The bowtie makes me suspicious right away
I shouldn’t have to tell my students that I don’t regard their backpacks as urinals, but apparently some professors have issues.
A Macalester College student has accused her chemistry professor of pissing (“urinating,” to use the legal term) on her backpack last December, reports the Mac Weekly. That prof, identified in a police report regarding “fourth-degree intentional damage to property” (well that really removes a lot of the nuance from the incident), is Paul Fischer, who is no longer a Mac employee.
That’s a first to me. There is an official police report on the incident.
A report from the St. Paul Police Department (SPPD) states that, on Feb. 6 at 9:41 a.m., a Macalester student informed SPPD officers that an individual had urinated on her belongings on Dec. 5, 2025, on Macalester’s campus. The report names former Macalester chemistry Professor Paul Fischer as the suspect in the case.
According to a statement SPPD spokesperson Alyssa Arcand made to the Pioneer Press, the student left her backpack unattended for several minutes in a classroom building and discovered urine on it when she returned.
So the event happened at the end of Fall term. Then, at the beginning of Spring term, Fischer is abruptly terminated.
On Feb. 19, chemistry Professor Keith Kuwata sent an email to all chemistry majors and minors, as well as biology majors with a biochemistry emphasis, stating that “Fischer is no longer an employee of Macalester College and is not authorized to be anywhere on campus.”
Kuwata’s email also notes that it has been “an unsettling time for many of you.” He stated that the department’s top priorities were student well-being and academic success.
My sympathies to the chemistry faculty at Macalester, that’s a rough decision to make, to suddenly drop a professor early in the term. I hope the students aren’t too traumatized by a professor suddenly losing his mind. That comment about “an unsettling time” suggests there is a lot more to the story, but they aren’t talking.
Apparently, Fischer started teaching at Macalester in 2001, not much different from me, starting at UMM in 2000. Do professors typically start falling apart around the 25 year mark? Should I be worried?
Again, I want to reassure my students that I probably won’t start pissing on everything.
Now, now. Don’t go making promises you can’t keep.
Probably?
Why did she wait two months to report it? Seems like that would be something one would want to immediately report.
From your link:
Now my question is why did it take so long for this person to get terminated.
Those reports come from RateMyProfessor, which is definitely not a reliable source.
See, if it was a zoologist, instead of a chemist, it would just be a case of “marking his territory”. But no, so boot ‘im out.
That behavior suggests disinhibition from frontal lobe dysfunction, possibly dementia, stroke, or tumor. He should see a neurologist.
As tragic as this seems to be, the good side is that 20 years from now, the students will have an absolutely unique story to tell about their bright, college days.
I just don’t think you are the kind of professor who would urinate into a backpack.
But don’t ask me about what you might do with spiders. ;-)
This reminds me of an oldie from 2000, after the election, in which Hillary Clinton gives George W. Bush a re-orientation tour of the White House and he raves about the improvements since his daddy’s time, particularly the “golden urinal” – following which the First Lady tells her husband, “I found out who peed in your saxophone…”
ahcuah @ # 8 – I doubt very much our esteemed host will ever piss on any spider!
” Do professors typically start falling apart around the 25 year mark? Should I be worried?” Not about falling apart, more like falling over judging by your recent ice-folly.
@8 ahcuah
Marisa Simonetti, charged in tarantula tossing case, found guilty
It seems to be a Minnesota thing.
I know a certain Doctor told me bowties are cool, but not on this guy.
Did anyone else have this on their 2026 Bingo card? Be honest…
@ ^ Recursive Rabbit & PZ : “The bowtie makes me suspicious right away.”
Do you think Bill Nye is suspicious or is he the exception that proves the rule? The Science guy is famous for wearing them after all.
That professor is one major SICKO!!
So when students are practicing qualitative chemical analysis, he’s the guy handing out mystery liquids.
It’s not like he was desperately lacking glass containers. So… deliberate abuse. But bizarrely self-destructive—unless he was arrogant enough to think he was untouchable? If he were disoriented, he wouldn’t be functioning at all as a teacher, and the story would be of a medical emergency.
I suspect as PZ says they aren’t telling the whole story. And the delay between the event and the report may be an important part of that story.
At first I thought this would have something to do with Expelled.
I am a chemistry professor and have really known only chemistry professors all my adult life, and, I am sorry to report, I am not all that surprised. This is a bit of an original method, but the type of behavior is in no way unusual.
Compulsory @17, you have it exactly correct: arrogance to the point of thinking you’re untouchable is the chem prof’s occupational hazard, and nearly all have it to some degree, sometimes very pathological degrees. If you aren’t arrogant, you’re supposed to pretend that you are and act like it. The more un-selfconfiident you are, the more arrogantly you must act. That makes you a man.
It really is one of the established, taught, transmitted, accepted, and admired, behaviors in the field. Those who say that white male science professors don’t perpetuate exclusion by creating the social construct of what a “good scientist” is considered to be, and who don’t reproduce themselves and their own traits and attitudes, should study this trait, and the transmision of it in white men, in chemistry
And the guy’s in inorganic, my field, and is one of the authors of one of the more famous textbooks, one that I use.
Owosso @16, you are right, but that is what the guy was trained and encouraged and required to be. An inorganic professor I knew used to throw glassware at his students while screaming abuse at them. That was quite accepted by the department and department head. No use the students complaining, they’d be told to live with it or leave.
Another used to, right after his grad students’ successful PhD defenses, refuse to sign the students’ theses unless the students continued to work for him all that summer for free. Since the department and department head were fine with that, the students always did.
These stories about rage and abuse stick in my head more because the sicko weird sexual and scatological behavior is rather too trivial to remember. Oh, there was a guy who exposed himself to the women chem professors. Which was, of course, fine, there were probably at most two women.
Now, this guy is old and I’m old, so perhaps there is less tolerance now? We’ll see, it’s going to be hard to shake.
Oh, I have to just tell one more: the chem professor who had three of the grad students in his group commit suicide within a 14-year span. He just couldn’t understand why they kept doing that, it wasn’t anything about him or how he ran his group, of course. The department did nothing. (That particular problem was finally addressed, and no longer haunts academic chemistry, I am glad to say.)
So no, PZ, you’re not a chemist, you aren’t infected. And, this behavior isn’t SOP, but it isn’t very surprising.
I take offense! {Regarding your bow tie slur, but only modestly, as you are not as sartorial as I am).
I started my teaching career as a middle school teacher. I’ve since taught all grades, pre-K, K-12 (14 h.s. subjects), and at UCLA, not to mention every special education and alternative education jobs in public education. (ALL means all, so Google what that entails).
I’ve not always worn bow ties, but I often have. I had a huge collection at one time.
Thankfully, I am done with education, and am “just” a caregiver (and homeless shelter manager).
I must disagree with garnetstar @20 and her/his take on the perp being a chemistry professor, and a male white one at that. As a white male chemistry professor, my experience is that Fischer’s sort of behavior isn’t limited to chemistry professors. A certain type of madness affects a small percentage of ALL professors with tenure, with perhaps a slightly higher percentage at private schools. There are, of course, different degrees of madness, but surely all us profs know colleagues in various departments (or even worse, administration!) who have behaviors similarly wacked out but are similarly (seemingly) protected from consequence. It amazes me how colleagues dismiss such behaviors (they’re as enabling as the current R party), and I’m even more amazed but not surprised that students and their parents, who collectively are paying extra for this level of education, do not object more.
Glad this guy got his comeuppance. And as another fellow bow-tie wearer, I agree with ANB @21 and suggest that the tie was just collateral damage and was not at all involved.
You could reassure everyone by putting “Excellent bladder control” on your resume.
Recursive Rabbit @ 13
Yes! Bow ties are cool!
davidw @22, I don’t disagree with you that unbridled arrogance, and subsequent insane behaviours, may well be found in professors in other disciplines. It’s just that I really don’t know, and I do mean, I haven’t ever met, any professors in any other disciplines, and so have no experience with them to report. (And, I have experience only in America: things are probably quite different in other countries.)
My experience is, though, that those attitudes and behaviors are common, not to say ubiquitous, in chemistry and are learned and transmitted from one generation to another. And that the behavior in this case, I would say, comes more from the traditional attitudes of arrogance rather than downright crazyhood.
(I once was at a small conference–for davidw, a Gordon confernce–where the chem profs amused themselves in the evenings by going around urinating in other chem prof’s beer bottles. Then, they all went out at midnight to play nude volleyball. It was rather difficult to engage in interesting scientific conversation with them.)
@25 Garnetstar – wow, the Gordon Conferences I’ve been to have been tame in comparison – the weirdest thing we ever did was stop by the warehouse liquor store on the way to the sites! Maybe my topics were boring (mostly dealing with spectroscopy).
Stay well, all!
davidw, perhaps spectroscopists are not as insane (by which I mean, childishly arrogant) as inorganic chemists?:)