It didn’t matter if she knew you — if you were a professor and Asian American, you were a potential target.
many instructors, Janani Umamaheswar occasionally checks Rate My Professors to monitor her course reviews. The site offers a loose barometer of how you are doing as a teacher, especially early in a career in academia. Since users post anonymously, including criticisms and rants, the site can also become a fount of anxiety.posted the criticism? They might run down the mental list of students who received low grades or did not get a requested extension or rarely spoke in class.
They assumed the company complied. But a short time later, comments in the same tone resurfaced under a new class code. Umamaheswar reached out to Rate My Professors again. Weeks passed. More posts emerged. An earlier one read: “Emailed me a bribe offering a grade boost if I did her a favor of attending a meeting she was hosting. I did not respond because accepting a bribe is illegal.”
Then, in December, police from Southern Connecticut State University contacted Umamaheswar’s department. The chair called Umamaheswar to inform her that a student had filed a police report against her and two other professors on campus. The accusations, like the Rate My Professors posts, were baseless. But they blindsided Umamaheswar anyway. As the news sunk in, Umamaheswar and Sinha learned that the other two accused professors from Southern Connecticut had separately filed police reports against S. for harassment. Umamaheswar decided against doing so herself. She was, after all, a professor who studied the law, social inequality, and incarceration.
A month later, the pandemic shut down college campuses, and classes shifted online. S. seemed to quiet, too. A year passed. Umamaheswar accepted a job as an assistant professor at George Mason University, and the family moved to Virginia. Sinha would continue to teach remotely, later commuting to teach at Hofstra University on Long Island. For the next year, they did not hear of any other letters or harassing emails from S. As far as they knew, they were moving past it all.
Concerns about professors being stalked or harmed on campuses are evolving and becoming more amorphous with online threats, but they are not new: In 2002, three nursing professors at the University of Arizona were killed by a student who had harassed and stalked them for a year. Four years later, a student at Loyola University spent a year making harassing phone calls to a professor before attempting to burn down his house.
found that questions of whether professors are at risk of being stalked by their students had received little attention. Yet the 52 faculty members interviewed for the study reported 87 concerning incidents, ranging from repeated unwanted messages, following them around, obsessively watching them, sexually coercive behavior toward the faculty member, endangerment, threats, and attempts to harm or even kill them.
It took a moment to process: thousands of tweets had been posted under the S.’s name. Most were racist, sexual, vulgar, and violent. Little of the ranting made sense. The user tweeted at all hours, sometimes nearly a hundred times a day. And the tweets seemed to focus solely on three people: Umamaheswar, Sinha, and the former colleague who alerted them to the account, the Vassar professor Catherine Tan.
The account had started posting in October of 2021. Seven months of tweets. Sinha went to work capturing the images as Umamaheswar began writing letters to her current administration, as well as to Vassar on behalf of Tan, alerting them to her history with S. Under the Trump administration, some of these policies were rolled back and changed, allowing accused individuals to receive more due process protections. Many universities have historically mishandled student allegations of rape and sexual misconduct on campus, and Title IX laws became a crucial tool in curbing discrimination and harassment against students and employees based on sex.
He captured the images for legal reasons and also so his wife would not have to read them. “On one level, it has become so ordinary, just part of my day, to read her outrageous, racist views. But at the same time, it never stops being outrageous,” he said. Sinha pulled back from using social media himself. He rarely tweeted anymore.
The tweets kept coming, sometimes trickling over to other professors online. Sinha took a screenshot of a tweet from S. on November 9th, 2022 — this time made to an Asian American assistant professor of sociology who was then at the University of Chicago and who Tan follows on Twitter. It read: “Hey can you stop stalking and sexually harassing me on Twitter.”
“They’re just racist Asian supremacists who stand with anyone and anything that even looks somewhat Asian and they don’t like white women and will abuse white women in the name of Asian nationalism.” But officials at Sinha, Umamaheswar, and Tan’s new institutions did not have a long history or record of all the issues they had dealt with in the past. The burden of evidence — to alert new or prospective employers or to warn colleagues and social media friends about their potential stalker — would fall on them for as long as S. is allowed to keep stalking and harassing.
On February 23rd, 2020, S. wrote on Facebook: “I filed a report that I was being harassed, stalked, defamed and studied by my professor and all I got was a joke of an investigation and this stupid legal warning.” She continued: “The university is gaslighting me. Most of the officials I dealt with did NOT follow proper Title IX policy procedure throughout the process and has consequently made my experience much worse.
S. managed to circumvent Vassar’s digital barriers using the online form on the school’s Title IX page. Tan, who received a copy of the email, explained: “She wrote this long letter accusing me of sexually harassing her, forcing her to be a lesbian.” S. signed with her full name. Tan was done allowing a platform that had enabled her harassment to keep getting away with it. She decided to try to take control herself. Tan began to type. “I have a stalker,” Tan. “Recently, she contacted my employer in effort to get me fired. She is racist, and has begun contacting ASIAN ACADEMICS connected w/ me on this platform. So, if that is you, there’s a chance she will send a similar letter to your employer.
“I’m not going to stop tweeting. I’m not going to adjust my life for this,” Tan told me. “I have my book coming out at the end of this year. I don’t want this person to be in the back of my head. And most of the time, she isn’t.” But now and then, Tan learns about the latest threat, post, or racial slur, and it upsets her all over again.
This can also make harassment more intimidating to report. If you don’t feel supported on the ground level, you can feel even more vulnerable at the top institutional level. “We’re all in different states,” Tan told me. “It’s not easy to arrest somebody. Unless she tries to physically harm us, there’s not much we can do.”
My department, program directors, and our humanities dean supported and backed me when I raised worries. But when other officials got involved, including the school police, the counseling center, and a campus dean, I was made to feel like I was being an alarmist. My own self-doubt crept in at first, and I found myself asking:“I don’t find him scary,” one campus official working on the case said. Instead, I was informed we would make a plan to help this individual graduate.
Once the school year ended and the student graduated, my worries about his behavior dissipated but never fully went away. In the online world, other professors have not been able to move past their own harassment so easily. “Deans and chairs are often unaware at all of how online abuse is actually affecting their faculty,” Victoria O’Meara told me.
“It’s not really possible anymore to be an active member of your research community without being on social media,” O’Meara said. Yet existing workplace harassment policies have yet to figure out how to prevent or protect faculty and staff from abuse, she explained, especially if the culprit is not someone under the authority of the institution.
Sinha tried to take screenshots when he could, but this time, he noticed S. would delete her comments a few hours after posting. “She’s still obsessed, and it’s not going away.”
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