Their open letter is here, and purports to dispute three allegations about the department's handling of suspected incidents of sexual harassment (the letter accurately quotes my summary of the allegations received, in the first instance, from a student there). One bit I find puzzling is that one of the signatories to the letter, Bonnie Mann, appeared to confirm the allegations in an earlier posting, which we noted. I invite readers to consider both the new letter and her earlier statement for themselves.
With respect to the first allegation, an Oregon paper usefully reports that the allegations of sexual harassment could not be pursued because “'no grievance or complaint was filed by any alleged victim.' The memo...states that there was 'insufficient evidence' to conclude that the UO policy on conflict of interest or sexual harassment was violated." One needn't be a lawyer to recognize, of course, that all of that is compatible with the correctness of the original allegations; indeed, as I read the newspaper report, it appears there was no finding that the allegations about sexual harassment were false, only that the relevant evidentiary standards and procedural requirements were not met. The law is often right to respect demanding epistemic requirements, but surely philosophers realize that they need have no bearing on the metaphysics of what actually transpired! [UPDATE: The procedural issue was, as I suspected, a statute of limitations issue. As often happens in sexual harassment cases, the alleged victim, traumatized by the events, waits too long under university rules before coming forward.]
With respect to the second allegation, the letter writers do offer a plausible explanation for why graduate students might have mistakenly interpreted appropriate confidentiality in procedures as administrative lethargy on the matter. I have no additional evidence that would settle the matter of which account is correct.
With repect to the third allegation, an Oregon grad students posts the following at the New Apps blog in response to the letter:
The graduate student open letter was signed by over thirty students in the department. Collecting that many signatures took time and inevitably sparked rumors that got back to certain members of the faculty. These faculty members requested private meetings with certain junior students involved in the composition of the letter. During these meetings they both pressed the students for information as to its contents, as well as pressured them to drop the whole matter. As one might imagine, the power dynamics involved in such interactions are considerably slanted and several students left them visibly shaken.
One of the faculty members behind such meetings was Bonnie Mann, who, in her capacity as director of graduate studies, holds mandatory progress-to-degree meetings with all pre-ABD students in the month of May. Dr. Mann used these mandatory (and supposedly academic) meetings as an occasion and pretense to exert pressure on certain graduate students. Not only was this highly unprofessional and distressing to the students so subjected, but it was precisely in the course of these meetings that she invoked the possibility of our department losing the SWIP award in an attempt to dissuade them from involvement in the open letter.
These are all matters of fact, whether the above signed faculty wish to admit so or not.
Although the apparent dysfunctionality of the Oregon Department has loomed large in some recent discussions, I would like to remind readers that the real issue is the "Climate for Women" section of the so-called "Pluralist [sic] Guide," and that allegations about Oregon arose only because they constituted yet one more piece of evidence suggesting that the Guide employed an unreliable methodology for assessing the "Climate for Women."
UPDATE: Another interesting comment from the New Apps blog, from a feminist philosopher:
First please note that among the faculty members who did NOT sign the letter are (a) the most senior and well-established feminist philosopher in the department, Naomi Zack, and (b) the director of undergraduate studies, who is supposedly at the center of all of this.
Second, Bonnie has claimed on the FP blog and in the Eugene Weekly [BL: linked above] that "“The entire discussion, as far as I can tell, seems to be based on a letter sent to Leiter." This is simply false. Several different members of the UO department reached out to several different outside members of the profession, myself included, with concerns about how the harassment allegation was being handled and with grave doubts that the department had earned its climate accolades honestly. Their versions of the story matched and were quite different from what we get in this letter.
Third, the newspaper article to which Bonnie links on the FP blog (comments now closed) adds no new evidence of any kind. It is almost entirely a string of quotes, mostly from Bonnie herself, and mostly repeating word for word what she's said on blogs. We already knew her public view of the matter.
Fourth and finally, at a *bare minimum* it is clear from blog postings that there is significant conflict between the two main feminist scholars in the department, and that at least some grad students do not feel comfortable in their interactions with one of the female professors. This seems pretty darn good evidence already that the climate for women there is at least vexed, regardless of what actually went down with regards to the harassment business. If I were putting together a 'strongly recommended' climate list, the trail of conflict in blog space alone would be enough to make me take Oregon off the list.
I suppose if I were Chair of the Oregon Department (thankfully, I am not), I might advise Professor Mann to fall silent, since she has singlehandedly done more damage to the department's national reputation than anyone.
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