Stanford Politics

A little over a year ago, Stanford Politics Magazine published a cover story titled, “Fairly Normal and Routine,” which described fifty years of Stanford’s history with sexual violence.

In the wake of #MeToo, two former Stanford professors were accused of sexual misconduct. The first was Jay Fliegelman, a late English professor who was suspended in 2000 after one of his graduate students accused him of rape. The second was Franco Moretti, who was publicly accused of sexual misconduct by former students across three campuses where he had taught.

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It started with a phone call.

Seo-Young Chu, an associate professor at the Queens College Department of English, was sitting in her New York apartment when her phone rang.

Chu remembers that a woman’s voice had spoken when she picked up.

“Hi, Seo-Young? I’m calling from Stanford to ask about your experiences while you were here.”

And from there, Chu said, the story “tumbled out.” In 2000, she accused professor Jay Fliegelman of sexually assaulting and raping her while she was a graduate student at Stanford.

Following Chu’s accusations, an investigation took place. Fliegelman was eventually found guilty of violating university sexual harassment policies and suspended for two years without pay, during which time he continued to meet with the graduate students he was advising. Given the nature of Chu’s accusations, it was surprising that Fliegelman had any direct contact with graduate students during that time—Fliegelman was, after all, Chu’s adviser when she accused him of raping her.

The phone call was just one of many stories which Chu shared in an essay titled, “A Refuge for Jae-in Doe” in Entropy Magazine. Published in the wake of the #MeToo movement, “A Refuge for Jae-in Doe” chronicled the aftermath of the rape and Stanford’s response—which Chu found inadequate.  

In August of 2007, Jay Fliegelman passed away in Menlo Park, CA. Shortly after, Stanford passed a memorial resolution in his honor; on May 20, several students held a ceremony celebrating his life. They called it a “JayFest”—a “[celebration]of his influence on us as scholars and teachers.” At the time, Fliegelman’s suspension was not known to the public, and Stanford made no mention of it. By 2013, the American Studies Department had begun giving out the “Jay W. Fliegelman Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Honors Research.”

Part of Chu’s frustration and anger—her reasons for writing the piece in Entropy—came from Stanford’s limited response to Fliegelman’s wrongdoing. In a follow-up piece to “A Refuge for Jae-in Doe,” published in Johns Hopkins University’s ASAP/Journal, Chu highlighted several excerpted conversations from Facebook posts and private correspondences she had shared with Stanford. Though she openly praised several individuals who had offered formal apologies, Chu also noted that Stanford itself had remained largely indifferent to her requests: Chu had initially hoped to establish a dialogue with Stanford discussing the broader, systemic imbalances which had allowed a professor like Fliegelman to take advantage of her.

In an email to Stanford Politics, Chu wrote that the Stanford English Department had yet to explain the reasons why Stanford had held a “JayFest” in spite of their knowledge of Fliegelman’s assault.

“I want to believe we live in a world where the Stanford English Department is capable of answering my questions in a clear and respectful manner,” she said.

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Around the same time that Chu’s piece was published, another Stanford professor, who had recently retired, was facing similar allegations of sexual misconduct.

Franco Moretti was, in the words of The New York Times, a “revolutionary.” At Stanford, he had helped found the Stanford Literary Lab, a research lab which sought to understand historical texts through a process known as “distant reading,” a computerized analysis of up to thousands of texts at a time.

In the midst of the hype surrounding Moretti’s work—a hype which drove The New York Times Magazine to write a profile on his research—another story emerged. Kimberly Latta was a graduate student at UC Berkeley in 1984-85 while Moretti was a visiting professor. It was her first semester as a graduate student, and she had signed up for a seminar which Moretti was teaching. Moretti, she recalled in an op-ed published by Entropy, had taken a surprising interest in her, which she had initially thought was purely intellectual. As their academic relationship continued, however, Moretti’s advances became more readily apparent. According to Latta, Moretti took advantage of her later that semester and raped her on two separate occasions.

Latta’s piece—like Chu’s in Entropy—expressed her frustrations with the apparent lack of effort made by academic institutions to prosecute sexual predators. She had initially planned on coming forward, but recalled that Berkeley’s Title IX officer at the time—a friend of Moretti’s—had cautioned against it. She soon decided to drop the issue entirely, and no formal investigation was ever opened.

After Latta’s allegations publicly resurfaced in November of 2017, two more stories surfaced detailing Moretti’s behavior. The Daily reported about one woman who recalled she had set a dog loose to stop Moretti’s unreciprocated advances; in that same Daily article, another graduate student at Johns Hopkins University said that Moretti had inappropriately touched her.

Moretti continues to deny these allegations. In an email exchange with Stanford Politics, he was quick to note that “only Ms. Latta has accused me—falsely—of assault.” He made no mention of the other two cases, or of the word “rape,” which Latta used to describe the encounter.

Despite the allegations, in September 2016, Moretti was appointed by the former Dean of Humanities at the Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) as a senior advisor, helping the Swiss research institution define global strategy.. When the allegations surfaced a year later, current Dean of Humanities, Bela Kapossy, noted that Moretti notified EPFL immediately and provided them with a public statement of denial. His students at EPFL were also informed, Kapossy said, per Moretti’s request.

Following Latta’s letter and #MeToo, however, EPFL moved forward with Moretti’s teaching as it had before. Though a single allegation had been enough for Johns Hopkins University to rescind its offer to hire Moretti, neither EPFL—nor Berkeley or Stanford—moved to open an investigation into Moretti’s past behavior. “As you know,” Stanford University spokesperson EJ Miranda wrote in an email, “the allegations were related to other institutions and predated Moretti’s joining the Stanford faculty. Professor Moretti is retired and has no activities on the Stanford campus.”

According to Professor Mark Algee-Hewitt, the current director of the Stanford Literary Lab which Moretti founded, the lab no longer maintains any formal connection with Moretti. Nonetheless, its website continues to list Moretti as an off-campus associate. This is admittedly standard practice for the Lab—once members retire or move off campus, they are automatically relisted as off-campus associates.

The website’s “About” page also ends with the following declaration: “The Literary Lab strives to create an open, collaborative environment that supports the rights, safety, and personal integrity of all those who work in or with the Lab … no unprofessional behavior, harassment or abuse will be tolerated from any member, and we expect all participants to adhere to and further these values.”

The addendum did not appear on the website until November of 2017—after the allegations against Moretti had surfaced.In his email to SP, Moretti appeared to welcome the opportunity to speak publicly about the allegations. “As there have never been formal proceedings in connection with the false allegations, I have not had a meaningful opportunity to address and disprove the accusations,” Moretti said. “I can only repeat, again, that I wholeheartedly deny them.”

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When SP asked Miranda about the concrete changes which Stanford had made in the context of #MeToo, he pointed to several revisions of University policy regarding faculty-student relationships: in 2014, the University formally barred romantic relationships between faculty and students in all cases “when the faculty member has had, or can ever be expected to have, academic responsibility for the student.” These changes were not, Miranda admitted, made in direct response to either Latta’s or Chu’s accusations, but were nonetheless “important to note.”

Kimberly Latta personally found the changes made in 2014 to be fairly meaningless. To begin with, she wrote, the nominal changes barring faculty-student relationships had existed at Berkeley in the 1980s when she was Moretti’s student. “Moretti didn’t care. He was above the law, and he got away with it,” she said.

After finishing her graduate studies at Berkeley, Latta went on to receive a Ph.D. in English from Rutgers University in 1998. She began working her way up through the academic world, starting as an assistant professor at Saint Louis University and eventually becoming the Director of State Relations at New York University. Moretti’s fame only continued to grow in the meantime—in 2006, he was named to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

And despite Latta’s growing success, however, she still feared the repercussions of speaking out against an academic rockstar like Moretti. “Since Franco Moretti threatened he would destroy my career if I spoke about [his behavior], I have been very afraid. I was afraid I would be punished somehow for speaking out, and that nothing would happen.”

And, to some extent, nothing did happen to Moretti. Per Miranda’s email, the fact that the allegations predated Moretti’s time as Stanford faculty gave the Title IX office little reason to open a direct investigation into his behavior at Stanford; currently, the Stanford English Department website lists him as an emeritus faculty and former holder of the Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professorship in the Humanities. There is no mention of any of the allegations which were made against him.

To this day, Moretti teaches at EPFL, where he remains in close contact with students. “No one has even slapped his hand,” Latta claims. “Certainly not Stanford. They claim that because he raped me when I was at UC Berkeley, but not at Stanford, that they are not responsible and that it is somehow not their place to take further action.”

In Latta’s piece for Entropy, she mentioned the story of another person—“presumably at Stanford,” she wrote—who was assaulted by Moretti. When SP asked her to clarify these statements, she confirmed that “more than one” Stanford-affiliated individual has yet to come forward due to the allegations.

“Has Stanford created an environment in which victims of sexual assault can feel safe coming forward?” she said. “Absolutely not.”

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In early 2018, Chu met with senior university officials, hoping to gain some clarity regarding Stanford’s handling of the Fliegelman case. In her words, it was a far cry from the dialogue she had envisioned having with the English Department—and Stanford—following the accusations she and several other students had made. Although Chu had requested to meet with then–Department Chair Alex Woloch, Stanford sent two other individuals: the General Counsel and the director of the Sexual Harassment Policy Office.

Chu remembered wondering why the Department Chair Alex Woloch wasn’t present: she had, after all, requested to meet with him personally. In an open letter on Facebook, Chu had written that Woloch was present when Fliegelman first began to make his nonconsensual advances. He was, in her words, complicit and responsible for Fliegelman’s behavior.

Woloch refused to respond directly to inquiries from SP. All questions, he wrote to us, were to be directed to University spokesperson EJ Miranda. Miranda offered little explanation as to why Woloch himself was not present the meeting with Chu despite her requests. He merely referred back to University policy which stated that academic departments would not conduct their own internal investigations: because the English Department was not conducting an investigation, there was no reason for Woloch to be present.

And yet Chu had not asked for an investigation: her original inquiries to Stanford asked for a “dialogue” with the English Department regarding its treatment of sexual misconduct cases. According to Chu, however, no members of the English Department were present at the 2018 meeting.

The email ended an addendum which appeared to defend Woloch. “There has never been a formal complaint against Professor Woloch by Dr. Chu,” Miranda wrote. “Professor Woloch has consistently maintained that he had no knowledge of an issue of sexual harassment between the two and that he is in no way responsible for Professor Fliegelman’s actions.”

Since she made her initial accusations, Chu’s expectations for Stanford have changed. At first, she had hoped for an apology—not only for Stanford’s lenient punishment, but for its decision to celebrate Fliegelman’s work as they had following his passing: it seemed almost as if Stanford had willfully forgotten his suspension when it memorialized Jay Fliegelman.

Even now, though, Chu still hopes to have an open dialogue with Stanford regarding its treatment of sexual harassment and assault cases. Later in 2018, Chu made a $50 donation to Stanford requesting the aforementioned dialogue. She has since requested a full copy of the investigation report detailing the case against Fliegelman as well as the letter of censure he received. Chu was denied both the letter and the full report and was instead provided with a summary of the case—a response which, according to Miranda, is standard university procedure.

After reading the case summary, Chu was left with more questions than answers: the summary noted that Fliegelman had been found guilty of sexual harassment and nothing more. There was no mention of the word “rape” or of Chu’s hospitalization, even though the report noted that Fliegelman forced himself onto Chu. Although Chu initially requested a full copy of the investigation report, she later offered to cease all requests if Stanford donated one million dollars to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN)—a request which Stanford has ignored.

By contrast, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), whose Graduate Student Caucus had named its “Excellence in Mentorship” Award after Fliegelman, came forward with a public apology immediately after hearing the allegations. To this day, its webpage describing the criteria for submitting the award contains a note explaining the Graduate Student Caucus’s decision to remove Fliegelman’s name from the award. “We deeply regret and sincerely apologize for the violence enacted in the 2009 naming of our Graduate Student Mentorship Award in honor of Jay Fliegelman, and we are grateful to Professor Chu for coming forward with her experience,” the note reads.

Chu spotlighted ASECS’s email in her follow-up piece for ASAP/Journal. Many students at Stanford, including the graduate students of the English Department, expressed their support for Chu’s cause. Provost Persis Drell even made a personal contribution to RAINN. Nonetheless, no institution—academic or otherwise—has opened a new public investigation into the behavior of either Moretti or Fliegelman in the wake of #MeToo.Unsurprisingly, both Latta and Chu ended their emails to SP decrying Stanford’s—and the academic world’s—response to #MeToo. “Faculty sexual harassment is still a big problem, and the universities still have their heads in the sand,” Latta wrote. “It often seems as though no one is listening.”

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Kyle Wang, a freshman studying English and computer science, is a staff writer for Stanford Politics.