A committee appointed to review how the University of Georgia • Athens handles complaints of sexual harassment on campus found that the university's administrators have failed to make needed improvements to prevent a hostile work environment for faculty and staff and a hostile educational environment for students. The groups responsible for preventing sexual harassment are inconsistent in their application of the school's sexual harassment policy, keep poor records, and have repeatedly released private information, including the names of complaining victims, the committee's report says.

As we reported on February 21, the university was forced to concede the need for a review of its anti-sexual harassment processes because of public outrage at the apparent mishandling of numerous, well-documented complaints against a professor. Both employees and students had accused Veterinary Medicine professor Brett Tennent-Brown of making sexual remarks so inappropriate that they created a hostile work and educational environment. While the university's Equal Opportunity Office called the comments "deplorable, unacceptable and abhorrent," the office found that they did not violate the university's sexual harassment policy, and Tennent-Brown was merely given a warning.

The current system of enforcement is the result of a reorganization ordered by UGA President Michael Adams in 2008 because several sexual harassment scandals had reached the press at that time. In some cases, faculty and staff appeared to receive no punishment for instances of harassment that were blatant and abusive. In another case, the university dealt harshly with allegations that a court later found did not even meet the legal definition of sexual harassment.

Serious inconsistencies in enforcement remain, according to the committee, which is made up of members of the largely-elected University Council. The UGA Equal Opportunity Office's ombudsman program, the committee said, is hampered by those inconsistencies, as well as by bureaucracy and an apparent disregard for victims' privacy.

Attempts to end sexual harassment on the UGA campus are simply not working, report says

The determination that a public university harbors a hostile work environment or a hostile educational environment is a disgrace, and UGA President Adams has promised to change it. He set a goal to educate all university employees and students about harassment on campus and what options are available to protect the rights of victims.

Even that modest goal has not been met, according to the committee report.

More troubling, the committee found a system that is so inconsistent and inadequate that it could prevent victims from making complaints. For example, although the University is supposed to redact victims' names and other identifying information from sexual harassment reports, officials have repeatedly released unredacted records to the public.

The program also keeps shockingly poor records, the report says. "More than one recent completed case file offered neither investigative notes nor any indication of the grounds upon which final disposition rested," the committee wrote.

When it comes to enforcement, the office appears to rank situations involving a single off-color joke in the classroom just as seriously as "a concerted campaign of sexual predation, involving repeated pressuring of isolated undergraduates and leading to one student's reckless physical endangerment," continues the report.

The report is expected to be presented to the full University Council on April 21.

Source: Athens Banner-Herald, "Panel raps UGA handling of harassment complaints," Lee Shearer, March 30, 2011