A group of top New Zealand scientists and academics has written an open letter condemning sexual harassment of students by staff within education and research institutes, sparked by a Newsroom investigation into a student who believes she was groomed by a senior university lecturer which led to brutal sexual encounters.
A collective of 64 current and former Rutherford Discovery Fellows from 10 institutes, including the country’s top universities, banded together to make the announcement.
The group is calling for a stronger code of ethics and the creation of an independent professional body for researchers, similar to other sectors like the Medical Council of New Zealand.
“It is our collective responsibility to uphold the highest standards of research ethics and professional behaviour towards students and others. Investigations into sexual harassment and assault must be taken very seriously, with priority given to supporting victim-claimants and to ensuring consequences for offending staff are transparent.
“Instances of sexual harassment, sexual assaults, and physical assaults are too common within New Zealand’s academic sector and steps must be taken to safeguard those in our community who are targeted,” said the statement.
A spokesperson for the collective, Dr Chris Cornwall, said inappropriate behaviour and abuses of power existed within research institutes both in Aotearoa New Zealand and globally and it was time to do something about it.
“As a group, we were shocked by the events detailed in the article. Many of us have heard or witnessed the sort of behaviour from the Newsroom story – maybe not to that extent – but other abuses of power, such as predatory behaviour from staff members towards other students.”
“It seems to be an ongoing issue within research institutes, but also in other positions in New Zealand where someone has power over another person, this tends to be occurring quite frequently. A lot of us feel we need to show some leadership here and do something. Just sitting back and saying it’s bad is not good enough.”
Lecturer got new job overseas
The woman at the centre of the Newsroom report made a complaint to the university following the sexual encounters and the university subsequently launched an investigation into the lecturer’s actions and put him on leave.
As a result of the incidents the student became distressed, suffered bouts of anxiety and found it difficult to study. Unsure whether she would have to face the lecturer in class again, she moved to another country before the investigation concluded.
Nine months after she lodged the complaint the final investigation was released. It upheld all of the investigated complaints, including that the lecturer formed a personal, unprofessional relationship with the student, used his position of power and influence to instigate a sexual relationship with the student, failed to disclose the relationship to the Head of School, and breached staff conduct policy.
(The investigation did not investigate three complaints – one because the investigator, an employment lawyer, could not find a suitable definition of ‘adult grooming’, and the other two because they involved sexual incidents that were the subject of a police complaint.)
The lecturer left New Zealand at the conclusion of the investigation to take up a new posting at another university overseas. When Newsroom asked the New Zealand university whether it had informed the lecturer’s new place of work in Europe about the investigation and whether it had supplied a reference it said it could not comment “for privacy reasons”.
The senior lecturer at the centre of the investigation, who is from Europe, had arrived in Aotearoa New Zealand several years earlier following a teaching job at a top-tier US university and before long had secured more than $1m in New Zealand funding for his projects.
One of those funds was a prestigious Royal Society Te Apārangi Rutherford Discovery Fellowship worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, with a small portion of that funding going to the New Zealand university.
The Rutherford Discovery Fellowship is awarded to just 10 scientists each year to conduct research in their field over five years. Fellows have to live in New Zealand during that time.
The Royal Society Te Apārangi terminated his fellowship contract as soon as the university informed it he had left the country the month after the final investigation was completed.
But at no point did the university inform Royal Society Te Apārangi about the complaint, the investigation or the outcome into the lecturer. Questions by Newsroom sent to the society were the first time it had heard of the lecturer’s conduct.
Spokesperson Cornwall said the group was dismayed the lecturer had not only been a Rutherford Discovery Fellow, but had been able to take up a new post overseas.
“As Rutherford Discovery Fellows we’re meant to be the future leaders. And that’s what’s depressing about this situation is that future leaders shouldn’t be acting in this way. We should be leading by example.”
“One of the main problems that most of us had was the person was able to then go on and get a job somewhere outside of New Zealand,” said Cornwall.
Universities reviewing processes
Some institutes, such as Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, are in the process of reviewing their policies around intimate and close relationships between staff and students.
The University of Auckland’s Te Pūnaha Matatini Centre of Research Excellence already floated the idea of an independent body in its recent submission to Te Ara Paerangi Future Pathways, a government review of issues facing New Zealand’s research institutes.
Following the Newsroom investigation, members of Te Pūnaha Matatini also wrote strongly worded public messages condemning the “sexual harassment of students by academic staff in Aotearoa New Zealand”.
“We renew the call for a national professional board for all researchers that upholds tikanga and ethical behaviour in research spaces.”
“A safe learning environment for students is the bottom line for universities. We need a national regulatory body, with teeth, to stamp out unprofessional behaviour,” said Te Pūnaha Matatini director and Rutherford Discovery Fellow Priscilla Wehi, who is a signatory to the open letter.
A spokesperson from Te Pūnaha Matatini, Jonathan Burgess, told Newsroom he is most concerned about how experiences such as the young woman’s detailed in the Newsroom investigation can push students and early career researchers like her out of the field.
“One of our main purposes is growing and developing early career researchers, so a really big bottom line for us is a safe and supportive learning environments for those early career researchers and students.
“Our research agenda is to bring to bring people together from a whole pile of disciplines to work on complex issues, and the sort of issues we are facing as a society and a planet are the ones that need a variety of perspectives, not just the ones the system is designed to succeed at the moment. And this is an example of someone who gets turned away from the science system, and it’s a perspective we lose.”
Burgess said the implementation of an independent body could make judgements and provide transparent information that would help prevent situations such as the one described happening.
“It’s pretty difficult running this stuff through universities, even the language they use, like things being out of the terms of reference or they can’t comment on anything because of privacy is just so endemic to the way universities operate.”
Made with the support of the Public Interest Journalism Fund
