Media Storm Investigates: Are Universities Protecting Predatory Professors?

Situation A: Over a dozen sexual misconduct allegations against one male professor result in a) no further disciplinary action for him and b) several female staff resigning in protest.

Situation B: A leaky pipeline for women in academia sees the female-male ratio slip from over 50/50 at postgraduate studies to 30/70 at the highest rank of professor.

Our hypothesis: Situation A and Situation B are connected.

Media Storm investigation

At Media Storm, we have been investigating how universities handle sexual misconduct cases when their prestigious professors are at the centre of the scandal.

To borrow the resigning words of one female professor, what we found, at times, “reads like a textbook on how to turn a complaints process into a gauntlet, into a warning to women not to challenge the behaviour of men and the institutions that protect them”.

Yet this is not a story of female victimhood, so much as universities shooting themselves in the foot.

As a society, we talk increasingly about the impact of sexual violence on victims (rightly so), but what does it do to the institutions failing to prevent it? Are they draining themselves of, or at least side-lining, female talent — and with it, not just the academic excellence they offer but the most rigorous guardians against sexual abuse for the students entrusted to universities’ care?

Research in this area is problematically thin, but one standout US study from 2023 established that the most likely reason women leave academia is because they feel pushed out by a harsh workplace climate, in which harassment is likely. For men (who leave at far lower rates), they more commonly leave for better opportunities, or better work-life balance.

But while too many women are being pushed out of academia altogether by sexual misconduct, plenty simply move on to other institutions with better-safeguarding reputations. Here, it is not the women who lose out, but the universities they leave behind.

There were “various reasons” Professor Johanna Thoma joined a wave of women leaving The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in the wake of Situation A (referenced above) in 2023, but the situation “certainly didn’t help”.

At the time, Thoma was supporting a student in her own faculty who confided in Thoma that she had been abused by a male staff member. The revelation that a separate professor had survived over a dozen allegations unscathed left Thoma “in an impossible situation”.

“On the one hand, you don’t want to pressure [the victim] to come forward, and can’t reassure them about the process in the face of legitimate doubts… but at the same time, you want to protect women who are currently at the university—and there’s nothing you can do about it without there being a formal procedure.”

Thoma felt that rather than being appreciated by the university for the safeguarding service she and other female staff were providing by supporting victims alleging staff abuse, she was “made to feel, at best, less valued and supported than the men accused of sexual misconduct”.

Thoma, like nine other women at varying stages of their academic careers who spoke to Media Storm on and off the record, has endured sexual misconduct herself by a senior male faculty member at some point during her academic career. Across our sources, these accounts ranged from coercive relationships to serious sexual assault.

Another woman, a senior lecturer at the University of Bristol, argues for a total ban on staff-student relationships due to her own experiences as a PhD student (at a different university). She began her PhD in a covert relationship with her supervisor, a man nearly twice her age, and who she says pressured her to keep it secret against her better judgement. 

He would say to me, if you reveal that we’re in a relationship, nobody will ever take your PhD admission seriously. And there is a very slim chance you’ll be a successful academic because people will judge you

Former PhD student who was in a relationship with her supervisor

“It was very scary,” she added to Media Storm. “I felt like, if people found out, it would really ruin my life.”

The result was not simply to seclude her from loved ones and him from accountability, but to cause her to doubt her entire professional viability as an early-career academic. “It took me a long time to really accept that I am actually a good academic and I do deserve this.”

On the whole, sexual violence at universities by staff is a neglected area of research and action. “The issue of gender-based violence in universities has only really been on the policy agenda since about 2010,” explained Dr Anna Bull, “since then, research and practice has focused on students — but staff have been forgotten.”

Bull co-founded The 1752 Group, a UK-based organisation dedicated to ending staff sexual misconduct in higher education, and which has documented the “severe career impact” of experiencing and reporting sexual misconduct in academia.

“It’s very possible that people are being pushed out of their jobs as a result,” she affirmed, “both of the harassment, but also as a result of the institutions being unable to keep them safe if they report it”.

It was a feeling that her university did, indeed, have a culture of impunity for predatory professors, that drove one LSE student to put the case on Media Storm’s agenda in the first place. “It makes me personally feel really unsafe” — our intern, Camilla, told us — “because it just points out how the institution won’t protect you if something were to happen”.

This feeling is also what drove one of her peers — who asked to be referred to by the pseudonym ‘Charlotte’ — to attempt suicide, following her own rape complaint against another student, in a desperate and devastating bid to pressure LSE into real change.

I was just thinking, is my suffering not enough for them to acknowledge that this is such a flawed system? What does it take for them to see that and change? If I die, would this problem be visible? Would other people start to care?

Charlotte, LSE student

In a move that surprised even her, Charlotte eventually returned to LSE to progress her academic career. What got her back on her feet? A female professor who supported her, and who resigned in the face of allegations made against a male colleague — what we referred to earlier as ‘Situation A’. In her resignation letter, the professor denounced “a culture of discrimination and misogyny” at the university.

“She was so human, so empathetic, unlike other people who adopted this bureaucratic, impersonal tone when they were dealing with me,” remembered Charlotte. “It’s just so unfortunate that she had to leave.”

Charlotte hopes to fill the gap left in her wake: “She really inspires me, I aspire to be someone like her.”

Media Storm’s investigation points to an institutional lack of capacity and will to discipline senior academics — who often afford institutions financial and reputational gain — for abuses of the immense power they hold in the rigid hierarchical structures of academia. This is a systemic problem that stretches beyond any single university.

A spokesperson from LSE said: “LSE is committed to a working and learning environment where people can achieve their full potential free of all types of harassment and violence. We take reports of sexual harassment extremely seriously and encourage any member of the LSE community  who has experienced or witnessed this to get in touch via one of our many channels.”

LSE also detailed a range of measures being taken to “ensure any allegation of misconduct receives a trauma-informed, robust and compassionate response,” following an advisory review LSE commissioned from Rape Crisis South London and Survivors UK.

Media Storm’s investigation, ‘Academia and abuse: Are universities protecting predatory professors’, is out now.