HANOVER — Some Dartmouth College alumni and students are pushing a leadership change for the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences after new allegations were added last week to a $70 million class-action lawsuit alleging that administrators turned a blind eye to sexual misconduct within the department.
Two groups, the Student and Presidential Committee on Sexual Assault and the Dartmouth Community against Gender Harassment and Sexual Violence, have sent memos in recent days to Dartmouth President Phil Hanlon and other administrators requesting that the college place PBS in academic receivership, replacing the current chairman David Bucci with someone from outside the department.
“The entire PBS department must be re-investigated for complicity in years of sexual violence and abuses of power; further, the department must be put into receivership immediately,” the SPCSA, a group aiming to act as an intermediary between students and the larger Dartmouth College community, wrote in its Friday memo. “All students and researchers, from undergraduates to graduate students to post-doctoral fellows, are not safe in this department under its current leadership.”
The SPCSA said that the new allegations by two new plaintiffs, Jane Doe 2 and Jane Doe 3, prove that the “culture of violence” within PBS “would have been obvious to anyone who did not willingly ignore the evidence of harm.”
The two new plaintiffs bring the total participating in the suit, which was first filed in November, to nine. The suit alleges that college administrators ignored sexual harassment and assault for more than 16 years, despite knowing about the professors’ behavior, which allegedly included engaging in unwanted sexual relationships and threatening their professional careers when the women ended those relationships or failed to respond to their advances.
Specifically, SPCSA pointed to an allegation by Jane Doe 3 that Bucci acknowledged “that he had always been aware of ‘rumors’ concerning Jane Doe 3’s relationship with (former professor Bill) Kelley.”
Bucci did not immediately respond to an email on Monday.
The three professors Kelley, Paul Whalen and Todd Heatherton either retired or resigned last summer before the college could fire them following internal investigations that resulted in recommendations that they be terminated.
In its memo issued on Monday, DCGHSV — a group of alumni, graduate students and undergraduates — also demanded that PBS be placed in academic receivership.
“While department chairs and deans may claim not to have known about years of harm done to at least nine students, we insist that it was their job to know,” DCGHSV wrote. “Having abdicated that responsibility, they no longer have a right to hold powerful positions at Dartmouth…”
Dartmouth spokeswoman Diana Lawrence said in a Monday email that the college is in the midst of climate reviews — lead by Abigail Stewart, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, and Vicki May, a professor of engineering at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering — of all departments on campus.
“The reviews are designed to help us understand whether individual academic departments at Dartmouth are equitable and inclusive environments for all of their members,” Lawrence said. “The exercise will assess current conditions and identify opportunities for improvement, while also recognizing what is going well and how to build on success.”
Valley News Staff Writer Nora Doyle-Burr can be reached at ndoyleburr@vnews.com or 603-727-3213.
