Addressing the situation at Yale
On April 28th, 2023, an article was published in the Yale Daily News documenting a dispute between Professor Brian Scholl and former graduate student Sami Yousif1. The dispute culminated in an 11-month-long investigation of Professor Scholl initiated by the Provost’s office. The report following that investigation, written and signed by five faculty members from across the university, concluded the following: “Professor Scholl treated Mr. Yousif in a way that (1) was substantially inconsistent with University standards; (2) was reckless or intentional; and (3) did Mr. Yousif serious harm.”
I am prompted to write this note because, since that time, Professor Scholl has continued to make vague, defamatory claims about Sami via department-wide emails, and via direct email to individuals who expressed support for Sami online. Much as I am reluctant to speak publicly about this ordeal, I believe it is important not to allow these defamatory claims to go uncontested.
For context, I have been a faculty member at three institutions since 1975 (Indiana, Rochester, Yale). At Rochester, I was department chair (3 years), Director of Graduate Studies (15 years), and Dean of Arts & Sciences (5 years). I have mentored over 20 PhD students and postdocs, two-thirds of whom are women. Perhaps most importantly, I was the lead plaintiff in a 2017 lawsuit against the University of Rochester for failing to uphold their legal responsibilities by ignoring complaints about a persistent pattern of sexual harassment that negatively affected the careers of 16 women. I resigned my tenured faculty position, after 33 years at Rochester, in protest against those institutional failings.
The essence of the complaint brought by Sami is that, after Sami transferred to another lab within the Psychology Department, Professor Scholl retaliated against him. The aforementioned report validated this central complaint.
Concern about retaliation is, unfortunately, common in academia. Professors can withhold reference letters, delay projects, or impede student progress in a myriad of ways. Yet this instance of alleged retaliation was different. In this case, weeks after strongly encouraging Sami to stay in his lab, but Sami wishing to leave it nevertheless, Professor Scholl began accusing Sami of having harassed his lab-mates. Although the exact nature of this harassment has never been clarified — Professor Scholl uses vague, dramatic, hyperbolic language rather than concrete evidence — it was immediately clear that this situation was unusually contentious. Looking at the language in Professor Scholl’s emails, it is not hard to see why Sami has referred to these allegations as potentially “career-ending”.
What happened — and why is it that I and so many others continue to support Sami, despite the unusual nature of the accusations made against him?
Background — February, 2019
Sami officially left Professor Scholl’s lab in January, 2019. Weeks later, an email was sent to the entire Psychology department at Yale announcing an upcoming student talk. As is convention, this email included an abstract describing the talk. Sami thought the language of the abstract felt familiar. It strongly resembled language (including some sentences that appeared to be copied almost verbatim) from a recent paper that he had published with Professor Scholl.
Sami believed, based on similar prior experiences, that Professor Scholl was putting another student in the middle of a petty dispute over intellectual ownership. (Professor Scholl is a hands-on advisor; Sami knew that every word in the abstract would have been written and approved by Professor Scholl.) Regardless of the reason, Sami believed that this student probably was not aware of the similarity between the abstract and his recent paper. He did not want that student to be blindsided by any fallout from the controversy between himself and Professor Scholl. Thus, Sami texted the student, asking if they were around. They said no but offered to talk on the phone.
A 5-10 minute phone call ensued in which Sami says he gently informed the student of the similarity in wording between the two abstracts. According to Sami, the conversation was entirely amicable. The student repeatedly asked Sami what to do about the situation, and he repeatedly assured the student that there was no need to alter the abstract or the talk. They thanked each other, and the conversation ended.
Later that same day, Sami received an email from Professor Scholl with the subject line: “Urgent update on your participation in our lab group...” an excerpt from which is copied below.
“I write with an update about your ongoing participation with our lab group. It is one thing to continue acting so very disrespectfully toward me; I know you're having a hard time, and I can take it. But your behavior today crossed a new line: now you're acting disrespectfully toward other students in our lab -- and it is so much worse to be harassing other more-junior female students (to the point of making them cry all day and making them feel physically ill!). This is completely unacceptable… And for you to do this without even touching base with me first seems equally outrageous.”
From this moment onward, Sami began receiving a barrage of demeaning, threatening, hateful and unprofessional emails from Professor Scholl. I have seen thousands of words of these exchanges. In my 40+ years in this profession, I have never seen behavior so combative toward a student. Professor Scholl could have easily deescalated the situation.
The critical question becomes: What happened in that 5-10 minute phone conversation between Sami and the other student to cause Professor Scholl to go from encouraging Sami to stay in his lab to accusing him of harassment just a few weeks later?
To be clear, disputes among faculty and students regarding authorship and intellectual ownership are not uncommon. However, this situation wasn’t remotely like that. Immediately following the above email, Sami responded to Professor Scholl. He clarified his stance about the ownership of the ideas in the abstract: “Since you invoked the question of intellectual ownership, I just want to be clear to the others on the email: I fully recognize that the decision to frame our paper in this way was [Brian Scholl’s] idea. I am not claiming that I originally thought to write our paper in this way.” In that same exchange, Sami later explained: “I talked to [this student] out of a concern for [this student]; I was motivated by nothing else.”
I was not present for the phone call between Sami and this student, so I cannot say with certainty what happened. It is possible that Sami inadvertently said something that was interpreted by the student as insulting or threatening.
But what lends credence to Sami’s account is the disconnect between Professor Scholl’s behavior prior to Sami’s departure from his lab and his behavior immediately afterward. I have seen several emails from the period when Sami was discussing with Professor Scholl the possibility of transferring to another lab. He not only praises Sami, he says that he hopes their “relationship can be salvaged, for all sorts of reasons -- including (1) the dominant fact that it is such a rewarding experience to work with brilliant students such as [Sami]...” Yet, years later, in his testimony to the Provost’s Faculty Standards Review Committee (FSRC), Professor Scholl claimed that Sami had always been a bad actor. He bizarrely claimed that he had conversations with Sami about his behavior every few weeks. Sami claims that he never once had a conversation with Professor Scholl of this sort.
Suppose, however, that Professor Scholl was telling the truth about Sami’s poor behavior. Why then did he praise Sami and encourage him to stay in his lab? Why has nobody been able to provide any documentation to validate Professor Scholl’s subsequent claims that Sami misbehaved? Why did Professor Scholl not inform Frank Keil (Sami’s new advisor) about these concerns? He was happy to share with Professor Keil some negative opinions about Sami as a scientist (never voiced to Sami when he was working in Professor Scholl’s lab); why would he not also feel comfortable speaking about interpersonal concerns? It doesn’t add up.
Recent Events – Yale Daily News (April 28, 2023)
The article published in the Yale Daily News summarized this four-year saga, including how Yale puts up barriers for student complaints against faculty when a dispute arises, how delays and shallow investigations are the norm, and how sanctions, when they are implemented, are unusually light. Throughout that investigation, Professor Scholl claimed that he was merely trying to protect two of his students who were the recipients of repeated instances of ‘trauma’. Yet the only specific instance cited by Professor Scholl was that 5-10 minute phone call between Sami and that student back in 2019.
Professor Scholl was asked by the FSRC about a half dozen times whether he had any evidence of Sami’s misbehavior. Again and again, he said “no”.
In the spirit of full transparency, there were some slightly more specific accusations made about Sami years after the precipitating incident. Sami was accused of being aggressive about authorship, for instance. Yet Sami claims that he and the student making this accusation never collaborated on any projects at all — that there were no opportunities for authorship disputes. I have seen no evidence of collaborations or of disputes. Sami was accused by this same individual of sending critical emails. I have seen all of Sami’s emails with this student, and I have never seen anything critical. On the contrary, I have seen hundreds of exchanges in which Sami responds calmly in the face of extraordinary provocation by Professor Scholl.
The case made against Sami has mostly depended on dramatic, hyperbolic language — “abuse”, “trauma”, “monstrous”, “harassment”, etc. — never facts or even specific accusations. Despite Professor Scholl’s consistent reference to student gender as a key component of this dispute, this was never a Title IX issue. The FSRC who investigated the case purposefully clarified that this was not a Title IX issue. And this was certainly not an issue of sexual harassment, as some have speculated. Professor Scholl himself said this in his testimony to the FSRC: “...neither I nor anyone else to my knowledge has ever accused Mr. Yousif of sexual harassment.”
Of course, it is difficult to know what really happened all those years ago. There is little concrete evidence (if any) about the allegations made against Sami. What evidence does exist, in my opinion, seems to exonerate him.
Even if Sami was guilty, though, this situation should have been resolved peacefully, quickly, and quietly. Instead, Professor Scholl’s continued escalation of this situation has hurt everyone involved, including, in my opinion, the very students he claims to be protecting.
Given the difficulty of making progress if the underlying facts are shrouded in secrecy, Sami has repeatedly called for investigations into his own conduct. He knows an investigation would clear his name. Unfortunately, these calls have almost always gone unanswered. (One brief, informal investigation into Sami’s conduct by the Director of Graduate Studies at Yale concluded that Professor Scholl’s claims about Sami were unwarranted.) The committee that spent the most time investigating this matter (the FSRC) made clear that they were not investigating Sami in any way. In their final report (September 19, 2022), they wrote: “...it was not this panel’s mandate to assess the veracity of [the allegations against Sami], only to determine whether Professor Scholl responded appropriately and in conformance with University standards. We conclude that he did not.”
By ruling against Professor Scholl without evaluating his counterclaims against Sami, the FSRC was taking a strong stance. They were saying that even if Professor Scholl’s allegations were true, his behavior was still inappropriate. This makes Professor Scholl’s recent description of his conduct even more problematic. The case was never about why Professor Scholl acted as he did. A committee of five faculty members, with full knowledge of his motives, concluded that he acted inappropriately regardless.
Seeking a resolution
All of this understandably has caused Sami great stress. His reputation has undoubtedly been harmed to some extent. Professor Scholl claims that he has always exercised discretion in speaking about Sami. He mocked Sami for worrying about things he might say.
Should Sami have trusted Professor Scholl when he said he exercised discretion? I don’t see how he could have. All that we ever saw from Professor Scholl was impulsive, reactionary behavior. It is implausible that Professor Scholl spoke recklessly about Sami in all contexts except when Sami’s career was on the line. Whether we were right or wrong about that, we believed that the university needed to step in and offer Sami protection. Thus, Sami sought avenues within the University to determine how he could protect his reputation from remarks by Professor Scholl that seemed aimed at defaming and retaliating against him.
Sami’s attempts to work within the Yale system were met with confusion and disarray. It was not clear to whom a complaint should be made nor what the formal process of filing and resolving a complaint entailed.
Eventually, as noted at the beginning of this document, Sami became aware of an avenue by which complaints could be directed to the Office of the Provost. He therefore filed a formal complaint in August of 2021, nearly 3 years after having left the Scholl lab. The complaint triggered an investigation by a committee of five faculty members who spent the next 11 months interviewing Sami, Professor Scholl, three students (two of whom were suggested as witnesses by Sami), and several other faculty members from the Psychology department. As noted earlier, the committee reached the following conclusion: “Professor Scholl treated Mr. Yousif in a way that (1) was substantially inconsistent with University standards; (2) was reckless or intentional; and (3) did Mr. Yousif serious harm.”
The reason that this case has not “gone away” is because, despite the clear conclusions reached by the committee, the sanctions rendered against Professor Scholl were extremely light. They consisted of the following: (1) that he receive formal training and ongoing coaching on how to mentor students, including appropriate and professional communication, and (2) that he submit a written apology to Sami for his use of “threatening, intimidating, and unduly harsh language.”
Particularly distressing was the following rationale by the committee for not rendering additional sanctions on Professor Scholl: “The panel is sympathetic to the fact that there were no clear policies or procedures for Professor Scholl to rely on in seeking to rectify the situation. For example, there does not appear to be any formal training or guidance for faculty members, Department Chairs, or Directors of Graduate Studies about how to mediate such (non-Title IX) conflicts. We believe the ambiguity confronted by Professor Scholl regarding appropriate means of managing his conflict with Mr. Yousif should temper our recommendations.” Essentially, the committee is giving Professor Scholl a “pass” because the University has no written guidelines on how to deal with faculty-student conflict. This is a shocking explanation.
Personnel disputes are not uncommon in academia. In such disputes (faculty-faculty, student-student, faculty-student) the obvious path to investigation and resolution is to pull the two sides together and work out a mutually agreed upon solution. Failing to have specific written guidelines is not an excuse to exonerate one party to the dispute.
Sami and I (as well as many of his other colleagues who were closely monitoring the situation) were quite upset by this “slap on the wrist” of Professor Scholl. Sami wrote to the Provost, Scott Strobel, to ask him to consider slightly stronger sanctions. The Provost never replied. Sami then wrote to the President, Peter Salovey, asking if he would reconsider the sanctions. President Salovey declined, based on a rule about the timing of such appeals that was buried in the faculty handbook. How many students read the faculty handbook?
I then wrote to President Salovey myself and urged him to meet with Sami. He refused.
Going Public
After the YDN article was released on April 28th, 2023, Professor Scholl immediately (that same afternoon) sent an email to the entire Psychology Department (faculty and grad students) doubling down on his narrative that Sami had abused “multiple women” — that he (Professor Scholl) was merely acting on his duty to protect them.
Note here just how misleading this language is. By “multiple”, he means, in reality, “no more than two”. And by referring to them as “women”, he is making an insinuation that this was some sort of sexual harassment/Title IX issue. We know that Professor Scholl is aware of this insinuation, because he has been called out for using this sort of language before, including the very first time he made such accusations in 2019. The Director of Graduate Studies in the Psychology Department immediately (though informally) investigated. He found no cause for further action. He told Sami that he should move on with his career without worry. Professor Scholl was forced to walk back his insinuations.
To address the misleading language in Professor Scholl’s April 28 note to the department, Sami’s co-advisors (Professor Frank Keil and myself) sent a reply to it on April 30 in which we pointed out a variety of inconsistencies in Professor Scholl’s claims. But on May 2 Professor Scholl tripled down on his claims that Sami was an abuser of women. He passed along an anonymous message, authored by a former student who alleged that Sami had behaved inappropriately. In this email, this individual confirmed that they had not made a formal complaint against Sami but claimed to have experienced “fear, discomfort, and trauma”. They asked for privacy given how the resurfacing of these past events was so upsetting.
Sami never wanted to challenge or identify those who Professor Scholl claimed Sami had “traumatized”. Sami told the YDN that he understood it would probably be necessary to discuss Professor Scholl's allegations against Sami (he provided thorough documentation about everything he was accused of), but he asked them to refrain from naming the individuals who had testified against him. To the journalist writing the story, Sami wrote, "I would hope that this privilege (of being unnamed, or even unmentioned, as much as possible) can be extended to the two individuals who testified against me. I... believe that naming [these individuals] would cause them a significant amount of trauma." The YDN honored that request.
So, it wasn’t Sami who brought attention to this individual (the author of the anonymous message on May 2). It was Professor Scholl. He passed along that individual’s message to the department on May 2, 2023, thereby allowing that individual’s identity (by inference, not by name) to be revealed. Had Professor Scholl not done this, little public attention would have been paid to any of the students in Professor Scholl’s lab.
Days before this anonymous individual called for privacy, Sami wrote (in a blogpost on his website), “I hope that people can respect the privacy of the many people involved, especially those who were dragged into this conflict unfairly.” Sami says that he wrote this sentence with this anonymous individual in mind.
Hours before Professor Scholl sent the second email to the entire Psychology department (May 2nd), Sami had called for a private resolution to this dispute. He wrote an email to Professor Scholl, the Chair of the department, and the Director of Graduate Studies, advocating for two different amicable solutions. Sami’s email went unanswered.
Professor Scholl’s conduct
In Professor Scholl’s original email to the department, on April 28th, he claimed that the FSRC mostly exonerated him. “The one exception related to the tone (though not the content) of several of my emails to Mr. Yousif in early 2019 relating to his treatment of women,” he wrote.
It is my strong opinion that Professor Scholl’s inappropriate conduct extends far beyond a few emails back in 2019, or as he claims, the ‘tone but not the content’ of his interactions with Sami. My opinion is bolstered by statements by the FSRC itself. As noted by the FSRC:
“Professor Scholl appears to dismiss the possibility that his interactions could have occasioned harm because Mr. Yousif subsequently experienced favorable professional outcomes... We believe this is an excessively narrow view that overlooks the psychological harm that can arise from sustained interaction with an authority figure whose style of communication is at times hyperbolic and demeaning.”
It is easy to see why the committee reached this conclusion. Below are some excerpts from statements that Professor Scholl made to the FSRC, during 2021 and 2022. The language here is preserved as it was originally written, including any emphasis.
1. Professor Scholl is confident that all aspects of Sami’s complaint have no merit.
“The Bottom Line: Each and every one of the allegations listed in the complaint letter is entirely baseless…[and] grossly and provably false and misleading.”
“The multiple previous investigations with many other students turned up exactly the same sorts of sentiments. In short, my current and past students have all spoken with one voice about how the culture and mentoring in my lab is simply superlative — and Mr. Yousif is an outlier in this respect in every possible way. (One frequent vociferous complaint I have received over recent years, however, has been that my students cannot nominate me for the GSAS Graduate Mentor Award, since I am one of the few members of our department who has already won it.)”
“...no penalties or any changes to any ongoing practices were recommended. Indeed, the verbal feedback I received from Dean Fischer was (to paraphrase) that essentially everything she had learned about my actions, my lab’s operation, and my interactions with students was uniformly positive, and that we should all aspire to that level of care and mentorship. (I hope that she will be able to confirm this for you.) And her written feedback included the suggestion that: “My hope and expectation is that we can close this case, which has been ongoing, once and for all.” (Sigh.)”
“I will stress again that I think the narrative above (and the documentation that you could collect in support of it) makes clear that my actions in the context of all of these events were entirely reasonable. (And dare I suggest that in some cases these same actions might even be deemed downright admirable, as I attempted to continually demonstrate steadfast support for the female students who had felt so distraught due to their interactions with Mr. Yousif.) Most importantly: while Mr. Yousif and I certainly had more than our fair share of disagreements (all long ago now, thankfully), I fail to see how in any of these cases my actions could possibly be taken to rise to the high level demanded of violations for this panel. In particular, I stress that nothing in the above events, emails, and interactions could reasonably be taken to approach anywhere near the level of reckless, intentional, or serious harm discussed in those criteria.”
2. Professor Scholl attacks Sami’s character.
“I came to see Mr. Yousif as a cancer that had to be removed from our laboratory – regardless of the degree to which his impact on others was intentional.”
“Mr. Yousif is not making these allegations in good faith in the first place.”
“...past experience also suggests that Mr. Yousif will attempt to be as ‘slippery’ as possible with regard to the specifics of each allegation.”
“Mr. Yousif has clearly attempted to effectively ‘trick’ the committee via the sheer number of different allegations he provides.”
“I suspect that he is just fabricating all of these statements, in an attempt to tar one of his accusers – something we have seen time and again in the ‘me too’ era.”
“Mr. Yousif is irresponsibly tossing out accusations based on no knowledge whatsoever, and is seeing monsters under the bed.”
“Mr. Yousif’s complaints have been brought in bad faith, in a disingenuous and misleading fashion.”
“[Mr. Yousif’s] responses are just disgusting, and I hope it is clear now in the ‘Me Too’ era how they are a page right out of the Harvey Weinstein playbook.”
“I truly wonder if Mr. Yousif has the requisite empathy to understand such (all too common) reactions that victims often have to their abusers.”
3. Professor Scholl claims Sami is on a vendetta to harm his lab.
“...this is but the latest string of complaints from Mr. Yousif, who from my perspective has been on a sad multi-year crusade to harass and discredit our laboratory and myself.”
“Mr. Yousif’s goals with his many complaints over many years has been precisely to disrupt and demoralize our group as much as possible.”
“I will try to find some other productive use of my time to fill up the yawning gap that will now exist since I will not have to write these long missives to you every few weeks (at least until Mr. Yousif’s next complaint, which I will be expecting around this time next week).”
4. Professor Scholl justifies his actions in conveying negative opinions about Sami to colleagues inside and outside Yale.
“Mr. Yousif is obviously aware that I hold unflattering impressions of him …. And he would obviously prefer that such impressions be subject to a ‘gag order’, never to be shared with any others, under any situation. (Wouldn’t we all). But they have been shared, on rare occasion, when it was reasonable (or even morally imperative to do so). Examples include… colleagues at other institutions… who [were interested in whether] Mr. Yousif would be a good fit for their lab or their institution.”
“...it would seem like some sort of academic malpractice (or ethical violation) for me to not carefully and confidentially share my experiences and concerns.”
These are not cherry-picked examples. There are hundreds of other examples I could have selected. Professor Scholl’s behavior was, at times, remarkably cruel. No student should be subjected to this unprofessional behavior by a faculty member.
One final quote is particularly disturbing: “Mr. Yousif should also be held accountable for each of his allegations since bringing such allegations against a faculty member at this level is such a grave and momentous thing to do.”
Concluding thoughts
Even if we take at face value that there was a conflict between Sami and two individuals in Professor Scholl’s lab (a conflict that was decidedly not a Title IX matter, and for which no evidence has ever been provided), I believe Professor Scholl used this conflict as a vehicle to retaliate against Sami. This opinion on my part is driven by Professor Scholl’s continued efforts (as recently as April 28, 2023 and May 2, 2023) to cast Sami’s alleged bad behavior as gender-related. He knows full well how misleading and harmful such language can be.
Finally, let me quote from my letter to President Salovey, sent on November 30, 2022:
“Faculty should never – ever – demean the intellectual abilities of a student, cast them as the devil, and gratuitously portray their actions as worthy of their disdain. But that is precisely what Professor Scholl did to Dr. Yousif in numerous scathing letters he submitted to the committee. There must be accountability in cases like these. If the types of egregious behaviors exhibited by Professor Scholl are allowed to pass with little or no consequences, students will know, and they will act accordingly. I have personal knowledge of students in the Psychology department who were either unwilling to come forward or did so only if their identity was withheld for fear of retaliation for exactly this reason. If the university fails to act, you can be sure that future students will never bring to light legitimate complaints like Dr. Yousif’s. They will be afraid, and understandably so. Surely you do not wish to convey to Yale students that they should remain silent in the face of unprofessional and unethical conduct by faculty. But that is the message that you will have delivered, loud and clear, if you fail to reconsider the recommended sanctions for Professor Scholl.”
If Professor Scholl is to be believed, all of this was escalated because of one less-than-10-minute phone call between Sami and one of his lab mates back in 2019. Surprisingly, it has never even been clarified exactly what Sami said on this phone call that was so upsetting. He remembers it as normal, matter of fact; not a single specific detail contradicting this has ever been provided.
Sami has repeatedly attempted to work within the Yale system to resolve these conflicts, but that system has failed him. The system failed him first by putting up barriers to file a complaint and then by explaining away and minimally sanctioning the demonstrably unprofessional behavior of a faculty member.
I believe Sami and support his quest for accountability. If faculty members have the power to lash out unpredictably in this way and threaten the career of a student by vague insinuations without a competent investigation, then all students will be faced with further uncertainty about when to make a complaint, no matter how well justified. That lack of trust in the system, and its associated absence of accountability, undermines the faculty-student relationship upon which all of academia rests.
Institutions must do better.
I use Sami’s first name throughout this note. However, he received his PhD from Yale in 2022 and is now a postdoctoral fellow at Penn. His official title is Dr. Yousif.