US institutions and states are revamping hiring practices in an attempt to increase transparency about past misconduct in academia.
In 2015, an assistant dean at a University of Wisconsin campus resigned following allegations that he had sexually harassed a campus employee. During the next two years, he took similar jobs at two other universities, neither of which learnt of the investigation or its findings during reference checks. He eventually resigned from the second position, which was at another of the 26 campuses of the University of Wisconsin system, after former colleagues contacted the institution about the original harassment investigation.
The case and others like it have provoked media coverage when they are exposed and, at the University of Wisconsin, have led to a revamping of policies to prevent similar scenarios from playing out. But for each high-profile example in which an accused harasser ends up, and sometimes reoffends, at another institution, there are many others that don’t receive public attention and so go uncounted, says Susan Fortney, a law scholar at Texas A&M University in Fort Worth who specializes in legal and organizational ethics.
The #MeToo movement, which encourages people to share experiences of sexual abuse and harassment, has increasingly led to such ‘pass-the-harasser’ cases coming to light — so named because individuals are able to move to another employer without them knowing about past misconduct findings. This has led to some...
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