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)

Affirmative Action in American Law Schools: A Critical Response to Richard Sander\u27s A Reply to Critics

Richard Sander’s Stanford Law Review article, “A Systemic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools,” has generated considerable attention and criticism. This included a critical essay in the May 2005 Stanford Law Review by the four of us, as well as others in the same issue by Professors Ian Ayres and Richard Brooks, Michele Landis Dauber, and David Wilkins. Sander’s “A Reply to Critics” also appeared in the same issue. For those following this empirical debate about the costs and benefits of affirmative action, we provide this working paper as a response to Sander’s “A Reply to Critics.” We show the weaknesses in the logic that underlies many of Sander’s assumptions and arguments and show that his reply does not salvage the case against affirmative action that he claimed to have made in his Stanford article. Rather, Sander’s reply explicitly or implicitly repudiates much of the methodology and many of the claims he made in “Systemic Analysis,” even as he clings firmly to its conclusion and compounds earlier analytic mistakes with new ones

The Real Impact of Eliminating Affirmative Action in American Law Schools: An Empirical Critique of Richard Sander\u27s Study

In 1970, there were about 4000 African American lawyers in the United States. Today there are more than 40,000. The great majority of the 40,000 have attended schools that were once nearly all-white, and most were the beneficiaries of affirmative action in their admission to law school. American law schools and the American bar can justly take pride in the achievements of affirmative action: the training of tens of thousands of African American (as well as Latino, Asian American, and Native American) practitioners, community leaders, judges, and law professors; the integration of the American bar; the services that minority attorneys have provided to minority individuals and organizations once poorly serviced by white lawyers; and the educational benefits that law students of all backgrounds derive from studying in a racially diverse environment. But not every student admitted through affirmative action realizes his or her ambition to practice law. Of the African American students who entered law school in the fall of 1991, the one year for which we have good data, about 43% either did not graduate or graduated but had not passed a bar exam within two years of graduation. Only 17% of the white students in the 1991 cohort suffered either of these fates. In A Systemic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools (Systemic Analysis), Professor Richard Sander argues that if affirmative action were eliminated in law school admissions, the rate at which African American students fail to graduate and pass the bar would be reduced substantially without any concomitant loss in the numbers of African Americans joining the bar. He acknowledges that fewer African American students would be admitted to law school, but predicts that those who were admitted would graduate and pass the bar at much higher rates because they would no longer be attending schools where the competition was too stiff for them. Sander builds to an astonishing forecast: that the number of black lawyers produced by American law schools each year and subsequently passing the bar would probably increase if those schools collectively stopped using racial preferences. In particular, he predicts that the cohort entering law school in 2001 would have produced 7.9% more new black lawyers entering the bar.5 We agree with Sander that the high rate at which African American students fail to graduate and fail to pass the bar is alarming.6 Indeed, we take the problem so seriously that despite the high value we place on racial diversity within law schools, the four of us would not support affirmative action as currently practiced in law school admissions if we believed that employing race-neutral admissions criteria would in fact lead to a net increase in the number of African Americans passing the bar.7 We find, however, that while Sander has appropriately forced us and others to take a hard look at the actual workings of affirmative action, he has significantly overestimated the costs of affirmative action and failed to demonstrate benefits from ending it. The conclusions in Systemic Analysis rest on a series of statistical errors, oversights, and implausible assumptions. It is these empirical shortcomings that we address in this Response

Affirmative Action in American Law Schools: A Critical Response to Richard Sander\u27s A Reply to Critics

Richard Sander’s Stanford Law Review article, “A Systemic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools,” has generated considerable attention and criticism. This included a critical essay in the May 2005 Stanford Law Review by the four of us, as well as others in the same issue by Professors Ian Ayres and Richard Brooks, Michele Landis Dauber, and David Wilkins. Sander’s “A Reply to Critics” also appeared in the same issue. For those following this empirical debate about the costs and benefits of affirmative action, we provide this working paper as a response to Sander’s “A Reply to Critics.” We show the weaknesses in the logic that underlies many of Sander’s assumptions and arguments and show that his reply does not salvage the case against affirmative action that he claimed to have made in his Stanford article. Rather, Sander’s reply explicitly or implicitly repudiates much of the methodology and many of the claims he made in “Systemic Analysis,” even as he clings firmly to its conclusion and compounds earlier analytic mistakes with new ones