It turns out that yet another "strongly recommended" department according to the now notoriously unreliable "Climate for Women" part of the SPEP/SAAP Guide to philosophy programs has a special history when it comes to sexual harassment. As reported here,
A former Penn State department head filed a federal lawsuit against the university and two university officials, alleging that he was removed as philosophy department head for reporting discrimination and harassment within his department.
Mitchell Aboulafia, who was the philosophy department head from July 2003 to March 2004, filed a lawsuit against the university, College of the Liberal Arts Dean Susan Welch and former Associate Dean Ron Filippelli for a breach of contract, violation of the Pennsylvania Human Relations Act and violation of First and 14th amendments of the U.S. Constitution.
According to a 23-page brief Aboulafia's attorney filed last August, current and former senior faculty members in the department discriminated against and severely harassed students and graduate teaching assistants on the basis of sex, ethnicity and religion. When he tried to report the alleged discrimination, Aboulafia said he was removed as head of the department and demoted to faculty status, according to the court documents.
Professor Aboulafia's complaint alleged:
15. During Dr. Aboulafia’s tenure as Head of the Department, he received numerous, troubling reports involving the conduct of certain Department faculty members.
16. These reports concerned incidents of discrimination and harassment on the basis of sex, ethnicity and religion by current and former faculty members in the Department directed towards students, graduate teaching assistants, and junior faculty members; discrimination on the basis of race, sex, and ethnicity by current and former faculty members in the Department against prospective faculty members and graduate students; and the severe harassment and humiliation of students and graduate teaching assistants by faculty members.
17. While these reports involved several senior faculty members, many of the most serious reports involved one particular senior professor, who oversaw the academic work of graduate students in his role as a teacher and dissertation director and oversaw the students’ work as graduate teaching assistants in his role as Director of Graduate Studies.
The University eventually settled with Professor Aboulafia. (Alas, this seems to be part of a university-wide pattern of gender discrimination issues at Penn State (see also this).) The Aboulafia lawsuit may have been connected with a subsequent exodus of faculty from the Penn State program. That the Penn State program partly imploded over retaliation against a Department Head who wanted to deal with sexual harassment problems in the Philosophy Department some six-seven years ago doesn't mean, of course, that the problem remains today. On the other hand, based on the allegations in the complaint, I believe at least one of the faculty members accused of harassment is still there.
Of course, there is no reason the surveyed "leaders in the field" of "Climates for Women" should know anything about a retaliatory firing for reporting sexual harassment, just because it resulted in multiple news stories and a lawsuit, which the university settled for allegedly a substantial sum.
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