'Sexually Promiscuous' Professor at the University of Rochester Faces Censure Vote

I suspect Prof. Jaeger's behaviour was simply German.  German men tend to be a bit pushy with women.  It is expected

Later today, the faculty senate of the University of Rochester will vote on a motion to censure Florian Jaeger, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences, for sexual misconduct.

"Professor Jaeger engaged in a variety of inappropriate and unprofessional sexual or sexualized behaviors in his interactions with students," Senate Co-Chairs Mary Jane Curry and Kevin McFarland wrote in an email to the faculty senate that was obtained by Reason. "These behaviors had predictable and harmful impact on students."

Jaeger, who was hired at Rochester in 2007 at the age of 31, is accused of having inappropriate relationships with multiple students, of creating a climate of sexual harassment within the brain and cognitive sciences department, and essentially of being a serial predator.

The allegations against Jaeger, which did not become public until last fall, seem damning at first blush. One of his accusers, former Rochester Ph.D. student Celeste Kidd, said he constantly made her feel uncomfortable. On September 1 of last year, Kidd and six other academics filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) alleging a pattern of harassment and discriminatory behavior. According to this complaint, Jaeger made it clear that students who wanted to excel needed to please him, socially and sometimes sexually. He used obnoxious and objectifying sexual language, intentionally crossed boundaries with women, including undergraduates, intentionally humiliated female students, and knowingly made women feel physically unsafe; they got the sense that their discomfort excited him.

He used illegal drugs with students and hosted hot tub parties.

Kidd and her fellow complainants have also accused the university of retaliating against them. They filed an additional complaint in federal court on December 8, 2017. Student-activists have protested Jaeager's continuing employment at Rochester. Many signed a petition calling on him to be fired. One student even launched a hunger strike.

Largely absent from the conversation is one inconvenient fact: Jaeger was cleared of any wrongdoing. Not once, not twice, but three times. It's easy to see why investigators repeatedly reached this conclusion: University policy did not bar professors from engaging in sexual relationships with their students until 2014, by which point Jaeger's objectionable behavior had ceased. That's why Rochester determined that while Jaeger may have crossed certain lines, there was no grounds to terminate him—a decision the university stood by even after the complainants appealed.

Moreover, some significant factual assertions made at various stages of the investigation were deemed false during a subsequent, independent investigation conducted at the university's request by the law firm Debevoise and Plimpton.

The results of this investigation—led by Mary Jo White, a former chairperson of the Securities and Exchange Commission—were released earlier this month. The document detailing the findings is more than 200 pages long. It recommends that the university make certain changes to its sexual misconduct policy. But it also concludes that "while there is no doubt that Jaeger, at one time, had a reputation as promiscuous—another aspect of his character that did not change from his years as a graduate student—Jaeger's characterization as a 'sexual predator' in the complaints is baseless."

While Jaeger did indeed pursue sexual relationships with students before the university changed its rules, he was never accused of sexual assault. "We are aware of no evidence—or even allegation—that Jaeger ever engaged in sexual assault or any other nonconsensual sexual contact whatsoever."

White and her team interviewed more than 140 witnesses, including 14 of the 17 graduate students and seven of the 10 postdoctoral fellows who worked with Jaeger between 2007 and present. It was clear to them that Jaeger's inappropriate sexual behavior—including his tendency to make sexually explicit jokes and comments—abated after the university became stricter about such things in 2014.

Further, the White investigation concluded that several claims concerning Jaeger were simply false:

The EEOC Complaint, for example, suggests in two separate places that Jaeger engaged in sexual activity with a prospective student who stayed with Jaeger and his partner during a visit to [the university] in 2015. To the EEOC Complainants' credit, their subsequent federal lawsuit, where Rule 11 pleading requirements apply, withdraws that assertion, noting that the student has now confirmed that she did not experience any sexual advances or other misconduct by Jaeger during her visit.

Rule 11 is a federal provision that essentially subjects attorneys and their clients to possible legal sanction if they make unsubstantiated claims. It doesn't apply in EEOC filings—nevertheless, this aspect of the EEOC complaint was simply false, according to White.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of Jaeger's behavior—the place where the harassment case seems most compelling—is his treatment of Kidd, who claims she was subjected to "unwelcome, harassing sexual comments." Her claims are complicated by the fact that she lived with Jaeger for nearly a year: She rented a room in his apartment from the summer of 2007 until the spring of 2008. Kidd characterized this arrangement as coercive—he "pressed" her to live with him—but that's hard to accept at face value. As White's report noted:

The unedited Facebook messages between Jaeger and Kidd, as well as their email communications, suggest that in summer 2007, when Kidd moved into Jaeger's house, their relationship was friendly and harmonious, and we found no evidence indicating that Jaeger coerced Kidd into living with him. Interviewees overwhelmingly indicated that while they found Kidd's and Jaeger's living arrangement strange, they all thought Kidd and Jaeger were friends from summer 2007 to spring 2008. Emails between Jaeger and Kidd at the beginning of their living arrangement echo this perception.

By all accounts, Jaeger's and Kidd's living arrangement appears to have been initially friendly and mutually acceptable, although we note that we view it as a serious lapse in Jaeger's judgment to live with a graduate student.

It's hard not to see parallels between Jaeger's situation and that of Northwestern University Professor Peter Ludlow, who was accused of engaging in a nonconsensual sexual relationship with a student—even though, as Laura Kipnis wrote in her book about the Ludlow investigation, it was difficult to imagine how the long-running relationship could possibly have been forced. "What would it mean to not consent to sending a thousand text messages?" wrote Kipnis. A similar dynamic seems to be at play here.

There's one more element to the Jaeger situation: Since 2014, he has been in a relationship with Chigusa Kurumada, who is also a professor in Rochester's cognitive and brain sciences department. Kurumada is from Japan, and living in the U.S. on a work visa. (Jaeger is himself from Germany.) Kurumada told me that she strongly disputes the complainants' claims. Moreover, in their zeal to destroy Jaeger's career, she says they have imperiled hers.

"In what was purported to be a campaign to protect and empower women, Florian's accusers—my own colleagues—belittled my professional achievements and insinuated that I was complicit in his behaviors or even enabled them," she writes via email. "I was the only woman not given a pseudonym in the EEOC complaint. Using my real name, obviously foreign, furthered the goal of presenting Florian as a perpetrator by portraying me as a stereotypically submissive Asian woman."

Kurumada's prospects have suffered greatly as a result of the efforts to oust Jaeger, she claims.

"While I have consistently carried out my academic responsibilities, I have done so while being publicly shamed by my colleagues and while my partner endures death threats and daily hate mail," she wrote. "My plans for grant proposals and journal submissions have been in large part tabled, and I have been disinvited from one speaking engagement in Japan, my native country."

It would be easier to count the damage to Kurumada's career as an acceptable loss if it meant holding a serial sexual abuser accountable. But it's hard to argue with White's exhaustively researched conclusion: Jaeger's long-ago behavior may have been gross and ill-advised, but it did not violate university policy and it no longer threatens students or faculty members at Rochester.

Nevertheless, the censure vote in the faculty senate later today could result in a loss of tenure for Jaeger.

"My client Florian Jaeger has now undergone three separate investigations...each one determined he did not violate any law or University policy," says his lawyer, Steve Modica. "Now some members of the faculty senate wish to revoke Florian's tenure because he engaged in consensual relationships 10 years ago with several female students. I would hope a group of educators from a world renowned institution like Rochester would be concerned about due process, facts, and context instead of complaints filled with misinformation and distortions."

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Title IX Is an Insult to Victims of Sexual Assault

Rape is an appalling crime. Its perpetrators deserve criminal prosecution and lengthy imprisonment upon conviction. Yet the discourse on sexual assault at American colleges and universities in the past few years has fueled a backlash. Until the recent revelations of #MeToo, colleges have dominated the discussion of sexual misconduct in America. (This focus is misplaced, as young women who don’t attend college have rates of sexual assault more than twice as high as their matriculated peers.)

Much of the emerging backlash concerns false accusations of sexual misconduct. Consider some of the campus rape cases to have received the most media attention over the past decade: the Duke lacrosse players (2006), the University of Virginia assault reported in Rolling Stone (2014), Emma Sulkowicz, the Columbia University “mattress girl” (2012), and the Baylor athletic department sexual assault cover-up scandal (2015-2016).

The Duke lacrosse and Rolling Stone accusations have been incontrovertibly debunked; the Sulkowicz accusation is almost certainly unfounded. Only the Baylor case, in which the football coach, athletic director, and university president were all fired for systematically suppressing rape allegations, actually reflected sexual misconduct. Colleges and universities are themselves contributing to the proliferation of false accusations. Ironically, these false accusations have ensued from a misguided policy intended to protect the interests of rape survivors: the 2011 Department of Education directive known as the “Dear Colleague” letter.

The letter contained extensive new guidelines for how colleges and universities handle sexual misconduct cases. Although the letter has been officially rescinded, the Title IX industry has taken on a life of its own, and its dictates have become entrenched in American higher education. Title IX officers remain eager to pursue every allegation of sexual misconduct, no matter how flimsy. Often these allegations are based on nothing more than words. For example, a Howard University professor’s poorly conceived test question about bikini waxing resulted in a 504-day investigation and sanctions that included mandatory sensitivity training.

My own Title IX investigation was also largely based on words. In 2016, I was brought up on charges that included, most memorably, telling a few colleagues that I’d proposed to my now ex-wife at a strip club. The complaint also cited various instances of “potty mouth” and bawdy conversation.

All of this occurred almost 20 years ago, during off-campus outings for pizza and beer with several of my fellow junior colleagues. We were all swapping off-color stories. No one seemed offended at the time or later told me that they were offended. The complaint against me also contained fanciful accounts of gender discrimination. Here is the most specific example:

In an April 6, 2016 faculty meeting discussing the outcome of an external review report of a Department program, you yelled ‘I feel vindicated! This is exactly what I’ve been saying all along!’ You reacted this way because the director or [sic] the program is a woman…

It’s beyond my understanding as to why my endorsement of the “external review report,” a document authored by three academics at other universities, should be construed as me discriminating against my department chair. I doubt the colleague who accused me knows how I really feel about women. I hadn’t had a conversation with her for over a decade prior to the Title IX charges. In short, the accusation of gender discrimination was maximally nonsensical.

Perhaps the most ominous part of my Title IX allegations was relegated to a footnote in the allegations:

In early June, a writer for a magazine who interviewed Wolfinger called the Department to complain of inappropriate sexual comments which she alleged occurred during the interview. The OEO/AA attempted on several occasions to reach the writer to interview her and get information regarding specifics of her interactions with Wolfinger, however, she did not return the OEO/ AA’s attempts at contact and did not participate in the investigation process.

I’ve talked to hundreds of reporters in the past 20 years and had absolutely no idea what I might have said. It’s profoundly threatening to open intellectual inquiry to know that anyone can complain about you to your university at any time.

If there was a silver lining to any of this, it was instantly realizing that the case against me was so frivolous that it had no chance of being upheld. I retained top-shelf counsel right away and assiduously avoided ever having a face-to-face meeting with my Title IX inquisitor (such meetings offer prime opportunities for self-incrimination). Several months later the charges were dismissed.

I was not out of the woods yet. Early in 2017 my dean, who had not been involved in the Title IX process, filed new charges based exclusively on the Title IX investigator’s report. Although it had not been part of the initial allegations against me, the report went to some lengths to cast me as a lousy colleague: I sighed and rolled my eyes in faculty meetings. I said fuck once. I “look down on anyone who [I perceive to be] doing more teaching/service and less research.”

For these transgressions, my dean sought an official reprimand and a fine equal to a month’s pay (about $5,000 after taxes; as a state employee, my salary is public record). Fortunately, the vice president for faculty, who outranks my dean in the academic food chain, was a voice of sanity and unilaterally rescinded my dean’s attempted sanctions. This marked the end of the administrative ordeal initiated by the Title IX charges against me.

Title IX inquisitions like the ones described here trivialize the actual victims of sexual harassment and assault.
Two other faculty members have written about their experiences as the target of a Title IX investigation. Laura Kipnis, at Northwestern University, was charged for merely writing an article; her accuser claimed she’d created a “chilling climate” for reporting sexual misconduct. Kipnis’ crusade against the DCL culminated in her 2017 book Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus (Harper). J. Martin Rochester of the University of Missouri-St. Louis suspects he was charged after an intemperate email exchange with two colleagues (not uncommon in Title IX cases, he never learned what the actual charges were). Ultimately, Kipnis and Rochester were cleared of their Title IX charges.

None of the cases I’ve described here had much to do with sexual harassment or assault, yet all were the basis of Title IX charges. In each case, a university conducted an investigation, sometimes at great expense to all parties (my attorney fees totaled $14,000 and I got off lightly; many accused students are expelled, while faculty members have lost their jobs).

Every second and every dollar a university fritters away on frivolous or trumped-up allegations is time and money not spent on cases with actual victims. Title IX inquisitions like the ones described here trivialize the actual victims of sexual harassment and assault, often young people who may have been subjected to gruesome assaults or stalking so invasive that it interferes with the victim’s ability to pursue a college education. Frivolous Title IX cases are a crushing insult to the unacceptably large number of women who have been victimized by their peers in higher education. No one deserves that.

#MeToo is a necessary moment of reckoning. A civilized society has no place for men (and, occasionally, women) who abuse their power by abusing their subordinates. Accusations of sexual misconduct must always be taken seriously. At the same time, anyone who is accused deserves due process, not an internet lynch mob. Civilized society also has no place for vigilantism. As the journalist Emily Yoffe has pointed out, the damage done by Title IX on campus should inform how we move toward a society free from sexual misconduct.

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Top Australian University introduces mandatory sexual harassment course using stick figures to tell students they can't kiss or touch each other without an 'ENTHUSIASTIC yes'

Feminist rubbish.  One doubts that the authors have ever been kissed

Students have slammed a mandatory sexual harassment course telling them they cannot kiss or touch without an 'enthusiastic yes'.

All commencing students at the University of Sydney must take the module, originally developed at Oxford University by London-based company Epigeum.

The university's website says the course is to help students understand consensual sexual activity, which it defines as including kissing and touching.

'It is the university's way of saying, "we've done our part, we look good", but it's not actually going to fix anything,' honours student Claudia Reed told the Daily Telegraph.

Medical Science student Eleni Vellios said asking explicitly for an 'enthusiastic "yes"' before kissing someone was silly and impractical.

'It's a bit unrealistic, no one is going to ask for them to spell it out and ask for it,' she said.

Ms Reed agreed, saying they course will not help or change the minds of anyone who needs to be taught what consent is.

The compulsory survey was a 'tick-a-box exercise', she added and said the university should be more focused on fixing the problems within its residential colleges. 

The University of Sydney states: 'Whenever you participate in any sexual activity, everyone involved needs to give their full consent.

'This means that everyone is entirely comfortable with the situation and freely able to agree, give permission or say "yes" to participating in a sexual activity (this includes kissing and touching). 'Sexual activity without consent is sexual assault and is always a crime.'

'Consent is never ambiguous. If someone is not able to offer an enthusiastic "yes" to questions about sexual activity you do not have consent.'

'Consent Matters: Boundaries, Respect, And Positive Intervention' uses stick figures to illustrate the importance of consent and the impact that drugs and alcohol have on consent.

The course states that 'everyone must have explicit permission from the person they intend to make contact with' before going ahead.  

A university spokesperson confirmed that students would be forced to keep attempting the course until they got every section correct.

'The Consent Matters module is mandatory for all new students enrolling at the University of Sydney from 2018 onwards,' she said.

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