Date: Sun, 01 Feb 98 19:52:28 EST From: Alan Davidson Subject: Re: Weisberg case (fwd) To: socgrad@CSF.COLORADO.EDU ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Date: 31 Jan 98 15:24:41 EST From: Steven.Cades@Washcoll.EDU (Steven Cades) Reply-To: TEACHSOC@poplar.lemoyne.edu Subject: Re: Weisberg case To: TEACHSOC@poplar.lemoyne.edu Looks like my first attempt to send this with the Chronicle article attached failed, so I'm trying it another way... I haven't seen the _Lingua Franca_ piece, but the attached, from _The Chronicle of Higher Education_, suggests to me that Weisberg may well have taken the autobiographical approach too far. Politics aside, I have some doubts about asking for such writing. While I understand that if students can find history in (auto)biography--as Berger suggests--they can learn much sociology, I already have enough difficulty helping students disentangle sociology from psychology. I'd love to learn what my colleagues do to ease students' understanding the distinction between the discipline. Steve steven.cades@washcoll.edu --- end of quoted material --- November 14, 1997 A Professor's Personal Teaching Style Wins Him Praise and Costs Him His Job Colby scholar loses tenure bid over claim that he created a sexually threatening environment By ROBIN WILSON Just a few years ago, Adam Weisberger was an up-and-coming sociologist at Colby College. Colleagues who evaluated him in 1993 described his teaching as "especially effective" and noted that many students rated him as the best teacher on the campus. Tenure seemed a sure thing. Four years later, the promising assistant professor has left Colby, his career derailed by charges that he created a sexually threatening environment in his classroom. In the realm of sexual harassment -- where many disputes come down to a he-said-she-said standoff -- Dr. Weisberger's case is grayer than most. None of the 16 female students who complained about him said he had touched them or made sexually explicit remarks. And only one claimed that he had expressed a romantic interest in her. What they all claimed was that he acted more like a psychotherapist than a professor, by inappropriately mining their written assignments for details about their private lives. After a lengthy battle, Dr. Weisberger was denied tenure last year. Now he is a first-year law student at Boston University, hoping to start a new career. But he hasn't left his old one behind yet. Last month, he filed a claim in Maine Superior Court, charging Colby with defamation and infliction of emotional distress. He plans to file suit in federal court soon, claiming that the college discriminated against him because he is a man, and that none of the students who complained would have done so had he been a woman. His defenders say he has been tarred for using a teaching technique that is hardly unusual -- connecting theoretical material to students' lives. "This is an issue of academic freedom," says his lawyer, Jonathan Shapiro. "This guy was not standing up there in front of the class talking about his genitalia. The entire tenure process was poisoned by these false charges." Others familiar with the case, however, say there is a side to the story that can't be found in Dr. Weisberger's legal briefs. Students say he coerced them into writing essays about their lives and then analyzed the intimate details in private conferences after class. Some say he made sexually tinged comments about their writings. Outside the classroom, the students say, Dr. Weisberger seemed to forget that he was a professor. He lived in the Goddard-Hodgkins dormitory, where, as a faculty resident, he was encouraged to interact with students. But female students say he went too far, lounging on the floor of their rooms, telephoning them to ask them to lunch, and describing his recent divorce in detail. Dr. Weisberger, who arrived at Colby in 1989 and earned his Ph.D. in sociology that year from the University of Pennsylvania, initially agreed to talk about the charges with The Chronicle, but later he canceled the interview. A former faculty member at Colby says the professor told her he was worried that the story would be unfavorable to him. But Mr. Shapiro says Dr. Weisberger is too busy with law school to talk. The lawyer did speak with The Chronicle and provided dozens of pages of documents that detail Dr. Weisberger's struggle at Colby. Sociology professors who were involved in Dr. Weisberger's tenure decision said the college's president, William R. Cotter, ordered them to refer reporters' calls to the administration. The administrators refused to comment on the case, other than to say they followed campus rules in hearing the complaints against Dr. Weisberger and denying him tenure. "We have bent over backwards in an extraordinary way to provide fairness and complete consideration to him," says Robert L. McArthur, dean of the faculty. Dr. Weisberger's troubles began in the fall of 1994 in his popular, upper-level course on sociological theories. In his first few years at Colby, he had been hailed by students for making an otherwise dry course about Marx, Weber, and Dheim come alive. He asked students to write papers about their families, telling them the exercise would help them realize how their lives had been shaped by social forces. With each paper, he encouraged students to delve deeper into their feelings. Many students have found his approach helpful and have said so in their course evaluations. But in his fall 1994 course, a handful of women said Dr. Weisberger's teaching style made them uncomfortable. They decided to tell him so in the final papers they wrote for the course. One such student was Adrienne Clay, who graduated from Colby in 1997. She says Dr. Weisberger told students that if they chose not to write about their families, he would have to approve of their decision. He never asked her to relate sociological theories to the personal subjects she wrote about, says Ms. Clay, now an editorial assistant in Stanford University's "Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project." In her first paper, she says, she wrote about her father, who is an obstetrician/ gynecologist. "My father sees young women who have had awful things happen to them, and he is overprotective of me as a result," she says. But when she went to visit Dr. Weisberger to talk about her paper, she says, he twisted her ideas. She says he suggested that she read a book about sexualized father-daughter relationships. "Adam said, 'Do you think the fact that your father thinks of you when he sees patients is problematic?'" Some students also were offended by the papers that Dr. Weisberger read at the beginning of the course as examples of the kind of work he expected. One paper was about the sociology of a keg party, and how tapping the keg was like an orgasm, they recall. In another instance, he read aloud a paper by a woman who detailed her sexual promiscuity. Jenny Higgins, who took the course last year, says she came to regard Dr. Weisberger as "a crude voyeur." A few of the women who objected to his teaching methods in the fall of 1994 complained to Teresa Arendell, who was then chairwoman of sociology and anthropology. Dr. Arendell says she cannot comment on what happened to Dr. Weisberger, because Colby officials instructed her not to. The women who went to Dr. Arendell say she told them that they could go to the dean of faculty with their complaints, and some of them did so in the spring of 1995. None of them filed formal charges. The next semester, however, another woman came forward, this time with charges that the college considered much more serious. She and her parents met in December 1995 with Dr. McArthur, the faculty dean, and told him that they wanted Dr. Weisberger fired for sexual harassment. The student had taken Dr. Weisberger's sociology-theory course in the fall of 1994. At the end of the course, she had given it an "excellent" rating and even took the unusual step of signing her name to the evaluation. "Adam has made social theory interesting and has taught me to apply my major to what happens in everyday life," she wrote. "He is a wonderful professor." But in the year that followed, the student told the dean, she had come to regard Dr. Weisberger as a sexual harasser. Prompted by the professor, she said, she had written papers for the course about her own childhood sexual abuse. The student, who is named as a defendant in Dr. Weisberger's claim, could not be reached for comment. (The Chronicle does not identify the victims of childhood sexual abuse and other sex crimes.) The woman did describe her concerns in a meeting with the dean, a transcript of which was provided to The Chronicle by Dr. Weisberger's lawyer. "Always over my head was, If I don't indulge him in my personal affairs my grade would be affected," she said, according to the transcript. The personal conferences that she had with Dr. Weisberger about her papers "took the scene of psychologist-student," she said, according to the transcript. Then, at some point during the fall 1994 semester, she said in the transcript, Dr. Weisberger began crossing "the boundaries of the student-teacher relationship." She said he made telephone calls to her dormitory room, telling her things like: "You look lovely today. I really like that skirt." At one point, she said, he asked her to have tea at his apartment to discuss her paper, and told her there that he "had feelings for me." The student spent the next semester studying abroad, but when she returned to Colby in the fall of 1995, she said in the transcript, Dr. Weisberger resumed approaching her and asking her to eat lunch with him on the campus. Finally, she said, she visited him in his office in November 1995 to tell him that he was "harassing" her and that he had manipulated her into revealing her sexual abuse. He broke down and cried, she recounted, saying his job was in jeopardy and urging her to keep her complaints to herself. When Colby administrators confronted Dr. Weisberger, the professor disputed most of the student's charges. He was particularly concerned about her complaints because they came on the eve of a departmental vote on his tenure bid, set for 1996. He wrote a rebuttal to her charges and sent it to his tenure committee, arguing that she had voluntarily written about her sexual abuse. And it was she, he wrote, who "attempted to violate the student-teacher boundaries." She once told him that she had had a dream about him, he told the committee. He said he had been "embarrassed and alarmed by her remark." "It is possible," he wrote, that the student "was expressing emotions for me and when I did not reciprocate her feelings she turned on me with a vengeance." Although his department voted 4-1 in the fall of 1996 to grant Dr. Weisberger tenure, the college-wide Promotion and Tenure Committee overruled the decision, voting 6 to 3 against him. Its decision was based largely on letters that the 16 female students had written. Dr. Weisberger made a final appeal for tenure to a special committee at Colby, arguing that his teaching approach was not "radical or controversial." Asking students to relate social theory to events in their lives, he wrote, was an approach that is "practiced in many disciplines at Colby." He added: "To declare my previously praised teaching to be the basis for the denial of my tenure is chilling to say the least. The clear message sent by this decision is to avoid experimenting in the classroom, to avoid trying interesting and innovative methods of education, and to avoid trying to bring students closer to the subject matter of the class." But the special panel upheld his tenure denial, and he left Colby last August. The college never held a formal hearing to air the complaint of sexual harassment. According to campus policy, students may decide whether to lodge "formal" or "informal" complaints. If a student decides to go the "informal" route, an administrator can attempt to work out the dispute between the professor and the student. That is what happened in this case. For his part, Dr. Weisberger says administrators were too cowed by a climate of "political correctness" to defend him against the complaints. He believes that the college denied him a chance to clear his name, and that it tarnished his bid for tenure. "I was convicted as guilty of sexual harassment without any investigation, and a rampant campaign of defamatory rumors was generated on campus to the effect that I was a 'known harasser of women,'" he wrote in a charge of discrimination similar to one that he filed against Colby last summer with the Maine Human Rights Commission. The commission is considering his charges and his lawyer said he eventually expected to file a federal suit. During the tenure process, Dr. Weisberger also repeatedly accused the former sociology chairwoman, Dr. Arendell, of whipping up students' antipathy toward him. He said she persuaded students to interpret his teaching style as sexually threatening. (The students say Dr. Arendell never encouraged them to inflate their charges.) Dr. Weisberger's defenders say Colby got rid of him because administrators were worried about angering parents, who pay close to $30,000 annually for their children to attend the college. His lawyer says any good teacher is bound to make students uncomfortable. "If you went into every classroom in this country, you would probably find something that was troubling, unnerving, and offensive," Mr. Shapiro says. What came about at Colby, he says, was a "sheep mentality," in which female students rushed to complain about Dr. Weisberger even after some of them had given him favorable course evaluations. "These students," the lawyer says, "were out for blood." Copyright (c) 1997 by The Chronicle of Higher Education http://chronicle.com Date: 11/14/97 Section: The Faculty Page: A12 To: TEACHSOC@poplar.lemoyne.edu Subject: Weisberg case Cc: Bcc: Date: Sat, Jan 31, 1998 2:45 PM I haven't seen the _Lingua Franca_ piece, but the attached