RINDOS PROBE MUST NOT BE ABANDONED.
By Kate Legge

The death of a West Australian academic leaves the big questions unanswered.

"Rindos here", he would bark down the phone in his Yankee twang before briefing me on the latest twist and turn in the Byzantine saga that hijacked his career and consumed the last five years of his life.

I had heard about David Rindos while researching a story on sexual harassment in academia. Here was a gay male lecturer agitating on behalf of female students who had complained of misconduct by a female gay professor in the archaeology department at the University of Western Australia. What a 90s tale.

Summarising the allegations against Professor Sandra Bowdler in a speech to the West Australian Parliament last year, Labor's Mark Nevill said: "Grave concern was raised by evidence indicating a long series of sexual involvements between Professor Bowdler and her female students. Professor Bowdler had secured grants and jobs for her girlfriends at the expense of other students. Other women were victimised at times for not accepting her advances and at other times for having ended the relationship."

The vice-chancellor of UWA, Fay Gale, chose not to pursue the recommendation of the first internal review urging a proper investigation of these "highly disturbing and serious allegations". Archaeology lost its autonomy but Bowdler remains at the university on a full salary. Rindos, the American recruit she had hailed as "brilliant" was denied tenure four years later, prompting his relentless bid for an independent inquiry into the events surrounding this decision. His quest hijacked his life.

Would the outcome have been different if the professor had been a heterosexual male accused of "badgering and intimidating" students?

The university's administration must dread the thought of Rindos as martyr, but not enough to spoil relief at possibly closing the lid on this affair. A State election and a new Parliament could derail the Legislative Council committee investigating the university's treatment of Rindos and without him driving the case interest will surely diminsih.

People who feel wronged face a terrible conundrum. They are eaten up by a grievous sense of injury and must choose between cutting their losses or standing to fight with an intensity that opponents use to tar them as paranoid and obsessive.

Rindos tortured himself. He turned from archaeological research to proving much more illusive hypotheses. His brilliance was evident in meticulous use of freedom of information to recover memos supporting his charge that denial of tenure was a managerial solution. His creative talent was ploughed into using the Internet as an electronic archive. He was not the only victim. Bowdler has suffered as a result of the continuing controversy over allegations that have never been tested. So, too, has the university, and the students who felt betrayed by a system that seemed to disregard them.

To his credit Rindos always furnished both sides of the story. He never hid his opponents' testimonies suggesting he was driven by personal ambition for a bigger empire and was monstrous to work alongside. But the two internal reviews of the archaeology department both disregarded criticism of him to focus on what they regarded as far more troubling allegations against Bowdler.

These cases are always fraught with personal vendettas, distortions, and political intrigue. The plots are complex and your judgement depends on where you sit. The West Australian press took sides and the campus was polarised. It would be easier in some ways to bury the whole business with Rindos's casket, but the inquiry has been at work for the best part of a year and there are outstanding and serious charges against UWA that need to be resolved.

On Tuesday, after his death, I was rummaging through documents relating to the case and found an essay he had written explaining his motivation. Surprisingly this piece is not burdened by poisonous accusations but describes how he felt as a mature-age graduate and first-time author meeting a great priest of his discipline, a man whose work he had challenged, a mentor who cared more about pushing out the frontiers of discovery than any tarnishing of his own academic crown.

"Behind a scholar nearing the end of his career I could see an indistinct line of scholars and academics. They stretched back, seemingly to eternity. Behind me, behind a young man just beginning his career, I could almost feel a hand on my shoulder - ghosts in the future, a matching academic procession of those yet to come... At that moment, for the first time, I met The Academy. I felt it deeply. And it is still alive in me. It's about as close to religion as I have ever come."

Rindos went on to say that he was fighting hard not simply to salvage his job and professional standing, since he regarded the wave of international protest by his peers as reaffirmation of his academic worth. He said he lobbied and hounded like a zealot because he believed academic freedom had been compromised in a department where student fortunes appeared to hinge on personal prejudices that ruled everything from the purchase of library books to the provision of resources.

"The real crime is not what they have done to me. Instead it lies in the consequences of such an action for academia as a whole. The cynical demeaning of proper academic standards in the name of crass expediency is a far worse crime than any just dismissal could be.

"Without good faith academia cannot exist. Without open and free discourse discussion can not occur at all. And without the honest application of true academic standards, fairly applied, academia suffers a painful death indeed.

"I tried for the sake of my students and the institution itself to do what was right. In this I apparently failed. The Academy, God save it, will need a far more powerful advocate than me."