Abuse in Higher Education Exposed | Power, Silence & Survival

If you ever believed that higher education is a safe place, if you ever trusted that institutions are designed to protect you, this episode is for you. Because what happens when the very place meant to develop you is the place that breaks you. Today we're talking about something most people don't want to touch, abuse in academia. I'm excited. Not rumors, not isolated incidents, but patterns of power use, grooming, retaliation, silence. And the real question is, why does it keep happening? And why does it keep getting protected? I'm your host, Edna White, and this is Keeping It Real On Purpose. But we don't just tell the story, we break down the pattern behind it, so you know exactly what to do next. Today, I'm joined by Julie. Am I saying it right, Cruz? That's right. Everybody give me a high five, guys out there. She is a writer, advocate, and founder of Academia Abuse, academicabuse.com. Julie is also the author of a forthcoming memoir. Can I show them? Yeah, please. I got it right here, too. The Burn List. I just got it today, where she documents her journey from childhood trauma into years of exploitation across multiple universities, not universities, universities. Her work exposes something critical. Abuse doesn't just happen in broken systems. It happens inside respected institutions that know how to hide it. Welcome to the show. I'm ready for this. Welcome. Thank you. So glad to be here. I can't wait to get into it. Yes, yes. Give us a little bit of your story and start, give us a backstory, so we can just lean on in. Yeah, sure. So backstory, I personally, I grew up in a very small town, north central Ohio, home to the number one amusement park in the world with the tallest, fastest roller coasters on the planet. And I grew up in a quite difficult home. So those of you out there that know what I'm talking about, you have my deepest sympathies. Yeah, so it was pretty bad, rocky start around the house right away. And that was primarily because my mother, this individual targeted her and was in and out of our house and basically had us on the run for the first few years of my life. It started around three years old for me. And so that was, I kind of was born into just extreme violence and all sorts of abuse, drug abuse, sexual abuse, physical abuse. It just was the laundry list, collect them all. And throughout that whole entire ordeal, I kind of learned to keep my cool and focus on my way out. And to me, the way out was higher education. I thought, yeah, I never want to get stuck like my mom. I never want to get stuck like her and be in a position where some very violent predatorial male could trap us and hurt us. And I just thought, well, the way to do that is to be economically independent and never have to ever rely on anybody. And for me, that meant college. And so despite all that was going on and being homeless at 14 and being in foster care and all the things, I supported myself with multiple jobs and got into all the extracurriculars to beef up my resume and had a 3.967 GPA and ended up getting a full scholarship to college. So I was like, okay, all right, I did it. And you cannot imagine how superwoman I felt to come out of that and be like, I got this scholarship. My life is going to be awesome. Goodbye. It's everybody and everything that ever hurt me. And I thought I was out. I thought that was it. I thought my life goes up from here. And what ended up happening is I found out pretty early in to the college experience that something wasn't right. Early on, I didn't really have the language for it, but I definitely was like, wait a second. I thought things were going to be better here. Why are things like this? And pretty much the entire journey of my academic career from being an undergrad to a grad student, to a PhD student, to being a staff member, to working in public, private, Ivy League and community colleges, I saw the same patterns over and over again. And unfortunately, they weren't just targeting me. I was definitely a primary target as kind of a working class, high achieving woman from an at-risk, first-gen background. I think it was very obvious that I was a kind of easy prey or shiny prey in the system. But it targeted people who had wealthy women from wealthy families and students who come from institutions like Berkeley or Stanford, and everybody got it. All the women got it. And I started to see that even male students who refused to participate in the sexism or the racism were also targeted for retaliation and payback, I guess. You didn't participate in the system that is oppressing others and is rewarding the white men in the system. So now you're a liability, so you've got to go. And I kept seeing it. I kept seeing it to the point where people that were new to it would look at me like, help me, help me. And I'd be like, this is not my first time at the rodeo, and I'm sorry that it's yours, but it's going to get worse. It's kind of how I would always coach people through it. And I thought that when I worked in higher education, I'd be safe, but definitely not even remotely close. And I would say that in college, the types of abuse that I experienced there ranged from coercive rape from multiple professors and also blackmail threats to myself, personally, my emotional, psychological, physical safety, threats to my career, threats to my family. I was made aware of professors who were trafficking drugs and who were prostituting. There was a lot going on. There's like this seedy underbelly in higher education. And I ended up all throughout my time just kind of being like, how is this being allowed? Who's pulling the strings here? What's really going on? And now, so when I left higher ed in 2023, I left with questions more than answers. I already knew that things were not right. Things were not only not right, but awful, that things were really, really abusive. But then I left with all these questions like, well, how abusive? How far does this go? And who's in charge of it? Is kind of what I wanted to know, because somebody's got to sanctioning this, right? It's more complicated than that. So I started doing all this research and long and short is I gave birth to academicabuse.com. And in that website, I have a data dashboard that I created that gathers stories, new stories from around the world of allegations of misconduct in higher education. This is a really important and powerful tool because it's the only one on the planet like it. So I now know from that data that started being aggregated in January of 2025, January 1st. So in about a year and almost, well, a year and four months, basically today, right? Isn't today the last day of the month? The third day? Yes, it is. So four months of data, I can tell you that there are over 8,000 stories aggregated in this dashboard of allegations of misconduct in higher ed. I can also tell you that the majority of those stories fall into three categories. The top category is discrimination. And then the latter half of categories is Title IX and harassment. So in Title IX is gender-based abuse, right? So racism and sexism are the two top tiers of alleged misconduct in the news in higher education systems. And so nobody's been able to get that information before now. I've got it. And now that I've got it, I'm really trying to get the word out there about it to raise awareness, but especially from what I've seen and lived, but now also having data to reinforce that or not even just evidence that, I guess you could say, that this is an epidemic, that what's going on in higher education is a public crisis and that it needs to be exposed and it needs to be dealt with. And I'm taking activism steps to call for change with representatives. I have some petitions out there and the nature of the problem is super complex, but I think that's quite a lengthy answer to the question. So I'll stop in case you have more. You floated right into a lot of the questions I was going to ask, which is you covered them and I love what you do, but why do you think this persists? I have several thoughts as to why it persists, but I'm going to lead with this one. The first thought is we have misnamed what is going on in higher education. We are calling certain types of abuse civil rights violations. So it's like Title IX, Title VII, Title VI, all these civil rights laws that apply to federally funded institutions and educational institutions. And those are there for a reason and they're important. However, the number one flaw in those laws is that there's no enforcement baked in. So it wasn't until I want to say, and I just read this in another book that I'm reading called On the Wrong Side, how universities protect perpetrators and betray survivors of sexual violence. And I just learned in this text that colleges were not required to enforce Title IX or excuse me, address it until 1997. So 1997 was only three years before I enrolled. And so if you can imagine all these college administrators building some way to address it and then trying to fine tune it, if that's what they're claiming. Then by the time I was experiencing everything I was experiencing, it was lawless. And this was also pre me too, like pre hashtag me too. So there was no public conversation about it. And so everything was just kind of being swept under the rug. Now, as far as why it's persisting, number one, there is no legal mandate to actually enforce or address in any way that has teeth with these colleges. Number two, the colleges, and this is in my opinion, deliberately don't fund the offices that they have created to allegedly address these issues. So if you only have like one, for example, University of Washington, where I worked for eight years, had one ombud for the entire tri campus system. So wait a second, you're telling me you have a campus that's like 70,000 students and not counting staff and everybody else and you have one ombud for the entire system, then that tells me that you don't care that that's not a priority to you. And this is in spite of the fact that there are surveys coming out where, you know, people are the campus surveys are, are issued every year and people are saying these things are a problem, but they claim there's no money, or there's no resources or they don't claim that at all. And they just stay silent and, you know, keep things as they are. Well, we released a survey and it's like, well, thanks for the performance of allegedly caring about it. Right. So, so I think one is definitely there's, they, they don't fund or have actual mechanisms to address these issues that have teeth. I think another issue is the, the hierarchies in higher education. So it's very hierarchical system where you have, it's like a fiefdom. It's at the top, there's like the president and then there's like the provosts and then there's like the deans and then there's like the departments and then there's the chairs of the departments and there's a associate professor or full professors and then there's associate professors and then there's tenure track professors, assistant professors, junior professors, adjunct teachers, and TAs and RAs, and then down at the bottom of the food chain is students. So, like, every single step in that ladder is dependent upon committees that have to approve you to climb the ranks. And so, if your committee has people on it that have been bad actors and you need their approval to move up the system and climb the ranks, are you actually going to come forward on behalf of a student if you've witnessed abuse? No, you're not. And I've seen it. I've seen it. They're not. And they've told me, you know, because I've gone to people for help, you know, hey, I know that you've seen this. I know that you know what's going on. Will you help me? And the answer is, I can't. I'll get retaliated against, right? So there's no meaningful protection against retaliation. And then that brings me to my next point about why these things persist, that you can't lodge formal complaints in a college without identifying yourself to be accused. So that's a huge deterrent, right? And they make the process extremely difficult, extremely burdensome for the complainant, whereas the bad actor has practically nothing to do at all other than sit there and wait for them to shut the case down because it's designed to wear out the complainant so that they'll eventually just give up and go away. There's all sorts of problems, but I'm going to lean into this phrase that I really want people at home to hear. I think it is my opinion after 20 plus years navigating the system that what is actually happening in higher education is trafficking, specifically student trafficking. So I'm finding from my data dashboard that there are 30, this is the last time I checked, which was I think Sunday last weekend. There were 38 universities with Epstein ties. Make it make sense. Yeah. Like explain that to me. Explain that one to me. Why are there 38 universities with Epstein ties? And second of all, if the system as I've described it effectively functions in such a way that for a victim to file a complaint means risking professional suicide, then that creates conditions in which perpetrators connect with a risk of effectively zero. So if the risk of speaking out is professional suicide, then the risk of misconduct is zero. So they have all this leeway to do whatever they want and they pretty much do. So imagine that, you've got the definition of human trafficking in federal law is forced fraud and coercion unless they're under 18. Under 18 is different, but over 18, forced fraud and coercion, excuse me, using forced fraud or coercion to obtain sex or labor is human trafficking. You don't have to be tied up in a back of a van to be trafficked. That's not how that works. So if your professor is saying, I'm going to fail you on this test unless you do a sexual favor for me, you know, that's trafficking. And it's called in the court system in the United States, sexual misconduct. So how is it that universities are getting a completely different system of evaluation than any other institution in the country? Yeah. And why? You know, why is that? Why is that being allowed? So and then if you think about that in terms of labor, we can get into that too. But yeah, well, the audience, I know it's a lot to take in because I'm taking in things and one of the things that I thought about is I believe that that a lot of the governmental things are, you know, school in general or, you know, the systems and they're set up by those hierarchies that that kind of can utilize and use. But as you were talking, I was thinking about the very institution of religion. I was thinking about that. I was like, yes, it sounds just the same. And as you described the the hierarchy, it reminded me of my friend. She's always in these, I don't know, network marketing schemes. And it reminded me as you were saying it and I was seeing the like how they were sitting. I was like, wow, using everybody because you literally use the one that's on the top is standing on the shoulders of everybody else. So it's kind of crazy that you're saying all this because it is a system. You know, we we want there's no way we can get out of. I say this to my grandson, I would say to my kids now, but I was like, you know, you have to learn to be like so very wise and open, you know, open minded. And I always tell my children because, you know, they're black. And I said, you know, you need to start your own business. I started my own and I'm happy, you know, and every working for somebody is an institution. We're going to school. It's an institution. Right now we're seeing the biggest debt ratio in the world with student loans and things. It's horrible. You're supposed to go to school in order to learn something to make money. You end up owing money before you even get to earn. Yeah. So it's almost like, you know, it's only almost like you're getting schooling to to be enslaved, enslaved with money. Yes. You took the word right out of my mouth. It's like I was like, this is not fun. This is you've got all these student loans and it's not fun. It's not the way it's supposed to be. Now you end up at the gate, you know, with money out the gate. Yeah. No, this is this is a big thing that I talk about, too, like in what other industry are workers forced to pay to work? Right. Like that doesn't make any sense. Like so when I I've worked over 60 blue collar jobs in my life, OK, service industry. And when I started a new job, I was paid to train on the job when I was a waitress. I only made 213 an hour back in the early aughts. But I got tips. Right. But I was paid that to train. I was paid. I was paid to learn the restaurant. I was paid to understand their, you know, procedures, the cashier stuff. Yeah. So why are we outsourcing every industry in the country to higher education, to like train them, right? For workforce? That makes no sense. And then we make the workers pay to get trained and actually go into debt on it. And who makes the money meanwhile? Yes. While this is happening, you've got university presidents making something like one point two million dollars a year. They make more than the president of the entire free country. That is the most powerful country on the planet. Yes. Come on. What kind of bullshit scam is that? I'm sorry. You said it's a scam. Yeah. They always transitioning, you know, paid, you know, paid slavery. They're transitioning all the time. It's like everything. Even I think when I think maybe five or six years ago, they had this new test that they were doing here in New York and. And the test was to gauge, you know, it had nothing to do with school, they had to take the test and they come to find out they wanted to see how many kids were behind so they can count how many heads they're going to have for a jail that they were building. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's I mean, exactly. I mean, I live in New Orleans and it's a known community fact that like after Katrina charter schools went down the shitter, educated all the teachers that knew the community were forced out and brought in teachers that didn't know the community. Now you have kids getting into 11th grade that don't know how to read. And then where do they go? Where do they go when they don't know how to read to make money? Yep. And they end up in a for profit prison. And I agree with you that that slavery is just being transitioned. It's like we're free on paper. Right. Exactly. And we're not. No, not at all. We're not. Yeah, I see so many of my clients come to me and the biggest burden is college. Like I can't make it, you know. And, you know, I've had people contemplating suicide behind this. And I wanted to share, too, with my sister was working for a college here. And she's she's a clinical psychologist and they hired her on the pretense. Oh, she's like, this is great pay. They need to promise me this. I said, just be careful with academia. Just be careful. Yeah. She was there a year. The next year, the contract changed and she had to do 50 percent teaching and 50 percent student counseling students. And she goes, you know how many students there are? And you know how many you know how many psychologists are for them? I was like, I can imagine. And she goes, I I turn the contract down. They're not going to kill. She said I would be working from sunup to sundown because I would have to create the curriculum. Then I would have to I have to have my notes in for them. And I said, you know why they do that, sis? And she goes, no. I said, they're acting. They don't care because they work you to death. You have asked everything, not that you want to, but you have no choice. You have asked everything. And the main people that's supposed to be supposedly taking care of the students won't get the care they need. That's right. Yeah. And and I think when I know. Right. And when you look at that, when you look at that system, it's really interesting because also colleges have been over time encroaching on different areas. So like now, in order to be a full time student, you have to live in on campus housing for the first two years. So now they control your future, right, by controlling your degree. Yes. And then they also control your housing. Oh, wait. And now we're going to control your food. We're going to have all the different restaurants and what are your meal plan? Oh, and now we're going to have a gym and we're going to have all the students take that out of their tuition area. Like, you know, they're just expanding their territory and increasing their control over the student body for the first at least two years and upping the tuition. And it's just like, you know what? Like, **** you guys. I get pissed. I get pissed because the people that are supposed to be going to school, right, are the people that need to mobilize their their monies and their, you know, their ability to make monies. Like, I came from a dirt poor background, like dirt poor, and you want me to pay for like your gym and your housing and all this other crap that I could get, you know, down the road, half off. Like, but I have to do it to go here to get this degree. And then, like, heaven forbid, if I were to file a complaint about something that's going on, because now you control my housing, my food, my everything, you know, like it all goes out of it. Yeah. So, yeah, it's it's it it messes. It pisses me off, Edna. It pisses me off. So how can people begin to protect themselves while still navigating these environments? Give us a couple of tips. Yeah. OK, so the first thing I'm going to say, this is this is going to sound, but I don't mean it this way. I genuinely mean this. Yeah, give it to us. There's a few things. Number one, you can go to the website, academic abuse dot com. OK. And on that website, I have built like self-help kind of resources out of my own love experience. And these are the things nobody's going to tell you. Right. So so no one's going to tell you about how to document a problem. No one's going to tell you about how to avoid meetings in private where you where nobody's a witness to what's going on. You know, nobody's going to tell you these things. Nobody's going to tell you that you can now you have to check your state laws. Right. But in most states, if you feel threatened for your safety, you're allowed to record a private a private interaction. Yeah. Right. These are things you can use. And, you know, there are also there's also a ton. And I and this is why I wrote this book. There's a ton of things that I put in the burn list that are from my lived experience that will help you identify what's going on as it's happening, where the website, OK, where my website, academic abuse dot com, is like a kind of like a technical manual in a way like where like here here's how to recognize this type of like here's how to recognize if you're being discriminated against, if you're a student or if you're a staff member. Right. Like I give examples of how to recognize discrimination. Then I also give examples of like how to navigate it, how to fight it, how to escalate your fight if you need to. But my book provides a completely different kind of play by play breakdown of how these things can look in real life. You know, I tell a story in my book about some a couple of students. This is one of my favorite, favorite tactics that I've seen for catching discriminatory professors. It was so, so smart. A couple of students of color, they were one was lighter skin and one was darker skin. And they suspected that they were that the darker skin student was being graded more harshly because of her her skin tone. Right. And that the lighter skin student was being graded less harshly because she was more like, quote, white passing. Right. So they didn't experiment for that professor that they thought was doing this. The two of them started switching papers. So the one student, let's call it student B, the darker skin student, student B would write a paper and put students a student A's name on it. The light skin student. And student A would write a paper and put student B's name on it. And he did this and found that the professor was consistently downgrading student B's or excuse me, that it wasn't like if student A's name was on it, it got a better grade no matter who wrote it, no matter how good it was. And they turned it in and she got caught. This professor got put on a year of so sad that the consequences were worse, but put on a year of paid leave. I think she should have been fired personally. But that was a good that was a good strategy for catching her. Like they switched papers. So these are things that are in my book that, you know, I can't tell everybody everything on the Internet. No, no, they got it right. Can't get it. And also, I think my favorite thing about the book is really targeting women. So like it teaches you like I can sit here and say to you, I can say it in a website. I can say it in an interview. I can say like, you know, here's how to recognize grooming and I can give you like 10 signs that you're being groomed by a professor for sexual abuse. Like I can do that. But it's not the same as reading a play by play that takes place over the course of four years to see how that looks and feels and what it actually is like so that that you know, you know what I mean? And then in the middle of the book, I do like a retrospective and I break down the most common tactics that I've encountered through research. Like so, for example, I teach you how to recognize love bombing. I teach you how to recognize identity erosion. I teach you how to recognize indirect threats. Indirect threats are very, very powerful because they offer plausible deniability. Right. So I can say like I can like if you're being indirectly threatened, it's not going to sound like this. It's not going to sound like if you say anything, I'm going to come after you and I'm going to hurt you. That's not what it's going to sound like. What it's going to sound like is, let's say, you know, I'm performing an indirect threat for you. I'll say, oh, yeah, such and such student tried to rat me out and they just got rid of her, you know, and, you know, it's an indirect threat. It's me letting you know. And it's plausibly deniable if I put it in writing. Right. So I teach you these things. And also the book has a bunch of actual communications from actual professors and actual people that were involved in higher ed and findings from H.R. They're actually all in there. So, yeah, yeah, this is pivotal, pivotal, and we're and students, if you're out there, even women get this, get this book. So a quick lightning round with some quick answers for you. Are you ready, Julie? All right. One word that describes the root problem in academia. Power. One mindset shift survivors need right now. Ninja. One action someone can take immediately if they feel unsafe. Breathe. Think. OK, think you did the person breathe. The air gives you some breath to think. Yeah. Don't act rashly. That's great. Let's bring it home. Here's what we talked about. Abuse in academia is not isolated. It's patterned power without accountability creates vulnerability. Trauma can shape what we tolerate. Systems don't always protect people. Awareness does. Your voice is not the problem. Silence is. And the most important thing, you don't wait for permission to protect yourself. That's what our guest today, Julie Cruz, is telling us in the burn in the burn list. Get that today. You've heard the story. Now let's talk about what to do with it. Remember to like and subscribe and share this episode and make the environment you want to feel. Remember, you are watching and listening to keeping it real on purpose. I am your host, Edna White, and my esteemed guest today, Julie Cruz. It's been great talking with you and getting all the information we need to live a better life. So we want you to keep this conversation in mind and hope we hope it helps you keep it real on purpose. Bye for now.