Campus Puritans Come for an Astronomer–and His Byline
quillette.com
quillette.com
https://evolutionnews.org/2023/12/how-scientific-materialism...
> After a six-month investigation, Geoff Marcy — a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has been mentioned as a potential Nobel laureate — was found to have violated campus sexual harassment policies between 2001 and 2010. Four women alleged that Marcy repeatedly engaged in inappropriate physical behavior with students, including unwanted massages, kisses, and groping.
> As a result of the findings, the women were informed, Marcy has been given “clear expectations concerning his future interactions with students,” which he must follow or risk “sanctions that could include suspension or dismissal.”
> As word has spread that Marcy was not more severely disciplined, some fellow astronomers have begun speaking out about his behavior, asking for stronger sanctions and even telling him that he is not welcome at his field’s biggest annual gathering.
(Quillette characterizes this as "a (weak) preponderance-of-the-evidence standard", which is not the same as saying it was wrong, or highlighting the proper standard.)
and
> Harvard astronomy professor John Asher Johnson was a graduate student in Marcy’s lab from 2000 to 2007. During his first few years in the lab, Johnson told BuzzFeed News, he directly witnessed Marcy giving an undergraduate a back massage, with his hand underneath her shirt, alone and after hours in the lab.
It reminds us of the potentially brilliant people who were denied the opportunity to become astronomers:
> She didn’t register an official complaint until eight years later, by which time she’d left astronomy — in part, she said, because of the sexual harassment she and other female astronomers experienced. “When you’re a student and you see every complaint being ignored, and every male professor who has violated that have zero consequences, it really makes you not want to step forward,” she said.
Nor is it confined to a single campus. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/azeenghorayshi/geoff-ma... points out "Famous Astronomer Accused Of Sexual Harassment At His Previous Job, Too". Quillette characterizes it as "treating students as friends, hugging them or kissing them on the forehead" but that's citing Marcy as the source. From the BuzzFeed article we see a different story, like - "One day in 1995, she recalled, Marcy touched her breast when they were in a private meeting together" and "He would also play with her hair or brush up against her with his legs, she said, “often resulting in his crotch touching me.”"
Nor can you say it's 'campus' as the National Academy of Scientists, which expelled him, is not a campus, but part of the broader term "academia."
Puritans were not known for supporting women's equality nor their views on consent, so calling this opposition "Campus Puritans" is doubly wrong.
From this article:
> how was lead author Weiss (a junior faculty member, it should be remembered) induced to withdraw the paper with its current author list except through mob bullying tactics?
How bizarre. Quillette emphasized the "junior" to suggest, what, that the lead author wasn't capable of doing the work without more senior faculty?
Because it's usually the other way around - the junior faculty members face bullying tactics to add senior faculty to the author list. The only reason is isn't "mob bullying tactics" is because there are too few senior faculty, compared to junior faculty and students, to make up a mob.
That's because "mob" is used as a code-word to mean "a large number of people who aren't in power." The elite can never be a mob because they are so few, even though the have strong bullying power as consequence of their elite status.
> But if you visit arXiv to read the paper now, you can’t. It’s been withdrawn. Why? Was the data incorrect? Was the analysis conducted improperly? No. The problem was that Geoff Marcy’s name was on it.
According to the arXiv site, “It has come to my attention that there are significant concerns about the author list of this manuscript. It is very important to me that I honor everyone’s contribution to this work appropriately. Accordingly, I am revisiting the author list, with the goal of setting a standard for authorship that fairly acknowledges everyone’s contribution.”
According to https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/05/29/when-they... "he was co-author on a paper that excluded credit to the graduate students who did much of the work."
I assume you meant "appalling" here