Study Examines Faculty-on-Student Harassment

Professors Nancy Chi Cantalupo and William Kidder have posted a forthcoming study about an aspect of campus sexual misconduct that warrants more public discussion: the sexual harassment of students by faculty members.  They studied media reports as well as lawsuits and administrative complaints, amassing a data set of over three hundred cases. As they put it in the abstract,

Two key findings emerged from the data. First, contrary to popular assumptions, faculty sexual harassers are not engaged primarily in verbal behavior. Rather, most of the cases reviewed for this study involved faculty alleged to have engaged in unwelcome physical contact ranging from groping to sexual assault to domestic abuse-like behaviors. Second, more than half (53%) of cases involved professors allegedly engaged in serial sexual harassment. Thus, this study adds to our understanding of sexual harassment in the university setting and informs a number of related policy and legal questions including academic freedom, prevention, sanctions, and the so-called “pass the harasser” phenomenon of serial sexual harassers relocating to new university positions.

Here is a link to the study, which will be published in the Utah Law Review.