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History of the Case

Jenny Harrison received her Ph.D. in 1975 from the University of Warwick in England, where her adviser was the topologist Colin Rourke. Her thesis, Unsmoothable Diffeomorphisms², concerned a problem that was solved independently around that time by William Thurston and Charles Fefferman, both at Princeton University, who ceded priority to Harrison and did not publish the result. The question was whether every C^r diffeomorphism of a manifold is topologically conjugate to a C^r+1 diffeomorphism; Harrison found a 2-dimensional counterexample (and others in higher dimensions in later papers). Her thesis work is considered to be very good by both her supporters and her opponents.

Harrison held positions at Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study before she went to Berkeley in 1977 on a Miller Fellowship, a prestigious postdoctoral position. In 1978, she accepted a tenure-track assistant professorship at Berkeley. A year later, she received an offer from Oxford University for a position at Somerville College and spent three years there, while still retaining her Berkeley post. On returning to Berkeley in 1982, she announced that she had found a C² counterexample to the Seifert Conjecture, providing an example of a twice-differentiable vector field on the three-sphere without a closed orbit. Her work extended a result of Paul Schweitzer, who in 1970 had found a C¹ counterexample.³ Harrison's work drew on new and delicate techniques from several fields and proved very difficult to write up for publication. A number of experts believed early on that the result was correct, but others maintained it was not. These factors contributed to the delay in publication, and the work was not generally believed to be correct until early 1986, when it was accepted for publication.⁴ Though there is some disagreement on the importance of this result, the consensus seems to be that it is a high-quality piece of work.

Harrison was denied tenure that year. In March, 1988, she filed a formal complaint with Berkeley's Privilege and Tenure Committee, a campus-wide committee of faculty from various disciplines which hears grievances about tenure reviews, among other things. This committee, after examining various charges of gender discrimination and mishandling of procedures in Harrison's tenure review, ruled against Harrison on all charges.

Harrison filed a lawsuit against the university in 1989, charging sex discrimination. In 1991, Harrison's lawyer obtained a court order forcing the university to surrender the files of the eight men who had been promoted to tenure between 1978 and 1988. Harrison has said that the files prove that her work compared favorably with that of the eight men and contain evidence that discrimination was the reason she was denied tenure. In August of 1991, Harrison was diagnosed with throat cancer, and the trial was put off. During 1992 and early 1993, legal depositions were taken from numerous witnesses, mostly from the Berkeley mathematics department. These depositions, taken under oath, allowed the lawyers to see what evidence witnesses would supply. When the settlement negotiations slowed in early 1993, Harrison's lawyers secured a new trial date for June 1993. In March 1993, the two sides agreed on a settlement according to which an outside review committee would make a recommendation to the university about whether Harrison's work merited a tenured appointment to the department.

The university has said that the committee did not reopen Harrison's 1986 tenure case, but instead addressed the question of whether her work, as it stands in 1993, merited her appointment to a tenured position at Berkeley. Harrison's most recent work extends Stokes' theorem to nonsmooth domains, and, in particular, to fractals.⁵ The university has released neither the names of the review committee members nor a description of the process by which they came to their conclusion. The terms of the settlement, which involved a payment to Harrison as well as her appointment in the department, will remain secret.

Adding any detail to this bare skeleton of the history of the case means running into conflicting opinions and interpretations. Many aspects of the case are confidential, and the few individuals privy to all the details surrounding the case are not eager to divulge them. Nevertheless, there are aspects of the case that are public and that can be examined.

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