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A watchdog organization from Philadelphia sent a letter to Chancellor Robert Coombe last Friday charging that the actions by DU administration against Arthur Gilbert, a professor in the Josef Korbel School of International Studies, have threatened free speech and academic freedom.
The organization was the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which, according to its mission, “defends and sustains individual rights” at American universities, including DU.
In April, Gilbert, 75, was removed from the graduate class he was teaching, The Domestic and International Consequences of the Drug War, because of allegedly creating a “sexually harassing hostile environment” and was also banished from campus for more than 100 days. The charges arose after Korbel administration received two anonymous letters by female grad students regarding his teaching methods in the class.
In an extraordinary move, the Drug War class was taken over by three professors, including the dean of Korbel, Christopher Hill.
At press time, Coombe and Hill have not responded to the criticisms by FIRE.
According to case documents and letters obtained by the Clarion last week, the ruling in the case could change the learning environment in classrooms across the DU campus – by setting precedence for the way professors may conduct themselves in the DU classroom, what topic material they may teach to students and the way in which they teach it. There is concern that DU’s commitment to academic freedom and tenure for professors is in jeopardy.
According to DU’s Faculty Personnel Guidelines Relating to Appointments, Promotion and Tenure, approved by DU’s Board of Trustees on June 8, tenure is awarded by DU to recognize “excellent performance in teaching and scholarly research and/or creative activity.” The guidelines also state one of the purposes of tenure is “to assure academic freedom in both teaching and research.”
Arthur Gilbert has held tenure, and correspondingly academic freedom, for 42 years, since Josef Korbel – for whom the Josef Korbel School of International Studies is named – gave Gilbert tenure in 1969, eight years after Gilbert started teaching at DU.
As it relates to classroom teachings and discussions, the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) stresses that professors are entitled to full freedom in research, in the publication of results and freedom in the classroom in discussing the subject. However, professors “should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject.”
It is the relevancy of Gilbert’s academic freedom to his course’s content that has DU administrators, including some in the Korbel School, concerned, and it is the relationship of the controversial matter to Gilbert’s course subject that is the heart of this case.
Under FIRE
According to the letter sent by FIRE to Coombe, DU has threatened free speech and academic freedom through its “punishment and finding of sexual harassment against Professor Arthur N. Gilbert after roughly 50 years of teaching.”
Six months ago, Gilbert allegedly created a “sexually harassing hostile environment” in his Drug Wars class. Allegations against Gilbert arose on April 1, when two female graduate students wrote anonymous letters about Gilbert’s conduct in the spring quarter 2011 class.
During one class session early in the quarter, Gilbert brought in a vibrator to illustrate points he was making during the teaching unit “Drugs and Sin in American Life: From masturbation and prostitution to alcohol and drugs.” The unit was listed on the course syllabus, along with required published readings, which included two by Gilbert: “Doctor, Patient, and Onanist Diseases in the Nineteenth Century” and “Masturbation and Insanity: Henry Maudsley and the Ideology of Sexual Repression.” The previous teaching unit in the class was listed on the syllabus as “Bread of Dreams: On the relationship between food, legal drugs and illegal drugs.”
Gilbert said that any student who read the syllabus had the option, ability and time period to drop the course without affecting his transcript or registration if he or she felt classroom lecture regarding food, sex, prostitution and masturbation made him or her uncomfortable.
Following the allegations against Gilbert, none of the 24 students in the class withdrew, Gilbert said. The professor was only four class sessions into his syllabus when the two students submitted their letters to the Korbel administration.
The Power of Truth and Consequences
Christopher Hill, formerly the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, has served as the dean of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies since July 1, 2010. Hill has denied comment on the case to the Clarion on multiple occasions. Yesterday, Hill canceled an afternoon meeting with the Clarion because he had “additional meetings that needed to be scheduled,” according to an email to the Clarion from Rita Rossi, Hill’s executive assistant. In this instance of contacting Hill for comment, and in another instance last Thursday via email, the Clarion was referred to DU’s University Communications office.
On April 22, 2011, after first contacting him, Hill told the Clarion via email it would be inappropriate for him to comment “out of respect for Arthur Gilbert’s privacy.” However, Hill may have violated Gilbert’s privacy on a different occasion, April 29, when Hill met with one of Gilbert’s teaching assistants, Mitch Chrismer, a graduate student at the time, regarding what Chrismer told the Clarion in an interview for the story published on April 26, “Art Gilbert removed from teaching, put on paid leave.”
According to a letter Gilbert wrote the Faculty Review Committee (FRC), which is composed of 12 faculty members from the various schools at DU, dated July 31, 2011, Gilbert admits he spoke to Chrismer after Chrismer’s meeting with Hill: “Mitch mentioned things that I [Arthur Gilbert] had never shared with him before” – including the contents of the two anonymous letters. Gilbert argues that Chrismer would not have known the contents of the letters had Hill not shared them with Chrismer.
In a letter written by Hill to Gilbert, dated June 28, Hill explains that he did not give Chrismer any of the anonymous letters, instead merely “informing him [of] the complaints that he was already aware of because you [Arthur Gilbert] had spoken openly about them to the Drug War class and to him personally.” Although Chrismer was not enrolled in the Drug War class in spring of 2011, he did have an academic relationship with Gilbert: Chrismer served as the assistant director to Gilbert’s now-canceled winter interterm study abroad class in Costa Rica.
In the June 28 letter to Gilbert, Hill also claims that Chrismer requested to meet with Hill. However, according to a Facebook message Chrismer sent to the Clarion on April 27, it was Hill who asked for the meeting, not Chrismer.
While Hill did not physically produce the letters for Chrismer during the meeting on April 29, the two did talk about them, Chrismer told the Clarion on Sunday.
“I know we [Dean Hill and I] discussed the nature of the letters,” said Chrismer, a Korbel M.A. recipient. “From what I recall, Dean Hill read excerpts from the anonymous girls’ letters to me to demonstrate why he took the action he did. I remember him speaking about what [the anonymous letters] said, what was said by the girls and what the accusations were.”
However, Gilbert never saw the letters, nor was he able to discuss their contents with Christopher Hill or DU administration, Gilbert said. The professor acknowledged the letters when he addressed his students at one point during the final days of his Drug War class prior to removal, but he never addressed any specific individuals, as he did not know who wrote the letters in the first place, Gilbert said.
“I understand that [Arthur Gilbert] was not shown these letters nor given the opportunity to respond to the allegations contained within them before being placed on administrative leave,” said Dean Saitta, professor of Anthropology and president of the DU Chapter of the AAUP, in a letter dated May 5 to Hill; Provost Gregg Kvsitad; and Amy King, the director of Human Resources at DU. Saitta was first made aware of the case through Don McCubrey, president of the DU Faculty Senate.
“I further understand that these letters have since been shown to other people expressing an interest in the case,” Saitta said. “None of this is consistent with the treatment we might reasonably expect would be afforded a 50-year veteran of DU teaching who, from time-to-time, has been prominently featured in promotional material trumpeting DU’s extraordinary faculty.”
According to Gilbert, the professor never had the opportunity to view the two letters containing the allegations, nor has he seen them now.
Throughout appealing his charges of sexual harassment and creating a “sexually harassing hostile environment,” Gilbert was banished from the DU community for 112 days, not 101 days as previously reported in the Clarion – from April 6 to July 27. Because Gilbert’s banishment began in the middle of teaching his Drug War class spring quarter 2011, Hill began teaching the class in Gilbert’s place. However, Hill had to cancel the first class session on April 12, following Gilbert’s banishment, because Hill was out of town.
The 24 graduate students in the class received only a two-line email explaining the circumstances, said Alexis Kopakowski, M.A. recipient at Korbel who was in the class.
According to Kopakowski, three different people taught the Drug War class following Gilbert’s removal. They included Hill, Korbel lecturer Lynn Holland and Korbel doctoral candidate Joel Pruce, who is currently teaching as a lecturer in International Human Rights
“Each person picked a section and taught how they wanted,” said Kopakowski in a phone interview with the Clarion on Sunday. “They didn’t really stick to Professor Gilbert’s syllabus at all. It wasn’t cohesive. It was a really messy rest of the quarter.”
Despite multiple attempts by Gilbert to receive permission to return to campus, only once did Hill grant Gilbert the right to return to DU – on April 20, for a celebration of Gilbert’s 50th anniversary of teaching at DU, hosted by two student organizations: the Korbellian Resistance, whose purpose is to promote diversity of thought opposing dominant societal politics, and the Queerbell Alliance, an LGBTQ student organization based out of Korbel.
At the celebration, which was held in the space of Korbel named for the professor, the Arthur N. Gilbert Cyber Café, Gilbert delivered a speech entitled “19th Century Masculinity.”
On Sept. 12, at the beginning of the new academic year, Gilbert returned to the DU community to teach graduate students. However, prior to this case, in early January 2011, Gilbert had been notified by Korbel administrators that he would no longer be teaching undergraduate courses. That his ability to teach undergraduate courses was not reinstated when he returned to DU from his banishment does not regard his sexual harassment case, but instead a move by administrators to have Gilbert focus only on the graduate level, Gilbert said in an interview with the Clarion on Thursday.
The class Gilbert has been teaching this quarter is called Human Rights: Genocide. Next quarter Gilbert will teach two graduate-level classes, History, Culture & Conflict and Religion and International Studies: The Apocalyptic Tradition. For spring quarter 2012, Gilbert told the Clarion he anticipates teaching the Drug War class again with the same controversial syllabus as last year. Although he was asked to change the syllabus, especially regarding the unit, “Drugs and Sin in American Life: From masturbation and prostitution to alcohol and drugs,” Gilbert said that to change his syllabus would be admitting he was guilty of creating a “sexually harassing hostile environment.”
What Is Sexual Harassment?
Arthur Gilbert’s case hinges on what constitutes sexual harassment and what does not. According to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), sexual harassment is a form of sex discrimination that violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
DU’s Sexual Harassment and Discrimination Policy falls in accordance with Title VII. The DU policy states that “unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors or other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature will constitute ‘sexual harassment’ when submission to such conduct is either explicitly or implicitly term or condition of an individual’s employment or status in a course, program or university-sponsored activity; or submission to or rejection of such conduct is used as the basis for employment or educational decisions affecting that individual; or such conduct has the purpose or effect of unreasonably interfering with an individual’s academic or work performance, or of creating an intimidating, hostile or offensive environment for working or learning.”
Thus, academic freedom does not prevent DU from investigating matters that may or may not violate anti-discrimination laws, according to Kim DeVigil, director of news and public affairs in University Communications. However, did Gilbert violate anti-discrimination laws and DU policy and, in fact, sexually harass these two graduate students?
The answer: it depends.
In a letter to Gilbert dated June 8, the director of the Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity (ODEO), Susan Lee, said that the ODEO’s investigation of Gilbert’s case found it “more likely than not that, absent an academic justification, [Arthur Gilbert] created a hostile sexual environment in [his] class. Whether this is justified by the academic integrity of your teaching of the subject matter is beyond the scope of this investigation and will be determined by the appropriate academic decision makers.”
“To convict me of creating a ‘sexual harassment hostile environment,’ while at the same time admitting they do not understand the academic justification and integrity of my classroom discussions, is patently absurd,” said Gilbert in his Aug. 26 letter to the FRC.
The investigation by the ODEO found that there was “insufficient or no evidence” supporting the allegations that Gilbert shared intimate details about his sex life or prostate surgery – which occurred in spring 2011; that Gilbert discussed the relationship of food to addiction and “there was no evidence that his lectures on this topic were highly sexualized”; that Gilbert gave a female freshman student two condoms and “wished her luck on her date with a fellow student in the class”; and that Gilbert inappropriately touched female students.
However, the ODEO’s investigation did find that Gilbert often said that masturbation and ejaculation was good for men’s prostate health and that Gilbert “frequently” used the f— word. Yet other allegations, which contained sufficient confirmatory facts, could not be deemed relevant to the academic content of the Drug War course, ODEO said, because the considerations of the allegations to academic relevancy were “beyond the scope of this investigation.” These final allegations included Gilbert screening films and film clips that are “sexually graphic,” sharing a vibrator in more than one class and that his classes were “highly sexualized.”
The academic decision-makers who would be involved in determining whether these alleged practices were relevant to the academic content of the course were Hill and Provost Kvistad.
But therein lies another issue: Hill and Kvistad did not consider the academic justification of Gilbert’s teaching methods, according to records.
No administration member, including Kvistad and Hill, asked Gilbert why he brought the vibrator to his Drug War class in the first place, Gilbert told the Clarion last week.
After a 9-to-1 vote by the FRC – two of the 12 members didn’t show up to the meetings nor vote by email, according to Saitta – an Oct. 4 report concluded DU administrators appeared to have violated Gilbert’s academic freedom by passing judgment on his teaching methods without consulting other faculty members or referring to standards of teaching developed outside of DU, according to Peter Schmidt’s story, “Provost Upholds U. of Denver’s Handling of Professor Who Discussed Sex in Class,” published on the website for The Chronicle of Higher Education, a source of news, information and jobs for college and university faculty members and administrators, on Oct. 24.
“Professor Gilbert has published in his course subject area. The titles of his refereed publications – easily located by just a few minutes of web searching – contain words and phrases like ‘buggery,’ ‘sodomy,’ masturbation,’ ‘insanity,’ ‘sexual deviance’ and ‘sexual repression,'” said Saitta in a letter to Gilbert and Hill regarding Saitta’s supplementary statement for the FRC Report to Gilbert’s complaint, dated Oct. 3. “Thus, Professor Gilbert’s area of scholarly research and academic expertise is demonstrably ‘highly sexualized.’
“The content and tone of the two anonymous letters that triggered Professor Gilbert’s suspension, in my opinion, suggest students who feel shortchanged and disappointed by Professor Gilbert’s classroom presentations, rather than sexually harassed by them.”
The Future of Academic Freedom
According to the AAUP’s 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, academic freedom with regard to teaching “is fundamental for the protection of the rights of the teacher in teaching and of the student to freedom in learning.” However, Saitta said he worries the ruling in Gilbert’s case could send shockwaves throughout the DU community, creating a chilling effect which will prevent professors from teaching controversial subjects.
At press time, DU has not yet responded to the letter sent by FIRE last Friday regarding Gilbert’s case. However, Saitta released a reflection on the case on Sunday, entitled “Sex, Pedagogy, and Academic Freedom.” Saitta previewed much of its contents to the Clarion during a conversation on Friday.
“Our campus AAUP chapter expressed concern about the due process and academic freedom dimensions of this case when it first broke last spring,” Saitta said. “We worried about the consequences for all DU faculty – especially contingent faculty, given their much greater vulnerability – if Professor Gilbert is wrongly busted for justifiable classroom speech.”
At the conclusion of Gilbert’s banishment from campus, on July 27, he met with Hill and Human Resources director Amy King. During this meeting, Gilbert received a letter containing Hill’s chosen punishment: sensitivity training. Although the letter was dated July 14, almost two weeks prior to the meeting itself, Hill was requiring Gilbert meet with Chuck Passaglia, an employment law attorney who started Employment Law Solutions, Inc., which represents both sides of employment disputes, by Aug. 9. Gilbert said he never scheduled to meet with Passaglia for sensitivity training because, in doing so, the act would have been an admission of guilt for making interdisciplinary connections between sex, food, masturbation and prostitution.
“Academic quality is teaching, research, service and public outreach that makes ‘beautiful connections’ between the varied phenomena that attract inquiry within the great domains of human knowledge,” said Saitta in an email to the Clarion. Saitta also asserted in an interview with the Clarion on Friday that these “beautiful connections” are what make interdisciplinary study and conclusions so interesting.
However, Saitta, who teaches mostly about evolution within the Anthropology department, fears that Gilbert’s case may have repercussions for him, too.
Saitta teaches a class on human evolutionary psychology, called The Culture of Rape. In one section, Saitta said, he plays devil’s advocate and challenges students to think about how rape prevention policy changes if we see rape as not simply about power but also about sex.
“I could easily be charged with ‘spreading lies’ about the nature of rape, if not sexual harassment,” said Saitta. “Things gets very dicey in this rape conversation – especially if there are rape hotline counselors in the class – even though the object of the unit is to think a little more broadly and perhaps a little more clearly about how we might eradicate rape as a social problem.”
As the president of the AAUP and also one of the 10 faculty members who reviewed Gilbert’s case on the Faculty Review Committee, Saitta has known about the allegations, in one way or another, and their ramifications on academic freedom since the Clarion‘s first story on Gilbert on April 26.
“If a tenured professor and 50-year veteran of DU teaching can be threatened in this way, then what chance do untenured colleagues, adjuncts and other contingent faculty have if called to account for pushing the envelope in their classrooms?” said Saitta. “The outcome of this case, no matter which way it breaks, could easily determine whether teaching faculty will err on the side of risk-taking and boundary-crossing, or docility and conformity. Opting for the latter would be the death knell for innovative education at DU.”
