Killip, four staff members told The Crimson, recorded their every move and publicly harassed them, while Phelan and Mitchnick swore in front of students, made obscene references to both staff and students behind their backs and asked staff members to perform personal errands and chores.

“It’s a culture of unacceptable behavior that was going on for so long they didn’t know it was wrong,” said a University source familiar with the department. “The problem isn’t that one person says ‘fuck you.’ It’s that one person says ‘fuck you’ and everyone thinks it’s fine. There’s a total lack of discretion, confidentiality, and respect...and the hardest thing is to maintain your professionalism.”

“If I had known what kind of atmosphere I was getting into, I wouldn’t have come,” said a staff member.

Four staff members independently told The Crimson that Killip monitors their hours in the Carpenter Center and publicly reprimands them when he thinks they are not performing their jobs adequately.

In a meeting on May 3 with VES director of administration Susan H. Foster, Assistant Dean for Human Resources Laura Ervin, and Garber, a University source and one faculty member said Killip read excerpts from a personal diary of staff attendence and assailed Foster’s administration. Killip would not comment on the meeting, but said that “since [Phelan’s removal], I’ve kept a record. [I’ve done] timekeeping.”

After Harvard Film Archive staff failed to poster an outside kiosk earlier this year, Harvard Film Archive manager Julie A. Buck recalls, Killip left a large hand-written note on the wall, saying, “this is the most blatant show of incompetency, even for you people.” One staff member complained directly to Ervin that Killip told three staff members he watched them “all the time.”

Phelan says there was little she could do to control Killip.

“Chris is a tenured, full professor, and it’s very hard for me to reprimand him in a meaningful way,” she says. “The chair is a rotating member of the department and it’s not easy to tell your colleagues what they may and may not do.”

Mitchnick says that she swears in front of—but not at—students. In an e-mail earlier this year to academic coordinator Michael Lawrence, she says she wrote of a troubled thesis student, “Give the fuck a pass.” Lawrence forwarded the e-mail to FAS Personnel, and Phelan says Knowles read it to her when he asked her to resign.

“You can’t have a loose cannon like that around students,” a staff member said.

But Mitchnick says swearing was a “habitual” part of VES culture and was “not meanspirited.”

She and Phelan say they could not respond to the staff’s concerns about their vocabulary because they were never approached about them directly.

Before Foster’s arrival, two staff members say, certain faculty, including Mitchnick, asked many staff members, who did not feel they were in a position to refuse, to perform personal errands and chores, sometimes but not always for pay.

Assistant to the Chair Wells says Mitchnick requested that she xerox an entire course book that Mitchnick planned to give to Phelan as a gift. When she gave Mitchnick what she described as “a funny look,” Mitchnick responded, “Were you hired to do faculty support or what?”

Phelan says Mitchnick made certain staff members so uncomfortable—Lawrence threatened to leave the department if her behavior did not improve—that Phelan removed her from the Head Tutor position last fall.