The world has changed in only a few weeks and it now seems to be a legitimate question to ask a powerful politician or bureaucrat if he/she has ever been the subject of a sexual harassment complaint. In a prior time that would have been like asking “Do you beat your wife?” but apparently metaphorically and literally a lot of wives have been beaten and the new inquiry has developed a certain instant legitimacy.
To avoid a witch hunt, perhaps the correct question should be instead, “Have you ever been found to have committed sexual harassment?” since an accusation is just that.
Among those in high
public positions in Texas who have declined to answer that pregunta recently is
William McRaven, chancellor of the University of Texas System, with 14 institutions and 234,000
students under his authority; the leaders of Texas A&M System, Texas Tech
System and Texas State University. House Speaker Joe Straus was at
first unforthcoming regarding any issues in the House of Representative—his
press person Jason Embry was asked before Straus announced he would not seek
reelection and the Speaker’s Office took ten days to respond no the Speaker
himself has not done it and Speaker Straus has "no information
responsive" to the issue of sexual harassment among the 150 members and
hundreds of staff of the House. But Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick who is also President
of the Texas Senate and the man who feminists in the state most love to hate,
replied without hesitation, through Secretary of the Senate Patsy Spaw who said
in an email that there have been no confirmed cases of sexual harassment in the
Senate during Governor Patrick’s tenure. Ms. Spaw also said no money has been paid in
settlements. A week out Speaker Straus had yet to respond in any way,
especially to that more revealing question, if the state coffers paid out state dollars to settle any
sexual harassment cases during his tenure in office. Stats may lie in a way
that a trail of money leaving the State Treasury does not.
The Texas Public Information Act is not helpful when looking at private industry like movie-making but it should have revealed more in the public domain, especially UT’s response, than it did. Chancellor McRaven has gotten a lot of press about ending sexual improprieties on the campuses he supervises but in response to an open records request his General Counsel’s Office said Admiral McRaven maintains no data on sexual harassment at individual campuses. His lawyers responded with stats regarding UT System Office (about 900 employees) citing two cases but not detailing any money paid by System or individual campuses—payments which would presumably have to be approved in Austin, by the UT Regents. But only if over $1 million. "Please note," Admiral McRaven's lawyers informed me, "that while UT System might maintain some information regarding complaints of sexual harassment by faculty or administrators at the institutions, not all complaints and/or outcomes would be maintained by UT System, and UT System does not maintain a list of faculty or administrators who have been disciplined for sexual harassment." Why not? Admiral McRaven may have a reason but it's certainly a fair question.
Ditto in College Station at the state’s other flagship institution of higher education. The general counsel of Texas A&M System headquarters, with 11 campuses and 143,000 students, said the same thing, that A&M leadership doesn’t keep stats on what’s happening at individual campuses, on the sexual harassment front. (A&M does admit however to paying more than $100,000 in the last two years to settle such cases, while Texas Tech says there have been a handful of confirmed cases recently, most involving Tech-employed physicians, but no money paid out.) None of these responses seems likely, frankly, but lying in response to open records requests, which was formerly an art form, has become more brazen under the lax enforcement of Attorney General Ken Paxton.
"We have no responsive records and nothing further to say on this subject," was the rather testy response of Texas State University System (eight institutions and 42,000 students) in an email written by Assistant Vice Chancellor Therese Sternenberg. Asking university leaders personally seems fair in this instance: for example UT Austin President Gregory Fenves comes from the University of California’s flagship campus, Berkeley, which has been embroiled in a series of harassment claims in recent years. A UC regent just resigned after being accused of sexual harassment. Fenves' press person Gary Susswein said in an email that Dr. Fenves has never been accused at UT, UC, "or anywhere else" but he wants $200 to release the university's stats, which sounds like using administrative charges to avoid disclosure, which is illegal. But we digress. Also at UT's flagship in Austin, Dr. Clay Johnston, Dean of the startup Dell School of Medicine said he has never been accused. Like Fenves, Johnston is a UC product, this time from California’s exclusive healthcare campus, in San Francisco, which has been source of much of the UC's most recent contribution to the racism and sexual harassment debate. The San Francisco Chronicle just reported that UCSF fired its chief harassment investigator, earlier this year, after she falsified dates and hid files from state auditors, which goes back to a time when Dean Johnston was a high official on the UC San Francisco campus. Berkeley gets all the headlines for bad practices but it is actually UCSF, led by Australian researcher Sam Hawgood, which has had many of the most discriminatory outcomes in healthcare higher ed. To his credit, Dr. Johnston has criticized his old employers.
Admiral McRaven has been less
forthcoming. The retired SEAL-in-Chief just issued a statement on his lack
of interest in running for governor, he travels the country telling audiences
how to change the world (one starts, he says, by making one’s bed in the
morning) and he leads an important institution, in this case a university that has historically been
fertile ground for harassment—sexual, racial and fraternity-related. Notably he
also comes from a position of great power in another institution, the U.S.
Navy, in which the modern issue of sexual harassment was born with the Tailhook
Scandal of 1991, at a convention in Las Vegas, involving 90 victims (men and
women) and featuring naval officers (aviators not SEALS like McRaven) as perps.
The other three Texas university system leaders, John Sharp at A&M, Robert
Duncan at Tech and Brian McCall at Texas State also all came from an
institution, the Texas Legislature, that would seem to be fertile ground for this kind of wrongdoing, with 181 very powerful men and women and a host of subservient
staff and lobbyists. Except, at the very outset, the word from the Capitol is
that nothing like that goes on in Austin on the north end of Congress Avenue. One former member mentioned a former
lawmaker, a black guy from Houston, who exposed himself to his aide in his
office, a few years back. Mostly, speaking of sex, unlike what the Times' all-girl crew found in Hollywood, the Live Music Capital of the World only features the consensual kind.
There is a rumor, as yet unverified and
possibly unverifiable, that a male State Senator was caught this session in the
bathroom of a hotel, a few blocks from Congress Avenue, getting a blowjob from
someone not his wife. What's the big deal? That Senator is Caucasian, a
Democrat and from an urban district, not that that matters.
There’s actually nothing wrong with sex in a public place, it seems to me, unless it wasn't discreet or coercion was involved. A few years back a white female member was said to have had sex with a black lobbyist on the floor of the House of Representatives, literally, when not in session, obviously. Literally on the floor, on the great seal or whatever. This liaison, like the unnamed Senator's clandestine hummer, was Democratic action, interracial as well, not that there's anything wrong with that. The legislator is no longer in the House but the lobbyist who boned her is still influential and refuses comment on how their hips allegedly came to meet.
Decades ago, a Capitol staffer, this is absolutely true, set out to have sex with every member of the Legislature and made it into the sixties, if memory serves, before she was uncovered, so to speak. But the Texas Capitol was majority-Democratic then and, we are told, D’s are more prone to sins of the flesh than R’s. It seems unlikely that harassment is totally absent in our modern-day Republican-dominated state government. And universities are particularly likely locales. Just a few months ago UT Austin bid a tearful farewell to Vice President for Diversity Gregory J. Vincent, who left to become president of Hobart and William Smith Colleges in upstate New York. The reason for Vincent's departure has evolved and now appears to be that he engaged in a series of extramarital affairs with women from campus and used public funds to woo his conquests. The relationships were reported, once again, to be consensual, but still illustrate the nexus between sex and money in the public domain. Regarding this matter Mr. Susswein has refused comment as has Dr. Vincent himself.
A female House member mentioned recently that Speaker Straus’ leadership at the Capitol has not seemed to be the kind that lends itself to anything in flagrante. Straus is a big family guy and for that reason the Speaker’s silence was not heartening. We have yet to include surveys of much of the gun-toting side of Texas government, including the National Guard which is refusing to answer any harassment questions at all. The last executive director of the Texas Military Department was removed for sexual harassment more than a year before the MeToo allegations were made public. In law enforcement both the Highway Patrol and Texas Rangers, under the umbrella of the legendary Texas Department of Public Safety, have a long and ugly history, actually. The just prior Director of DPS was removed after retaliating against a female Highway Patrol staffer who complained that a sergeant exposed himself to her. The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of appeals ruled in her favor, opining that the alleged flash by the sergeant could not be proven but that the retaliation against her for making the accusation was clear. The DPS Director before that was removed for chasing a female employee around the office. You couldn't make this up. She got $100,000 as settlement, by the way, which seems to be the most popular monetary penalty, involving the State of Texas, or maybew the stautory limit. DPS is still described, even by other cops, as a white male environment with sexist and or racist tendencies. Not to be critical. With 6,000 commissioned gun-carrying officers DPS is also a semi-rigid military hierarchy in which women are present but mostly powerless in the upper ranks. Macho is rule one, especially among the Rangers. The likeliest bombshell on the harassment front after the National Guard is the prison system, the euphemistically-named Texas Department of Criminal Justice, with 150,000 inmates living in the most dependent position imaginable, across the state.
A month after my first open records request, TDCJ lawyer Sharbel Sfeir was still trying to convince me that the Department of Criminal Justice didn't understand what "total payments made to settle sexual harassment cases" means, or "total number of sexual harassment cases" meant. What it meant was a big problem in the state's prisons: when the stats were finally released they showed, in the past two and a half years, 870 complaints of sexual harassment among employees, per Sharbel Sfeir, and 303 complaints by prisoners against guards. It's unclear from TDCJ's statement whether these were confirmed or merely alleged. More interesting is who in power has answered the question openly.
President Fenves at UT did, as noted. Austin’s acting police chief Brian Manley who is being considered for the top cop’s job just said no, no accusations have been made against him. Isn't that a fair question to ask of a man would be Chief of Police? Like the National Guard, City officials are stalling, unwilling to say if they've made any payments to settle with victims. The City has appealed to Attorney General Paxton in order to be permitted to keep silent. General Paxton doesn't like City of Austin officials but he likes government disclosure even less. In one of the few instances in which the capital city's elected officials, who have a reputation for being holier than thou, actually appear more enlightened than public officials in the rest of the state, Travis County Judge and chief executive Sarah Eckhardt answered that she has not, either. Women need to speak up in this regard too. Times have changed for everybody. It may not be the answer that is as important as the asking.
