Former faculty allege sexual harassment, racial discrimination in pre-lawsuit letter
For decades, Yale leaders failed to respond to complaints about inappropriate faculty behavior in the electrical engineering department, a letter claims.

Tim Tai
A letter sent to the Yale president’s office in March details dozens of instances of alleged sexual harassment and discrimination. The letter was a pre-lawsuit notice, a document lawyers often send before filing lawsuits. It claims Yale leaders failed to address two decades of complaints about A. Stephen Morse, a professor of electrical and computer engineering.
Three former faculty members in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department jointly hired lawyers to write the letter. The lawyers conducted interviews with almost a dozen former and current faculty and staff members and found that “many junior faculty” have complained to departmental leadership over the years about Morse’s behavior. The letter claims that no meaningful action has been taken in response to their complaints.
Yale’s Office of the General Counsel responded to the pre-lawsuit letter in May, conducting an investigation of whether the issues raised had affected the three plaintiffs’ ultimately unsuccessful tenure cases. The general counsel talked to three members of the department, not including Morse, and concluded that there was no wrongdoing, according to an email obtained by the News that one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers sent to various people involved.
In December, a heavily-redacted version of the 10-page letter, entitled “Client 1, Client 2, and Client 3 v. Yale University,” was circulated among electrical engineering faculty in department-wide email threads. The three clients requested anonymity in the letter and for this article, citing fears of retaliation that could damage their careers.
“Over the last two decades, the faculty seem to have gained an unique privilege of being exempt from any Title VII, Title IX, and other university rules or regulations as demonstrated by years of alleged violations that have gone on unchecked,” wrote a recently-terminated professor in electrical engineering in a faculty-wide email to the department. “The senior faculty are unaccountable, shielded by their tenure status, and protected by various university offices.”
The lawsuit recounts incidents dating back to 2010, but claims that Morse’s behavior has likely persisted for at least two decades. It based these conclusions on interviews that the lawyers — Ann Olivarius ’77 LAW ’86 SOM ’86 and Jef McAllister ’77 LAW ’86 — conducted with almost a dozen former and current faculty and staff members of the School of Engineering & Applied Science.
Morse, who is in his 80s, wrote to the News on Thursday that he is not aware of any hostility toward women or minorities in the department now or ever since the department was founded in around 1977.
In response to the letter, he wrote that “it suggests very significant confusion about many things. There are many mis-representations of the facts and many statements which are false … the bottom line specifically about the letter is that I am not in any way at all, nor have I ever been the person I am accused of being – not at all.”
When asked to elaborate, he wrote, “while I much hope the details of my response can be aired in a proper venue, I elect to limit my comments at this time to those.”
He noted that being denied tenure, as the three former faculty were, “is quite completely devastating causing huge emotional strains … I certainly can imagine how hard it must be on them. They really deserve our understanding.” He wrote that he believes tenure decisions in the department are made in a fair and equitable manner.
Morse wrote that he was first made aware of the pre-lawsuit letter when it was mentioned at a departmental faculty meeting on Dec. 4, 2024, just after the emails containing the letter circulated to all department faculty. He said that he saw the letter for the first time on Tuesday, Jan. 21, after asking the department chair for a copy when the News reached out for comment on this article. No departmental or Yale leaders seem to have previously reached out to Morse about the letter.
Claims of sexual harassment
The alleged sexual harassment targeted women involved in SEAS at many levels: faculty, spouses of faculty, undergraduate students, graduate students, doctoral students, job candidates and staff.
According to the pre-lawsuit letter, undergraduate women reported to SEAS faculty around 2010 that as they walked to office hours with other professors, Morse would stand outside his office, ogling them and commenting on their appearances. He allegedly called two of his doctoral students, both Chinese women, the “pretty one” and the “ugly one” multiple times to other members of the department.
Also around 2010, Morse referred to a job candidate as “the one with the big breasts” at a faculty meeting and later spoke about another candidate as “the one with the small breasts,” the letter alleges. It claims that at departmental faculty meetings, Morse made a habit of commenting on the breast sizes of both students and faculty members. Multiple faculty members told the lawyers that they stopped bringing their wives to departmental events because Morse would stare at their breasts.
Morse allegedly told a graduate student that she was “too pretty to be working with” a person whose name is redacted in the letter, an incident that a faculty member reportedly relayed to then-Department Chair Leandros Tassiulas around 2018. The faculty member also allegedly reported to Tassiulas that around 2018, Morse met with an SEAS administrator in her office. As the administrator walked past him, the letter claims, “Morse brushed his body and hands along her torso and breasts, followed quickly by exclaiming ‘don’t report me for sexual harassment!’”
Tassiulas wrote to the News on Thursday that he was “informed about some related email circulation recently,” but declined to comment further.
“I have no recollection of the events mentioned in your email,” he wrote. “If a harassment or violation of code of conduct case falls to my attention I do follow due process.”
Faculty members told the lawyers that Morse routinely referred to women faculty as “girls” and once said they were “obedient” for arriving to meetings promptly.
Much of the alleged sexual harassment fixated on one former faculty member, known as Client 1 in the letter. Morse regularly commented on her appearance and stared at her body “with exaggerated facial expressions and body language,” according to the letter, on which Client 1 is a plaintiff. Morse also allegedly suggested that she get pregnant to avoid doing work, and commented to another plaintiff on the letter that Client 1 “was just a little girl.”
Morse used similar language in several emails obtained by the News. In an email to Client 1 on July 6, 2014, he told her to “keep smiling beautiful woman – I notice that you are very very good at this!” In another email, on April 17, 2015, he called her a “smart girl.”
While at Yale, Client 1 was one of the only women in a male-dominated department. The pre-lawsuit letter contends that the “blizzard of sexist commentary” she experienced began to color her reputation in the department and led her to feel “substantial stress and anxiety.”
Cases like these have led many victims of workplace harassment to seek legal representation, much like those pursuing a law firm against Barry Brock in high-profile misconduct lawsuits. Legal experts emphasize that holding perpetrators accountable not only seeks justice for survivors but also helps prevent future abuses in professional and academic settings.
“Morse repeatedly made her feel that her looks and body, not her professional accomplishments, were what mattered,” the letter states.
Claims of discrimination
The allegations extend beyond sexual harassment, also detailing instances of anti-Chinese and anti-Black racism, xenophobia and homophobia. If a lawsuit were filed based on the letter, the legal case to address these claims would rest on Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the federal law that prohibits employment discrimination based on race, national origin, color, religion or sex.
In conversations with colleagues and at meetings, the letter alleges that Morse complained that too many foreign-born and Chinese researchers were applying for jobs in the department. In a discussion about an Asian woman applying for a position, Morse allegedly said that he had difficulty hearing Asian women because he said they have high voices. It claims that around 2010, Morse advocated against hiring a man who wore an earring, saying he did not want a gay colleague. The candidate’s application was ultimately unsuccessful.
During Client 1’s interview for her faculty position in the department, Morse said repeatedly that her voice sounded like students of his from the same country as Client 1, the letter asserts. Much later, when Client 1 used the British phrase “full stop” at a faculty meeting, Morse — seemingly unaware that the expression was British — allegedly asked the department chair whether it was an “[ethnic] thing.”
Once, the letter claims, Morse made a “cruel joke” to a Black administrative assistant about “ripping off her wig and buying her a new one,” an incident which other senior faculty allegedly heard and played down.
“I certainly have the sense that this professor of considerable distinction was representing attitudes of his era as opposed to modern attitudes of equality among colleagues,” McAllister, one of the lawyers representing the former faculty, said.
Yale leadership allegedly ignores complaints
The letter asserts that Morse’s behavior was reported to Yale leadership as early as 2016. Based on the lawyers’ interviews, “many junior faculty” have complained to departmental leadership over the years.
In early 2016, Client 1 reported “Morse’s record of harassment” to Electrical Engineering Department Chair Jung Han, the letter claims. It states his response was a “brushoff,” and that Han said it is “difficult to change people at Morse’s age.”
“I do not recall the exchanges in 2016,” Han wrote to the News on Thursday. “If there were complaints, we process them according to university guidelines.”
He declined to comment further.
The letter continues that Client 1 then complained to SEAS dean T. Kyle Vanderlick, saying broadly that Morse “made inappropriate comments,” to which there was allegedly no administrative follow-up.
Vanderlick did not immediately respond to the News’s request to comment.
The faculty member who reported two incidents to then-Department Chair Tassiulas — the first where Morse allegedly said “don’t report me for sexual harassment” and the second where he allegedly said a graduate student was “too pretty to be working with” another person — made those complaints in 2018, according to the letter.
Tassiulas told the faculty member then that Morse had previously been reported to Yale’s Title IX office, the letter claims. Representatives of the office, which oversees Yale’s response to sex- and gender-based discrimination, did not immediately respond to the News’s request to comment.
The pre-lawsuit letter also addresses how Morse’s alleged discrimination may have factored into hiring and tenure decisions in the department.
The letter alleges that other faculty with power in Client 1’s tenure case knew that Morse’s vote could be tinged by his alleged discriminatory beliefs and harassment behavior, but that they did nothing to address the issue.
A recently-terminated electrical engineering professor’s faculty-wide email to the department detailed similar grievances.
“In my case, in the last 18+ months, I have received no written explanation of why my tenure case was denied, nor even a summary of the votes,” the faculty member wrote. “Faculty have given no meaningful verbal feedback, and some faculty refused to have even a courtesy meeting plainly indicating they have something to hide … This operation of the department is a joke.”
The former faculty members who hired lawyers received an answer from Yale on May 9, 2024, around a month and a half after sending the pre-lawsuit letter. McAllister, one of the lawyers, met with a lawyer in Yale’s Office of the General Counsel. McAllister declined to comment about the meeting, but according to an email obtained by the News that McAllister sent to various people involved after the meeting, the general counsel told him that they had investigated the letter’s claim that illegal bias had influenced the clients’ tenure decisions.
Per McAllister’s email, the general counsel said that they had looked into the case by talking to three people who were part of making the tenure decisions about the clients. Allegedly without speaking to Morse, they concluded that he did not have undue influence in those decisions, but rather that the decisions to deny the clients tenure were difficult but fair ones based on their scholarly records.
The general counsel said it was “unfortunate” that Morse spoke to other professors in the way he did, McAllister’s email claimed, but reiterated that Yale’s 45-day grievance period for tenure decisions had passed for all of the clients.
The email stated that the general counsel would not elaborate on his disciplinary record but said Morse had been spoken to in the past about the kinds of issues raised in the letter.
The general counsel did not immediately respond to the News’s request to comment.
Legal limitations stall lawsuit
A glaring problem with the clients’ legal case is that the clock has long run out on the Connecticut statute of limitations. Title IX cases cannot be brought in the state if the incident occurred more than three years before, and Title VII cases have a 300-day time limit.
The lawyers said they sent the pre-lawsuit letter to former University President Peter Salovey’s office knowing this, but hoped that by consolidating and presenting evidence, Yale leaders would take notice of the patterns to which its regular procedures had not responded.
“We always knew that any potential claims were beyond the statute of limitations, but we thought the cumulative record of allegations was such that it might move Yale to reconsider their personnel decisions,” McAllister said. “It might not have been obvious to the administration that there was a cumulative record.”
Olivarius, the other lawyer who authored the letter, sued Yale for the first time as an undergraduate in the 1970s. That lawsuit, “Alexander v. Yale,” was the first instance of a Title IX sexual harassment case against a university in United States history. As a result of the lawsuit, Yale and other universities created their first grievance procedures for sexual harassment, and a court found for the first time that sexual harassment was a form of sex discrimination.
Olivarius and McAllister now work together to litigate employment, discrimination and sexual harassment cases, and are married to each other. They met as students at Yale.
McAllister said that the allegations against Morse reminded him of Olivarius’s case against Yale when they were undergraduates.
“We understand it may be difficult to get to grips with a senior figure, distinguished in his field, who nevertheless cannot help himself fulminating retrograde views about women and minorities and has the stature to succeed in blocking their employment,” the pre-lawsuit letter concludes. “But the law says that is Yale’s job, and it has failed here.”