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Controversy over an award-winning UCLA ecologist who was suspended without pay and banned from campus deepened this week when her supporters accused the University of California at Los Angeles chancellor’s office of blowing concerns about collegiality out of proportion and deciding to “massively expand” the sanctions a faculty committee had recommended.
Meanwhile, emails and documents obtained by The Chronicle paint a picture of an embattled department whose members were divided over whether Priyanga Amarasekare was justified in her complaints about discrimination or whether she had taken those grievances too far, behaving unprofessionally toward her colleagues.
As the fallout over Amarasekare’s’s suspension continued, personnel issues that are normally handled behind a university-enforced wall of privacy spilled into the open. Amarasekare, a native of Sri Lanka and one of two women of color with tenure in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology, had for years complained about department and university policies she felt discriminated against people of color, including herself.
But it was her message posted on an email list, set up in 2020 for her department, that ignited a firestorm. The list was started in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by the police as a place “where we can indeed listen, especially from those hurt, even if unintentionally, by any aspect of the EEB culture,” the department’s interim chair at the time, Barney A. Schlinger, wrote members of the department. Amarasekare didn’t hold back.
“For over a decade, I have been vocal about discrimination against minorities in recruitment, retention, and advancement, asking difficult questions about hiring procedures that put agendas above diversity, and speaking up about other wrongdoings that go on both within the EEB Department and at higher levels of university administration,” she wrote. “The department’s way of addressing the problem, which it has done with the knowledge and approval of the higher administration, is to take measures that essentially render me voiceless and invisible.”
Conversations with current and former members of the department, including students who asked not to be identified for fear of professional repercussions, indicate that Amarasekare clashed with a few members of her own department over who was most deserving of promotion and the most appropriate choices for committee chairs and other leadership positions. Too often, she argued in her post on the department’s email list, those ended up going to white men. Graduate students weighed in, many offering messages of support for Amarasekare on the department’s email list. At the same time, opposition to her blunt style — the result, she said in her email post, of feeling that no one was listening to her — was growing.
In 2021, formal complaints were brought against Amarasekare for violating the Faculty Code of Conduct, one of them by seven members of her department. A highly redacted report of the Academic Senate’s Privilege and Tenure hearing committee — obtained by The Chronicle from someone not directly named in the case, who asked not to be identified — revealed that the committee last year found her responsible for breaching confidentiality about personnel matters. It also found her responsible for “making evaluations of the professional competence of faculty members by criteria not directly reflective of professional performance.”
No other information about that charge appeared in the redacted copy of the committee’s report. It showed that the committee had recommended a written censure, with a potential salary reduction only if the alleged violations continued. “To date,” the report said, “Prof. Amarasekare has failed to cooperate with efforts to correct her behavior and treated those who tried to bridge the gap between her and some of her colleagues with contempt.”
The committee recommended setting up reviews to ensure that she was interacting appropriately with her colleagues, and giving her the opportunity to avoid pay cuts if she complied.
When the matter was referred to the chancellor’s office, those sanctions escalated. Amarasekare was suspended without salary or benefits for one year, with a 20-percent salary reduction for two subsequent years. She was prohibited from entering the campus, communicating with her students, or getting access to her National Science Foundation-funded research, which examines the effects of climate warming on biodiversity.
Amarasekare, who is a Guggenheim fellow, was suspended just months after becoming the most recent recipient of the Robert H. McArthur Award, the Ecological Society of America’s top honor. Contacted again this week by The Chronicle, Amarasekare said the university’s privacy rules prevented her from commenting.
Assuming the Worst
The Chronicle reached out to 18 of the 27 other faculty members listed on the department’s website to request comment. Those who responded said university rules precluded them from discussing private personnel matters.
Nearly 500 ecologists and other scientists signed a petition, sent to the university system’s president and regents, as well as UCLA’s chancellor, Gene Block, asking the university to rescind the sanctions against Amarasekare. Citing confidentiality rules, the university hasn’t divulged what she was being punished for and has prevented her from saying that either. That could lead people to assume the worst, the petition states, because such sanctions are usually applied “only to the most egregious wrongdoings such as scientific misconduct and Title IX violations.”
Andy Dobson, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University who helped circulate the petition, took issue with those who have anonymously accused her of mistreating colleagues who disagree with her. He said, in an email to The Chronicle, that it’s unlikely “that a recently widowed mother of two small children was bullying people who were physically and mentally in much more secure situations. To suggest otherwise either stretches credulity or reflects very deep insecurities in her colleagues.”
From what he can see, Dobson said, “concerns about congeniality were blown out of all proportion by the senior members of the UCal administration and led to a level of punishment that goes way beyond that recommended” by the faculty committee. It appears, he said, that someone in the chancellor’s office “arbitrarily decided to massively expand the punishment of Priyanga, as they felt their authority was indirectly impacted by her claim to have been repeatedly bypassed for promotion.”
In a statement released to The Chronicle this week, Michael S. Levine, UCLA’s vice chancellor for academic personnel, wrote that the university has strict rules to protect the rights and privacy of people involved in disciplinary proceedings and that he couldn’t describe the specifics of Amarasekare’s case.
He did, however, outline the process that’s followed for a grievance, discipline, or early termination. An Academic Senate committee or campus investigative agency conducts a preliminary investigation before a matter is referred to the Academic Senate for a formal hearing. After that hearing, a Senate committee makes recommendations to the chancellor, who has the authority to make a final decision. If the chancellor’s decision differs from the committee’s recommendations, the chancellor meets with the committee’s chair to explain the reasoning, and the chair reports that disagreement to the Academic Senate without divulging confidential information. The chancellor’s decision is communicated in writing to the person in question.
While Amarasekare’s supporters believe she was denied promotions and leadership opportunities in retaliation for her complaints, Levine wrote that “academic promotion is based strictly on evaluation of teaching, scholarly research, and service — not disciplinary or grievance activities.”
The university, he added, supports freedom of expression and doesn’t condone retaliation. Levine added that the university is deeply committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion. “Our university, like most institutions of higher learning, has more important work to do to achieve these goals,” he wrote. “We continue to be deeply committed to doing this important work, which is happening at the campus, division, and departmental levels.”
In a February 6 letter to The Chronicle, Levine cited the “irreparable harm” that incomplete information about the case is causing to people who aren’t able to respond publicly.
Peter Chesson, a professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona, said he had repeatedly recommended Amarasekare for promotions she didn’t receive. Chesson, who spent 12 years in the University of California system, first as a postdoc at UC-Santa Barbara and later as a tenured professor at UC-Davis, said that no one had identified who, besides Amarasekare, is being harmed, or how. She’s the one, he said, “whose livelihood has been cut off. She is the one whose research has been destroyed.”
Rather than celebrating the accomplishments of a scholar who’s received national accolades and brought in significant research funds, he wrote, “UCLA has gone out of its way to keep her down,” denying her opportunities to advance in the department. When Amarasekare complained, “she was accused of not raising the issues in the right way, and given terrible sanctions, threats, and intimidation to shut her up,” Chesson wrote.
“Our complaint is that the university should not be inflicting that kind of harm on an individual without giving serious justification,” he wrote.
In his statement, Levine also addressed concerns that Amarasekare’s students, whose research was interrupted when they were cut off from contact with her, are being harmed. When a professor is on leave for any reason, he said, the university works with students to find appropriate faculty members to oversee research, provides resources to continue research projects or identify new ones, and reaches out to make sure the students’ needs are being met.
Meanwhile, Amarasekare’s supporters have started a GoFundMe drive that, by Friday, had raised more than $26,000 to help cover her expenses. “The secrecy surrounding the charges and the sanctions,” the fund-raising appeal says, “is destroying her reputation, jeopardizing her chances of obtaining employment elsewhere.”
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