Abuse in Higher Education Exposed | Power, Silence & Survival

If you ever believed that higher education is a safe place, if you ever trusted the institutions are designed to protect you, this episode is for you. Because what happens when the very place meant to develop you is a 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. 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 forthcoming memoir can I show them yeah please I got it right here too the burn list I just got it today where the document 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 ready for this welcome thank you so glad to be here i'm i can't wait to get into it yes yes give us give us a little bit of your story and start get this backstory so we just lean on in um yeah sure so backstory i 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 yes um and i grew up um in a quite difficult home so those those of you out there that know what i'm talking about uh you you have my my deepest sympathy is you know um yeah so it was pretty bad rocky start around the house right away um and that was primarily because my mother um 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 you know kind of all and um throughout that whole entire ordeal you know I kind of learned to keep my cool and uh focus on my way out and to me the way out was higher education i thought you know yeah you know i never want to get stuck like my mom right i never wanted stuck like her and be in a position where some very violent predatorial male could uh you know trap us and hurt us you know and i 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 i despite all that was going on and and being homeless at 14 and being in foster care and all the things i supported myself with multiple jobs and um got into like all the extracurriculars to like beef up my resume and had like a 3.967 gpa and ended up getting a full scholarship to college so i was like okay all right I did it and I you know you you cannot imagine how superwoman I felt to come out of that and be like you know I got this scholarship my life is gonna be awesome you know goodbye it's everybody and everything that ever hurt me and I thought I was out you know I thought that was it I thought you know my life goes up from here and uh what ended up happening is I found out pretty early in to the college experience that something wasn't right. Like I, 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 you know kind of a working class high achieving woman from an you know at risk first gen background i think it was very obvious that i was a a kind of easy prey or shiny prey in the system yeah but it targeted people who had wealthy women from wealthy families and and students who come from you know yeah institutions like Berkeley or Stanford and everybody got it all the women got it and i started to see that um that even male students who refused to participate in the sexism or the racism were also targeted for retaliation and payback i guess you know like you didn't participate in the system that were that uh 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 you know help me help me and i'd be like i'd be like this is this is you know it is not my not my first time at the rodeo and i'm sorry that it's yours but it's gonna get worse you know 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 um i would say that in college the types of abuse that i experienced there ranged from you know um coercive rape uh from a you know from multiple professors and also um blackmail threats to myself personally my emotional psychological physical safety my threats to my career threats to my family um i was made aware of professors who were trafficking drugs and who were prostituting um there was a lot going on there's like this seedy underbelly in higher education and i and i ended up all throughout my time just kind of being like how is this being allowed who's who's up who's pulling the strings here what's really going on and now um so when i left higher ed in 2023 i left with questions you know more than answers like i already knew that that that things were not right you know things were not not only not right but like 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 you know who's in charge of it is kind of what I wanted to know because somebody's got to be 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 to academicabuse.com and that 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 yes it is so four months of data i can tell you that there are eight 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 the and then the latter half of categories is uh 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 in higher education systems well 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 i'm really trying to get the word out there about it to raise awareness that um 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 um that this is an epidemic that what's going on in higher education is a public crisis and um 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. It's okay. It's all right. 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, right? So it's like Title IX, Title VII, Title VI, all these civil rights laws that apply to federally funded institutions and educational institutions, right? 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. Wow. Wow. So 1997 was only three, 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, right? Then by the time I was experiencing everything I was experiencing, they're really, it was lawless. And this was also pre me too, like pre hashtag me too. so there was right yeah i was gonna say that right yeah 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 right number one there is no um 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 um 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 campus surveys are are issued every year and people are saying these things are a problem but uh 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 yeah we all need it yeah 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 um the hierarchies in higher education so it's a very um hierarchical system where you have uh it's like a victim it's like Like you start, there's up 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 associate 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 um committees that have to approve you to climb the ranks and so if your committee uh 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 here so that's a huge deterrent right and 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 yeah so there's there's all sorts of problems but i'm going to lean into this phrase that i really want people at home to hear um 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 38 this is the last time i checked which was i think uh sunday last weekend there were 38 universities with Epstein ties, well make it make sense yeah like explain that to me, explain that one to me why are there 38 universities with Epstein ties okay 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 uh professional suicide then that creates conditions in which uh perpetrators connects with a risk of effectively zero so like the risk of speaking out is professional suicide and the risk of misconduct is zero right so they have all this leeway to do whatever they want and um they pretty much do so um imagine that you know you've got the definition of of human trafficking in federal law is force fraud and coercion unless they're under 18 under 18 is different right but over 18 uh force fraud and coercion excuse me using force fraud or coercion to obtain sex or labor is human trafficking you don't have to be tied up in a back of the van to be trafficked that's know how that works right so if your professor is saying i'm gonna fail you on this test unless you do a sexual favor for me you know that's trafficking but it's called in the court system in the united states sexual misconduct right so how is it that universities are getting a completely different uh system of evaluation than any other institution in the country yeah yeah and why you know why is that why is that being allowed so okay and then if you think about that in terms of labor we can get into that too but yeah well what do you see I know it's a lot to take in because I'm taking in things and one of the things that I 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 um 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 yeah it sounds just the same and as you described the the um 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 was saying it and i was seeing the like how they were sitting i was like wow using everybody because you're literally using 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 like i say this to my grandson i don't 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 work going to school it's an institution it's 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 to in order to learn something to make money you end up owing money yeah before you can get to earn yeah so it's almost like you know um 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 Slavery Yeah yeah It's like slavery Because I know I was like this is not fun this is no we've got all these student loans and this it's not fun it's not the way it it's supposed to be no you end up out the gate you know with money out the gate yeah no this is a this is a big thing that i talk about too like in what other industry yeah are workers um forced to pay right 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 okay 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 2.13 an hour back in the early aughts but i got tips right but i was paid that to train i was paid to learn the restaurant i was paid to understand their you know procedures cashier stuff yeah 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 1.2 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 it's a scam they always transitioning you know paid you know uh paid um slavery they're transitioning all the time it's like everything even i think when my 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 was it had nothing to do with school it was they 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 were they 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 i live in new orleans and it's a known community fact that like after katrina charter schools went down the shitter as you can they all the teachers that knew the community were forced out 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 right 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 um yeah I see so many of my clients come to me and the biggest burden is college like I 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 um she's she's a um a clinical psychologist and um they hired her on the pretense oh she's like this is great pay and they promise me this i said just be careful with academia just be careful yeah she was there a year the next year their contract changed and she had to do 50 percent teaching and 50 percent student um counseling students and she goes you know how many students there are and you know how how many you know how many psychologists are for them i was like i can imagine and she goes i i turned the contract down they're not going to kill me she said i would be working from sun up to sun down because i would have to create the curriculum then i would have to i have to have my notes in for them and and she's i said you know why they do that sis and she goes no i said they're acting they don't care because it works you to death you have to ask everything not that you want to but you have no choice you'll have to ask 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 you 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 yes oh wait and now we're going to control your food we're going to be you know 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 offering the tuition and it's just like you know what like **** you guys i get pissed i get pissed because the 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 right right 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 those getting out of it yeah still getting yeah it's it's it it messes it pisses me off at night it pisses me off so how can people begin to protect themselves while still navigating these environments give us a couple tips yeah um okay 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 give it to us there's a few things Number one, you can go to the website, academic abuse.com. Okay. And on that website, I have built like self-help kind of resources out of my own lived 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 um 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 um and uh 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 um 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 okay where my website academicabuse.com is like a kind of like a technical manual in a way like we're 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 um 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 um some a couple of students this is one of my favorite uh favorite tactics that i've seen for catching discriminatory professors it was so so smart um 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 right 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 uh or excuse me that it wasn't like if student a's name was on it yeah it got a better grade no matter who wrote it no matter how good it was and they turned it in and um she got caught this professor and got put on a year of so sad that the consequences weren't worse but put on a year of paid leave i think she should have been fired right 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. 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 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. 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, 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 i'm 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 these things and also the book has um a bunch of actual communications from actual professors and actual people that were involved in higher ed and findings from hr they're actually all in there so okay yeah this is this sounds pivotal pivotable and we're and um students if you're out there even women get this get this book so um a quick lightning round um 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 think you did the first one breathe the air gives you some breath you have 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 silences 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 it helps you keep it real on purpose. Bye for now.