Nothing.
Last week the school paid for its laissezfaire attitude. Settling a five-year-old lawsuit, the university issued a humbling public apology and agreed to pay Dr. Jean Jew $60,000 in back pay, $126,000 in damages and $896,000 in fees and expenses to her attorney. “Dr. Jew deserves our apologies and our respect for her stand " concluded Iowa’s president Hunter Rawlings III.
The case has created sharp divisions in the university community. Jew’s supporters thought the school should have settled sooner–as an example to other institutions involved in sexual-harassment suits. Others argued that settling the case limited academic freedom and freedom of speech on campus. The suit has brought much negative publicity to Iowa City, a town proud of its reputation as a liberal, sophisticated community. Last month The Des Moines Register printed a full page of excerpts from a federal district court ruling in Jew’s favor and urged university officials to give up their plan to appeal. “It would be an outrage to delay justice . . . a moment longer,” the Register said in an accompanying editorial.
In her suit, Jew claimed that a fellow anatomy professor, Robert Tomanek, spread a rumor that she was having an affair with Terence Williams, a former chairman of the department. Williams had been a professor at Tulane University in New Orleans before taking the Iowa job in 1973; Jew met him when she was a medical student there. She and two male doctors came to Iowa with Williams; Jew became a tenured assistant professor in 1979.
No comment: In a 34-page ruling issued in late August, U.S. district Judge Harold Vietorwrote that Tomanek “told faculty, graduate students and staff members of the department, sometimes in locker-room language, that Dr. Jew had been observed having sexual intercourse with Dr. Williams in Williams’s office, that she was a ‘slut,’ that she and Dr. Williams were having an affair, that they had been seen coming out of a motel together, and that Dr. Jew had received preferential treatment based on a sexual relationship with Dr. Williams.” Tomanek is still at the university; he declined to comment. In a 1985 defamation lawsuit brought by Jew, a jury returned a $35,000 verdict against Tomanek.
Others in the department joked about her ethnic background. Jew is an American of Chinese descent. Explicit sex-based graffiti about her appeared on the walls of the department’s men’s room when she was being evaluated for promotion. In 1979, another professor, apparently drunk, yelled at her as she walked down a hallway in the department, calling her a “slut,” a “bitch” and a “whore.”
Before filing suit, Jew protested several times to university officials. She says they told her to endure the insults; her life might be “hell,” but she was assured she would continue to progress. Last week she said that “the hardest part of all is still to come”–correcting the problem. “It’s so much easier to hand over money than to do what’s right.” Rawlings promised that the school would “provide a hostility-free environment=for Dr. Jew,” and “not tolerate” any other cases of harassment. That’s a tough assignment, and one that no university can afford to fail.
