Faculty Behaving Badly

By Dennis Baron

Paula Barringer sat in my office and told me that she had stopped taking her meds, that this was fine with her therapist, and that she was feeling better than ever. Not that I had asked about any of that.

Barringer (not her real name) had come, at my request, to explain the threatening e-mail message that she had sent to a female graduate student whom Barringer accused of turning faculty colleagues against her. She saw nothing wrong with sending the e-mail, which was clearly inflammatory. According to Barringer, the student was not only guilty of rumormongering, she had also put an ominous, albeit anonymous, note on the windshield of Barringer's car.

It was Barringer, not the student, who had been wronged. How could I possibly think otherwise? she asked. It was my job to defend her against this malicious student. Barringer spent an hour telling me this. I barely got a word in.

The student's story was quite different. Out of the blue she had received a threat from Barringer. She had never been Barringer's student. She had never had a personal relationship with Barringer. She had never placed a note on Barringer's car. In fact, she had no idea what kind of car Barringer drove. It came out that the only connection between the two was that she was the student of a faculty member with whom Barringer had been feuding.

Aha. Even off her meds, Paula Barringer was only mildly out of control. She eventually agreed in writing to leave the student alone, and things did settle down. But there was a larger issue: She hated being a faculty member. Within months she had resigned to sell condo conversions on the West Coast where, she tells me, she's never been happier.

One of the things you realize almost immediately as a new department head is that you are going to learn a lot more about your colleagues than you really want to know.

About 98 percent of the faculty members in any given department do their jobs honorably and need minimal tending from administrators. In this column I'm going to talk about the 2 percent in my department who were the subjects of complaints that required significant intervention.

Sometimes I didn't even need to intervene in those cases, at least not right away. Someone would come in and alert me to a situation that needed watching: the threatened punch, the shouting match, the overturned table. So I watched, and that, together with the occasional proactive gesture, seemed to keep most lids on tight enough.

In my experience looking into complaints, I've found that there are often multiple interpretations of what might have happened, that things are seldom what they seem, that many complaints are based on misunderstandings, or are simply unfounded. Then there are complaints that are justified. Sometimes it's easier, sometimes more difficult, and sometimes impossible, to sort things out. And sometimes, in the sorting out, you uncover additional problems that need to be solved.

Bad behavior was the most disheartening thing I had to face as an administrator. What I present here are brief summaries of four cases, but they are based on detailed investigations, interviews, and hearings. The names have been changed to protect the innocent. Unfortunately, that also protects the guilty.

Jack Keating was a faculty member who felt compelled to hit on his graduate assistant. What started out as risqué banter soon escalated, and the aggrieved student chose to file a formal complaint with the dean of students. That required an investigation, and the investigation turned up evidence of another bad habit Keating had: He wasn't showing up for work. The complaint process culminated in a hearing at which Keating explained to the student that he had meant no offense by his off-color comments, and he formally apologized to her.

But there was still the matter of his little attendance problem. I drafted a letter of expectations requiring changes in his interpersonal manner and his management style. The following year, Keating took a job at another institution, but I had the uncomfortable feeling that the problem was just getting moved, not solved.

Sometimes faculty members complain about one another. Charlie Chipping allegedly tried to sabotage the research grant of an untenured colleague, Jennie Molloy. The incident polarized the faculty, and outraged parties on both sides threatened at various times to bring in the provost, the police, the ACLU, the AAUP, even The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The whole thing fizzled when it turned out that the research in question wasn't subject to university regulation, anyway, because Molloy's literary study didn't involve attaching electrodes to students, injecting them with experimental drugs, or recombining their DNA. That brought the matter back to where it started, a he said/she said shoving match. Chipping insisted that it was all a misunderstanding. Molloy insisted that she understood only too well what it was all about. This dispute ran its course without real resolution, but just to be on the safe side, I paid special attention to Molloy's promotion until it got through.

Undergraduates are often reluctant to complain about professors because they don't know whom to complain to, they aren't aware of the complaint process, they don't think anyone will believe them, and they think the instructor will penalize them. But Manny Rath pushed one student, Angela Argo, too far, and even the A- he offered her wasn't going to make her go away.

Here's what happened: Rath had invited his students to his house so they could give their class presentations in a relaxed atmosphere. The occasion was more of an end-of-term party than a workshop, and alcohol was served, even though most of the students were under 21. When the party was winding down, Argo stopped in the kitchen to say good-bye to Rath. He placed his hands on her arms, told her she looked beautiful, and kissed her. On the mouth.

Argo, who brought witnesses to corroborate her story, was more angry than traumatized. She opted for an informal complaint process. That meant I would talk with Rath to find out his side of the story. Then I would try to resolve the problem to Argo's satisfaction. If she was not happy with the process, or its outcome, she could initiate a formal complaint at any time. Argo wanted a letter of apology and a reprimand for Rath. She didn't want him groping any more undergraduates.

But what Rath was accused of was more than an embarrassing lack of self-control. It was potentially illegal, and if Rath had done those things, then it was probably time for him to go. When I met with him, Rath, like the others before him, initially insisted that he had done nothing wrong. Then he launched into a rambling, defensive monologue. He often told women students that they looked nice. He didn't remember the kiss. If he had kissed Argo, surely he had meant something like the light kiss on both cheeks that the French use as a greeting. He hadn't been drinking. He took medication that precluded drinking. He was unaware that students had brought wine to the gathering. But if they had, then surely the underage students wouldn't drink it.

Rath suggested he might consult his lawyer. Then he offered to apologize to Argo. Rath told me he wasn't ready to retire. (I hadn't mentioned retirement). Then he asked about retirement incentives. I told him that the complaint had to be resolved before we could discuss retirement. Maybe he was stressed, I said. I knew he had some health problems. I mentioned, without dwelling on it, the "fitness-to-work" evaluation that administrators can require to ascertain whether faculty can physically or mentally perform their duties. I also said there might be incentives to retire, but we would come back to that when the air had cleared.

So Rath wrote an apology for what he insisted was his inadvertent behavior, and I put a letter in his file chastising him for his behavior and warning him not to meet his students outside the classroom. Two weeks later Rath announced that he would retire. As soon as possible. He left no forwarding address.

In the grand scheme of things going wrong, the incidents that most department heads have to investigate are of the hill-of-beans variety. There are professors who behave much worse than anything I've encountered, but they are very rare. There are the stalkers, rapists, and embezzlers, who must be dealt with by the police. There are the data fakers, plagiarists, and professors who glamorize their past, who are judged by ethics panels.

I knew a department head who wouldn't meet with one professor without a police escort. My cases were not so extreme, though at the time they all seemed to me to be practically felonious. Their resolutions -- when they were resolveable -- were simple and in proportion to the offense: typically, written apologies and letters of expectation governing future behavior.

But the outcomes of many of these cases were not simple. Students were harmed, careers altered or derailed. I lost a friend and a lot of sleep.

Handling such complaints left a bitter taste, as does talking about them now. But putting the cases in perspective also confirms my sense that the overriding goal in addressing the interpersonal problems that arise on campus is not so much to invoke the rules and procedures -- though you need to do so to protect everyone's interests, including those of the institution -- but to make sure you do the right thing. And the university proves to be a space where doing the right thing is everybody's goal, at least most of the time.