Academic Whistle Blowers Stand Alone republished with permission from Education News and in honor of Dr. Miguel Berrios 1951-2019
Behind the manicured appearance of a college campus lurks a dark secret: report fraud, sexual or scientific misconduct and lose your rightful place among your peers. I know because this happened to my family.
As a full-time faculty member and director of a research-support center at a public university, my husband discovered scientific fraud in a high ranking professor’s laboratory. This professor also served as vice president for research. Following the faculty code of ethics, my husband reported the fraud to superiors. Two independent groups confirmed the fraud as scientific misconduct. The professor absolved himself of responsibility by blaming the fraud on a subordinate in his laboratory.
Though we did not know it at the time, my husband’s career ostensibly ended when the matter reached the offices of the University President and the Chief Legal Counsel. University administration closed ranks and conspired against my husband. They defamed him and abandoned our family as we tried to manage the resulting vandalism and threats. Apathy and a nearly complete lack of faculty diversity (particularly among those in leadership positions) handily dispatched justice for us.
Following the advice of law enforcement, we secured evidence in federal and state courts through law suits that we won but that failed to keep my husband employed, employable or even solvent. He has been without salary for over six years first looking for work then suffering a myocardial infarction and now battling terminal cancer precipitated perhaps by years of fighting for his family, career and reputation.
How a once welcoming university brutalized my husband defies logic let alone human decency. University administration punished him simply because they could, not because it was the right thing to do. Instead of investigating or intervening on my husband’s behalf, they commandeered the narrative and defended a professor university administration knew well for his decades-long perniciousness and criminality. The university covers for this professor even today granting him paid time to become a pastor at a world famous seminary. He remains fully employed on campus, his huge, publicly supported salary secure, and (as an ethicist and chaplain) with full access to vulnerable populations.
Not long ago, I introduced myself to a senior professor about whom my husband spoke highly. Although he did not remember my husband, he knew his story and the perpetrator. Victims, like my husband, become irrelevant, nameless and forgotten.
Our experience resonates within the academic world. Survivors of campus sexual harassment or assault suffer similar rejection. Recently, a victim of public and private harassment by a professor left campus after her complaint to the department chair and administration festered. On her way out, she slapped the university with a multi-million dollar lawsuit to be paid ultimately either by taxpayers or through a reduction in basic campus services. Women on my campus refer to harassers among faculty and staff as “title IX” people – shorthand that both alludes to the law barring discrimination at any institution receiving federal funds and recognizes the number of offenders. A “title IX” administrator resurfaced this past winter on another campus within the same public university system at a similarly high rank. He would not have gotten that plum assignment without a recommendation from the campus where the alleged offense occurred. My husband, who did what was right, experienced no such help or protection. One prospective employer told my husband that she perceived him as someone with “legal” issues and would not give him a chance despite a recommendation from a peer.
Tenured professors (like Supreme Court justices), work for as long as they so desire. Impervious to economic downswings in the national economy, they live in an artificial universe, making their own hours, enduring no inconvenient evaluations by their supervisors and disappearing completely in the summer or during sabbaticals. Fearful of embarrassing publicity and retaliation by university administration against their sometimes hard-won tenure, my husband’s faculty peers refused to take a position in his defense. They stood on the sidelines and watched my husband’s demise choosing personal safety over morality and the protection of the scientific data base to which they contribute.
Today, just a few miles from the campus that has now forgotten him, my husband is no longer fighting for truth or his career but for his very life. His legacy endures in journals and textbooks, through the students he taught and the inventions that still bring revenue to the university that favored a fraud over the truth.
Ann Berrios is a graduate of Barnard College (1977) and Stony Brook University (MA 1992). She has worked as a college administrator for over 35 years and enjoys writing, keeping up with current events and having her voice heard.