SAN FRANCISCO — An associate UCLA professor who pursued a student until she was afraid to attend classes paid the university $7,500 in lieu of suspension. At UC Irvine, a dean accused of sexually harassing a co-worker agreed to take a demotion and stayed on as a teacher.
And at UC Santa Cruz, a professor accused of sexually assaulting a female student after a wine-tasting trip resigned before he could be fired. The University of California later agreed to pay his accuser $1.15 million.
The cases, among a trove of confidential files released last week by UC officials, show that the same lack of transparency and lax discipline that critics complained about during a UC Berkeley sexual harassment scandal involving faculty last year also occurred at UC’s nine other campuses.
In a rare look at the handling of sexual misconduct allegations in one of the nation’s largest university systems, the cases show discipline was meted out inconsistently. The files cover 112 cases from January 2013 to April 2016 at nine campuses, excluding Berkeley, which separately released documents last year.
The Associated Press scoured hundreds of pages, many of which UC officials redacted in whole or in part citing privacy reasons. While the employees who were investigated included cafeteria workers and administrative employees, the AP examined cases involving the most prominent figures on campuses: the faculty.
The UC President’s Office said faculty accounted for 25 percent of the 112 employees found to have violated sexual misconduct policies over the nearly three-year period but declined to specify those cases in particular. The AP was able to verify at least 20 of the cases involving faculty members, and found:
At UCLA, for example, now-retired French Studies professor Eric Gans was accused of writing some 300 poems to a female graduate student that created a “sexually hostile environment,” and pursuing the student while serving as her adviser, according to a December 2013 investigation.
