Do you think a University of Iowa professor could explicitly ask students to expose their breasts in exchange for better grades without being reported almost immediately?
I don’t pretend to be any kind of medical expert, but upon reading this story my first thought was that Professor Arthur Miller might be going through early-stage dementia, which can manifest in inappropriate sexual behavior.
It’s amazing that a longtime professor would send students e-mails asking them to show him their breasts. (CORRECTION: It appears he used vague language in the e-mails rather than directly asking students to take off their clothes.) It seems that the university would have booted him long ago if he had a history of doing that. What do you think?
UPDATE: Some of you disagree with me in the comments. I think we will soon find out if Miller had a long pattern of this behavior, because if so, women who took his classes within the past 10 to 20 years will start coming forward.
5 Comments
asdf
“It seems that the university would have booted him long ago if he had a history of doing that.”
Nope…. When I was at ISU, it was an unspoken ‘common’ knowledge for women to do everything that they can to not be a student of a particular instructor for an extremely important course related to our major. He was known to not only expose himself, but to fondle himself in front of female students. How he became an instructor is beyond me as one of his buildings collapsed!! (ps – I graduated in ’88)
So, for this to have been uncovered and an attempt is being made to actually investigate within 10 months of the first email…. is downright speedy.
nchristine Wed 13 Aug 8:34 PM
I also went to college in the 1980s
but I would think it would be harder to cover these things up today, especially if a faculty member were approaching multiple women in the same semester (as opposed to picking one or two victims a year).
Universities get sued over things now that no one paid attention to decades ago.
desmoinesdem Thu 14 Aug 4:17 AM
No way he could have been doing this long...
I was talking to a friend at work the other day, who told me that he had gotten a recommendation for law school from this particular professor. He said he was a pretty nice guy, even if (in his own words), “He always did pay a lot more attention to the girls in class”.
My guess is that this prof is looking down the barrel of retirement (he is 66, after all), getting surpassed by younger and more ambitious profs, and was just looking to “spice up” his last few semesters at Iowa. He probably figured that if word got out he would simply be asked to retire a bit ahead of schedule. I think that’s exactly how it would have gone, except for the football scandal–which forced the administration to drop the hammer on him.
american007 Thu 14 Aug 9:59 AM
sounds like we need to hear from
the girls Professor Miller was paying a lot more attention to in his classes.
desmoinesdem Thu 14 Aug 10:36 AM