A jury verdict is often as unpredictable as a coin toss. Even seemingly open-and-shut cases result in surprise endings. So it’s hard to predict how a jury in a New York City courtroom will come out on an explosive trial involving Columbia Business School and a junior female faculty member who claims she was sexually harassed by her self-designated mentor, a senior tenured male professor, who she also accuses of sabatoging her career.
After closing arguments today (July 24) in the more than two-week-old trial, the jury was sent off for deliberations to consider the once promising mentorship between Enrichetta Ravina and Geert Bekaert, a collaborative partnership that devolved into a bitter and nasty breakup. The dispute ultimately caused a major split among the senior faculty at Columbia Business School, resulted in her being denied tenure, and led to the $30 million lawsuit she filed against Bekaert and the university.
If the jury were to decide this case merely on the merits of a junior professor’s publication record for tenure, this would be a no-brainer. But this is not a tenure case, no matter how hard Columbia University’s lawyers have tried to make it just that. It’s a sexual harassment, gender discrimination and retaliation case. It’s a case against an arrogant, unpopular senior faculty member, sadly protected by tenure, a case against a university and business school accused of failing to protect a junior professor from both harassment and career sabotage.
IN A HE-SAID, SHE-SAID WORLD, IT TAKES TREMENDOUS COURAGE FOR A WOMEN TO COME FORWARD
That’s why Geert Bekaert, the accused senior professor of finance, and Columbia University will likely lose the case. Like Bill Cosby, Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein, Bekeart will no doubt go to his grave denying he did anything to sexually harass the Italian-born assistant professor 11 years his younger. He claims, like Trump and others before him, that he had no romantic interest in his mentee at all.
But in a he-said, she-said world, it takes a tremendous amount of courage for a woman to come forward and tell the world her story. No one who knows her, including the most senior administrators in the dean’s office, denies that she was under extreme duress. The vivid detail of her allegations—from the first time Bekeart told her his marriage was on the rocks and the time he asked her if she had a live-in boyfriend to the time he asked her out on one-on-one dinner dates and the time he allegedly tried to kiss her on the lips—are highly convincing pieces of a larger narrative.
That is especially so because this same professor had been accused of repeatedly harassing a female MBA student only a couple of months before Ravina came forth to tell the business school she needed help in dealing with Bekeart. After Bekeart threatened the student with retaliation for her complaint, she chose not to participate in the Title IX investigation.
HER ONE-TIME MENTOR CALLED HER CRAZY, INSANE, AN EVIL BITCH
After Ravina filed her 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. This is not the behavior of a highly educated, rational man nor it is the behavior of someone who is innocent.
The emails introduced as evidence, in fact, 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 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. “If this is harassment,” Bekeart wrote another, “the Americans really are total pussies.”
The fact that many of the senior, tenured professors in their finance and economics division sided not with Bekeart but with Ravina tells you enough about what they think of their senior colleague. The faculty, in fact, filed three separate petitions with Columbia Business School Dean Glenn Hubbard, each one of them demonstrating considerable support for their junior colleague.
THE UNIVERSITY FAILED TO PROTECT HER FROM BEKAERT’S RAGE AND RETALIATION
What did the university do to protect her? Shockingly little. Even though it had closed its harassment investigation into Bekeart just two months earlier, the university’s Equal Opportunity & Affirmative Action (EOAA) conducted a shockingly superficial and incomplete review of Ravina’s charges. On the witness stand, Michael Dunn, the EEOA’s then director, conceded that he only interviewed one other person, besides Ravina and Bekeart. That person was 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, in fact, conceded there was no formal investigation, just a “preliminary fact-finding review.” Even that description of what he did and did not do is rather generous. Dunn admitted 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 Bekaert that she had sent him. Even worse, Dunn said 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.
In other words, the university failed to properly investigate her charges and then failed to protect her from Bekeart’s retaliatory actions once she came forward. Bekeart’s own emails conceded he stopped working on their collaboration for several months because of his dislike for his one-time mentee. Dunn also 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. Instead, Bekaert was sent at his convenience to a one-to-two hour training session on appropriate professional communications.
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
ALARM BELLS SHOULD HAVE SOUNDED DUE TO THE EARLIER HARASSMENT COMPLAINT BY AN MBA STUDENT
Because of the previous report against Bekaert by a female student and his documented threats to her, Ravina’s complaint should have set up alarm bells. Instead, the dean’s office at Columbia Business School said it was completely unaware of the previous harassment complaint against Bekaert. Though Dean Hubbard initially believed the dispute was over their research collaboration, he quickly found out there was more to it than that. A day after his first meeting with Ravina on July 15, 2014, he was told by newly named Senior Vice Dean Katherine Phillips that some sort of sexual innuendo was being alleged. But he would not meet with Ravina against until September, cancelling a scheduled meeting in August.
As Phillips explained it on the stand, Ravina told her that there have been these negative emails that had gone between them, but that “there were emails that she hadn’t shared with people that might kind of imply some sexual innuendo. He had asked her out to dinner several times, maybe he wanted something more than just dinner. I certainly felt like I needed to immediately report that to somebody. I went straight to Hubbard’s office and I said I think we need to investigate.” The dean’s office referred the matter to the university’s EOAA office on July 19th.
“I thought the situation was unreasonable,” thought Phillips. “My sense was that as the senior faculty member maybe Geert could give a little bit more in the situation to try to resolve the situation. So my exasperation a bit there was really about like can we get this resolved already.”
GIVEN HER SCANT PUBLICATION RECORD, SHE WAS EASY PREY
And then jury members will have to talk about the school’s decision to deny her tenure. They should do so in the context of knowing that when she first came to Columbia in 2008, she had a scant publication record. So from the very beginning, she had a lot riding on her collaborative work with Bekaert. She was, in fact, easy prey for a senior faculty member whose marriage was allegedly troubled. As a junior professor, already behind in publishing breakthrough papers, Bekeart would have even greater influence and power over her than he would have had in even a more normal circumstance. The fact that the research would all come from a massive dataset to which Bekaert had access only made the senior professor’s hand stronger.
When the school insisted that its senior faculty members not consider how her allegations had impacted her publication record, it insured that she would be denied tenure. But sexual harassment, gender discrimination and retaliation helped to paralyze her at Columbia Business School. It was relevant in judging her tenure case, particularly in light of the university’s failure to protect her. She was under extreme pressure, feeling alienated from the school and the university. Unable to sleep, she was under the weekly treatment of a therapist. No one can be productive under those circumstances.
Yet, because the school had delayed the tenure process due to negotiations her and its lawyers, it had to rush it along at the last minute. This is why many senior faculty members in her division drafted and signed three petitions and the administration had to call a meeting with senior tenured faculty to address their concerns about the process.
‘SEEMS LIKE A BALDFACED ATTEMPT TO GET RID OF HER’
“The unprecedented acceleration in Ravina’s case seems like a baldfaced attempt to get rid of her,” wrote Noel Capon, a long-standing professor at Columbia Business School since 1979. Capon, tenured since 1988, was a former division chair from 2000 to 2006. He sent his email with this message to the faculty and administration.
The peer group used to measure Ravina’s output was composed of nine men and two women, Victoria Ivashina and Adele Morris. The school acknowledged that it had tossed into the mix of peers a “superstar” professor. Of course, Ravina’s three peer-reviewed papers and citations would show her to be considerably behind other young academics in her field. But none of them had to go through the horrendous struggle of dealing with an angry and arrogant senior professor just out of a failed marriage who had been accused of sexual harassment, gender discrimination and retaliation.
At this point, Columbia would do well to contact its insurance company.
DON’T MISS: CBS DEAN CALLS FACULTY DISPUTE ‘A SOAP OPERA’ or COLUMBIA INVESTIGATED FOUR SEPARATE CASES OF HARASSMENT AT ITS BUSINESS SCHOOL IN A SINGLE YEAR
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