Rethinking How Academia Confronts Harassment
Rethinking How Academia Confronts Harassment
For close to 20 years, Justine Tinkler, professor of sociology and an OIBR Distinguished Scholar at the University of Georgia, has examined how organizations respond to harassment—and why many well-intentioned policies fail to produce meaningful change. Her most recent project, “New Strategies to Combat Harassment in Engineering,” moves beyond documenting the limits of policy to testing solutions that can transform academic culture from within.
Funded by the National Science Foundation with a $1.2 million award, the five-year project (2020–2025) focuses on colleges of engineering, where concerns about harassment, power dynamics, and inclusion are especially heightened. Rather than relying on traditional compliance-driven training models, the research asks a different question: What happens when faculty are empowered to become agents of change?
From Policy Critique to Policy Solutions
Tinkler’s path to this project reflects a long-standing commitment to understanding both the promise and the unintended consequences of harassment law and policy. Her dissertation examined reactions to the enforcement of sexual harassment law, and her subsequent scholarship revealed that formal policies—while necessary—can sometimes provoke resistance or fail to shift everyday behavior.
That realization prompted a pivotal turn in her work. Alongside Mala Htun, a political scientist at the University of New Mexico, Tinkler previously evaluated a mandatory sexual misconduct training program at a large public research university. When the results showed limited effectiveness, the two scholars began imagining an alternative approach—one that emphasized engagement rather than compliance. Their collaboration eventually expanded to include Sharyn Potter, a professor at the University of New Hampshire and a leading expert on bystander intervention strategies, laying the groundwork for the NSF-funded project.
Mobilizing Faculty as Change Agents
At the heart of the project is an intervention inspired by sociologists Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev’s “managerial engagement” approach to organizational change. Drawing on decades of research across hundreds of U.S. corporations, this framework challenges the assumption that diversity and inclusion problems can be solved through control, blame, or one-off trainings. Instead, it emphasizes empowering leaders, involving them in solution-building, and holding them accountable for outcomes.
Applying these insights to STEM academia, Tinkler and her collaborators designed an intervention that trained faculty members to deliver a prosocial bystander curriculum directly to students in their own courses. Over four years, the research team collected extensive observational and interview data from both faculty and students, documenting how this hands-on approach reshaped understanding, confidence, and readiness to intervene.
Evidence That Engagement Matters
A 2025 paper published in Socius provides the clearest evidence to date of the intervention’s effectiveness. Faculty who facilitated the curriculum reported deeper engagement with the material as they prepared lessons, shared personal experiences, and conveyed the value of bystander action to their students. These activities increased accountability and expanded faculty members’ definitions of what it means to be a bystander—moving beyond immediate confrontation to include a broader range of prosocial actions.
Importantly, the study also found that leading an intervention mattered more than simply attending training. Interviews and a small, randomized experiment showed that faculty who facilitated activities demonstrated greater readiness to act than those who only participated as trainees. In a time when universities face increasing pressure to eliminate or scale back programs associated with civil rights compliance, the findings offer a promising pathway for building bystander readiness in environments where both the risks of intervening—and the costs of not intervening—are rising.
Paradoxes and Challenges of Research
Reflecting on her research, Tinkler states,” My research continually surprises me. I am particularly intrigued by the paradoxes that underlie most people’s orientations to inequality in the U.S. On the one hand, most people believe race, gender, and class equality is worth striving for, but on the other hand, many people across the political spectrum resist the enforcement of policies and laws designed to reduce inequality. The roots of this resistance are varied and often unexpected.”
The most challenging aspect of her research, she says, is moving from problem identification to solution-building. Highlighting social problems is often more straightforward than demonstrating how to address them effectively, especially when findings are complex or counterintuitive. Yet this challenge also underscores what motivates her work: contributing knowledge that can genuinely make the world a better place.
Looking Ahead
Over the next five years, Tinkler hopes to extend her work on harassment in an ambitious new direction: developing the first nationally representative, longitudinal survey of people’s experiences with sexual harassment. Currently under revision for submission to the National Institutes of Health, the project would provide an unprecedented data resource for understanding how harassment unfolds over time—and how interventions might interrupt it.
In parallel, she continues her work as co-director of the Laboratories for the Study of Social Interaction (LaSSI), an experimental research lab at UGA that examines socio-emotional processes, justice, and identity at both individual and group levels.
Together, these efforts reflect a career-long commitment not only to understanding inequality—but to testing strategies that can move institutions closer to the change they aspire to achieve.
Written by: Andrea Horsman
January 12, 2026