The Ford School of Public Policy hosted “The Consequences of Faculty Misconduct” Monday afternoon, an event showcasing the research of Sarah Cohodes, associate professor of public policy. Cohodes is currently conducting her research within the Education Policy Initiative at the Ford School, exploring the long-term academic and career consequences for students who experienced faculty misconduct.
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Public Policy Professor Kevin Stange, EPI co-director, said the EPI speaker series informs students on current education policy topics and conversations.
“One of the things we do is put on this seminar series where we bring in experts from around campus … to talk about a topic of interest and importance in education policy, and whether that’s in K-12 or post-secondary or early childhood,” Stange said.
Opening her lecture, Cohodes said audience members might find the subject matter difficult because the University of Michigan is not exempt from incidents of academic sexual misconduct. Cohodes said power imbalances exacerbate cases of faculty sexual misconduct.
“Almost 20% of students report experiencing some form of sexual harassment in this college setting, and of those who have reported sexual harassment, a little more than 10% report sexual harassment from faculty,” Cohodes said. “It is perhaps not the biggest problem when it comes to conduct on campus, but I find it especially depressing and tough because it involves people who are in a position of power over students.”
Cohodes said her research focuses on how much faculty misconduct affects students’ choices to leave a degree program and if those decisions changed those students’ overall career.
“What I’m trying to do with this paper is to figure out: How much does faculty sexual misconduct affect in-field degree completion, and does that response differ over time and by gender?” Cohodes said. “And then: If there are shifts in major, do those shifts in major affect students’ career choices and earnings? And if so: Do they perpetuate gender stereotypes?”
Cohodes said she answered these questions using information from various open-source databases, including the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, which gives information on institution characteristics, and College Scorecard, a U.S. Department of Education tool that provides estimates of earnings after graduation. After compiling the data with the Academic Sexual Misconduct Database, Cohodes said large academic departments tend to have more cases of sexual misconduct on average, with a few exceptions.
“(These departments) just enroll a lot of students, and when there are a lot of humans interacting with each other, there’s more opportunities for misconduct to occur,” Cohodes said. “But then, there are some much smaller departments which also are toward the top in terms of misconduct — music, theater, anthropology — and those tend to involve lots of one-on-one interaction,”
Cohodes said changes in enrollment following these incidents are usually minimal, but she found there were often drops in degree completion within the faculty’s field of study after such incidents were exposed.
“We found a decline of 3.4% in degree completion in the field where there was a perpetrator,” Cohodes said. “And that effect was really driven by incidences after 2014, so incidences in the Me Too era, where that decline was almost twice as large — a 7% drop.”
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Rackham student Katie Leu, Cohodes’ co-author, said she enjoyed seeing the audience’s reaction to the study’s findings and she finds students are often unaware of the research being conducted at the University.
“The professors here are doing a lot of research, but I guess the students, more broadly, may not really know what they’re doing,” Leu said. “So I think it’s just kind of important to share that with the broader community, since it’s the part that doesn’t get seen as often.”
Cohodes said she hopes her research could push academic institutions to establish better reporting mechanisms, institutional responses, student supports and regulation.
“There is the potential for policy and culture to reduce the impact of such incidents,” Cohodes said. “My hope is that, while it is the case that people are responding to these incidents by changing fields, that more people become aware of this and the more it is addressed.”
Daily Staff Reporter Rebecca Borlace can be reached at rborlace@umich.edu.
