Julie Lythcott-Haims ’89, a member of the Palo Alto City Council and former dean of Stanford, resigned from several council committees last Thursday following backlash over an affair she had with a ten-year-old girl earlier.
Lythcott-Haims served as dean of freshmen and undergraduate advisor at Stanford from 2002 to 2012. She left her position to pursue a master’s degree in fine arts and later published best-selling books on parenting and adulthood. Earlier this year, she ran openly in primaries for the congressional seat in California’s District 16, 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 was the dean described through Haas.
“I privately apologized to Ms. Haas years ago,” Lythcott-Haims wrote in the statement, which she also later posted on her Substack blog. “Now I want to publicly apologize to her for my moves and the effect they’ve had on her. ”
In her article, Lythcott-Haims wrote that dating a student “was beside the point when it happened thirteen years ago, and beside the point now. ” She added that since then she has focused on “making the necessary paintings to fix where it can be fixed. ”
Haas wrote in his essay that he didn’t want to hurt Lythcott-Haims 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 expressed sadness after learning of the actions beyond Lythcott-Haims. Vicki Veenker, a member of the council, said she was “shocked and deeply saddened by the revelations relating to 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 left in 2012, the University followed a new policy that prohibited sexual or romantic relationships between staff members, “including deans,” and scholars over whom they had “influence or authority. “”through the University, but it is not officially prohibited.
The Daily contacted the University for more information about the policy change.
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