Dartmouth Allowed 3 Professors to Sexually Harass and Assault Students, Lawsuit Charges

Nell Gluckman
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Originally published November 15, 2018

Seven current and former students sued Dartmouth College on Thursday, saying it had failed to protect them from three psychology and brain-science professors who sexually harassed and assaulted them. In the lawsuit, filed in a federal court in New Hampshire, they say that when they and others reported horrific treatment, the college did nothing, allowing the professors’ behavior to continue until last spring, when one retired and the other two resigned.

The 72-page complaint, which seeks class-action status, describes an academic department where heavy drinking, misogyny, and sexual harassment were normalized. It says that the three professors — Todd F. Heatherton, William M. Kelley, and Paul J. Whalen — “leered at, groped, sexted,” and “intoxicated” students. One former student alleges she was raped by Kelley, and a current student alleges she was raped by Whalen. Dartmouth ended a Title IX investigation after the professors left, and, as far as the complainants could tell, did not attempt to examine how the abuse occurred or how it could be prevented it from happening again, according to the complaint.

In a written statement, a Dartmouth spokesman said that college officials “respectfully but strongly disagree with the characterizations of Dartmouth’s actions in the complaint and will respond through our own court filings.”

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Committee supervises ethics of human testing

By Madison Pauly
The Dartmouth
Published on Monday, February 25, 2013

From new cardiology studies to students that go overseas and want to interview people, the Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects answers ethical questions about human research at Dartmouth. The committee is an interdisciplinary group of experts and community members who analyze the risk posed to participants by Dartmouth-affiliated researchers’ studies.

As Dartmouth’s incarnation of a federally-mandated institutional review board, the committee analyzes proposals for research on human subjects from Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in White River Junction, as well as the College’s graduate and undergraduate departments.

While all studies involving human participants are subject to review by the committee, those that receive funding from sources other than the government must pay a review fee to the committee office.

A division of the Provost’s Office, the committee is financed in part by federal funds allocated to Dartmouth for research. Accordingly, its review process follows federal policies to ensure “respect for persons, beneficence and justice,” according to a Department of Health and Human Services report.

Major areas of ethical concern include the research’s medical relevance, involvement of vulnerable populations, its informed consent process and use of deception, said assistant provost for research Liz Bankert, a member of the committee.

The current federal regulations were last revised in 1991 and often fail to give adequate ethical guidance on modern research questions, said Bankert, who also serves on a national research ethics advisory committee.

The entire story is here.