Tribunal backs the professor’s return but warns him not to read it as vindication
The University of Melbourne sacked a tenured professor in December 2023 for serious misconduct after finding he had sexually harassed a woman who reported to him. He challenged the sacking, won reinstatement, and the university appealed. On September 4, 2026, a Full Bench of the Fair Work Commission dismissed that appeal.
He keeps his job. The decision, though, reads nothing like a clearing of his name.
The conduct traced back to a dinner in September 2019. The professor was then acting dean of the university’s science faculty; the woman was the faculty’s executive director and reported directly to him. According to the decision, he reached across the table, took her hand and said words to the effect of “I can see us being in each other’s lives for the rest of our lives. I love you.” Outside afterwards, the tribunal recorded, he hugged her and said he had “never felt like this before.” The next morning he sent a text the tribunal described as “euphoric language,” signed “Yours always.” She had made clear she wanted a professional relationship only. Unwelcome contact continued in other forms over the months that followed.
Here is the detail HR teams should sit with. The faculty’s HR manager knew about the dinner and the text at the time - the woman had shown her the message. Yet the university took no formal action until 2023, after the professor applied for a role that would put him back in contact with her. That triggered a formal complaint, an external investigation and, in the end, dismissal.
At first instance, the Commission found the professor had committed serious misconduct amounting to sexual harassment - then found the dismissal unfair anyway. Two things drove that result: the years of delay, and an informal “intervention” the HR manager staged in March 2021 that, in a practical sense, had already dealt with the matter. The professor had apologised, promised no further contact and kept that promise. He was reinstated, but denied back pay.
On appeal, the Full Bench sided with the university on the law. The delay, it held, was the wrong thing to weigh when asking whether there was a valid reason to dismiss. Serious misconduct is a valid reason; a delay in acting on it does not make the reason disappear. Delay belongs in a separate part of the test - the catch-all “other matters” that bear on whether a dismissal is harsh, unjust or unreasonable.
The Full Bench added a point worth filing away. Under the university’s policy and the law behind it, a harasser’s intent is beside the point. The first-instance member had leaned on his view that the professor never set out to pursue a romance. That was a distraction, the Full Bench said. The real test is whether a reasonable person would have anticipated the conduct might offend, humiliate or intimidate - not what was going on in the harasser’s head. Forcing an employer to prove intent, it warned, would leave it in an “impossible position” when enforcing an important policy.
So the university won the arguments and still lost the appeal. The first-instance member had also found the dismissal unfair on a second, alternative footing - putting the delay and the 2021 intervention into that “other matters” basket, where they belonged - and the Full Bench found that reasoning sound. The professor had already moved to a substantive, non-leadership role and worked for years without further incident. On those facts, the Full Bench held, reinstatement was a decision reasonably open to the original member.
It closed with a pointed message to the professor: he “should not view our decision as vindication.” Reinstatement, it stressed, turned on the particular circumstances - chiefly that the job he was returning to was not a leadership post. Had he been going back into a dean-type role, the Full Bench signalled, the result might well have been different.
For HR, the practical lessons stack up fast. Substantiated harassment is a valid reason to dismiss, and you do not have to prove the harasser’s motive to rely on it. But sit on what you know - especially where a manager or HR resolves it informally and signals the matter is closed - and that delay can still undo a dismissal years later, not on validity but on fairness. And where a manager runs an off-the-cuff “intervention” and tells the person an apology will be “the end of the matter,” a tribunal may later read that as the employer having, in practice, drawn a line under the whole thing.
