Giving Universities, and People, the Courage to Address Sexual Harassment and Violence: Interview with Jennifer Freyd

Today Professor Jennifer Freyd speaks out against institutional betrayal, specifically about issues of sexual harassment and violence. We talk about what happens when institutions of higher education, which are supposed to be nurturing young people, teaching them to be better citizens and contributors to society, end up betraying them when they are mistreated.  We talk in particular about the effects this has on students who enter universities hoping to become professors themselves, only to be betrayed by their own departments. Jennifer helps us understand why both individuals and departments deny betrayal, and she makes a forceful argument for changing that state of things. She ends by talking about hope and the future, and the work of her non-profit Institute for Institutional Courage.

Jennifer J. Freyd, PhD, is a researcher, author, educator, and speaker.  Freyd is the Founder and President of the Center for Institutional Courage, Professor Emerit of Psychology at the University of Oregon, and Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences in the School of Medicine, Affiliated Faculty at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and Affiliated Faculty, Women's Leadership Lab, Stanford University. She is also a Member of the Advisory Committee, 2019-2023, for the Action Collaborative on Preventing Sexual Harassment in Higher Education, National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. Freyd was in 1989-90 and again in 2018-19 a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Freyd currently serves as the Editor of The Journal of Trauma & Dissociation. 

Freyd is a widely published and renowned scholar known for her theories of betrayal trauma, institutional betrayal, institutional courage, and DARVO. She received her PhD in Psychology from Stanford University. The author or coauthor of over 200 articles and op-eds, Freyd is also the author of the Harvard Press award-winning book Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse. Her most recent book Blind to Betrayal, co-authored with Pamela J. Birrell, was published by John Wiley, with seven additional translations. In 2014, Freyd was invited two times to the U.S. White House due to her research on sexual assault and institutional betrayal. In 2021 Freyd and the University of Oregon settled Freyd’s precedent-setting equal pay lawsuit.

Freyd has received numerous awards including being named a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, an Erskine Fellow at The University of Canterbury in New Zealand, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In April 2016, Freyd was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for the Study of Trauma & Dissociation.  Freyd was selected for the 2021 Christine Blasey Ford Woman of Courage Award by the Association for Women in Psychology.