I just learned today that UW quietly graduated one of the harassers, Pratyush Patel, who had committed serious academic misconduct in addition to harassing women. Specifically he has a pattern of emotionally manipulating and abusing women to get them to write his code and papers. It’s unclear that anything in his thesis was either his idea or his work and yet UW has decided to give him a PhD, on a thesis committee led by my advisor, Arvind Krishnamurthy. This is deeply disappointing and disgusting as no one should be able to profit off of the emotional abuse of women but also because it devalues all other PhD degrees from UW, including mine. In contrast, many of the women have dropped out of academia/decided to not get their PhDs because of sexual harassment and bullying, so we can see who the university is valuing and not. The HR investigator was given significant evidence of his abuse in the form of text messages, emails and interviews, including from other universities, and chose not to include it in the report as it was “out of scope”. Despite the fact that he clearly targeted women and used them to perpetrate significant academic fraud.
