[ Golden Gater Online - December 16, 1997 ]
Sharon Lerman
Staff writer
Last semester, Kathy Carroll had a lot of spring cleaning to do. Without any assistance, she transformed a filthy storage room on Hensill Hall's first floor into a fully functional biology laboratory. She scrubbed caked-on chemicals, spilled years ago, off the counters and benches. She hauled out dusty, broken equipment, abandoned and long forgotten. She cleared away moldy boxes filled with cracked test tubes and shattered petri dishes. She swept out piles of dead insects and batted at cobwebs that had crept into the corners.
And after the floors had been waxed to a fine polish, Carroll stocked the room with thousands of dollars' worth of equipment, donated from businesses she solicited. She brought in a microwave oven from home to heat chemicals, as well as a stereo to relieve the tension that comes from conducting monotonous, time-consuming experiments where even the smallest mistake can flub weeks of hard work.
Meanwhile, fresh from their winter break, students met in a molecular biology class. Because they were inexperienced, Carroll trained them in lab procedures. She researched and wrote instructions for class experiments. She spent her days, nights and weekends going over material with them and answering their questions. And once she even took them on a field trip to Genentech, a biotechnology company she used to work for.
But she was not their instructor, and the lab she cleaned from floor to ceiling did not belong to her.
Carroll was a graduate student and a teacher's assistant for the class, which was taught by Laura Burrus, a new tenure-track instructor. Burrus was her master's thesis adviser, a position which involved assisting Carroll with her thesis project, studying muscle development in chicken embryos, and providing her with a lab to work in.
But over the course of the semester, the two had a slow falling-out, which Carroll says resulted from personal problems Burrus was having and the strain she endured from moving to a new city -- problems which led Carroll to take up the instructor's slack and all but take over her class and the formation of the lab.
In June, Burrus abruptly ousted Carroll from the lab she created and has refused to speak to her since. In fact, Carroll says Burrus never told her she was kicked out -- she heard it second-hand from another student, who said Burrus had mentioned it to him.
Now, Carroll has fallen nearly a year behind in her master's program. Because she cannot continue her research with Burrus, she has presumably lost the work she did in the spring, and she had no lab to go this semester and during the summer.
And due to a serious heart condition, she says she may never get her degree, since she can no longer afford to be unemployed and without adequate health coverage. And even if she could start over, she fears no instructor would have her after the problems that arose with her last sponsor, even though she is a top student in the biology department.
"I have bent over backwards for her, and what she's done to me is completely outrageous and unfair," Carroll said.
She says Burrus has attempted to turn the story around, making herself appear the victim. The two, who are close in age, had become friends during the time they worked together, sharing personal as well as scientific information. But Carroll says that when their relationship soured, Burrus told John Hafernik, the department chair, that she had tried, and failed, to maintain a strictly professional relationship with Carroll, and that she feared for her physical safety.
"When the term 'harass' came into play, I felt really nervous," Carroll said.
Carroll says Burrus' accusations have ruined her reputation in the department, where she has been respected by students and faculty alike for her years of experience in the field and because she excels in her studies.
"It could happen to any student, and there's no way to fight it," she said. "Professors are in a critical power position. We rely on them for references, for jobs."
Neither Burrus nor Hafernik responded to telephone calls placed to their offices by the Gater.
On Sept. 5, Carroll filed a formal grievance against Burrus, a university procedure filled with bureaucratic jargon and designed as an end-of-the-line means of conflict resolution, to be invoked only when all else fails.
And for Carroll, everything else did fail.
She took her problem to Hafernik, but says he refused to hear her side, instead aligning himself with Burrus. She sought help from the graduate student representative and Joe Julian, dean of human relations, to no avail. She placed "more than a dozen urgent (phone) calls" to Paul Chang, president of Associated Students, but he did not respond to them. And when he did, she said, he failed to show up for an appointment.
"Early on, I started feeling really alone and isolated," she said.
Finally, she contacted Donna Schafer, associate dean of the graduate division and coordinator of grievance procedures for graduate students.
Carroll says Schafer advised her to take the semester off as a cooling-off period even though the grievance procedure, which is outlined in the university bulletin, clearly states that "a grievance must be filed within six months of the wrong occurred."
Schafer declined to comment on the case, citing the grievance policy, which states that the content of the proceedings must remain confidential.
"I don't feel I have the ability to deny what (Carroll) has said," Schafer said. "Not only am I precluded from commenting," but Carroll herself is in violation of the procedure by making her case public.
"The procedure is very rarely used," she said. "But when it is, people have to respect the process or the process isn't any good."
But according to Carroll, the process is already flawed beyond repair.
"It's too adversarial," she said. "It's not set up as a way to resolve things, it's a means to prevent a lawsuit for the university."
Carroll's hearing took place last Wednesday, and she is currently awaiting the outcome. But she says she isn't confident it will be decided in her favor.
She says the procedure is biased, in part because two-thirds of the hearing panel work for the university. The panel is composed of three members chosen at random -- a faculty member, a staff member and a student.
But more importantly, she says, Schafer did not give her adequate notice of the hearing date -- she learned of it the Friday before it took place -- and did not allot her enough time to present her witnesses.
She says the hearing lasted about four hours, but only two of the her eight witnesses were able to testify within that time frame.
One witness, Dot Huey-Louie, sat in the hall outside the hearing and was never called in.
Huey-Louie was also a teacher's assistant for Burrus' class last semester, and she collaborated Carroll's version of events.
"(Carroll) went way above and beyond what was expected of her" as a teacher's assistant, she said. "I've never heard of a graduate assistant writing the protocols and basically running the class, which is what she did."
She said that in the spring, Carroll would come to school as early as 7 a.m. to prepare for the class. She said she saw the effort Carroll put into cleaning the lab, and recalled conducting an experiment in the room before it was revamped, only to find her samples had been contaminated by the mold which pervaded the dingy room.
"It really wasn't a room that could be used for science," she said. "It was just a mess."
Huey-Louie says Burrus should have tried to resolve her problems with Carroll rather than exile her from the lab. She also believes the university should have supported Carroll rather than subject her to the daunting grievance procedure.
"(Carroll) was treated unfairly by the biology department," Huey-Louie said, "but when she tried to resolve this she had these other hoops to jump through."
[ Golden Gater - December 16, 1997 ]