Julie Lythcott-Haims ’89, a Palo Alto City Council member and former Stanford dean, resigned from several council committees last Thursday following backlash over an affair she had with a more than a decade ago.
Lythcott-Haims served as dean of freshmen and undergraduate advisor at Stanford from 2002 to 2012. He left his position to pursue a master’s degree in fine arts and later published best-selling books on fatherhood and adulthood. Earlier this year, he openly ran for the congressional seat in California’s 16th District, which covers Stanford and Silicon Valley.
On July 10, Olivia Swanson Haas ’11 published an essay on Autostraddle, an LGBTQ-focused news and entertainment site, detailing her year-long relationship with an unnamed school dean while she was a student. The next day, Lythcott-Haims showed Palo Alto Online that she, the dean, described through Haas.
“I privately apologized to Ms. Haas years ago,” Lythcott-Haims wrote in the statement, which she later posted on her Substack blog. “Now I need to publicly apologize to her for my movements and their effect on her. “.
In her article, Lythcott-Haims wrote that having a date with a student “is beside the point when it happened thirteen years ago, and it is beside the point now. “He added that he has since focused on “doing the necessary tasks to fix where it is possible to fix it. ”
Haas wrote in his essay that he wished Lythcott-Haims some harm and that the former dean supported the selection of Haas to tell his side of the story.
Several members of the Palo Alto City Council have expressed sadness after learning of the actions beyond Lythcott-Haims. Councilmember Vicki Veenker said she was “shocked and deeply saddened by the revelations about Julie. “An editor at the Palo Alto Daily Post wrote that Lythcott-Haims is resigning from the city council.
Lythcott-Haims made the decision to withdraw from the City-Stanford and City-School District committees and the Youth Mental Health Task Force after speaking with Veenker and Palo Alto Mayor Greer Stone, he wrote in an article for The Daily.
“My priority is to serve the city’s most productive interests and I am concerned that recent revelations about my past may obstruct my ability to constitute the city well on those committees,” Lythcott-Haims wrote.
Haas’s essay also mentions that the dean left the university to pursue a master’s degree in fine arts, although this matter was the real cause of her departure.
After Lythcott-Haims’ departure in 2012, the university pursued a new policy that prohibited sexual or romantic relationships between staff members (including deans) and academics over whom they had “influence or authority. “”discouraged” through the University, but not officially prohibited.
The Daily contacted the University for more information about the policy change.
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