2010s Carleton Spotlight

Bending Over Backward for a Professor with Tenure

Nine sexual misconduct complaints about anthro professor Jay Levi aren’t enough to take him out.  


In October 2016 a student filed a Community Concern Form about tenured Sociology/Anthropology professor Jay Levi. She described multiple encounters with him that had made her feel “trapped or unsafe.” After a review of the case by Mary Dunnewold, an attorney who had worked for the college as a Title IX investigator since 2013, Levi was given a no-contact order. Four days later, the office opened a formal Title IX investigation, interviewing seven additional students with complaints against Levi. He was charged with engaging in “sexually inappropriate conduct, defined as “crude, obscene, or sexually offensive gestures or behavior, or unwelcome sexual comments or communication,” a lesser charge than sexual harassment or assault.
The eight complainants received word in April that the adjudication was complete and Levi had received sanctions, though no further details were provided.
That same day, the Off-Campus Study program announced that Levi’s program in Guatemala and Chiapas for the following year was being canceled for lack of interest. Enrollment had been so low the previous year that the OCS office had taken the unusual step of inviting students from elsewhere–Knox College–to fill it out. 
Levi also announced that he’d be taking the following year off, telling the Carletonian, “I have decided to extend the sabbatical I was already scheduled to take in spring to also include winter and fall.” Interim department chair Clifford Clark, who had recently returned temporarily from retirement, repeated Levi’s explanation. When the Carletonian asked dean of the college Beverly Nagel, a sociology professor and Carleton grad (’75), and the sole adjudicator of cases brought against faculty, if Levi’s departure was related to sexual misconduct, her only response was that no faculty member had been formally suspended. 
During Levi’s leave, in the winter of 2018, a leaflet about his Title IX case was anonymously placed in student mailboxes. Then, in the spring, when students began registering for fall classes, some noticed that the first name on Levi’s course offerings had been changed from Jay to “Jerome.” The new SOAN department chair said this simply reflected Levi’s desire for his catalog listing to be more consistent with his publications, but while such changes were normally made through the dean of the college, neither Nagel nor the registrar acknowledged knowing about it. In a Carletonian op-ed, a student suggested the possibility that Levi was trying to bury his past: “I read the name change as an attempt to rebrand Levi, to cultivate a new, untarnished reputation for him, and to erase students’ associations between him and Title IX.”
When Levi returned in the fall of 2018, his office had been moved from the department in Leighton to Weitz, the old Northfield Middle School building on the edge of campus. Students made their disapproval clear: only four spots were filled of the 25 to 30 openings in each of his three offered classes. However, Levi was also scheduled to teach one of the Argument & Inquiry seminars required for all incoming freshmen. Those students would be assigned to his class based on their ranked subject preferences. They’d be unaware of the controversy and they’d have no way to opt out. One student suggested the unannounced change
on Levi’s course offerings from Jay to “Jerome”
was an attempt to “rebrand.”Under pressure to respond, Dean Nagel told the paper that as Levi wouldn’t be teaching any requirements for the major, no one would be forced to take a course with him, but she demurred about the freshmen, explaining that they could select other A&Is over the summer or switch into a different one during registration. However, the paper also reported, “She did not respond to the question of whether or not the college would inform incoming students of Levi's Title IX violation before the end of registration.” 
After a parent posted on the Carleton parents' Facebook page that her son, who had been assigned to Levi's A&I, had been notified it was canceled, Nagel told the Carletonian that while disciplinary investigations were usually confidential, this time, “because of the speculation and information floating around, we wanted to make sure, insofar as we could, that more accurate details and information were shared.” 
In her official statement on the matter, which she provided only upon request, Nagel said that Levi “expressed regret for his earlier behavior and has been cooperating fully with the college administration to ensure appropriate boundaries are continuing to be observed now and in the future.” 
In October 2019 the Carletonian produced another bombshell. The student who’d filed the initial complaint against Levi in 2016, now a graduate, revealed the details of her complaint: her campus job in the SOAN office had put her in regular contact with Levi, who was “creepy” and made her “feel very uncomfortable.” Once, Levi gave her a copying task, then followed her to the darkened copy room, where he pressed his body up against hers. Another time, Levi “put his hand between my legs and started fondling my thigh three times in rapid succession and was yelling at me at the same time.” The first time, she thought it was an accident, the report says, but ‘the next two times seemed less accidental.’” As a SOAN major, she said, she didn’t feel she could avoid Levi and “was so distraught I didn’t go to work for the first time in my life.” 
The formal investigation into Levi had been opened when, just four days after he was given the no-contact order, he sat down directly behind her in Sayles-Hill and a friend of hers snapped a photo. 
In the spring of 2019, the Carletonian reported that yet another complaint had been filed against Levi, his ninth, for more alleged misconduct in 2016-’17. Dean Nagel finally confirmed that Levi’s previous year-long leave of absence had been part of his sanctions, and over the summer Levi was given the news that he’d be taking another break from teaching. He had to take the following semester off and could return in winter 2020. 
Why did he get to stay at all? A student wrote to the Carletonian in January 2020 to express her dissatisfaction with the system: “Even if 100 percent of the faculty (not to mention students and staff) thought that a faculty member deserved to be suspended or dismissed because of a Title IX violation, but the administrator in charge decided on a more lenient sanction, the faculty would have no institutional power to contest the adjudicator’s decision. No outlet for faculty input, and no appeal.” 
According to the paper, firing a tenured professor required an agreement by the Faculty Judiciary Committee and the college president that the faculty member posed “an immediate and serious danger to the College or any member of the College community." Yet a legal expert contacted by the paper said, “It is exceptionally unusual for a professor who is found to have committed sexual impropriety to remain on faculty," explaining that doing so would magnify the college’s liability if there were any later infractions. However, he went on, “More often than not, colleges and universities will hurriedly dismiss faculty members accused of sexual misconduct, which can result in lawsuits from professors who feel their cases were inadequately investigated. Carleton’s approach, in Levi’s case, has been the opposite.” 

Anthropology professor Jay Levi