Jessica Cantlon, Florian Jaeger complainant, leaving UR

Justin Murphy
Democrat and Chronicle

Jessica Cantlon, recently named one of Time Magazine's People of the Year for her role as one of the lead complainants against professor Florian Jaeger at the University of Rochester, will leave the school's Brain and Cognitive Science department along with her husband for positions at Carnegie Mellon University, she said this week.

Cantlon, one of the women at the heart of the sexual harassment complaints that have rocked Rochester's biggest employer, said she and her husband, Brad Mahon, are leaving not because of Jaeger's actions, but because of the university's inaction in the months since the accusations became public.

Jessica Cantlon, at the door to her office in the Brain Cognitive studies department. She and others filed  complainants against the University of Rochester and Florian Jaeger, who's office is next to hers.

Cantlon, Mahon, Celeste Kidd and other Jaeger accusers urged UR to change its policies around sexual harassment and reporting; to change leadership in the BCS department; and to do something to restore the reputations of Cantlon and others after what they called unfair retaliation.

More:UR whistleblowers among those awarded Time's Person of the Year

"We told them (when we filed the complaint) we were thinking of resigning from the university if we weren’t confident they would make things right by the students and by us," she said. "They've had a lot of time to take at least some steps. ... They've given us no indication they plan to correct those things."

The university administration did not have an immediate comment on the departures.

The university is sponsoring an investigation into all the allegations in the original Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) complaint. The investigator, former U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White, has promised to release that report in mid-January. 

The EEOC complaint, filed by Cantlon, Mahon, Kidd and others, alleged that Jaeger had created a hostile environment for females in the department through persistent harassment, and that university leadership, from the department chair to President Joel Seligman, had ignored or mishandled the issue.

The Faculty Senate also recently criticized the administration for its inaction while the White investigation is pending.

Cantlon and Mahon are the most recent of several high-profile departures from BCS. Richard Aslin, one of the department's biggest names, resigned in protest over its inaction regarding Jaeger. Another researcher, Ben Hayden, left UR for the University of Minnesota, believing he and his wife, post-doctoral fellow and job candidate Sarah Heilbronner, had been retaliated against for speaking up regarding Jaeger.

Cantlon, like Hayden, said the school had made only a "low-ball offer" to prevent them from leaving.

More:Hundreds of professors sign letter advising students not to attend University of Rochester

They likely will not be the last to leave. Celeste Kidd, the other lead complainant against Jaeger, is "nearly certain" to depart along with her husband, fellow professor Steve Piantadosi, according to the lawsuit they and others filed against the university earlier this month.

LEFT TO RIGHT Keturah Bixby, Brad Mahon, Jessica Cantlon, Steve Piantadosi, and Celeste Kidd in the Brain Cognitive studies department. All five of them have  filed  complainants against the University of Rochester and Florian Jaeger.

Piantadosi and Cantlon have a joint five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health to study the development of mathematical abilities in primates and human children. It remains to be seen how that and other federal grants will be affected by the departures.

"That’s one of the things that made BCS special; I’d guess there’s almost nowhere else in the world you’d find primate and child (researchers) and computational people working together on the same project," Piantadosi said. "My closest collaborators were Ben (Hayden), Dick Aslin and Jessica, and now all three are gone. ... We had something special, and now it's just been destroyed."

The lawsuit alleges that the dean overseeing BCS told Mahon and Cantlon in June that "some people in the administration thought the best way to solve the problem was for the plaintiffs to leave Rochester."

"It’s hard to wrap my head around all the damage that’s been done and the disruption from making an earnest complaint about sexual harassment," Cantlon said. "None of us had the intention of leaving this university. ... Making this complaint has changed all our lives, and the injustice of that is hard to stomach."

JMURPHY7@Gannett.com