At the Where We Stand event a few weeks ago, over 50 students, staff, faculty, and administrators brainstormed ways that KSAS and WSE can put the National Academies of Science recommendations into action.

The suggestions below seems to coalesce around three key themes:

1. Normalize the conversation around these kinds of problems:
   • make it normal in your department to just low-key call out someone who does something inappropriate
   • have OIE give out case studies that show what happened to a person who broke the rules. And then discuss the case studies.
2. Rather than focusing on negative rules and prohibitions (“don’t do this, don’t do that”), foster conversations about our values as an academic community.
3. Foster flexibility & mixed-rank, mixed-department communication at all levels (student and faculty). Wriggle out of the fiercely vertical, hierarchal, and narrow organizational structure we are accustomed to.

We hope you’ll read through these ideas with your own department in mind, and that you will share the suggestions that might work for your own corner of Hopkins academic culture.

NAS rec #1 inclusive environments + #15 entire community responsible

• Importance of training, like bystander training—for all departments
• Help students understand better how to report anonymously
• Have a clear, more transparent process when it comes to reporting transgressions
• Publish & make the campus aware of the different actions that the institution is taking part in when it comes to addressing issues.
• Provide faculty training on gender harassment
• Bring to light aspects of the culture that are derogatory, excluding, or bigoted, and explain why they can be harmful—especially things that are not clear at first glance.
• Better ways of reporting microagression/minor sexist comments that don’t lead to them being dismissed.
• Implement situations that enable pronoun sharing
• Peers can be in a better position to hold one another accountable because inappropriate behavior often isn’t occurring in a formal setting
• Mandatory consent education and bystander intervention training for all students in all Hopkins programs
• Normalization of addressing issues (calling out problematic behaviors/pronouns)

NAS rec #2 Address gender harassment + #6 Support target

• We feel uninformed—especially if a colleague comes to us, or if it’s us. We have training on what to do with student concerns, but not faculty & staff situations
• Simplified version of these processes
• Advocate for target, separate from the investigator
• Publicize possible outcomes of these processes. People might not come forward bc they think they might ruin someone’s career or get them kicked out of school. If you need to change your class schedule, how to do it. Show what mechanisms exist to get out of a bad situation.
• Improve advocacy for reporting students
• Skepticism about the effectiveness of OIE is prevalent
• We need ways to alter existing hierarchies (PI, instructor, supervisor)

NAS rec #3 Move beyond legal compliance to address culture and climate

• Facilitate & encourage and bottom-up approach. If I’m in lab, and someone says something uncool, I need to say something. Express to each other that we support each other. Once things start to change, we can push it toward legal barriers.
• By encouraging this change in our communities, we are able to encourage change to the legal system through our own environments.
• For example, a lot of students don’t know the history of the person, Johns Hopkins. More discussions about that topic so more people understand and think about what THEY stand for.
• Sexual harassment gets weighted more than other things that same person might be doing. But if the sexual aspect is not severe enough, the rest of his egregious behavior gets overlooked because it’s not in OIE’s expertise. Thus the problem gets chopped up into very, very tiny pieces. This person then looks not as toxic as he actually is.
• We need a more holistic approach toward . . . professional bullying, sexual harassment, etcetera.
• Put another way: What about a person who does something that approaches sexual assault, among many other inappropriate, but not officially actionable, things. The assault is deemed not an assault. But it’s awash in all these other actions that contribute to a hostile environment. What do we do?
• What are our values as an institution, and how do we cultivate them? How do we help these values thrive?

NAS rec #4 transparency & accountability + #7 strong, diverse leadership

• Communicate about ways faculty are held accountable
• Suspension w/o pay
• Losing people for your lab
• Losing space, moving your office
• Taking away equipment
• Taking away role (ex, DUS)
• Length of time for OIE to address a case is too long.
• What if you are KSAS but your PI is SOM? Answer: OIE serves everyone.
• How do 3^rd party reports work? Answer: OIE reaches out to the person who experienced it, and sometimes they respond, or not.

 

NAS rec #5 Diffuse the hierarchical & dependent relationship between trainees and faculty

• Train us on how to advise/mentor
• Have an open conversation with grad students about expectations and roles—but not written as a contract. Instead, make it a flexible document to get conversations going
• Mentoring committees for people at all stages
• More than one person for a grad student and postdoc to go to.
• More money for junior people, like postdocs and grad students, so they depend less on their PI
• Peer mentoring – advanced grad students working with grad students earlier in their careers
• Department ombundsman to go to, someone who would not be writing letter of rec
• What are some creative ways to implement accountability? Take away money in response to bad behavior?
• Have conversations about roles, typical paths, power dynamics, and so ont hat normalize the discussion
• In person training (around sexual harassment or discrimination, for example)—not online
• Back away to say, this is everybody’s work and everybody’s responsibility
• [Two points that I didn’t quite catch when I was taking notes, sorry: Communicate from leadership level that . . . and something about ways to support people who want to come forward]

At Where We Stand, we always have themed tables with relevant resources, markers, and white butcher paper for notes. This year, with the focus on the NAS report on sexual and gender harassment, each table was focused around one or two of NAS’s 15 recommendations. We combined the NAS findings with JHU data. For example:

With over 50 people participating, the event began with a welcome from John Toscano, Vice Dean for Natural Sciences in the Kreiger School. Next Professor Karen Fleming gave an overview of the NAS report (WhereWeStand_KarenSlidesForDistribution)

Dean Toscano’s remarks: Good evening. As we get ready to discuss the National Academies Report on Sexual Harassment, I’m honored to be here with colleagues ready to engage in what is probably some of our most important work at this juncture: that is, increasing gender equity in all aspects of our academic and work environments here at Johns Hopkins University.

We have made notable progress on some of the goals outlined in the Vision 2020 Report. The new parental leave policy recently put into place will help to enhance work-life balance. Additionally, the provost’s office recently hired a dual career specialist who will focus on providing divisions with resources and services to maximize opportunities to recruit and retain dual career couples.

We have recently implemented two faculty initiatives at Krieger and Whiting – the Launch Program and the Master Mentor Program. Launch committees are designed to provide new junior faculty in STEM fields with advice and mentorship to facilitate early career success. Our Master Mentor program equips senior faculty to be better and more effective mentors for junior faculty, postdocs, and graduate students. While these programs are new, we are excited about their start and we believe that they have the potential to impact important aspects of our climate and culture.

Although we are proud of this progress, we also recognize opportunities for improvement that will better position us for institutional excellence. In order to create new knowledge that offers potential solutions to global and societal problems, it’s critical that everyone has a place at the academic table.

In particular, we must explore ways to expand pathways to leadership for women faculty and staff. One of our goals is to improve our training, hiring, mentoring, and promotion practices. Currently, some of these systems and policies can make it challenging for scholars and academic leaders to fully develop their academic and professional pathways.

We also know from research that the more diverse a team is, the more innovative it is. That means that if we’re not actively solving issues of underrepresentation at all levels, and breaking down barriers, we are losing out on talent and the opportunity to innovate faster and better.

Lastly and perhaps most importantly, we must engage men who are part of the Hopkins community in our efforts towards gender equity. Men, particularly those in leadership positions, play an important role in breaking down barriers and promoting equity. We can’t afford to place the burden solely on women or other underrepresented groups to change the status quo.

In this regard, we want to encourage men to increase awareness of actions and potential biases that impact the career success of women. For example, we encourage men who are chairs of academic departments to initiate discussions on ways to foster collegiality, collaboration, and an inclusive climate in their own departments – to fight what the National Academies Report refers to as “gender harassment” – that is, verbal or nonverbal behavior that conveys hostility, objectification, exclusion, or second-class status toward members of one gender.

As we begin to roll up our sleeves today and dig into this work, I’d like to envision the highest ideal – an environment and launching pad so inclusive that any student, postdoc, staff, or faculty member can reach for their heights without stumbling over barriers of any kind. So, let’s begin to dive into what is needed to get us from here to there.

Thank you.

In the next week or so, we’ll share the resources and the ideas of each of the tables. Until soon–