Stanford Update No. 2: The aftermath of Billingham's complaint

Margaret Billingham, Chief of Cardiac Pathology at Stanford University Medical School, is one of the world's leaders in the science of tracking the progress of heart disease and the body's reaction to transplanted tissues. Dr. Billingham built a program at Stanford that draws scientists and physicians from every continent to be trained in state-of-the art techniques, many of which were developed by Dr. Billingham herself. Hundreds of the world's top cardiac pathologists have trained with Billingh many of her colleagues believe she deserves the Nobel Prize for her work.

Yet today, many of Billingham's colleagues and she herself believe that Stanford's leadership is dismantling the program that she built and destroying her life's work.

Many observers believe that Billingham's early retirement and the stated decision not to replace Billingham with someone who can both continue and build on her work is the most blatant example yet of retaliation against women at Stanford Medical School who have spoken publicly about sex discrimination and sexual harassment. Intent to retaliate is extremely difficult to prove, and it is possible that the Dean of the Medical School simply does not understand the critical need for scientists like Billingham who are truly the bridge between basic science and clinical practice.

Billingham herself admits to being demoralized by her experience in dealing with issues of discrimination at Stanford. When Stanford neurosurgeon Dr. Frances Conley first spoke publicly about her own experience of being harassed and discriminated against at Stanford, Billingham was one of very few senior women at Stanford who openly supported Conley. Privately, Billingham told DataLine about her own years of discouraging differential treatment Ä starting with being told as a young resident that her children's health care would not be covered by the Medical School, even though male residents' children were covered, because her children were "her husband's responsibility". For more than twenty years, Billingham rarely complained, but when she heard Conley's public comments, Billingham heard a familiar story. The antagonistic reaction and aggressive ostracism that Conley suffered, moreover, surprised and shocked Billingham.

Billingham immediately accepted when she was asked in January of 1992 to head a new program called "Women in Medicine and the Medical Sciences" -- a program created as a result of the attention Conley's complaints generated. By May of that year, Billingham was so outraged by what she discovered that she wrote a strong, very detailed letter to the Office of the Dean, focussing on the most egregious problems in one department of the Medical School. Since writing that letter, which was reprinted in the June 1992 issue of DataLine, Billingham's life changed dramatically.

After a six-month investigation, in which many of the women who spoke to Billingham say they were threatened and intimidated, the Office of the Dean published a lengthy press release stating categorically that there "no concerns" about sex discrimination in the Department of Radiology. Dean David Korn declares that Billingham's explicit and scathing report was simply the result of "misunderstanding" these terribly complex issues. One reporter who eventually gave up trying to cover this story told us ft the Dean's office with an impression that Billingham was "a kind of coconut" who was "getting on in years".

Whatever the Dean actually believes, the fact is that his public and private characterizations of BIllingham border on character assassination and his treatment of her is insulting in the extreme. Dean Korn has implied that Billingham's work is passe, despite her having just been voted in as President of the top international scientific society in her field. He says he will recruit a more "contemporary" basic scientist to replace her, even though this will leave Stanford as the only major medical in the country without a cardiac pathologist.

But as Billingham herself said, "How could I have gotten it wrong? I just wrote down, verbatim, what they said." Also, five months before Billingham wrote her letter, many of the same women in the Department of Radiology told similar, detailed stories to DataLine.

Dean Korn has stressed the "complexity" of issues of discrimination and harassment raised in a "top-tier academic medical center like Stanford". We agree: the issues are difficult. But creating a fair and impartial process to hear complaints is not brain surgery. And Korn, despite contrary advice by faculty and university counsel, insisted on packing the investigative committee with two of his direct reports and another individual who would need his support in a future job decision. The composition of the committee led to a process that the current head of the University's Council on Diversity has called "terribly flawed".

If many of the women who spoke openly to Billingham were unwilling to repeat their comments to Korn's committee, the useful and necessary question to ask is not whether Billingham "misunderstood" but why and how those women were intimidated into silence. And also, why has no one from the Office of the President or the Board of Trustees even once picked up the phone and spoken to Margaret Billingham?

Editor's note (1994) All of the women in Radiology that Billingham interviewed have resigned or been fired. In the campus news account of the "exoneration" of the Department Chair, he declared that no woman in his department spent more than 30% of her time in the clinic. (One of the common complaints was that women were assigned to so many hours in the clinic that they could not spend adequate time on research. One woman who logged 42 hours per week in the clinic challenged the Chairman on his claim. He laughed and told her that the "30%" was based on a 168-hour week.

Billingham has since announced her early retirement, but Norman Shumway, who created the Department of Cardio-thoracic Surgery at Stanford, has recruited Billingham to join his group as an "emeritus called back to duty." Shumway's judgment of the University investigation of Billingham's complaint: "Bullshit".