A female graduate student who last year accused Colin McGinn, a prominent philosopher, of sexual harassment has filed a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, saying the University of Miami discriminated against her by mishandling her allegations against him.
The former student, who has left Miami and has not been named publicly, filed the 300-page complaint in March, accusing the university of violating both Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. The EEOC will consider the complaint and decide whether to issue the former student a right to sue.
Her lawyer gave The Chronicle a summary of the complaint, which says Miami played down her harassment charges, telling her she did not have enough evidence. Instead, the summary says, Miami told Mr. McGinn he had broken a university rule requiring professors to report romantic relationships with students they supervise. The university then pressured Mr. McGinn to resign, the document says, and he did so last December.
The graduate student—who also worked as an assistant to Mr. McGinn—maintains that she never had a consensual relationship with him.
“Professor McGinn harassed, stalked, and preyed upon” the student, the summary of the complaint says. The professor touched her hands and feet, told her “you are mine,” and proposed they have sex, the document says. The student, it continues, felt “hounded, suffocated, and trapped by his constant barrage of communications and need.”
Officials at Miami ignored the student’s complaints and charged Mr. McGinn with violating its relationship policy as a way to get him out the door fast and to avoid further fallout, the summary of the complaint says. In that way, it says, officials “hijacked” the grievance process “to save UM a public scandal, rather than provide a fair accounting of Professor McGinn’s misconduct.”
Swift Action
When the scandal involving Mr. McGinn broke last summer, some female philosophers—who have long maintained that the profession is hostile to women—applauded Miami administrators for acting swiftly to get rid of the professor.
Miami’s lawyer, Eric D. Isicoff, issued a statement last week to The Chronicle, saying the university “takes very seriously all complaints alleging misconduct.” After investigating the student’s allegations against Mr. McGinn, “senior administrators determined that an immediate resolution would be the most prudent approach,” the statement reads. “The entire situation was concluded over a period of only a few months.”
Mr. McGinn has maintained that he is not guilty of harassing the graduate student, who he said was as interested and involved in their relationship as he was. He has also said he did not think he had to report the relationship to the university because it didn’t involve sex. He said he agreed to resign from the university to save himself a costly legal battle and considers himself a victim of a “witch-hunt mentality going on right now over sex harassment.”
The summary of the graduate student’s complaint says the alleged harassment by Mr. McGinn and the university’s reaction forced her to leave Miami and enroll in another Ph.D. program. But, it says, she is suffering from anxiety and depression and has since taken a leave of absence from her new program.