Dr. Clanton Dawson, professor of religion and philosophy at Bethune-Cookman University, was in the middle of giving a lecture in the school’s Mary McLeod Bethune Fine Arts building more than a year ago when a student suddenly broke down and started crying.
“I go to her. I ask if she’s OK,” Dawson recalled during an interview Tuesday. “She said ‘yeah,’ but asked to speak with me after class.”
The conversation that Dawson says followed that fateful day is one of several that set off a chain of events that would ultimately lead to the controversial dismissal in spring 2009 of four faculty members who allegedly coerced female students into trading sex for grades.
Dawson said he never doubted the student’s story that she was being sexually harassed by one of her professors in the university’s School of Social Sciences, so he reported the allegations to university administrators.
“When a student tells me face-to-face that they’re having a problem and that they are being harassed in the classroom and that the instructor made it impossible for her to do her work and she breaks down in my class, yeah,” Dawson said. “Generally, when someone does that, I go directly to the dean.”
But in investigating the allegations, says Dr. Cary Nelson, president of the Washington, D.C.-based American Association of University Professors (AAUP), Bethune-Cookman administrators trampled over the professors’ due process rights.
AAUP recently released a scathing and painstakingly detailed report that criticizes the administration at Bethune-Cookman for dismissing the professors without evidence and based on anonymous complaints and essentially denying their rights under what the organization says was tantamount to tenured status.
