The Boston Globe

January 23, 1993, Saturday, City Edition

Tufts doctor was tenured while probe under way

BYLINE: By Alison Bass, Globe Staff

SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. 1

LENGTH: 1076 words

The Tufts University School of Medicine awarded tenure and a department chairmanship to Dr. Richard I. Shader after a 1991 sexual harassment complaint against him was settled for $ 90,000 and while the state medical board was investigating a separate charge that he had sexually exploited a female patient, according to a source familiar with the case.
The state Board of Registration in Medicine last month put Shader on what amounts to probation and restricted his psychiatric practice after he admitted having sexual relations with the patient in the 1970s. The board warned that this judgment would be set aside and the case reopened if there were other charges of sexual misconduct against Shader, who is now chairman of the psychopharmacology department at Tufts.
Several Tufts faculty members and psychiatric residents say they are disturbed at the way New England Medical Center has handled the case, and a leading psychiatrist has resigned in protest. Sources say the Tufts-affiliated teaching hospital negotiated and paid part of the 1991 settlement in the harassment complaint against Shader, which was filed by a hospital employee.
“Tufts gave him tenure despite knowing there were these allegations pending,” said Dr. Nora Schwartz, a third-year psychiatric resident at the hospital. “A lot of faculty members here feel betrayed by him, and they feel this needs to be talked about and exposed instead of being hushed up.”
Shader last night denied any involvement in sexual harassment. “I have never engaged in any sexual harassment,” Shader said through his attorney, Ellen Janos. “I regret if any individual believes otherwise.”
Neither Tufts nor New England Medical Center has taken any official action against Shader – either in response to the sexual harassment settlement or to the state board’s action in the exploitation case, several Tufts psychiatrists say. Shader, who is internationally known for his research on psychiatric drugs, still teaches at Tufts medical school, conducts research there, and sees patients for diagnostic evaluations.
The woman who filed the harassment complaint with the hospital’s human resources department gave up her job as a condition of the settlement and has been unable to find another one in the same field, sources knowledgeable about the case said, and she signed an agreement stipulating that she would not talk to anyone about the case.
Officials at Tufts and New England Medical Center have declined to comment.
Ten senior Tufts faculty members recently wrote to Dean Morton Madoff of Tufts medical school, urging him to take action against Shader. The Globe received a copy of the letter, which read in part: “As fellow faculty members in the School of Medicine, we feel that the posture of violation and disregard manifest in Dr. Shader’s conduct is not only disgraceful to his position as a physician and leader in education . . . it sends a message of compromise that reverberates through the medical and academic community.”
In an interview yesterday, Dr. Malkah Notman, who recently resigned her Tufts faculty appointment to protest Tufts’ handling of the Shader case, said: “I think giving him tenure after they settled the complaint and while other allegations were being investigated is deplorable. It is part of a pattern of disregarding or minimizing harassment situations, and it can only do harm to the profession over the long run.”
Notman is acting chairwoman of psychiatry at Cambridge Hospital and a former president of the Massachusetts Psychiatric Society.
Another Tufts faculty member, who asked not to be identified, said she had also been sexually harassed by Shader in the late-1980s, while a trainee at the university. Describing a pattern of harassment remarkably similar to the one sources described in the New England Medical Center complaint, she said Shader would come up to her at social gatherings, fondle her and kiss her on the mouth.
“I found it offensive, but I didn’t know how to tell him to stop. He was my boss,” the woman said. “I tried to stay away from him as much as possible.”
Sources say the harassment complaint settled by the New England Medical Center was filed in early 1991 by a woman who worked for Shader on a medical journal he edits. According to the sources, the woman alleged that the harassment took place on many occasions over a number of years and consisted of Shader’s fondling the woman, pulling her against him, kissing her on the mouth when he could catch her off guard, and repeatedly scratching himself in the crotch in her presence, a source said.
As a result of the harassment, a source said, the woman asserted that she began experiencing panic attacks and went to a therapist for help. After she filed the harassment complaint with the hospital’s human resources department, the source said, top administrators at the hospital told her that Shader was a powerful physician and that there was nothing they could do, other than perhaps pay for her psychotherapy.
In May 1991, after the woman hired an attorney, the New England Medical Center agreed to pay her $ 90,000 on the condition that she leave her job immediately and talk to no one about the arrangement.
That same year, the state medical board also began investigating a complaint that Shader had had sexual relations with a patient who had gone to him in the mid-1970s for help with marital problems and recurring panic attacks. The woman, who asked not to be identified, said she first filed a complaint with the Boston Psychoanalytic Society in May 1990 and that the society, after censuring Shader, reported the complaint to the state regulatory board sometime in 1991.
The board conducted its own investigation of the charges, which were common knowledge at Tufts medical school, several sources say.
In February 1992, the Tufts School of Medicine created a department of psychopharmacology and named Shader as its chairman, granting him tenure in the process. Shader had previously been chairman of the school’s department of psychiatry but resigned that position sometime in 1990, shortly before he left for a sabbatical at Stanford University School of Medicine.
Last month, before the former patient’s sexual abuse charges were adjudicated in a public hearing, the state medical board and Shader agreed to a “consent judgment” that limited his psychiatric practice and involved a stayed suspension of his medical license.