Sexual harassment report mostly vindicates UR, Jaeger

The University of Rochester and embattled professor Florian Jaeger both exercised poor judgment but ultimately did not stray from the law or campus policy on sexual misconduct, former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Mary Jo White said in a widely anticipated report released Thursday, largely vindicating the university's actions before and after the matter became public.

BREAKING NEWS: UR President Joel Seligman resigns

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The news was the first half of a momentous day at the River Campus. Just hours after White released her report, President Joel Seligman announced his resignation, saying that "the best interests of the university are best served with new leadership."

In the broadest sense, White said the case made by Jessica Cantlon, Celeste Kidd and others — a story that roiled the campus, made Jaeger a pariah in his field and earned Cantlon and Kidd national recognition as "silence-breakers" — is wrong.

"We found that some of the complaints’ allegations were true, and Jaeger’s

behavior and statements, at times, were viewed by many (both male and female) as insensitive, unprofessional, cruel and occasionally containing sexual innuendo, and this perception, combined with Jaeger’s reputation as a womanizer, genuinely caused some female students to avoid him socially and academically," she wrote. "At the same time, the complaints’ narrative — framed through the language of sexual predation and retaliatory animus towards women — is largely without factual basis."

Speaking Thursday afternoon, Kidd said the report strongly confirmed Jaeger's behavior to which they objected, and that underpins the EEOC lawsuit.

"The report describes Florian Jaeger as the predator I know him to be," she said. "Despite all this, Mary Jo White took the age-old approach of trying to shame me into silence and obscurity. ... It's a classic and transparent intimidation tactic, and I want to say tonight that it will not work."

White, heading an investigative team from her firm Debevoise & Plimpton LLP and hired by the university at great expense to conduct an independent investigation, also found there was no evidence that the university retaliated against the complainants.

The report nonetheless outlines a range of measures for the university to enact over the next several months. Among them:

extensive review of training it provides on sexual harassment

creating an office dedicated to investigating sexual misconduct by faculty members

a ban on intimate relationships between faculty and students in the same department

better communication to all parties about the steps of an investigation

advisers available for people involved in sexual harassment claims

more detail in Policy 106, which governs sexual harassment

publicly released annual data on harassment complaints

clearer policy on searching email without permission

She also recommended the university have a cabinet-level administrator "with relevant expertise and credibility" oversee the implementation of the recommendations, along with someone appointed by the Board of Trustees.

"This matter has fractured (the Brain and Cognitive Sciences department) and the university community generally," White wrote. "The university now needs

to promptly take a number of bold steps, including but not limited to acting on the

recommendations in this report, to repair the resulting wounds and distrust that have occurred."

The findings, mostly in favor of Jaeger and the university, are sure to generate a second round of controversy, and the complainants' federal lawsuit is still in its nascence.

They predicted from the outset that the investigation would disadvantage them because their active lawsuit precluded their participation. White noted that she interviewed Jaeger for nine hours and obtained significant documentation from him.

Otherwise, she said her team interviewed 140 people from BCS and the rest of the university.

White rejected the premise that her report cleared Jaeger or the university.

“I don’t look at this vindicating anyone," she said Thursday.

Ann Olivarius, who is representing complainants in a federal EEOC lawsuit alleging the college retaliated against those who sounded the alarm over Jaeger, said Thursday that Debevoise & Plimpton was the kind of law firm corporations hired to help limit potential financial liability over damaging claims.

Olivarius said that the investigation was flawed because White did not have access to a range of other evidence the complainants will produce in the case.

White's findings got a cool reception with the two most prominent local politicians, Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren and U.S. Rep. Louise Slaughter.

Warren said Seligman's departure will be "a positive step forward toward establishing a culture at this important local institution that fosters openness in an environment of respect."

Slaughter wrote, in a statement at odds with White's conclusions: "It was an outrage that this professor was allowed to take advantage of the uneven power that exists between faculty and students. ... No one should be driven out of research, academics, or their lifelong dreams because of intimidation or abuse."

"Not a moral or social judgment"

Though White clears Jaeger of the most serious accusations, he hardly escapes unscathed.

The report notes — and does not dispute — Jaeger's reputation as being "insensitive, cruel and at times, humiliating and bullying." It documents at least four sexual relationships within his department and says he made people uncomfortable with sexual innuendo.

The report offers as an explanation the fact that his parents were active in labor unions in Germany, leading Jaeger to "eschew hierarchy" as an adult. He struggled, White found, to change his behavior after graduating from student to professor and "unquestionably blurred the lines between his professional and social spheres."

"We do not imply that Jaeger’s conduct was acceptable," White said at the press conference. She called his behavior "inappropriate, unprofessional and offensive," but concluded it didn’t meet the legal definition of creating a hostile environment.

“This is a legal conclusion, I want to really underscore this," she said. "It is not a moral or social judgement, but one based on the governing legal standards to the facts as we understand them.”

White said that Jaeger's future was "... for the university to decide … all those issues.”

The major difference White draws is between promiscuity and harassment.

"While there is no doubt that Jaeger, at one time, had a reputation as promiscuous — another aspect of his character that did not change from his years as a graduate student — Jaeger’s characterization as a 'sexual predator in the complaints is baseless.' "

It noted that Jaeger's relationships with colleagues were consensual, and that he was not "the adviser or primary supervisor" of any of the women.

Kidd and Cantlon pointed to, among other things, White's lack of emphasis on Jaeger sharing unsolicited photos of his genitals with "women he was dating ... when these relationships were tumultuous."

"Both women said that they did not typically exchange explicit photographs with Jaeger," White wrote in a footnote. One of the women "was uncomfortable with the picture and believed it was meant to 'taunt her,' (but) did consensually resume her sexual relationship with Jaeger for a period after the picture was sent."

Olivarius said Thursday that White had shamed those two women by how they were represented in the report.

"The report confirms he used demeaning and derogatory comments to humiliate women," Kidd said. "The report admits students suffered from his actions. I suffered. More than a dozen of my fellow women students suffered."

But, the investigation narrative also gives a stronger voice to students who had a positive experience with Jaeger.

A March 13, 2017 letter quoted in the report from 18 former students in Jaeger’s lab acknowledged that he favored “honesty over diplomacy,” but that Jaeger had “made a lasting impression on all of us through his generosity as a mentor."

UR responded "seriously and professionally"

The White report is generally complimentary of UR's handling of the Jaeger case and sensitive to its "immense" task.

"We are sympathetic to the challenge UR faced in navigating a difficult personnel matter that spawned highly contentious internecine disagreements and, ultimately, a campus, alumni and public relations crisis," the report reads. "In such a climate, disagreements about UR’s actions are inevitable."

Nonetheless, White concluded: "The university’s investigations relating to Jaeger in 2016 were conducted in good faith, impartially, professionally and in (its) policy," she wrote. "And we agree with its ultimate conclusion of no policy violations."

In particular, Seligman, whose ongoing leadership of the university had been the subject of much rumor in the past few months, came off essentially unscathed. All he could have done differently, White concluded, was "perhaps ... to personally intervene during key moments of departmental tension."

He had already tendered his resignation, though, before the report came out.

Perhaps most significantly, the report knocks down the claim that UR retaliated against the complainants, including by disadvantaging them in hiring decisions or performance reviews.

Stressing that the finding was regarding the legal definition of 'retaliation,' White wrote: "(the complainants') characterization of UR's actions conflates unlawful retaliation with disagreement about UR’s conclusions and decisions about Jaeger and about how to handle a sensitive situation. ... UR’s failure to acquiesce to the complainants’ views about how that matter should have been handled does not amount to retaliation prohibited by law."

That finding will be a boon to the university as it prepares to defend itself in federal court against accusations of retaliation in a lawsuit from Kidd, Cantlon and others.

JMURPHY7@Gannett.com

Includes reporting from staff writers Meaghan M. McDermott, William Cleveland and Sarah Taddeo.

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