A Systematic Look at a Serial Problem: Sexual Harassment of Students by University Faculty

One in ten female graduate students at major research universities report being sexually harassed by a faculty member. Many universities face intense media scrutiny regarding faculty sexual harassment, and whether women are being harassed out of academic careers in scientific disciplines is currently a subject of significant public debate. However, to date, scholarship in this area is significantly constrained. Surveys cannot entirely mesh with the legal/policy definition of sexual harassment. Policymakers want to know about serial (repeat) sexual harassers, where answers provided by student surveys are least satisfactory. Strict confidentiality restrictions block most campus sexual harassment cases from public view. Taking advantage of recent advances in data availability, this Article represents the most comprehensive effort to inventory and analyze actual faculty sexual harassment cases. This review includes over 300 cases obtained from: (1) media reports; (2) federal civil rights investigations by the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice; (3) lawsuits by students alleging sexual harassment; and (4) lawsuits by tenure-track faculty fired for sexual harassment. It also situates this review within the available and most relevant social science literature on sexual harassment and violence in education and the workplace, as well as on methodological limitations of litigated case data, which tend to contain a higher concentration of high-severity cases compared to a random sample. 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 (53%) involved faculty alleged to have engaged in unwelcome physical contact dominated by groping, sexual assault, and 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

Mapping the Title IX Iceberg: Sexual Harassment (Mostly) in Graduate School by College Faculty

Asistimos en los últimos años a un cambio en la forma de competir de las empresas. Frente a una visión individual y aislada de la competencia, se impone actualmente la responsabilidad colectiva en el marco de relaciones y redes de empresas. Desde esta perspectiva, la relación inter-organizacional se constituye en un instrumento de la firma para incrementar su dotación de competencias, y a esto puede contribuir de forma decisiva la implementación en la relación de mecanismos de transferencia de conocimiento. En este estudio desarrollamos, en primer lugar, una escala de medición del uso de mecanismos para transferir conocimiento en relaciones inter-organizacionales, distinguiéndose entre directivas explícitas, rutinas explícitas y rutinas tácitas. En segundo lugar, presentamos y contrastamos empíricamente un conjunto de hipótesis acerca de los efectos de uso de mecanismos de transferencia de conocimiento sobre el desempeño de la firma receptora. Los resultados indican que la utilización de mecanismos para transferencia de conocimiento contribuye a mejorar el desempeño de la firma receptora, si bien con efectos distintos según el tipo genérico de mecanismos de transferencia de conocimiento utilizado. Implicaciones para la emergente teoría de la ventaja competitiva inter-organizacional y la gestión de las empresas son también presentadas al final del artículo.(resumo em espanol)Asistimos en los últimos años a un cambio en la forma de competir de las empresas. Frente a una visión individual y aislada de la competencia, se impone actualmente la responsabilidad colectiva en el marco de relaciones y redes de empresas. Desde esta perspectiva, la relación inter-organizacional se constituye en un instrumento de la firma para incrementar su dotación de competencias, y a esto puede contribuir de forma decisiva la implementación en la relación de mecanismos de transferencia de conocimiento. En este estudio desarrollamos, en primer lugar, una escala de medición del uso de mecanismos para transferir conocimiento en relaciones inter-organizacionales, distinguiéndose entre directivas explícitas, rutinas explícitas y rutinas tácitas. En segundo lugar, presentamos y contrastamos empíricamente un conjunto de hipótesis acerca de los efectos de uso de mecanismos de transferencia de conocimiento sobre el desempeño de la firma receptora. Los resultados indican que la utilización de mecanismos para transferencia de conocimiento contribuye a mejorar el desempeño de la firma receptora, si bien con efectos distintos según el tipo genérico de mecanismos de transferencia de conocimiento utilizado. Implicaciones para la emergente teoría de la ventaja competitiva inter-organizacional y la gestión de las empresas son también presentadas al final del artículo.Last years have been marked by a radical change in how firms do compete. The traditional vision of individual competition has been substituted by the relational paradigm of competing in the context of interfirm relationships and networks. From this perspective, the firm would increase its resources endowment establishing relationships with other firms, and the use of mechanisms to transfer knowledge from one firm to the other would make a significant contribution to this. In this study we, first, develop a scale to measure the use of knowledge-transfer mechanisms in inter-organisational relationships considering three generic types: explicit directives, explicit routines, and tacit routines. Second, some hypothesis about the effects of knowledge-transfer mechanisms on the target’s firm are presented and empirically tested. Results indicate a positive effect, though with disparities among the different generic types of mechanisms analysed. Implications for the emerging theory of competitive advantage in inter-organisational relationships and managerial implications are presented at the end of the article

The Mismatch Myth in U.S. Higher Education: A Synthesis of the Empirical Evidence at the Law School and Undergraduate Levels

Opponents of affirmative action in higher education commonly cite two principles to justify their opposition. One is that admissions to institutions of higher education should be based on merit, which is often treated by critics of affirmative action as consisting of little more than test score results and high school or undergraduate grades. The second is the legal and moral imperative of not making consequential decisions based on race. We shall not address these principles except to note that others have shown that they do not make the case against affirmative action (Carbado & Harris 2008, Shultz & Zedeck 2011, Prager 2003, Krieger & Fiske 2006, Kang & Banaji 2006, Kang 2012) and to suggest that the weaknesses of arguments derived from these principles are an important reason for the empirical effort to suggest that affirmative action hurts rather than helps its intended beneficiaries, the claim this paper reviews. If these claims were correct it would not matter if the legal and moral case against affirmative action is built on sand, which is perhaps why some leading critics of affirmative action seek to bolster their constitutional and moral critiques with empirical claims (e.g., Thernstrom & Thernstrom 2012a, 2012b)

The Role of Empathy in Moral Inquiry

In this dissertation, I defend the view that, despite empathy’s susceptibility to problematic biases, we can and should cultivate empathy to aid our understanding of our own values and the values of others. I argue that empathy allows us to critically examine and potentially revise our values by considering concrete moral problems and our own moral views from the perspective of another person. Appropriately calibrated empathy helps us achieve a critical distance from our own moral perspective and is thus tied to impartiality in moral inquiry. In defending this role for empathy in moral inquiry, I draw on empirical work from psychology and neuroscience to support a constructionist account of emotion, according to which we can develop more wide-ranging, fine-grained emotion concepts and empathetic capacities by seeking diverse experiences, communication, and engagement with art. I then defend the value of this effortful correction of empathy bias, arguing (1) that impartial moral inquiry ought to utilize empathy as a check on motivated reasoning and presumptions regarding what count as appropriate solutions to moral problems, and (2) that compassionate moral inquiry ought to involve empathy as a means of recognizing others as authentic moral agents that can make valuable contributions to moral debate. Lastly, I draw on insights from pragmatist philosophy to critique Adam Smith’s empathy-based account of the “impartial spectator” and defend a conception of impartiality grounded in fallibilistic, empathetic method

Empathy and the Right to Be an Exception: What LLMs Can and Cannot Do

Advances in the performance of large language models (LLMs) have led some researchers to propose the emergence of theory of mind (ToM) in artificial intelligence (AI). LLMs can attribute beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions, and they will improve in their accuracy. Rather than employing the characteristically human method of empathy, they learn to attribute mental states by recognizing linguistic patterns in a dataset that typically do not include that individual. We ask whether LLMs' inability to empathize precludes them from honoring an individual's right to be an exception, that is, from making assessments of character and predictions of behavior that reflect appropriate sensitivity to a person's individuality. Can LLMs seriously consider an individual's claim that their case is different based on internal mental states like beliefs, desires, and intentions, or are they limited to judging that case based on its similarities to others? We propose that the method of empathy has special significance for honoring the right to be an exception that is distinct from the value of predictive accuracy, at which LLMs excel. We conclude by considering whether using empathy to consider exceptional cases has intrinsic or merely practical value and we introduce conceptual and empirical avenues for advancing this investigation

Still Hazy After All These Years: The Lack of Empirical Evidence and Logic Supporting Mismatch

In the context of reviewing the book Mismatch by Sander and Taylor, the authors provide a comprehensive review and synthesis of dozens of social science research studies regarding affirmative action, mismatch, graduation rates and labor market earnings. In addition, the authors look at the recent graduation rates of nearly two hundred thousand black and Latino students at one hundred U.S. research intensive universities (Table 1). The authors conclude that the social science research overall, and particularly the best peer-reviewed studies, do not support the mismatch hypothesis with respect to affirmative action and African American and Latino college graduation rates and earnings (Table 2). The authors find that Sander and Taylor\u27s contrary claims are the result of cherry-picked data. The authors next critically analyze Sander and Taylor\u27s claim that California\u27s ban on affirmative action brought about a warming effect, i.e., a rise in the rates at which African Americans and Latinos applied to and accepted offers of admission from University of California (UC) campuses. The topic is relevant to the issue of stigma, including Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas\u27 judicial opinions discussing stigma and affirmative action. The authors conclude that the direct evidence on UC freshmen yield rates do not support the warming effect hypothesis, and Sander and Taylor\u27s contrary claims are not consistent with other research and do not properly account for factors including (a) admitted candidates likelihood of choosing to enroll at private selective institutions with affirmative action instead of UC; (b) UC\u27s anomalous price advantage in the years when affirmative action was first banned because its tuition dropped at the same time tuition at competitor institutions rose; (c) missing data; (d) inability to separately analyze African American and Latino candidates; and (e) disproportionate reliance on admittees in the bottom third of the pool, where there are pre/post affirmative action confounders such as the changed ratio of African American student-athletes. The authors show that Sander and Taylor (and Justice Thomas) rely on a theoretically impoverished and shallow account of stigma that is also not supported empirically. The authors provide a better, alternative test of the warming effect hypothesis by looking at 2008-12 campus racial climate survey data for twenty thousand African American and Latino undergraduates at UC campuses, University of Texas at Austin and other leading research universities (Figures 2A-2C). These survey results show that at the UC campuses where African Americans are only 2-4% of the student body, merely 34.5% of African Americans agree or strongly agree that they are respected on campus, compared to 81.8% of white students at these same schools. Results are more encouraging at research universities like UT Austin and UC Riverside that have higher critical mass and/or affirmative action, all of which calls into question the warming effect hypothesis. The authors conclude that the flawed and one-sided nature of the arguments in the Mismatch book are also evident in the disproportionate focus on underrepresented minority students when Abigail Fisher -- the white plaintiff in the high-profile Fisher v. UT Austin case recently remanded by the Supreme Court -- had a relatively lower academic index score similar to many of those black and Latino students Sander and Taylor claim are being harmed by race-conscious affirmative action programs. Affirmative action programs at U.S. selective universities, the authors conclude, provide access to important leadership, educational and career opportunities that are important to America\u27s future