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When Thomas Pogge came to Yale University in 2008, his hiring was heralded as a major boon to its philosophy department, which had been struggling in recent years. Professor Pogge, a renowned German-born scholar of moral philosophy and international affairs, brought to Yale impressive academic credentials, and a dose of star power.

But just two years later, Professor Pogge was accused of sexual misconduct by a recent Yale graduate named Fernanda Lopez Aguilar. Ms. Lopez alleged, among other charges, that Professor Pogge had groped her and made a series of inappropriate remarks, referring to her as “the Monica Lewinsky to my Bill Clinton.” When she brought her case to the school’s University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct, Professor Pogge essentially went unpunished. Other allegations soon followed.

Several professors in the field said that Ms. Lopez’s charges should have come as no surprise to the university: As a tenured professor at Columbia University, Professor Pogge had been disciplined after similar accusations of sexual harassment — behavior Yale knew about when hiring him. At the same time, in interviews with more than a dozen professors, administrators, students and experts, many wondered whether Yale could fairly adjudicate such cases when its process relied upon school personnel who may have had a stake in maintaining the university’s reputation.

In Ms. Lopez’s case, final authority rested with Peter Salovey, Yale’s president. While serving as provost, Mr. Salovey acted as the “decision maker” for the committee, which found insufficient evidence of sexual harassment in Ms. Lopez’s case, and later rejected her appeal of its ruling.

“I never had a chance for justice from the beginning,” Ms. Lopez said in an interview. “Yale had one agenda: protecting its reputation.”

Representatives from Yale declined to comment on the specifics of Ms. Lopez’s case, citing confidentiality.

“Yale takes all complaints and accusations of sexual misconduct seriously and investigates them thoroughly,” Tom Conroy, a university spokesman, said.

Professor Pogge, whose scholarship focuses on theories of global justice, said in a telephone interview that he had engaged in “some definitely inappropriate” behavior, such as sleeping on Ms. Lopez’s lap on a flight and sharing a single hotel room with her, and he denied the harassment charges. “I’m a non-hierarchical professor so I’m casual and go on walks with students, that sort of thing,” he said. “But I definitely, definitely did not in any way attack her. There was no romance in our relationship.”

After BuzzFeed News first detailed the alleged improprieties in May, Professor Pogge was met with swift rebuke across the academic world. Hundreds of professors, including more than a dozen members of Yale’s philosophy department and its chairman, signed an open letter to “strongly condemn” him.

Many professors interviewed at Yale and elsewhere said that this instance was no anomaly.

“Yale is pretty notorious for not taking seriously — at the administrative level — cases of sexual harassment,” Charles Larmore, a philosophy professor at Brown University, said.

“No institution likes a scandal, but at Yale there is a particular cultural silence,” said Seyla Benhabib, a professor of political science and philosophy at Yale, who signed the open letter. “There is a culture of male discretion and ‘boys will be boys.’ ”

A History of Complaints

Problems dealing with sexual harassment have dogged the university for decades. The lawsuit Alexander v. Yale, which was decided in 1980 and alleged sexually inappropriate behavior by faculty against students, held that such harassment constituted sex discrimination under Title IX. After Yale fraternity pledges chanted “No means yes, yes means anal” on the quad in 2010, a group of students filed a complaint with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, which then opened a Title IX discrimination investigation.

Problems dealing with sexual harassment have dogged the university for decades. The lawsuit Alexander v. Yale, which was decided in 1980 and alleged sexually inappropriate behavior by faculty against students, held that such harassment constituted sex discrimination under Title IX. After Yale fraternity pledges chanted “No means yes, yes means anal” on the quad in 2010, a group of students filed a complaint with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, which then opened a Title IX discrimination investigation.

The complaint against Professor Pogge follows another highly publicized investigation at the university involving the former head of cardiology at the medical school, Dr. Michael Simons. In that case, the committee found sexual harassment and recommended that Dr. Simons be permanently removed as cardiology chief. But the provost, Ben Polak, reduced the punishment to an 18-month suspension.

In the mid-1990s, when Professor Pogge was teaching at Columbia, a young philosophy student, who, like Ms. Lopez, was a racial minority, accused him of sexual harassment.

Professor Larmore was then the chair of Columbia’s philosophy department. He said it would be improper to talk about the case, but in a complaint Ms. Lopez filed with the federal Office for Civil Rights he is quoted as saying that Professor Pogge “had written a series of sexually harassing emails to the student, and there had also been some physical interaction between them.” The complaint also said the administration had forbidden Professor Pogge from entering the philosophy department building whenever the student had classes there.

Professor Pogge said in an interview that his punishment was not quite that severe, but he was unable to provide any supporting documentation.

A Yale spokesman said that when the university received information that a candidate had exhibited inappropriate behavior, it investigated all allegations “to the extent possible.” Professor Pogge said that a university representative had asked him about the Columbia case while he was being recruited, in 2007. Professor Benhabib, who served on Professor Pogge’s selection committee, said that she and other committee members had heard about the Columbia case but did not discuss it.

“I didn’t think it was my place to go searching into his history at Columbia,” she said. “Everybody slips once. That was our attitude.”

She added, “In retrospect maybe we should have done more.”

While faculty hiring at Yale involves a complex web of bureaucracy and approvals, the process at the time was overseen by the office of the provost.

Ms. Lopez, who is from Honduras, first took a class with Professor Pogge in her junior year, and he agreed soon after to supervise her senior thesis. Ms. Lopez said that he then started becoming uncomfortably informal. After she graduated, he invited her to work as a translator at a conference in Chile, and arranged for them to stay in the same room.

It was there one night, she said, that he sat astride the chair behind her as she worked at a desk, pressed his erection against her body and fondled her hand, thigh and breast.

Ms. Lopez said she spurned the advance. But Professor Pogge was her mentor, she said, and she was counting on him for a postgraduate fellowship at the Global Justice Program he ran at Yale. Although the details of that job had not been worked out, her name was listed on the program website and Professor Pogge had given her a letter on Yale stationery showing proof of employment to give her landlord.

Upon her return to New Haven later that summer, Ms. Lopez was told that in fact she did not have a job, and that regardless, any position would have been unsalaried. She and Professor Pogge got into a dispute over the arrangements, and Ms. Lopez asked that he at least pay her for her work in Chile, which she estimated was worth about $2,000. He refused.

When she reported Professor Pogge to Yale for sexual harassment, administrators rebuffed her claims on the grounds that she was no longer associated with the university. They did, however, offer to pay her $2,000 if she signed a nondisclosure agreement and dropped the matter. Ms. Lopez said she needed the money, so she agreed.

Peter Salovey, Yale’s current president, acted as “decision maker” for the university committee that cleared Professor Pogge of sexual misconduct. Credit Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times
But in May 2011, Ms. Lopez brought an official sexual harassment complaint to Yale.

In the end, the committee found “substantial evidence that Professor Pogge engaged in unprofessional conduct” but “insufficient evidence to support the charge of sexual harassment.” A note was filed in his permanent record saying only that he had inappropriately used Yale stationery in vouching for her employment.

Mr. Salovey, acting as the case’s designated “decision maker,” approved the recommendations and later rejected Ms. Lopez’s appeal of the ruling.

Ms. Lopez said she was devastated and decided in October 2015 to file the civil rights complaint with the Department of Education. That complaint, which also cites alleged improprieties by Professor Pogge with several other young women, is still pending.

Because all of the women cited are minorities, the complaint was submitted under Title VI, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin, as well as under Title IX.

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Source- http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/09/nyregion/a-yale-professor-is-cleared-of-sexual-harassment-but-concerns-linger.html?_r=0