions and beliefs about what was going on with Bekaert and was deeply troubled by what she had experienced. Dunn’s interview notes show that Bekaert admitted that he stopped working on their collaboration for a few months, effectively confirming Ravina’s claim that he had stalled their research after she made clear she had no interest in a personal relationship with the professor.
INVESTIGATOR SHOWED UP FOR HIS FIRST INTERVIEW WITH A PROFESSOR WITHOUT ANY PREPARED QUESTIONS
Former CBS Assistant Professor Enrichetta Ravina has filed a $30 million lawsuit against Columbia
Dunn conceded on the stand that he hadn’t even prepared any questions for Ravina when he first interviewed her and that he never followed up with her on any of the 170 pages of emails between her and Bekeart that she had sent him. Even worse, Dunn conceded that his highly limited “investigation” was narrowly focused along the lines of sexual harassment and failed to probe Ravina’s claims of gender discrimination, retaliation or other discriminatory harassment.
He also admitted on the stand that he had failed to follow up on a recommendation from Dean Hubbard that Bekaert undergo one-on-one Title IX training, even though he had initially agreed with that recommendation. Ultimately, Dunn said he did not conduct a formal investigation but rather a “preliminary fact-finding review of the allegations of sexual harassment.”
In Dunn’s outcome letter, which would allow Bekeart to claim he had been exonerated of all the charges, the investigator never addressed the power dynamic between a junior faculty member and a senior tenured one, a failure that both Dean Glenn Hubbard and then Finance & Economics Division Chair Stephen Zeldes believed was a blind spot in the investigation. Dunn’s conclusion on the case even borrowed Bekaert’s own description of their working relationship, claiming it was “mutually flirtatious.”
Columbia Business School Professor Geert Bekaert
INVESTIGATOR’S OUTCOME LETTER BORROWED BEKAERT’S ‘MUTUALLY FLIRTATIOUS’ DEFENSE
Columbia’s EOAA office had little more than three investigators to deal with complaints at a university with more than 40,000 students, faculty and staff. Dunn said he left the job, in part because he felt overwhelmed and stressed by the heavy workload.
The investigator would only meet with Ravina twice on Aug. 12th and Nov. 12th before concluding that Bekaert had not violated the university’s policies. Five days after that second session, Dunn produced his outcome letter on Nov. 17th.
“I found that you and Professor Bekaert engaged in a friendly working relationship that soured when you did not communicate effectively regarding your concerns about the status of your projects,” wrote Dunn. “I determined that your professional relationship with Professor Bekaert was friendly and at times mutually flirtatious. However, this relationship eventually devolved into unprofessional and inappropriate communcation. Professor Bekaert communicated in a more egregious manner and addressed you in unnecessarily aggressive tones that were ill suited for his position. In sum, however, I did not find evidence to support that Professor Bekaert’s actions or communications constitued sexual harassment in violation of university policies.”
SEX IN A FACULTY OFFICE: THE B-SCHOOL PROF COULD NOT RECALL IT
The university investigator said he also was probing two other harassment cases at the business school at the same time he was looking into Ravina’s complaint. One involved a complaint that came through the university’s compliance hotline and alleged that a male professor at Columbia Business School had sexual relations with a female student. “The fact that this event occurred and has become so well known, yet no action taken on the part of Columbia, both creates an uncomfortable work environment for female students, professors, and administration at the school,” according to the report dated Aug. 25, 2014.
Dunn told the court he iinterviewed the unidentified professor who admitted he had a romantic and sexual relationship with a female student, though the professor claimed he could not recall with certainty that he had engaged in sex in his office. The only other conducted for that complaint was of the female student who confirmed that it as a consensual relationship. Dunn ultimately found that the professor’s actions reflected poor judgment and created a difficult situation both professional and personally for the professor and the studnet but that there was no violation of university policy. That was because the relationshp apparently began after the the student’s class with the professor was over and after the professor submitted her grade.
Dunn also investigated another complaint against a male professor in the fall of 2014 after an Executive MBA student at Columbia Business School charged that her professor was “sexist, demeaning to women, and inappropriate.” Dunn admitted that he had only interviewed the female student who brought the complaint but no other students in the class, even though course evaluations of the professor were damning.
‘A SEVERE LACK OF PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY IN THE CLASS’
“There was a severe lack of psychological safety within this class due to the professor’s public shaming,” wrote one student. “This shaming occurred both in class based on in-class comments (and) based on turned-in confidential and nonconfidential written assignments…I was offended that Columbia woud hire a professor with overt sexism instilled into his subconscious which affects his underlying values that seep into his alignment, allocation and critique of assignments.” The student went on to complain about the professor’s “tendency to pick apart and put down the strongest and most well-spoken woman in the class. (He) does not do the same with the all-male groups.”
Yet another student wrote: “Most importantly, the professor did not want to hear opposing views and would verbally abuse and humiliate individuals based on personal, ethnic reasons rather than the validity of the argument.”
Though he failed to interview any other students in the professor’s class, Dunn concluded that he had not found evidence to support charges that the professor had violated Columbia’s employment policies. In his outcome letter, moreover, Dunn never even used the word “sexism” which was in the original complaint.
The $30 million lawsuit trial is expected to completed by the end of July.
DON’T MISS: COLUMBIA BUSINESS SCHOOL PROF ALSO ACCUSED OF HARASSMENT BY A FEMALE MBA STUDENT
The post Columbia Probed Four Separate Harassment Cases At Its B-School In One Year appeared first on Poets&Quants.
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