Professors in the University of California at Berkeley’s department of South and Southeast Asian studies sent a letter last Thursday to a vice provost, Janet Broughton, expressing their frustration with the institution’s slow response to complaints of sexual harassment against a member of the department, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
They said four complaints were filed to the university’s Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination against an assistant professor, Blake Wentworth, in the 2014-15 academic year, but not one has been completed, according to the newspaper.
Mr. Wentworth told the newspaper he denies all allegations against him. Sylvia Tiwon, one of the professors who signed the letter, told the newspaper that, “If you don’t speak publicly, it’s like it never happened.”
The university’s policy says that its response time for investigating and ruling on cases of harassment is 60 days, but complaints against Mr. Wentworth were filed 11 to 14 months ago, according to the newspaper.
On the same day that the professors sent the letter, the university’s chancellor, Nicholas B. Dirks, sent a campuswide email announcing new efforts to prevent sexual misconduct on the campus and to improve the response time to alleged incidents. Mr. Dirks’s email followed a series of high-profile sexual-harassment incidents at Berkeley, in which the university’s handling of allegations has been widely scrutinized.
Most recently, the university drew fire for its punishment of the law-school dean Sujit Choudhry, who was found to have sexually harassed his executive assistant, and later resigned.
Also recently, the university fired an assistant basketball coach, Yann Hufnagel, after a sexual-harassment investigation. And last fall, the noted astronomer Geoffrey W. Marcy resigned after claims that he sexually harassed students repeatedly.