Hen Houses With Long Incumbency Must Inevitably Become Toxic Environments

reason  |  Much of the information provided in this article, comes from the most extensive investigation into Jaeger, which can be read in full here. This piece also relies on additional investigations as well as interviews with Jaeger's colleagues and contemporaries, some of whom requested anonymity for fear of professional consequences.) 

The fundamental issue may have been that Jaeger refused, in some ways, to assimilate, to act his station in life. Part of this was probably his personality and part of it probably cultural. He dated or slept with several students in his early years as a professor at U.R., although none worked in his lab or were under his tutelage. This was, at the time, permitted under departmental policy, but this once-common practice is now taboo, perhaps guaranteed to cause problems for both the professor and for his or her students. Jaeger says he sees that now, but in his early 30s, to him, it seemed normal. 

All of this—his personality, his jokes, his flirting and boundary-pushing and sleeping around—made some people in his department uncomfortable enough to avoid him.

One of those was Keturah Bixby. In November 2013, Bixby, then a graduate student, wrote a letter to department head Greg DeAngelis. She then printed it out, brought it to his office, and sat there while he read it. (Bixby did not respond to a request for comment.)

"There's a professor here who's been doing unprofessional things that make me uncomfortable," the letter, which was provided to Reason, began. "It's never anything huge, but it's built up over the years I've been here and I don't feel safe around him. Although I'm generally really happy at Rochester, these situations have made me miserable at times. It's Florian."

Bixby went on to describe two incidents in which Jaeger made her uncomfortable.

In the first, she wrote that he walked into her shared office and, without asking, picked up a pen and Post-it notes off her office mate's desk and stood behind her writing a note. She said it was "creepy and unprofessional."

In the second incident, Bixby said that at a recruiting party that year, Jaeger asked if he could take a picture of her. She refused, and he later took a picture of her anyway.

"I was pretty angry," she wrote in her letter, "and the picture (if it still exists anywhere) is of me flipping him off. It makes me feel angry, sick, and my skin crawl to think of him having a picture of me anywhere."

Bixby added that she avoided both social and professional events for fear of seeing Jaeger, and asked that DeAngelis look into Jaeger's behavior and require "training on boundaries and respecting them." She also wrote that she never wanted to interact with Jaeger again.

"I never want him at a talk I give," she wrote. "Is that possible? If he ever tries to push for interaction, is it ok to tell him I prefer not to because of how uncomfortable his unprofessional behavior has made me?"