Professor Van Ry

The former assistant professor at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor says he had no idea what he was walking into when two administrators there summoned him to a meeting.

An email from the two mentioned only concerns about his “alleged interaction with university students.” At the meeting, he says, their casual tone and his own belief that he had done nothing wrong prompted him to candidly discuss having dated an undergraduate after she finished taking a course from him.

The 2012 meeting turned out to be “a setup,” recalls the former Michigan faculty member, who spoke to The Chronicle on the condition that it not identify him because he and the woman he had dated already have been harassed online.

The administrators, he says, soon used statements against him as part of a sexual-misconduct investigation. Months later, officials there declared that he had violated “the spirit of” a university rule barring romantic relationships between instructors and their students. <Read more.>

Via Peter Schmidt, The Chronicle of Higher Education.