Last year, the University of Wisconsin System very publicly launched a new policy against "passing the harasser" on to unwitting institutions. It said it would disclose substantiated misconduct findings when contacted for employee reference checks. The system also put checks in place to guard against being passed someone else's harassers.
Around the same time, the University of California, Davis, more quietly established its own pilot policy on faculty reference checks. Experts say this kind of policy is still extremely rare in academe -- but that that will soon change.
A year into its pilot, Davis officials are ready to talk about it. Provost Philip Kass, who recently testified about the policy during a Congressional hearing on harassment in the sciences, said Wednesday that he and colleagues sought ways to prevent and otherwise address issues of sexual misconduct on campus.
And they started thinking about how it's "possible for faculty to move between universities without the incoming university knowing about substantiated findings and discipline for any reason at a prior university."
K-12 school districts already are "well aware" of this problem, Kass said. But colleges and universities are another story -- even though examples abound of professors disciplined for misconduct moving on to new campuses to harass more students or colleagues. Ultimately, Davis adopted a new reference check program to "help prevent us from hiring faculty without the ability to evaluate such historic infractions." ...
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