Salem

The case is closed. There is something neat and seductive about those words. They are clean. Administrative. Final. A case can be closed, a file archived, a proceeding removed from a calendar. An institution can move forward and turn toward the next semester.

People do not “close” so easily.

Three women came forward at the University of Wisconsin–Madison with complaints concerning professor Dietram Scheufele. The university investigated and its Office of Compliance found that he violated UW’s consensual-relationships policy and faculty requirements concerning honesty and integrity. In November 2025, Interim Provost John Zumbrunnen went further, writing that “just cause exists to pursue dismissal.” In fact, I encourage you to read the actual letter Scheufele was sent which outlines in more detail the extent of the harm advanced by Scheufele and his enablers, though of course he has disputed the university’s findings. To that dispute, I refer back to the letter, “The Office of Compliance found, under a clear-and-convincing-evidence standard, violations involving the consensual-relationships policy and faculty honesty and integrity; among the findings it recites are unwelcome sexual conduct toward a student and representations during the investigation that investigators found “blatantly untruthful.” The provost concluded that the conduct adversely affected Scheufele's ability to carry out his university responsibilities to a degree greater than ordinary discipline.

Then the institution that had found just cause to pursue dismissal did not dismiss him! Because, obviously.

The university invited Scheufele into a settlement negotiation. He resigned pursuant to that agreement. There was no final disciplinary decision on the non-Title IX violations and no admission of wrongdoing. A scheduled Title IX hearing did not proceed after both Scheufele and the complainants waived their rights to it. The complainants’ attorney has said the women only did so after learning UW had already reached a settlement with Scheufele without their knowledge or input, leaving them with little confidence that continuing would change an outcome they believed had already been decided.

UW has said the settlement was non-monetary and that Scheufele received the benefits ordinarily associated with voluntary departure, except certain privileges such as emeritus status. He left with a settlement, a new job, a committee appointment with the National Academies, and the benefit of the doubt. The complainants left with a burden to prove.

And I keep returning to one question: Where is an apology to the women who have been harmed coming from? Not from him. He is merely a symptom. A person who was placed on a pedestal and given power that he wielded as he saw fit.

Where is the institutional acknowledgment of what it costs a human being to become evidence? We speak reverently about the courage required to report harm. We put courage in statements and training modules. We tell people to speak up, to trust the process, to bring wrongdoing into the light. But we spend considerably less time discussing the invoice courage leaves behind and who is expected to pay. And let me tell you, it’s not just the “complainants” who are paying it. It is their families and loved ones, too.

There is the first interview and then another. There are messages to find, dates to reconstruct, memories that must stop being memories and become exhibits. There is the strange violence of repeatedly taking something that happened to your body or your spirit and translating it into chronology so strangers can decide whether you remembered it correctly. And all the while, another life was supposed to be happening. There was research to do. There were dissertations to finish, friendships to tend, people to love, applications to submit, questions to chase, bridges to build. There were mornings when their first thought could have been about an idea instead of an investigation. There was sleep. There was joy. There was simply time. Maybe they entered the academy because they believed ideas could build bridges between people who had forgotten how to speak to one another. Maybe they wanted to ask beautiful, complex, nuanced questions and spend their life pursuing imperfect answers. Instead, some portion of that life was spent proving that what happened to them, happened.

And when the process ends, they acquire new names or… nouns.

Complainant.

Victim.

Survivor.

There is no shame in any of those words. They have helped people name experiences that were once deliberately left unnamed. But I wonder about the violence that can occur when a word meant to recognize what someone endured quietly becomes the primary way we recognize her. How many times should a human being have to tell the same painful story before we decide she has told it enough? He remains Professor. Scholar. Expert. Foundation Professor. They become complainants. There is something profoundly uneven about the distribution of nouns.

Arizona State University now employs Scheufele as a Foundation Professor of Communications. Whatever ASU knew when an initial offer was made, there is no ambiguity about what it knows today. The State Press confirmed that ASU received notice from UW–Madison in July informing the university that Scheufele had violated UW’s consensual-relationships policy. ASU could not confirm whether its hiring committee reviewed the full investigative report. He nevertheless began work at ASU this semester.

Interestingly, the University of Wisconsin System has spent years developing a policy intended to stop what higher education calls “passing the harasser”: the movement of a person with documented misconduct from one institution to another without the next institution knowing what happened. Which by the way, the National Academies celebrated. In this case, the information traveled. The question should no longer simply be, How do we make sure the next university knows? Now we have to ask: What happens when the next institution knows and chooses to continue anyway? And I do mean chooses. Whatever decisions were made months ago, ASU is making a present-tense choice now. Institutions are not absolved by the chronology of their paperwork. New information gives us an opportunity to make a new decision. But no, the choice they are making is to risk putting their students in harm's way.

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine deserve to be named here too. Not because Scheufele's history with the organization is itself evidence of wrongdoing. It isn't. They deserve to be named because prestige is one of academia’s most valuable currencies, and the National Academies are one of its most respected. They currently list Scheufele as a member of the committee for its Center for Health, People, and Places. To me, that relationship confers something. Committee appointments signal expertise, standing and trust, especially in an ecosystem in which institutional affiliation becomes evidence of whose voice deserves to be heard. The National Academies also know this problem intimately. Their 2018 landmark report on sexual harassment in academic science argued that organizational climate can enable harassment and called on institutions to move from institutional betrayal toward institutional courage. Their Action Collaborative has explicitly encouraged institutions to move beyond mere legal compliance and toward policies and practices that prevent harm, support people who report it, address retaliation and change academic culture.

In 2019, at the National Academies’ own summit on preventing sexual harassment in higher education, there was a session with an unusually direct title: “Working Collectively to Tackle the ‘Pass the Harasser’ Problem.” One of the practices presented in that session was the University of Wisconsin System’s personnel-file and reference-check policy. In 2022, the National Academies Press published that UW policy as an innovative practice for preventing institutions from passing known misconduct downstream. So now the question has arrived at their own doorstep. Knock, Knock… “Here's Johnny” - yes, toxic male reference intended iykyk.

What does institutional courage require when the person involved is not an abstraction in a report, but someone sitting on one of your own committees? I do not presume to dictate the answer. But I do think the National Academies owe the question more than silence. An institution cannot teach courage only when courage belongs to somebody else and institutional courage means something precisely because there is something to lose.

Now, shall we name some levers? I have been told by people in seats of power across academia that academia cannot really be changed. It is too large. Too old. Too complicated. There are too many entrenched systems, too much bureaucracy, too many competing interests. So, I’m told to be realistic and that we should pursue incremental change and start pulling on the levers of change. While I do have an abundance of patience and a lot of empathy for the very real fear of taking on a system, I also have an almost allergic reaction to that level of cowardice and unfortunately, I am yet to go numb to it. In those moments, I ask those inside of academic institutions that we must first be honest about what those levers are. I am met with a maze of words. A maze that they have constructed to keep themselves safe. We cannot afford to continue to wait for courage to show up in our choices.

So, here; Hiring is a lever. Funding is a lever. Mentorship is a lever. Authorship is a lever. Committee appointments are levers. Keynote invitations are levers. Awards are levers. Reference letters are levers. Who receives access to students is a lever. Who gets another chance is a lever. And silence is a lever too. These systems did not descend from the heavens as complete entities. It is recreated every morning through thousands of decisions made by human beings who can make different ones. Systems become hardened through choices. Which brings me to academia’s other curriculum. There is the curriculum printed in the catalog. Do careful research. Ask hard questions. Find mentors. Publish. Teach. Collaborate. Contribute something to the world.

And then there is the curriculum whispered after somebody decides you are safe or I don’t know, worthy? enough to hear it.

Be careful around him.

Don't be alone with him.

Everybody knows.

Don't challenge that person if you need a recommendation.

Keep your head down until you graduate.

They control the funding.

I went through it too.

It’s just the way things work around here.

They decide authorship.

That person can make one phone call and alter your life and career.

I keep thinking about the phrase “open secret.” What an extraordinary little contradiction. I wonder what were/are the open secrets about this man and who knows them? Perhaps because “open” means open only to those with enough protection to survive knowing. Everyone else is allowed to discover the rules after the rules have already injured them. Whispers are not protection. They may be all people believe they can afford. I understand that. Power makes truth risky and costly… yet more tolls. But we should be honest about the cost of keeping the price that high. Someone eventually pays it. In this story, humans with remarkable courage interrupted the whisper. And what was their prize?

Another thing I cannot stop thinking about is anonymity. Public reporting necessarily protects the identity of people who do not want to be named and while protection matters deeply, anonymity has a strange side effect. A person without a public name can slowly become a person without a public life. So I hear a thunderous echo in my heart: I’m anonymous, not nonexistent! She did not begin existing when she filed a complaint. She had ideas before this. She had work. She had a mind people sought out and a future she was constructing. She may have co-authored papers that still circulate through the field. She may have asked questions somebody else now gets credit for asking. She may be getting passed over for opportunities or speaking engagements. She may have helped make scholarship possible that remains attached to more recognizable names. Not knowing who she is does not mean there is no who there and protection should not require disappearance. That is why I have also become uncomfortable with the easy call to simply stop citing every publication with Scheufele’s name on it. I understand the desire but citation is not neutral in academia. Citations accumulate into metrics; metrics become prestige; prestige becomes money, invitations, authority, awards, access to grants and more power. However, scholarship as I understand it, is collaborative.

If a junior scholar contributed to a paper bearing the name of someone powerful, erasing the paper to deny him prestige will erase her labor too. Perhaps we need to learn the difference between citation and coronation. Maybe a practice we can lean into is to cite scholarship with more intention and precision. We can start by admitting that prestige has a habit of flowing uphill. We can redirect the river by becoming much more curious about how we distribute credit. I’ll admit that this area is tricky for me because I do not currently have any currency in this regard so, speaking in drafts, I offer;

Who developed the idea?

Who did the intellectual labor?

Who gathered the data?

Who actually did the labor of writing?

Whose career grew from the publication and whose name merely became another line underneath it?

Who gets invited to explain the research?

Who receives the award?

Who becomes synonymous with work that required many minds?

So, what does institutional courage actually ask of us? The National Academies themselves have written about institutional courage as a response to institutional betrayal. Their work calls for something beyond damage control: honest recognition of the people affected, leadership accountability, support for those who come forward and structures that reduce the likelihood that the same conditions will reproduce themselves.

There's that word again, courage, it should not belong only to complainants. We ask for extraordinary courage from the people with the least institutional power and remarkably little of the people with the most. A graduate student should be brave enough to report. Ok so, a junior scholar should be brave enough to speak, a person whose career depends upon a mentor should be brave enough to risk it? Fine. Then a university should be brave enough to lose a prestigious hire, a department should be brave enough to confront its own culture, a scientific organization should be brave enough to reconsider whom it elevates, a leader should be brave enough to say, publicly, we followed our process and our process still failed to provide the care people deserved, a university should be brave enough to ask the people who bore the harm what repair might actually look like.

Yes, policies matter, due process matters, fair investigations matter, but compliance is the fucking floor! If the harm happened under your watch, so should the healing. I cannot know what every UW leader intended when the university settled rather than completing the disciplinary proceeding its own provost had initiated.

I can name what the arrangement accomplished. A man whom the provost said there was just cause to pursue dismissing was permitted to resign pursuant to a settlement. There was no final disciplinary adjudication on the non-Title IX findings. There was no admission of wrongdoing. The complainants were not parties to that settlement, and their attorney says they experienced the process as “opaque, harmful” and more protective of the institution than of the people who came forward. Intent aside, the impact and effect is standing right in front of us. UW gets closure, Scheufele gets another university, ASU gets an accomplished scholar, The National Academies continue, at least for now, to list a respected expert on one of their committees.

And what do the women get? A notice that the process is over? I come to my original question, who will offer them the bare decency of an apology?

In the article, one of them described an experience that deserves closer scrutiny: she says she relied on guidance from the university’s Title IX apparatus about what would happen to her participation if she left her position, only to later experience a different outcome. I do not have the documentation necessary to adjudicate that claim from outside the institution. But that is precisely why trust matters. A process built for people navigating enormous power imbalances cannot ask them to trust its guidance and then leave them wondering whether that guidance was ever dependable. No repair was offered? No care? What effort was made to restore time, opportunity or faith in an academy they once imagined themselves belonging to? What changed so the next student would not need quite so much courage? Those are not sentimental questions, they should serve as guiding questions for changes and measures of institutional courage and change.

I do not particularly like the title of “victims”. I know, I know, policing words is not my vibe but I just don’t feel right about it. Survivor is better for some, but even that word can ask someone to spend the rest of her life orbiting the thing she survived and I am confident that they would not want this trauma to follow them forever! And I certainly do not want to respond to institutional labels by manufacturing one more. Still, there is a word I want to offer rather than assign. Re-sisters. Women who resisted. Women who resisted silence, resisted the hidden curriculum, resisted the seductive instruction to simply survive long enough to get the degree, resisted to pass along the game to another human. That is the embodiment of making space for others. To do what you can to make sure that no one else inherits the experiences you were subjected to. Women who entered a lineage far older than this university and far larger than this case: women who discovered that resistance has a way of creating sisterhood. Re-sisters.

If I could sit across from them, I would not begin by telling them how brave they are. I imagine they have heard enough about their bravery from people who did not have to pay its price. I would risk accusations of pandering or coming across as condescending and I would want them to know this:

You are not what happened to you, and you are not the oppression that tried to shape the boundaries of your life. You are not the stories strangers construct from fragments of your pain, and you are not the institutional nouns placed beside your name or where your name would have been. You have been wrapped in violent tides. You have thrashed and worried and grieved. You have paid tolls you never owed. But that is not who you are. There may be a version of yourself you once imagined becoming, before all of this demanded space in your life. Mourn her if you need to.

Then enter a renegotiation. A life can change shape without becoming smaller. You have poured something into communities you may never meet. Somewhere, perhaps, a student will encounter a boundary where you encountered silence. Somewhere a whisper will become a warning spoken loudly enough to be useful. Somewhere another person may recognize the game before the game takes something from her. Harm does not need to be romanticized to make meaning from what comes after it. But I will tell you that the environments that failed to recognize your worth do not get to define it. You are worthy of investment. Especially your own. There is nothing selfish about shedding a shell that became too small for the ways you have grown.

To the rest of us, I ask, they have done enough, right? We have a responsibility to disrupt and challenge, especially those of us connected to universities, research institutions, journals, professional societies, laboratories, funding organizations and the sprawling ecosystem we casually call “academia.”

I am not asking whether you believe people who come forward deserve support. That question is too easy. We all know what we are supposed to say. I am asking you to name one thing you will do. Not someday. Not after the next strategic plan. Not when the committee has finished studying the committee that will recommend the formation of another committee.

One thing; Maybe you will build mentoring structures so that no student's future depends upon the benevolence of one powerful person. Maybe you will refuse to let an “open secret” remain the institution's unofficial safeguarding policy. Maybe you will look beneath the senior name on the scholarship you cite and make sure the people doing the intellectual labor are also receiving opportunities. Maybe you will ask harder questions about whom your institution hires, honors, funds or places before students. Maybe you will sponsor somebody whose academic trajectory was interrupted by the exhausting labor of surviving the academy. Maybe you will ask your professional society what its values require when honoring someone becomes incompatible with those values.

Whatever it is, name it. Then tell somebody how you want to be held accountable for doing it. Shit, tell me, I’ll support you. Because these women have already done their part. They spoke, they documented, they remembered, they endured the investigation, they disrupted the whisper, Their courage does not need another round of applause from us. It needs to be matched.

Long live the witches!