The strange case of UCLA Professor Priyanga Amarasekare continues. Lot's of national attention. No comment from anyone who knows anything. The Chronicle of Higher Education - which we reproduce from UCOP Daily News Clips - revisits the story with an emphasis on the impact of the case on graduate students. The person most involved, Prof. Amarasekare, isn't talking and, perhaps more significantly, isn't litigating - at least as far as your truly can tell. (Once someone litigates, documents have to be produced, testimony has to occur, etc., etc.)
A U of British Columbia faculty member has created a GoFundMe page for Prof. Amarasekare which currently has over $36,000 in donations: https://www.gofundme.com/f/dr-priyanga-amarasekare. The text of that page reads:
Please consider supporting Priyanga Amarasekare, a minority female faculty member at the University of California Los Angeles, who has been sanctioned by the UCLA Chancellor without clear and just cause. Since July 2022 she has had no livelihood, no health insurance, and no retirement benefits. She is months away from the foreclosure of her home, and she is struggling to support her two children.
The sanctions, which include a one-year suspension and a 20% salary reduction for two subsequent years, are typically reserved for the most egregious forms of misconduct such as scientific misconduct and Title IX violations, of which Professor Amarasekare is not guilty. UCLA has forbidden her to divulge the nature of the charges or the report of the Privilege and Tenure Hearing committee, which makes it impossible for her to demonstrate that the punishment is severely disproportionate. The secrecy surrounding the charges and the sanctions is destroying her reputation, jeopardizing her chances of obtaining employment elsewhere...
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The Chronicle of Higher Education, Katherine Mangan, 9-12-23
The first clue that the trajectories of their doctoral studies were about to veer off course was in July 2022 when emails to their longtime adviser suddenly bounced. The second, for Tanner Dulay, Rosa McGuire, and Madeline Cowen, erased any doubt. It came in the form of an email, on July 8, 2022, from Tracy Johnson, dean of life sciences, informing them that Priyanga Amarasekare — the researcher they’d come to the University of California at Los Angeles to work with, the mentor with whom they had co-authored soon-to-be published papers, the professor they were counting on to chair their dissertation committees and write job-recommendation letters — was suddenly “on leave” through the end of the coming academic year. “The punishment made it appear that she had done something terribly wrong, but no one was saying what it was.”
Amarasekare, a tenured professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, would no longer be able to advise them, Johnson told the students. It soon became clear that they wouldn’t be able to communicate with her at all, even as they were putting the final touches on conference presentations and working through the kinds of complex mathematical equations and analyses she specialized in. Their adviser was strictly off limits, and no one would tell them why.
“Our first thought was we were hoping she was OK,” Dulay, now a fifth-year doctoral student, said in an interview with The Chronicle. “We couldn’t figure out any reason she’d suddenly drop off the world and not tell us and leave us completely unprepared.”
The next 14 months would become a blur of confusing email exchanges with administrators, copies of which the graduate students shared with The Chronicle, and failed attempts to figure out why Amarasekare had been erased from their academic lives. “In her capacity as your research adviser, Priyanga is not able to provide advising,” Johnson reiterated in August 2022.
The frustration, and the questions, escalated to the point over the past few weeks that the three graduate students decided to speak publicly. They’d waited more than a year to resume work with their adviser, but when July 1 came around, their emails to her were still bouncing and she hadn’t returned to campus. Through news accounts and word of mouth, Dulay, McGuire, and Cowen began piecing together what had happened to Amarasekare after a protracted dispute with her colleagues. Last year she was suspended for a year without pay or benefits, her salary docked by 20 percent for two years after that. She was also banned from communicating with her students, entering her lab or anywhere else on campus, or accessing her National Science Foundation-funded research, some of which examines how rising temperatures affect the survival of insect species, and biodiversity more broadly.
“The punishment made it appear that she had done something terribly wrong, but no one was saying what it was,” Dulay said. “Even if that were the case, there’s no reason to let all of her students fall through the cracks.”
The Chronicle sought comment on the students’ complaints from Johnson, as well as from Michael Alfaro, chair of the department of ecology and evolutionary biology, but got no response. Instead, the university issued a statement Friday that began: “The success and well-being of our graduate students is of the utmost importance to us. Generally, when graduate students encounter challenges as they work toward their degrees, including when their faculty adviser is unavailable, we prioritize the student’s academic needs and make every effort to support the continuation and completion of their research and their degree.”
Amarasekare is well known in her field, the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and, last year, the highest honor given by the Ecological Society of America — the Robert H. MacArthur Award. In an introduction to the scientific plenary address the UCLA scholar delivered in August at the society’s annual meeting in Portland, Ore., she was introduced as “the rare ecologist whose work is simultaneously broad and deep and has important effects on every area it touches from coexistence theory to climate change.”
That conference was an opportunity to step out from her extended exile while her future remained mired in secrecy back home. The university has forbidden her from discussing the proceedings that led to sanctions against her, and she declined comment for this article. Among those in attendance was Casey terHorst, a professor of biology at California State University at Northridge. “Priyanga’s suspension was meant to be lifted on July 1,” he wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “But they’ve now decided that she is a threat to campus safety (um…what??) and she has been placed on involuntary leave.” In cutting her off from her work and her students, terHorst said in an interview, “I think they’ve made bad decisions and they’re doubling down on those bad decisions.”
Citing privacy protections, campus officials would not confirm reports from Amarasekare’s students and other faculty members in the field of ecology who’ve spoken with her that, after her yearlong unpaid suspension ended July 1, she was placed on involuntary leave — paid but with a 20-percent pay cut. Her supporters reported that she was still cut off from her lab and the resources that she said she needed to advise students remotely, and that she was facing possible additional charges.
The university’s policies on imposing involuntary leaves suggest that further disciplinary action is expected. “Involuntary leave with pay,” the policy says, can be handed down by the chancellor if “there is a strong risk that the accused faculty member’s continued assignment to regular duties or presence on campus will cause immediate and serious harm to the university community or impede the investigation of wrongdoing or in situations where the faculty member’s conduct represents a serious crime or felony that is the subject of investigation by a law-enforcement agency.”
A native of Sri Lanka, Amarasekare has been an outspoken critic of what she sees as discrimination against minority faculty members at UCLA. On an email list set up in 2020 for the department of ecology and evolutionary biology, she accused the department of denying her promotions and leadership opportunities granted instead to white men, and her supporters contend that she’s being punished for complaining. With her blunt style in criticizing colleagues and department policies, and questioning who is the most deserving of promotions, she’s been a polarizing figure within the department.
Last year a faculty committee found her responsible for violating the Faculty Code of Conduct. Highly redacted documents obtained by The Chronicle revealed that the violations involved breaching confidentiality about personnel matters and “making evaluations of the professional competence of faculty members by criteria not directly reflective of professional performance.” The Academic Senate’s Committee on Privilege and Tenure recommended written censure and a potential salary reduction if the alleged violations continued.
When the matter was referred to the office of UCLA’s chancellor, Gene D. Block, the sanctions escalated with no explanation given for the more severe punishment.
Finding a new adviser is no small feat for graduate students who have been working closely for years under the same faculty member whose specific expertise lines up with their dissertation topics. At the time of her suspension in 2022, Amarasekare had three Ph.D. students and about a dozen undergraduate research students, and she served on the dissertation committees of two doctoral graduate students.
The university first urged the students to work with Alfaro, the department chair, to find other advisers. They were initially reluctant to switch, given how far along they were in their doctoral studies doing highly specialized work they argued no one else could adequately supervise. Eventually, Dulay told The Chronicle, they were “force assigned” to other faculty members but left mostly on their own to continue their research.
The university explained in its statement what happens when students resist being reassigned: “If a student is unwilling or unable to participate in the process of identifying an adviser, the department assigns an adviser to support the student, so they can remain active in their graduate program. “The department makes every effort to identify researchers with expertise to support the research or adapt the research to the wealth of expertise found within the university.” That includes providing letters of support and making sure students have access to needed supplies and equipment.
On July 1, the day her one-year suspension should have ended, the students reached out to Amarasekare, and still, their emails bounced. Alarmed, they emailed Johnson, the life-sciences dean on July 3, but received no answer. Dulay sent another email three days later expressing frustration at being kept in the dark and outlining why it was essential that they be allowed to meet with Amarasekare and “pick up where we left off a year ago.” Johnson replied that she was “awaiting instructions from campus administration.” Finally, on July 20, Johnson relayed the information that Amarasekare had been given permission, if she wished, to advise the students about their dissertations, conferences, and in a few other ways. The contact, Johnson later clarified, could only be remote. And no, she couldn’t discuss “personnel matters as they relate to Dr. Amarasekare.”
Working remotely, said Dulay, would prove challenging, given the nature of the research he’d come to UCLA to pursue. Dulay grew up in Pacifica, Calif., a coastal city just below San Francisco, working at scout camps, leading hikes, and learning and teaching about the natural world. As an undergraduate at the University of California at Santa Cruz, he studied ecology and astrophysics, where, in a lab, he developed a passion for using mathematical models “to uncover and explain patterns in nature that are hidden to the observer but drive and shape species interactions and biodiversity.” In an email, he added, “That led me to want to work with Priyanga, one of the best ecological theoreticians currently working.” His work, Dulay said, involves complex analyses of mathematical models, and the periodic 40-minute Zoom sessions he was finally, in July, allowed to participate in with Amarasekare were no substitute for sitting alongside her and working through problems.
He recalled that she told him that, without a salary for a year, she’d lost access to the university’s extended Zoom sessions and had to downgrade to a lower-speed internet service that, he said, frequently cut out when they were in the middle of brainstorming problems. Aside from the difficulty of continuing with his research, “There’s no one else in our department who does the work she does and no one with the same level of prestige she has in her field,” said Dulay, who hopes to become a university professor. That’s why the graduate students were so insistent, he said, in pushing for permission for letters of recommendation, which the university finally granted in July...
(The article continues with similar problems for grad students.)
Full story at https://www.chronicle.com/article/when-a-professor-disappears-and-no-one-will-tell-you-why.
Again, in reading the above material, keep in mind that no litigation has been filed.
