Ending Faculty Sexual Misconduct in Academia: An Open Letter From Women of Public Affairs Education 1

The #MeToo movement is descending upon the walls of the ivory tower. The day of reckoning has come for academia to end faculty sexual misconduct. As women of public affairs and nonprofit education, we demand to be heard.

Faculty sexual misconduct is often present within academia and more specifically in graduate public affairs and nonprofit education programs. At the undergraduate level, 24.2% of women and 15.6% of men report being sexually victimized on a college campus in just the last 2 months (Jouriles et al., 2020). One out of every 10 female graduate students report being sexually harassed by a faculty member (Cantor et al., 2020), second to only the military in prevalence (National Academies of the Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018). According to the grassroots efforts of Academic Sexual Misconduct Database, public affairs education programs had 20 publicly documented, substantiated cases of faculty sexual misconduct since 2016 (Libarkin, 2020). While that’s only about 2% of all cases across all disciplines, that number is shocking given our field differentiates itself on the qualities of “publicness” (Bozeman, 1987) and our programs are relatively smaller and newer than most.

Both the American Society of Public Administration and the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action’s respective codes of ethics have explicit statements requiring the highest personal and professional integrity. Yet, our programs are plagued by the same pass-the-harasser mentality as other disciplines. There are many examples. Just ask your female colleagues.

Public affairs and nonprofit programs need to be even more concerned than most higher education programs about erasing faculty sexual misconduct; 63% of the students in graduate public affairs programs are female, more than almost any other educational field (NASPAA, 2019). Graduate students face a high “administrative burden” (Moynihan et al., 2015) in that they are learners seeking access to knowledge and thus enter into unbalanced power dynamic relationships with advising professors (Young & Wiley, 2021). In many cases, they must bear these costs to achieve their goal to graduate. Given that sexual assaults often go unreported (Jouriles et al., 2020), students shouldering such administrative burden are even less likely to report faculty sexual misconduct.

Furthermore, the smallness and newness of public affairs and nonprofit graduate education programs may make faculty sexual misconduct more prolific. The newness of the fields translates to fewer big-name scholars (as compared with hard science fields). The smallness of the fields means the titans are more recognizable. These factors combined may make a student fear retaliation even more and negatively influence the likelihood they report misconduct.

Finally, recent policy changes to Title IX weakened protections for victims, which may unequally impact victims of faculty misconduct (Anderson, 2020). Other policies currently under review could likely further reduce protections—like the National Labor Relations Board’s current consideration to omit students employed at a private college or university in the context of their studies (including teaching and researching duties) from being defined as “employees” under the National Labor Relations Act (Jurisdiction-Nonemployee Status of University and College Students Working in Connection With Their Studies, 84 FR 49691, 2019; see also Jurisdiction-Nonemployee Status of University and College Students Working in Connection With Their Studies, 85 FR 6120, 2020). That means it would be legally permissible for private colleges and universities to discriminate against graduate assistants who file charges or testify to faculty sexual misconduct (National Labor Relations Act, 29 U.S.C. § 158 Section 8(a)(4)).