Graduate students enroll in the department of social and cultural anthropology at the California Institute of Integral Studies to examine and fight oppression in postcolonial nations, not to encounter it at home.
But over the past year they have been pulled into a fierce battle within the institute. Administrators, on one side, and a married faculty couple, on the other, have accused each other of silencing dissent, violating basic rules of fairness, and otherwise trampling the rights of faculty members and students.
Small, private academic settings, by their nature, can be politically perilous environments, where strong personalities and personal allegiances hold an inordinate amount of sway. But the controversy at the San Francisco-based CIIS is exceptional in terms of the abuses alleged to have transpired there and the acrimony created by them. For both sides, perhaps, the conflict offers a lesson on the dangers, in such an environment, of letting personal relationships blur professional judgments and of failing to adequately check and balance power.
Now gone are the department’s only two full-time faculty members—the husband-and-wife team of Angana P. Chatterji, a professor who is an internationally prominent advocate of human rights in Asia’s Kashmir region, and Richard Shapiro, an associate professor who had been the department’s chairman since 2004. Although the institute does not award tenure, she had been there for 14 years, and he for 25.
By all accounts, the department, which offers only master’s and doctoral programs, had revolved around those two faculty members. Both were known to take a deep interest in the lives of the programs’ roughly 50 students. Ms. Chatterji, in particular, was seen by students there as a towering figure, commanding deep respect for her human-rights work but pushing some of her students so hard they came to resent her influence on them.
Although the two had butted heads with the institute’s administration in the past, they say they were shocked to learn, last June, that they had been under investigation. The CIIS administration suspended them then and fired them last month, saying it had no choice because they had breached student confidence, falsified grades, misapplied funds, and otherwise engaged in unprofessional conduct, generally to ensure the loyalty and obedience of those they taught and advised.
In the suspension notices to the professors, Judie Wexler, the institute’s academic vice president, and Shirley Strong, dean of students, pronounced themselves “so stunned by the information thus far provided by our students” that they had decided to act immediately “for the students’ well-being.” The hearing board that handled the professors’ cases said it was “shocked at the climate of fear and intimidation” Ms. Chatterji had fostered, and it found “deeply disturbing” Mr. Shapiro’s complicity in creating such a climate, “centered around a cultlike idealization” of his wife. It said his “unwavering and uncritical support” for his wife “gave little hope for reform or remediation.”
The two professors strongly deny such accusations, arguing that their influence on students has been overwhelmingly positive, and that the few who have leveled charges against them were motivated by either grudges or frustration over their own lack of academic progress. Both Ms. Chatterji and Mr. Shapiro, as well as their many supporters among their students, have denounced the disciplinary proceedings as a sham that denied the two professors due process.
“Nothing has been based on evidence,” says Mr. Shapiro. “We really are not petty people, and we really do not have time to try to mastermind control over superintelligent doctoral students.”
Personal and Political
Both sides of the controversy see it as rooted in the distinct nature of the social-and-cultural-anthropology department as shaped by the two professors.
The California Institute of Integral Studies, a private, nonprofit university accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, was founded in 1968 with the mission of synthesizing Eastern and Western thought. Its program in social and cultural anthropology, however, was reorganized in 1999 to focus on fighting social and ecological injustice in “a multicultural, postcolonial world.”
Ms. Chatterji, who with Mr. Shapiro played a key role in that effort, criticizes the institute’s emphasis on combining Eastern spirituality and Western science as based on an outdated, racialist view of the East. The couple’s advocacy work on behalf of India’s minorities has led to complaints to CIIS from political advocates outside the institute accusing the two scholars of sympathizing with Marxists, anarchists, and India’s enemies in Pakistan.
With their focus on multiculturalism and social justice, the anthropology programs attract students who are more diverse in terms of race, class, and sexual orientation than the enrollment of the institute as a whole. They are known to fault one another in class for not sufficiently embracing radicalism, sometimes deriding others’ views as reflecting “bourgeois liberalism,” and they play a major role in campus’s identity-based student organizations and student protests.
The programs also have a much lower graduation rate than others in the institute, which Mr. Shapiro and Ms. Chatterji attribute to their racial and socioeconomic diversity. Administrators, however, blame the lower rates on flaws in how the programs have been taught and run.
Students entering the anthropology programs have been required to take an intensive diversity course, “Building Alliances.” In teaching it, Mr. Shapiro assured them confidentiality and urged them to bring up deeply personal experiences to confront their biases and undergo a wrenching transformation that would turn them into better advocates for the downtrodden.
Students in the programs tended to either love or loathe Ms. Chatterji. In the classroom, she was known to publicly hector students about poor effort or flawed work until they teared up—all, she and her supporters say, for the sake of helping them reach their potential. “My problem is not laxity,” she said in an interview. “My problem is too much rigor.”
As far back as 2007, students in the program had complained to administrators that she was abusive and displayed favoritism toward some students, but the administrators who initially looked into such allegations cleared her of any wrongdoing. The couple, though, had other disputes with leaders at the institute. Over the past few years, Mr. Shapiro says, he had been at odds with Ms. Wexler, the academic vice president.
Among the sources of tension was that he had criticized the administration’s adoption of a new classroom-scheduling policy that, he says, left anthropology instructors scrambling to find instructional space. He had also accused administrators of lacking accountability and usurping shared governance by inappropriately meddling in the affairs of faculty committees. Both he and Ms. Chatterji clashed with the administration over an adjunct instructor whom the department dropped in 2010 after students wrote letters of complaint about him.
‘Wild Claims’
Despite such tensions, the two professors say, up until last year they had received positive performance evaluations, and their department had fared well in reviews. The evaluations students gave them were overwhelmingly positive, on the whole.
The impetus for investigation of the two professors appears to have been a complaint against an adjunct professor in the department that three dozen students submitted to administrators in April. In suspending Ms. Chatterji and Mr. Shapiro, Ms. Wexler and Ms. Strong, the dean of students, said their examination of the complaint against the adjunct had “led to a much larger assessment” of the department. Based partly on interviews with 30 current and former students, they rejected the negative views of the adjunct offered by the students and by Mr. Shapiro, and instead decided to immediately suspend Mr. Shapiro and Ms. Chatterji.
The professors say they were blindsided by their suspensions.
Mr. Shapiro denounces the allegations that led to their dismissals as “extreme, exaggerated, wild claims, to simply disparage us.” He accuses the administration of pushing him out mainly to punish him for his advocacy on behalf of the faculty, and he argues that it conducted its investigation in an ad hoc manner that violated the institute’s faculty handbook. A student worker in the dean of students’ office, who had been supportive of Mr. Shapiro and Ms. Chatterji and at odds with her own boss, last fall issued a statement accusing Ms. Strong of being antagonistic toward the anthropology department and pressuring her to say negative things about the two professors.
For her part, Ms. Chatterji says CIIS administrators undertook “a fishing expedition” to find reasons to fire them. Like Mr. Shapiro, Ms. Chatterji argues that the CIIS administration saw her as an annoying source of dissent within the institution, especially given her students’ activism for causes such as the installation of gender-neutral bathrooms.
In addition, she says, she suspects that CIIS officials were motivated by a desire to placate potential donors from California’s Indian community, who have taken offense to her work documenting human-rights violations by Hindu nationalists in eastern India and by the Indian government in Kashmir, where she was involved in the excavation of mass graves.
Based partly on information reported to it by her students, the Asian Human Rights Commission, an international advocacy group, last fall publicized its suspicion that she was being punished for her work in Kashmir and urged activists around the world to come to her defense.
The American Association of University Professors, meanwhile, has expressed sympathy with the two professor’s complaints of being denied due process, arguing to Joseph L. Subbiondo, the institute’s president, that the two should have been allowed to bring a lawyer to to their disciplinary hearings, and to appeal their dismissals.
The CIIS administration said it had taken steps to ensure due process, such as involving other faculty members in the disciplinary proceedings. It rejected both the AAUP’s request to attend the disciplinary hearings and the AAUP’s assertion that the two professors are entitled to severance pay for the current academic year. The professors’ conduct “warrants, if anything, that restitution should be paid by them,” Mr. Subbiondo wrote to the AAUP this month.
Rival Realities
In its report on Ms. Chatterji, the hearing board said some students reported only positive experiences with her, while others accused her of showing “astonishing callousness and disdain.” The report said that, just as a hostile work environment often includes some employees who are victims of harassment or ill treatment and others who are unaffected by it or unaware of it, “so can an abusive academic environment be very damaging to certain classes of students, while others may not have the same experience at all.”
Several students who had been at odds with the two professors cheered last month’s terminations as having liberated them from an abusive and oppressive environment. They spoke only on the condition they not be identified, because, they said, they feared retaliation. They said Ms. Chatterji and Mr. Shapiro had demanded unquestioning loyalty from students, whom they often asked to mobilize on their behalf in conflicts with other faculty members, the administration, and other students in their program.
The hearing board that handled the two professors’ cases said they had fostered a “siege mentality” in which they were constantly seen as threatened. It said the couple’s status as the department’s only full-time professors gave them inordinate power because students found it very difficult to get through the program without taking several classes from them and having them as advisers. The pair largely determined which students would advance, receive scholarships, or get a chance to travel abroad.
“If you were not in line with what they wanted you to do in terms of school politics, ... then all kinds of opportunities would just be taken away from you,” said Sarah, a doctoral student who spoke on the condition that her last name not be used.
The hearing board found the professors guilty of holding students to different standards and of assigning many students grades based on coursework that was never done. James D. Martin, a spokesman for CIIS, says the institute was obliged to respond quickly to accusations of such behavior because the assignment of fictitious grades would violate federal law and jeopardize the institute’s accreditation.
The two professors have said they gave passing grades for incomplete work only rarely, when, for example, students were dealing with illness or a family emergency. But the hearing board characterized their grading irregularities as widespread, citing a finding that Ms. Chatterji gave grades of “incomplete” to an average of 43 percent of the students in her classes. Some students in the department have described the receipt of a “ghost grade” as a Faustian bargain because it left them beholden to the professor who gave it.
The hearing board also found both professors guilty of breaches of student confidence. In interviews, several students recounted finding out that the personal information they had revealed in class or in confidential conversations with Ms. Chatterji or Mr. Shapiro had been relayed from one professor to the other or from the professor to students. “There was no aspect of your life that you could really live outside the program,” one student said.
Both professors denied violating student confidence. But in an interview about his case, Mr. Shapiro spoke at length about his knowledge of the sexual relationships to which he attributes the alliances among some of his student accusers, whom he named. When asked if he thought it appropriate to relay such information in on-the-record remarks to a reporter, he said, “We would never share this, except that what is at stake is these students coming forward, and the administration using these issues, to take away our livelihood and destroy a highly successful academic department.”
Several students who are supportive of the two faculty members say the way the department has been characterized demeans them and dismisses their ability to think independently. “The presumption was we were cult members, like we were co-conspirators in whatever supposed fraud was going on,” says Eva Goodwin, a master’s-level student.
In October, Ms. Chatterji and Mr. Shapiro sent students surveys asking them to respond to concerns raised by the administration, so that their answers could be used in the professors’ defense in their disciplinary proceedings. The two professors have forwarded several responses, confirmed by The Chronicle as authentic, in which students spoke in glowing terms of their academic experiences, dismissed the idea that the professors’ marriage posed a conflict, and strenuously denied that either of the two ever breached their confidence, retaliated against them, directed them to take actions against others, or harmed them in any way.
Every class taught by either of two “has been of the utmost caliber of academic and intellectual rigor,” wrote one doctoral student, Jen Cordaro.
Another doctoral student, Heidi Rhodes, was dismissive of student complaints that the professor’s marriage posed a conflict, saying she has seen students make such allegations “if Richard does not affirm a student’s racism or sexism against Angana, or if Angana does not affirm a student’s anti-Semitism against Richard.”
Several of the students expressed appreciation for the interest Ms. Chatterji took in all aspects of their personal lives, including their health, their interactions with family, and their personal relationships. Erin McElroy, a doctoral student who has since left the program, wrote in a statement defending Ms. Chatterji: “You make a point to ensure that I get yearly doctor exams, that I eat enough, that I wear my helmet when I bicycle, and that I am in an emotionally and mentally sound and generative space.”
Legal Challenges
Because the San Francisco-based institute does not award tenure, the chief recourse contractually available to the two professors is binding arbitration, which they plan to enter into within the coming weeks. With the involvement of an arbitrator, Mr. Shapiro says, “finally all of this will be outside the insularity of the institute.”
Dozens of students who support the two professors have retained a lawyer and plan to sue the institute for breach of contract, by denying them the education and service they had been promised, according to a news release issued last month by leaders of that group. The statement said the hearing board had ignored 30 students’ requests to testify on the pair’s behalf. It quoted Elizabeth Pimentel, a master’s student, asking: “What happened to fair and transparent investigations? If there are legitimate issues, why not issue a warning, put the faculty on notice, or create a professional development plan?”
After removing Ms. Chatterji and Mr. Shapiro, CIIS appointed a new department chairman, Andrej Grubacic, a historian who specializes in anarchist social theory, and hired three new adjunct instructors for the department. Officials say they plan to continue the anthropology programs and maintain their focus on injustice in the postcolonial world.
But the department will need to replace more than just its core faculty. At least a few of the students who back Mr. Shapiro and Ms. Chatterji have dropped out.
“At this point I honestly feel CIIS has nothing to offer me,” says Alejandro J. Urruzmendi, a third-year doctoral student who has stopped taking classes there. “My work itself is really dependent on my relationship with Professor Chatterji and her work in the human-rights world.” With her dismissal, “all of that was thrown up in the air.”