Seventeen years ago, Stanford University quietly suspended an American literature professor for sexual misconduct with a young graduate student. Eight years later, it praised him as a “leading figure” in his field and bought his rare book collection, now housed in a university library section bearing his name.
For Professor Jay Fliegelman, the confidential punishment would be but a blip in a celebrated career of a tenured professor who died at 58 in 2007.
But this month, after an explosive series of revelations in an online publication and on Facebook, his legacy — and an elite university’s role in promoting it — has been tumbled upside down, exposing a dark underside of how powerful faculty at private institutions can escape public scorn.
After years of staying silent while watching Fliegelman be heaped with praise from other academics who either did not know what he’d done to her or were blinded by his academic accomplishments, his victim, Seo-Young “Jennie” Chu, has gone public and rocked the Stanford English Department.
First, Chu, now an English professor at Queens College in New York, detailed her traumatic experience in a gut-wrenching piece for the online magazine Entropy in early November. Two weeks later, she posted an open letter on Facebook, asking the head of the Stanford English Department, then an assistant professor and colleague of Fliegelman’s, why he’d stood by and let it happen. Finally, she demanded Stanford turn over its investigation into her mistreatment, something the university declined to do.
While public universities such as UC Berkeley are required under the state’s public records law to share sexual harassment findings against employees, private universities like Stanford are not and frequently cite California employment law and student privacy laws as reasons for refusing to release such information. But in an extraordinary confidential letter this week, summarizing Fliegelman’s case, Stanford vice president and general counsel Debra Zumwalt apologized to Chu.
“On behalf of Stanford University, let me express how sorry I am that you have suffered as a result of a faculty member’s misconduct,’’ Zumwalt wrote in a letter that summarized the findings against Fliegelman. “You did the right thing by bringing this issue forward back in 2000, and we are grateful to you for doing so.”
Stanford wouldn’t comment on the discrepancy between its private apology to Chu and its public laudatory comments about Fliegelman. But in a note to the campus community this week, Stanford Provost Persis Drell acknowledged, “For far too long, conduct that today we find abhorrent and unacceptable was in fact tolerated—in the workplace, in the classroom and on our campus. In particular, intimate relationships between faculty members and students in their classes and labs were tolerated, and the potential detrimental impact on students was overlooked.”
Chu said she appreciated the “condolences” but called on the university to do more. “I never did think it was just in my head,” she told this news organization, “but the years of secrecy, it’s toxic.”
As thousands of women share their stories of workplace sexual abuse in the wake of the explosive allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein, Chu is among a growing number of former students stepping forward to underscore the profound power imbalance in academia, where heralded professors quietly wield major influence over the trajectory of students’ lives.
“When he told me that he controlled my future, I let myself believe I had no future worth imagining. (I should have been brave and stood up to him.),” Chu wrote in Entropy. “I still wake up sometimes to find my clothes drenched in sweat and my body numb, literally numb.”
Chu, 39, accused Fliegelman of raping her while she was a graduate student at Stanford during the 1999-2000 school year, and he was a professor.
In an email, Stanford spokesman Ernest Miranda said the school is limited in what it can say about individual cases because of privacy laws but acknowledged Fliegelman had been disciplined for the misconduct.
But according to Zumwalt’s letter, Fliegelman “engaged in a pattern of unwelcome verbal conduct of a sexual nature, and engaged in an incident of physical contact under circumstances that were extremely inappropriate.”
In a response to Zumwalt, Chu questioned why the summary failed to include the word “rape.”
“I unfortunately remember him shoving his body into mine,” she wrote the university. “(I hate the fact that I had to type those words.)”
Chu said Fliegelman also asked her to “stroke” pages of a rare and antique pornographic book.
Based on the school’s findings, according to the report, the university suspended Fliegelman, barred him from the department for two years, levied a “significant financial sanction” against him, mandated that he attend sexual harassment counseling, and warned him that “any further professional misconduct would lead to his likely dismissal from the university.”
But after his death in 2007, Stanford showered him with praise in a glowing obituary of a “gifted teacher,” and the faculty senate stood in tribute, calling him a “treasured friend and devoted husband” in a memorial resolution. The university acquired his rare book collection, now known as the Fliegelman library.
And the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies named a mentorship award after him in 2009. The society removed his name from the award last year — only after Chu reached out to the organization to tell her story and ask for the award to be renamed. Not until this month — and Chu’s public revelation — did it explain why.
Chu fled to the East Coast after the abuse to complete a Ph.D. program at Harvard that she’d intended to pursue at Stanford and stopped going by her American name “Jennie” because it brought up painful memories of the abuse. She was, she said, “pretending to be a new person.” To this day, she continued, “It’s hard for me personally to enjoy being in a long-term relationship or even a short-term relationship.”
“I hope that my writing will illuminate the pain and fear that can result from sexual violence… Talking openly, seriously, and respectfully about rape is difficult work. Like other forms of emotional labor, it is too often unacknowledged,” she wrote in an email.
Women’s rights advocates say that’s all too true. While the country seems to be more inclined these days to believe women who step forward, “we are not seeing that kind of a parallel with student victims,” said Maha Ibrahim, a staff attorney with Equal Rights Advocates, a San Francisco-based non-profit.
In a Facebook message posted after the Entropy piece was published, Chu accused then-assistant professor, now-department chair Alex Woloch of doing nothing to stop Fliegelman’s abuse. She said in an email that he witnessed Fliegelman berate her for wearing thick glasses instead of contacts.
“How did you respond? Did you try to intervene? No. You laughed and played along,” she wrote in an open letter to Woloch.
When reached by phone, Woloch asked this news organization to contact him by email instead and hung up. He forwarded emailed questions to Miranda, who responded, “Prof. Woloch recalls only one occasion on which he was with Prof. Fliegelman and Ms. Chu and does not recall witnessing any behavior that was harassing. Prof. Woloch had no knowledge of an issue of sexual harassment until he was later informed that an investigation was underway.”
Several other professors who offered glowing tributes after Fliegelman’s death but would have known about his suspension also did not respond to requests for comment about their former colleague.
When Chu recently requested a copy of Stanford’s report about her case, she was denied. Stanford, as a standard practice, provides victims with only a summary of its findings and not full investigative reports. When the decision to suspend Fliegelman was reached back in 2000, she said, she was notified by phone.
“There is a lot of secrecy surrounding these cases,” Chu said by phone. “I want to know what happened to me.”
After Chu came forward this month, the Stanford Asian Pacific American Alumni Club wrote in the student magazine Stanford Politics that its members were outraged at the “normalization that allowed these crimes to occur,” and called on the university to be more transparent about when faculty who commit sexual violence return to teaching.
That secrecy can allow people in positions of power to maintain that power at all costs, Ibrahim said, even if it means obscuring the truth.
And professors certainly wield power over their students, which Fliegelman acknowledged in a 1996 interview that was then cited in Stanford’s obituary: “There’s a great pleasure in teaching freshmen because you’re sort of being folded into their lives at a particular, powerful moment in which you can make a difference.”
Miranda said the school has “created many more avenues for our students and members of our community to report incidents of sexual misconduct” in the last few years, and prohibited sexual relationships between graduate students and faculty members who oversee them.
Yet Stanford law professor Michele Dauber, a vocal critic of Stanford’s sexual harassment policies, said it’s not enough, particularly when private schools like Stanford operate largely without being subject to the public scrutiny public schools like Cal face.
Parents and students “have no way to find out what is happening at Stanford because it’s supposedly private,” Dauber said, pointing out the school receives significant public funding in the form of grants and loans. “We have got to have some transparency.”
