Beihang brave in making sex scandal public

On Thursday night, Beihang University announced the results of their probe into Chen Xiaowu, a professor who received complaints by four female graduates for sexually harassed them when they were in college.

According to the announcement, the complaints are true. As a result, Chen not only lost his professorship, but his teaching qualifications as well. He was also removed from his position as deputy head of the university’s undergraduate school.

On the university’s official microblog account, there have already been more than 16,000 “like”s and 4,000 comments, the vast majority of which support the university’s actions.

However, some have also asked why the university made the sex scandal public, concerned the school will “damage its image”.

Such questions arose when Luo Xixi, the first of the four women, publicized her complaints by microblog Jan 1. Some netizens, claiming to be Beihang University graduates, even blamed her for “tainting the image of Beihang University” and demanding she drop the complaint.

It is surprising such ideas still exist in 2018. Living in the age of the internet, no one should dream of hiding the truth of a scandal forever. When a scandal happens in any agency, the only way to prevent its image being “damaged” is to make the whole thing transparent. If any part is hidden, there will always be accusations of bending the law for power.

Beihang University was quite efficient in their probe and very brave in making the whole thing public. The next step, as their announcement mentioned, is to further improve regulations so as to prevent similar incidents from happening again.

For example, in many top global universities, there are strict rules prohibiting a professor from dating a student, because the former has power over the latter and any relationship is fundamentally unequal. In domestic universities such things are not encouraged, but rarely does any university introduce a strict ban. That’s partly why Chen had the chance to sexually harass these students.

Maybe Beihang University and other institutions of higher education could take an example from their foreign counterparts and introducing such bans. Only with proper and strict regulations can such scandals be prevented in the future.