The Columbia Business School professor currently on trial for allegations of sexual harassment and career sabotage by a former female junior faculty member, also had drawn a complaint from an MBA student who claimed she was harassed by him. In turn, the professor threatened the student with retaliation after he heard of the complaint.
That was among a series of shocking disclosures after the first week of a trial that explores a once promising mentorship between a junior faculty member, Enrichetta Ravina, and a senior tenured professor, Geert Bekaert, who she had relied upon for help in her academic career. That mentorship, however, devolved into a bitter breakup that would ultimately cause a major split among the senior faculty at Columbia Business School and a $30 million lawsuit.
The emails introduced as evidence in the case portray Bekaert, who has been a tenured professor at CBS for 18 years, as an often emotional, angry and defensive man, eager to discredit and defame his accuser and claim that he was actually the victim in the case. “The laws in this country are screwed up and totally biased against the privileged white males,” he wrote in an email to a colleague. “It’s amazing how powerless I am right now, despite having done absolutely nothing wrong.”
‘IF THIS IS HARASSMENT, THE AMERICANS REALLY ARE TOTAL PUSSIES’
To a friend, Karl Aquino, who apparently had a similar experience, he claimed to have been played. “In a nutshell,” wrote Bekaert in an email dated July 12, 2014, “this is a schizophrenic woman whose bad side I failed to see for a long time…and who I thought was a friend and so probably trusted too much. I am dealing with this harassment case. It’s so insane. If this is harassment, the Americans really are total pussies.”
While the trial is expected to last up to three weeks, testimony by both Rivana and Bekaert dominated the first week. Scores of other witnesses are likely to be called in the case, including Columbia Business School Dean Glenn Hubbard and several of the school’s senior vice deans and professors. Ravina accuses Bekaert of abusing his power by sexually harassing her for more than a year, and then sabotaging her academic career when she continually fended off his alleged attempts to move what was a professional relationship to a personal one. She is also suing Columbia University, claiming that the school did little to protect her from Bekaert’s alleged retaliatory schemes and then unfairly rushed through a review that led to a decision to deny her tenure at the school.
Among the revelations in the trial so far:
- When Columbia Business School brought Ravina up for tenure, a sizable number of her department’s senior faculty rose to her defense. In signed petitions submitted to the university provost and the dean of Columbia Business School, they believed the tenure and research process had gone awry and they were not in a position to provide an evaulation of Ravina’s tenure. They also urged that the university grant her request for more time on the tenure clock due to the impact that the sexual harassment and retaliation charges had on her work. Bekaert’s lawyer, Edward Hernstadt, acknowledged in court that his colleagues at CBS had turned against him.
- Within days of being told by CBS Dean Glenn Hubbard that he was not to communicate directly with Ravina, Bekeart sent a private email to her in violation of the dean’s directive. “The dean’s office has told me not to talk to you, hence the silence,” wrote Bekeart. “If you want to explain yourself, you can. I’m here. I’m intrigued to know who set you up to this.”
- After she filed her harassment complaint against him, Bekeart conducted a concerted campaign to discredit Ravina and damage her academic career. He sent at least two dozen emails to professors all over the world, many of them in highly influential positions at top academic journals critical to her success. In those emails, he variously described his former mentee as “crazy,” “insane,” or “an evil bitch,” causing untold damage to her career and her ability to get published in the future.
- When Ravina first came to Columbia in 2008, she brought with her from NYU Stern, where she had been an assistant professor for three years, a scant publication record. So from the very beginning, she had a lot riding on her collaborative work with Bekaert. When there was nearly a three-year delay in gaining access to a massive dataset that could ultimately result in four or five breakthrough papers, she still was unable to produce other publishable work to help her tenure case.
- After Ravina’s complaint, Bekaert refused to create a set schedule of deadlines to insure a certain level of progress on their research. And for months, he refused her requests to gain computer codes to help her move forward on the research. Even worse, he bragged to some colleagues and friends that his stalling tactics would harm her.
- Despite the detailed accusations of harassment against Bekeart, the university failed to send him for any kind of sexual harassment training. The one assigned training session, lasting little more than two hours, was to help him with his communication skills. Based on testimony in the trial, as much or more time during that session was spent agreeing with his story. According to an email he sent a friend, he was told that “it was very clear I had been played and that the legal environment had gone too far to the left and was getting abused left and right by evil people like this Enrichetta.”
- In the midst of his deteriorating relationship with his mentee in the spring of 2014, an MBA student in one of his classes accused him of harassment and reported him to the university after which he threatened the student in an email exchange. “I am harassing you?,” Bekeart wrote her. “I am keeping this email in a safe place and you can just hope I am too busy to take this further.” After that email, the student who submitted the report to the universtiy’s Title IX office chose not to participate in the investigation.
- The report alleged, among other things, that in Bekeart’s asset management class he began discussing his recent travels to Hong Kong. While rubbing his hands together with a smile, he said “Hong Kong, where the ladies are nice.” The student not only found the comment off-putting, other students in the class seemed shocked by the remark as well, according to the report.
HOPING FOR ‘BROWNIE POINTS,’ BEKAERT ADMITS ‘I’M NOT THE MOST POPULAR GUY’ AT COLUMBIA
Bekaert acknowledged that he was not necessarily the most beloved professor at Columbia Business School. In fact, he suggested it was one of several reasons he wanted to work with Ravina. “I am a little bit blunt and, you know, I have had my run-ins with some of my colleagues and the administration,” he told the court on Friday (July 13). “I’m not the most popular guy. I thought if I worked with somebody there, and I really helped a junior faculty’s career, I am really going to get brownie points in the dean’s office. They are going to appreciate me more because of this relationship.”
That strategy obviously backfired, to the point where Bekaert even suggested he wanted to strangle his one-time collaborator and mentee. “Can I just strangle her and get it over with?,” he asked Marie Hoerover, a principal economist in the financial research divison of the European Central Bank in an email.
No one could ever have imagined that the acrimony between the two could possibly get that vicious. When they first started working together in 2009 soon after Ravina’s arrival at Columbia, Bekaert says they had a very good relationship. “I thought she was a nice person,” he testified. “I thought we got along well. We’re both from Europe. So we sort of a little bit of a shared cultural heritage there.”
Enrichetta Ravina, a former assistant professor of finance and economics at Columbia Business Schoo who was denied tenure, accuses senior faculty member Professor Geert Bekaert of sexual harassment and sabotage
‘ENRICHETTA’S VITAE WAS NOT GREAT WHEN I STARTED WORKING WITH HER’
Ravina, he thought, was an ideal fit for a major research undertaking. Bekaert had been working as a consultant with Financial Engines since 1997 and the firm had a massive dataset that he believed represented an unusual opportunity for pioneering research on retirement accounts, automatic 401 (K) enrollment plans and reallocation of portfolio investments. She had experience in managing massive datasets, an area of expertise he lacked, and her background in behavioral finance and corporate finance seemed to complement his own in asset pricing.
The Italian-born professor saw the opportunity and was enthusiastic about it. As a tenure track junior professor, however, she had already been in something of a hole because she had published little to begin with. From the time she earned her Ph.D. in 2005, Ravina had only published fewer than a handful of articles in peer-reviewed journals. Not a single meaningful article bore only her own authorship, even her PhD thesis from Northwestern University remained unpublished.
“Enrichetta’s vitae was not great when I started working with her,” said Bekaert. “I told you before that that’s why I chose her. I thought I can really help her. She needed to finish the single-authored papers. Without that, I could write five, six, seven papers with her, it still wouldn’t have given her tenure because these are all jointly-authored papers, with me. She wouldn’t get full credit for this. And all of my colleagues were telling me that too. The key to her tenure would have been single-authored papers.”
‘I COULD NOT BY MYSELF SALVAGE HER TENURE CASE’
As early as 2011, three years after joining Columbia, Ravina began receiving consistent feedback from senior faculty and Dean Hubbard that she needed to publish more papers in academic journals. One trouble sign immediately occurred on the big collaborative project. To gain access to the data from Financial Engines, a contract had to be signed. It took nearly two years until the end of 2011 to get the contract in place. Then it took more than half the next year, until September of 2012, before they received the full dataset.
“This was frustrating,” Bekaert told the court. “I remember this was a very frustrating time especially for Enrichetta as well because we’re sitting there waiting. We have all these projects that we potentially wanted to do. We even started to hire research assistants that we then had to let go because just the data weren’t coming. The only way this data set would have contributed to her tenure was if we had been able to get the data much earlier. Really, the worst shock that we got was the fact that it took the company until 2012 to give us the data. To get everything published was kind of too late already. So in some sense, when we got the data, it was already too late. I could not by myself salvage her tenure case.”
Throughout this period, however, Ravina claims Bekaert kept hitting on her. 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).
BEKAERT WAS SERVED WITH THE LAWSUIT WHILE TEACHING AN MBA CLASS IN THE FALL OF 2015
Ravina felt she had no choice but to bring the case against her former mentor. “I thought long and hard before bringing this case,” she told the court last week. “I did it after years in which I’ve been trying to solve these issues with Columbia in good faith, to try to find a solution that was good for me, was good for the university, and was good for Professor Bekaert. And only after all these efforts has failed, I brought this lawsuit.” The suit was served on Bekaert while he was teaching an MBA class on Sept. 23, 2015.
Well before that time, however, the relationship between the two had deteriorated to the point where rumors about their rift were circulating far beyond the school–and Bekaert began writing colleagues and friends to label Ravina “crazy” and “insane” and to proclaim his innocence (a university investigation concluded he did not violate the university’s employment policies and procedures on discrimination and harassment in either the Ravina case or the MBA student case). Ravina’s lawyer maintains that the university’s investigation was superficial.
It was all-out war between the two, a conflict that even spilled over to Financial Engines, the provider of the rich dataset. At one point in January 9, 2015, Bekaert sent an email to Wei Hu, then vice president of financial research at Financial Engines. “We are dealing with at best a very sick person, at worst an incredibly evil person,” wrote Bekaert. “I cannot find any other word for it (crazy). She simply does everything to make our lives miserable. I really do not want to communicate with her anymore. My RA (research assistant) gets physically ill at the mentioning of her name.”
‘I AM INCREDIBLY PAINED BY THE ACRIMONY I AM WITNESSING OVER EMAIL’
The professor, who asked Hu to destroy one of the derogatory emails he had sent him, was hoping the FE executive would step into the disagreement with Ravina. Hu would not take sides, and Bekaert would tell a friend that Hu “pissed me off to no end.” Responded Hu on Jan. 21st, “I am incredibly pained by the acrimony I am witnessing over email.” After getting two drafts of the same paper based on his firm’s dataset–one draft from Bekaert and one from Ravina–Hu was displeased enough to tell both of them: “I would hate to put a stop to this research altogether, but that is a matter of sunk costs.”
Oftentimes Bekaert seemed as pained by the split as Ravina, spending inordinate amounts of time writing emails to people to complain about her. The emails were sent far and wide to professors at Harvard Business School and Duke’s Fuqua School of Business to UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School and UC-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. To Xiaoyan Zhang, then a professor at Purdue’s Krannert School of Management and associate editor of the Journal of Banking and Finance as well as Management Science, he wrote: “The evil bitch went ahead, and look at what she says. Pure evil lies. Unbelievable. I’m royally fucked as people seem to simply take her on her word.”
To Campbell Harvey, a professor at Duke Fuqua who was associate editor of the Journal of Financial Economics and a formerpresident of the American Finance Association, he claimed “this is a sad example of no good deed goes unpunished…she fabricated a series of completely false allegations about me.”
‘I WILL NOT LET HER GET AWAY WITH THIS’
When CBS proceeded with its tenure process on Ravina in the spring of 2016, Bekaert gained access to her personal statement, even though the school has claimed he was to be excluded from her review. Nancy Xu, a research assistant to Bekeart, described herself as a spy on his behalf. “I will not let her get away with this,” Bekaert wrote Xu in an email. “I got a list of a number of Phd students who worked with her from Andrea (another research assistant). Hopefully, I can get some to say how great their experience was with the charming Italian.”
The trial moves into week two today (July 16) with Bekaert returning to the stand. Once his testimony is completed, plaintiff’s counsel will call their final witnesses which should take Tuesday, Wednesday and possibly into Thursday morning. Those witnesses include Dean Glenn Hubbard, Michael Dunn, the university’s Director of Investigations for the Office of Equal Opportunity Affirmative Action (EOAA), Professor Patrick Bolton, a colleague at the CBS and president of the American Finance Association, and several Columbia administrators who will appear via their video depositions.
Closing arguments in the case may not occur until July 25th.
DON’T MISS: COLUMBIA BUSINESS SCHOOL’S SHOCKING #METOO TRIAL or A MENTORSHIP GOES BAD AT COLUMBIA BUSINESS SCHOOL
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