This is stunning. In the investigation into the accusations against Comaroff, Harvard decided to turn the investigation around and dig into the accuser’s personal history. So they got private psychotherapy records of one of the women, without her consent (how did they do that? Patient confidentiality doesn’t matter anymore?), and then turned them over to Comaroff.

Private therapist turned notes over to Harvard admin because… they asked for them.

I have so, so many thoughts. pic.twitter.com/V0fsdhHra3

— Else Marie Knudsen (@elsebelle) February 9, 2022

I am flabbergasted. This is such a blatant violation of ethics that the university and that private therapist need to be censured. Or worse, that’s just plain criminal.

I am becoming confirmed in my belief that university administrators everywhere are tainted with evil.

Maybe I was too hard on Harvard professors yesterday. Maybe 38 prestigious Harvard professors signed a letter to protect one of their own from a finding that he’d been a sexual harasser, but today 73 of them signed a letter protesting the first letter.

We, the undersigned, write in strong opposition to the open letter signed by 38 Harvard faculty calling into question the sanctions against Professor John Comaroff. We are dismayed that these faculty members would openly align themselves against students who have lodged complaints about a tenured professor.

Without full knowledge of the facts of the Title IX and Professional Conduct investigations, the signatories have endorsed details provided by Professor Comaroff’s legal team, which has taken advantage of the confidentiality of these processes to publicize its view of the case.

Furthermore, some of the signatories to the original letter are having second thoughts.

All of these professors earned their tenure and built their reputations on their ability to critique evidence and make sound judgements based on careful thought.

But the greatest disappointment here is the failure to protect their students. https://t.co/w16YYHostG pic.twitter.com/RXrYEXln8L

— Kevin M. Levin (@KevinLevin) February 9, 2022

Whoopsiedoodle! Maybe they should have thought about it before reflexively signing on to defend their colleague.

And then, oh boy, 3 former students have filed a federal lawsuit against Harvard University for its failure to protect them. Maybe Harvard administrators should have considered the implications for their students if they didn’t slap down the bad boys in their midst.

Three Harvard University graduate students said in a federal lawsuit filed Tuesday that the Ivy League school for years ignored complaints about sexual harassment by a renowned professor and allowed him to intimidate students by threatening to hinder their careers.

“The message sent by Harvard’s actions alleged in the complaint is clear: students should shut up. It is the price to pay for a degree,” Russell Kornblith of Sanford Heisler Sharp, the women’s law firm, said in a statement.

The suit filed in U.S. District Court in Boston alleges that one of the students, Lilia Kilburn, was subjected to repeated forcible kissing and groping as early as 2017 by anthropology and African and African American studies professor John Comaroff.

On another occasion in 2017, when she met with Comaroff to discuss her plans to study in an African country, he repeatedly said she could be subjected to violence in Africa because she was in a same-sex relationship, the lawsuit said.

Whew. I suspect there are a bunch of Harvard administrators who are now realizing they’ve waddled into a colossal clusterfuck of their own creation. Good. Maybe they’ll learn something and change. Maybe other universities around the country will see Harvard as a dreadful example, a warning that this could happen to them, too.

A Harvard anthropology professor, John Comaroff, had his wrists savagely slapped a few weeks ago for sexual harassment. This seems to be a common problem — many high ranking professors have vastly inflated egos, and I suspect it’s even worse at Harvard, where they already imagine themselves to be the smartest people in the world.

In 1986, a group of professors writing for the journal Current Anthropology found that the country’s most elite anthropology programs, including Harvard’s, operated based on a “hierarchy of prestige” dominated by powerful tenured faculty.

Nearly 35 years later, it is in part that very hierarchy that has allowed three of Harvard’s senior Anthropology faculty — former department chairs Theodore C. Bestor and Gary Urton and professor John L. Comaroff — to weather allegations of sexual harassment, including some leveled by students, according to people with knowledge of the matter and documents obtained by The Crimson.

All too often, a “hierarchy of prestige” is just a tall pile of assholes, which seems to be the case here. There’s a group of anthropology professors who have abused their position to make life hellish for some students — as usual, the pretty ones in an early and vulnerable stage of their careers. Ongoing investigations have been slowly trying to take apart a genteel collection of privileged jerks. Comaroff is the latest to get his comeuppance.

Comaroff was sanctioned by Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Claudine Gay on Jan. 20 after University investigations found that he violated Harvard’s sexual and professional conduct policies. He is barred from teaching required courses and taking on additional advisees through the next academic year.

I would trust the review committee — after all, it’s made up of Harvard professors, so it must be the best and smartest committee — and they came down with this decision after reviewing a lot of confidential information, which I, of course, haven’t seen. That’s one of the difficulties of these kinds of investigations, because they are processing sensitive and confidential testimonies and evidence, which often neither party wants made public. Another problem is that typically a victimizer can be quite charming and helpful to the people who aren’t his victims. I know for a fact that many of the people I knew who did horrible things to other people were nice to me, and it was an unpleasant surprise when their actions were revealed. That’s how they last so long in positions of power.

It’s a lesson I learned late in life, so it ought to be no surprise that an incredible number of Harvard professors don’t get it. It is disappointing, though, that 38 of them got together to write an open letter that basically says, “John Comaroff was nice to me, therefore he couldn’t possibly have ever been bad to anyone else.”

“We the undersigned know John Comaroff to be an excellent colleague, advisor and committed university citizen who has for five decades trained and advised hundreds of Ph.D. students of diverse backgrounds, who have subsequently become leaders in universities across the world,” the letter said. “We are dismayed by Harvard’s sanctions against him and concerned about its effects on our ability to advise our own students.”

The letter was signed by some of Harvard’s most prominent faculty — including a former Harvard College dean and five University professors, who hold Harvard’s highest faculty distinction.

Humble students of human nature, they are not. Do they even understand the fallacy they are committing? Did no one in this group of almost two score “prominent faculty” stop to think that maybe the fact that Comaroff didn’t hit on me or stifle my career is totally irrelevant to the issue of whether he did harm to others? Are they really that self-centered?

Oh. Harvard professors. I may have answered my own question.

Have you ever seen this stupid slogan?

It’s bullshit, through and through. It’s wishful thinking by meatheads.

I agree with Abe:

An obsession with “hard” masculinity is a very old trope, but one that continues to plague us. It’s often supported by facile historical comparisons that fall apart upon closer inspection, but it remains one of the most reliable tools for manipulating men into a whole array of harmful behaviors. Self-destructive showing off, domestic abuse, abusive relationships between friends, violence, support for political “strong men”, support for war, hatred of “weakness”, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia – all the traits we currently categorize as “toxic masculinity” tend to be supported by the notion that being a “hard man” is a good thing, and being not that is a bad thing. I think this Lonerbox video is a good companion piece to Thought Slime’s earlier look at the same topic, from a different angle. The reality is that this psuedo-historical “ancient wisdom” is both a-historical and (in my opinion) instrumental in creating hard times.

He has the link to the Lonerbox video, which is a must-watch. The whole thing is great, but the last line in particular is a killer.

Even prehistory refutes the claim. Look at Neandertals: bigger than us, more robustly boned, strong, active hunters of big game, truly hard men. Then they got supplanted by a bunch of sneaky, gracile, skinny (relatively) boys from the south. Humans have never relied on being a more muscular species than anyone else.

So this is how the gender-critical fascists are going to handle trans men and women: by simply denying that they exist, insisting that their identity and perspectives and history must be consumed by the ravenous Gender Binary.

On "Tucker Carlson Today," which is exactly like "Tucker Carlson Tonight" except that he wears a sweater to show that he's relaxed and relatable, anti-trans activist Kara Dansky claimed that trans people don't exist, which as a trans woman is a truly wild thing to hear pic.twitter.com/EhUaMPhQtq

— Ari Drennen (@AriDrennen) January 26, 2022

I know how this will go. Humans are binary. If you don’t fit our definition of the gender binary, you must not be human. Therefore, we can do with you what we will. It’s eliminationist logic through and through.

And seriously, Ms Dansky, if you’re asked to appear on Tucker Carlson’s show, and are getting the approval of Carlson, Fox News, and his audience, you ought to be questioning your life choices.

---

This is too true.

When he went off to college, Joseph Whedon “traded his basic name for a more interesting one” and started calling himself Joss. That’s not at all unusual, that you reinvent yourself when you get away from old social circles and find yourself in new ones, but I think, given the allegations and confessions in this article about Joss Whedon, I’m going to have to roll that change back. He’s Joe Whedon, and as he admits, he was “dark and miserable, this hideous little homunculus who managed to annoy everyone”. Gollum tried to call himself Smeagol, but no one is fooled anymore.

The author of the article, Lila Shapiro, lets people just speak, and boy is it damning. She interviews people who worked with Whedon on Buffy, for instance, and discover what an entitled little shit he was, who managed to impress everyone with his big words and flowery language.

A high-level member of the Buffy production team recalled Whedon’s habit of “writing really nasty notes,” but that wasn’t what disturbed her most about working with him. Whedon was rumored to be having affairs with two young actresses on the show. One day, he and one of the actresses came into her office while she was working. She heard a noise behind her. They were rolling around on the floor, making out. “They would bang into my chair,” she said. “How can you concentrate? It was gross.” This happened more than once, she said. “These actions proved he had no respect for me and my work.” She quit the show even though she had no other job lined up.

Then there were the alleged incidents two Buffy actresses wrote about on social media last year. Michelle Trachtenberg, who’d played Buffy’s younger sister, claimed there had been a rule forbidding Whedon from being alone in a room with her on set. Whedon told me he had no idea what she was talking about, and Trachtenberg didn’t want to elaborate. One person who worked closely with her on Buffy told me an informal rule did exist, though it was possible Whedon was not aware of it. During the seventh season, when Trachtenberg was 16, Whedon called her into his office for a closed-door meeting. The person does not know what happened, but recalled Trachtenberg was “shaken” afterward. An adult in Trachtenberg’s circle created the rule in response.

But you can tell Joe chose to do this interview because he wanted to correct the record.

Picking up a cup of tea, Whedon said he could no longer remain silent as people tried to pry his legacy from his hands. But there was a problem. Those people had set out to destroy him and would surely seize on his every utterance in an attempt to finish the job. “I’m terrified,” he said, “of every word that comes out of my mouth.”

That was a prophetic statement. You let your ego run away with you, Joe, you should have just shut up. His denials sound like confessions.

Whedon acknowledged he was not as “civilized” back then. “I was young,” he said. “I yelled, and sometimes you had to yell. This was a very young cast, and it was easy for everything to turn into a cocktail party.” He said he would never intentionally humiliate anyone. “If I am upsetting somebody, it will be a problem for me.” The costume designer who said he’d grabbed her arm? “I don’t believe that,” he said, shaking his head. “I know I would get angry, but I was never physical with people.” Had he made out with an actress on the floor of someone’s office? “That seems false. I don’t understand that story even a little bit.” He removed his glasses and rubbed his face. “I should run to the loo.” When he came back, he said the story didn’t make sense to him because he “lived in terror” of his affairs being discovered.

Wait, wait, wait. The story about making out with actresses couldn’t be true, because sure, yeah, he was having affairs, plural, but he was terrified of anyone finding out? That’s not a very good excuse, you know. It sounds like everyone on the set knew he was screwing around. His wife sure knew, since she divorced him over it.

Then there was that feud with Zack Snyder over the Justice League movie, which Whedon took over mid-filming and revised. I saw the Whedon version, and hated it; I haven’t seen the so-called “Snyder cut”, and won’t, because as bad as the first version was, I don’t think making it longer and putting an Ayn Rand fanboy in charge was going to make it better. It’s a convenient way to blame Joe’s fall from grace on an external force, though.

In our conversations, Whedon was somewhat more circumspect. “I don’t know who started it,” he told me. “I just know in whose name it was done.” Snyder superfans were attacking him online as a bad feminist and a bad husband. “They don’t give a fuck about feminism,” he said. “I was made a target by my ex-wife, and people exploited that cynically.” As he explained this theory, his voice sank into a hoarse whisper. “She put out a letter saying some bad things I’d done and saying some untrue things about me, but I had done the bad things and so people knew I was gettable.”

Snyder superfans tend to be horrible anti-feminist trolls, I agree, but this article makes it clear that Joe is the one who has been exploiting feminism cynically. That Joe Whedon admits to doing “bad things” is not the apology he thinks it is. He was gettable because he’d done those bad things, and that wasn’t Zack Snyder’s, or his ex-wife’s, fault.

Man, that last sentence really needs a “gollum, gollum” at the end of it.

Remember the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, that field station where the boys ran wild and made life miserable for women scientists working there? Nature recently published a bit of a follow-up. It sounds like not much has changed. The Smithsonian is going to form a task force (they haven’t done it yet), and now they’ve finally put locks on all the bedroom doors. I’m not seeing any mention of changes to the culture of hard partying that was rife at the station, nothing but a recognition that people at remote field stations drink a lot.

The dynamics of an island-based research institute where people live, work and socialize together complicates efforts to protect researchers, Tewksbury says. “Strong power imbalances, coupled with close, informal working environments, large age differentials and alcohol all increase the risk of abuses of power and sexual harassment,” he says. “The two main venues where that wicked cocktail is mixed up are field research stations and conferences.”

“It would be a mistake to say [sexual misconduct] is a problem with STRI per se,” Crofoot says. “Assault, sexual harassment and unsafe working conditions are a common thing at field stations. There’s a need for institutions to recognize that they can’t continue to ignore these problems.”

You know, these stations are work places. Most such places have rules about getting drunk at work, and age differentials are common. If, at the end of a long day of classes, I brought out a couple of bottles of tequila and started flirting with students, I would be fired so hard, and would lose the respect of my peers, and would probably be hauled away by campus police, not to mention getting kicked in the crotch by some 20 year old student athlete. Why are field stations being given a pass on “Assault, sexual harassment and unsafe working conditions”? This dichotomy in how we treat professionals working in different environments is intolerable. I understand the privilege and responsibility of having a position at a university, why should being employed to work in a field station be any different?

But Crofoot is right. These are problems everywhere. It’s just that when people get away from oversight in a place with a “boys will be boys” attitude, some of them run amuck. Why, here in more civilized parts of academia, everyone knows you’re supposed to sneak around when taking advantage of your underlings.

Like the president of the University of Michigan did.

The University of Michigan Board of Regents has unanimously fired school President Mark Schlissel for cause following an investigation into a relationship with a subordinate, the board announced Saturday evening.

In a letter to Schlissel posted on the school website, the board spelled out its concerns and said his conduct was “particularly egregious considering your knowledge of and involvement in addressing incidents of harassment by University of Michigan personnel, and your declared commitment to work to ‘free’ the University community of sexual harassment or other improper conduct.”

He was exposed by a long history of suggestive emails between himself and the woman employee. He also had a history of talking big about stopping sexual harassment, while also promoting a system of reporting that disadvantaged victims trying to get justice.

Also, email? Does anyone really think the campus email system is a secure way to discuss your criminal activities?

A sexual harassment case brought by a student against a professor at the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities — my back yard is 150 miles long) has finally been closed with a settlement.

The Minnesota Department of Human Rights announced Friday a settlement agreement with the University of Minnesota Board of Regents after a Humphrey School professor sexually harassed a graduate student.

The settlement requires the Humphrey School of Public Affairs to take steps to prevent sexual harassment, pay a graduate student $75,000 and allow the student to complete her degree tuition-free, according to the release.

Well, yay. He was an egregious offender.

According to the release, “the professor made sexual comments in front of her, told her about sex he had with other women, and commented on her appearance in front of her classmates.” The professor also told the student he wanted to be her boyfriend and live together in his home.

There are a few problems with the settlement, though. Free tuition is nice, except the student hasn’t attended classes since 2018. One might guess that she’s less than enthusiastic about returning to the scene of the crime, where the university was so slow in responding. It also doesn’t help that after the professor resigned, the dean of the business school sent out a university-wide email praising him as an “accomplished scholar“ who contributed “substantially” to the school’s global policy classes and research agenda.

Also, there’s the little matter of the student getting $75,000, and the professor getting $190,000 as an incentive to resign. Also getting 3 other pending cases against him dismissed. Also getting an agreement that the university would not publicize his firing…oops, resignation. Also, they initially let him back on the faculty, without notifying students of the results of the investigation that found him guilty.

Hey! It looks like the professor, James Ron, is back on the job market, and he used some of his settlement cash to hire someone to build him a cheesy, generic website to advertise has availability.

James Ron is a dynamic, creative, and adaptable senior research professional with deep and broad experience defining research approaches and methods, managing large, diverse global and domestic project teams, developing policy recommendations, and reporting results. James is respected as a published scholar, author and thought leader.

It mentions his employment at the University of Minnesota, but for completely understandable reasons, fails to mention why he left a job that pays $170,000 per year (Huh…I get less than half that, and I don’t harass my students.)

His colleague, Jason Cao, was also found guilty of violating university policy. He’s still working in the Humphrey School of Business, with restrictions on who he can advise.

Lest you think these are just the sins of those over-privileged wankers in the business school, take a look at the UMN biochemistry department, and the seedy reputation of Gianluigi Veglia. There’s a nice short summary at that link.

After enduring years of sexual harassment, two members of biochemist Gianluigi Veglia’s lab filed complaints with the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Investigators corroborated their accounts and recommended that Veglia be fired. University administrators decided to impose lesser sanctions instead. The university kept the decision quiet until a Minneapolis newspaper revealed details. Universities often don’t disclose information about harassment cases, but sexual harassment experts say this practice is harmful. The lack of transparency about the sanctions against Veglia, who continues to work at the university, catalyzed reforms intended to protect against sexual harassment and improve decision-making. But distrust continues among faculty and graduate students.

It wasn’t a secret. Veglia was openly harassing his students.

Veglia also regularly harassed Soller about the fact that she was married. He said, “Why are you missing out on all of these experiences you could be having in grad school because you’re married?” Soller says. “I was also told that I couldn’t be a successful scientist and also wife.”

She also recalls one time when Veglia commented on a lab mate, saying something to the effect of, “I bet she’s a devil in bed.”

Veglia referred to the female graduate students in his lab as “Veglia chicks,” Soller says. “When you’re constantly being referred to as that, and you’re trying to be taken as a serious scientist in the field, it’s degrading.”

Dicke, who joined Veglia’s lab in 2012, says he would frequently tell her that the only reason he hired her was for her looks.

“At one point he told me that I was very beautiful and that I was going to be sexually harassed and that’s why he said inappropriate things to me—because I need to be desensitized to it,” Dicke says. “At some point he told me that I just want to be dominated. He meant that in a sexual way.”

Another time, “he tapped my arm with his elbow and said, ‘Don’t order anything with garlic so we can get close later’ in front of this other professor. The other professor responded by saying that we should order more wine because the ladies need to loosen up,” Dicke says. The other professor was not from the University of Minnesota, Dicke says, though she declined to give C&EN his name.

Don’t worry, though, the faculty had a “vibrant” discussion about him.

“Given its egregious and repetitive nature, Dr. Veglia’s conduct created an intimidating, hostile, and offensive working environment,” one of the reports says. The parts of the reports that included Veglia’s responses to the complaints were redacted.

In a separate letter, the EOAA Office recommended that Veglia be fired, according to several of C&EN’s sources.

“A very vibrant, protracted discussion” ensued to determine Veglia’s fate, according to one administrator, who asked not to be named because the person was not authorized to talk about the proceedings. According to the administrator, the people involved had different opinions about the facts of the case, as well as whether firing was an appropriate punishment for the harassment. Everyone directly involved in the discussion was a man, except for EOAA representatives.

It is reassuring in a way, I suppose, that the university will do their darndest to shield me, and the university, from embarrassment if I should go on a sexual rampage. It is not at all reassuring that I might have to work with assholes, or that my students are vulnerable to this sort of thing. Fortunately, my colleagues here at the Morris campus of the UMN all seem to be decent, good people…but then, how would I know? The university likes to conceal this information from everyone.

Of the 55 sexual misconduct cases substantiated in the university system from 2013 through 2017, more than half ended in the shadows. In 23 of the cases, the responsible employee left the university either through “resignation, lay-off or non-renewal” after the finding but before being disciplined; their names and case files are not publicly released.

In nine other cases, the employees remained at the university but weren’t disciplined. They may have received letters of expectation, been directed to complete training, or received coaching or monitoring, but these consequences are not severe enough to meet the university’s definition of discipline. Their names and case files also remain private.

I’d like this place to hold higher standards.

Here’s how the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) was founded.

When the Chagres River was dammed in 1913, water rose to engulf 164 square miles of tropical rainforest, creating Gatun Lake and many small islands peeking above the surface. Naturalists were drawn to Barro Colorado Island, but for decades women were barred from staying overnight. David Fairchild, one of the island’s founding figures, advocated for the prohibition of women, writing in a 1924 letter that the island should remain a place “where real research men can find quiet, keen intellectual stimulation, freedom from any outside distraction.”

Right. I’ve been to places like that, where they want you to think it’s all lofty high-minded serious work, but that’s not what you get when you exclude women. You get a frat house. It’s farting, crude jokes, and lots of drinking, which is excused because everyone is “working hard” during the day…which never made sense to me, because when I’ve been working hard, I want to retire to my room, maybe read a book for a while, and get a good night’s sleep. That’s how you recover from hard work. But then, after you’ve built a culture of masculine privilege for a few decades, you might succumb to pressure to allow women to join in the research, but you’ll do it your own way. The established men get to vet all applicants and decide who they’ll let in, and hell no, they aren’t going to change the culture. Instead, these select women will be expected to join in the hard-drinking frat boy culture, and then they get to add rape and sexual harassment to the party.

I could have predicted it. That’s exactly how the STRI evolved, and wow, is it ugly.

Many researchers who set foot on the island consider the opportunity a dream. But 16 women scientists interviewed for this story described a pattern of sexual misconduct by high-ranking men at the institute, one of whom acknowledged his inappropriate behavior to BuzzFeed News. The women said that struggling to fend off the sexual demands of scientists with the power to determine a young researcher’s career trajectory left them feeling traumatized and isolated.

Seven of the scientists said they have stopped visiting the institute or collaborating with its staff on account of the unprofessional behavior they said they experienced or witnessed there, and two have left academia altogether — a #MeToo brain drain that has cost science an incalculable toll of lost research.

“I was spending more and more time figuring out how to navigate the culture there,” said Nina Wurzburger, an associate professor at the University of Georgia who worked at STRI from 2008 to 2012 but said she no longer pursues major research projects there because of the pervasive discrimination and sexual harassment.

Internal emails and complaints reviewed by BuzzFeed News, as well as interviews with 25 scientists, show that STRI leaders for years issued little more than verbal warnings or social restrictions to employees accused of sexual misconduct while allowing them to continue interacting with newly arrived young researchers. The institute eventually took additional disciplinary action against two of the accused scientists in 2019 and 2020. A third scientist, named in this story, continues to work at STRI.

Two scientists were disciplined out of 1200. I’m not exactly razzle-dazzled by their ‘vigorous’ response.

Here’s what needs to be done: presumably, since they’re able to say there are “leaders” at this organization, they have a chart of the hierarchy. Lop off the top of the chart. All those men get sent back to their home institutions, banned from working at STRI, or put back on the job market. They will no doubt claim to be respected, famous scientists who add prestige to the institution…but that just means they should have no trouble landing positions elsewhere. Appoint a woman to run the show. Put in place a new hiring committee that is at least half women. Rebuild the personnel from new applicants.

Yeah, it sounds draconian, but it’s what needs to be done. The worst solution (but probably the one the Smithsonian will implement) is to keep all the same people in charge, let the culture persist, and send them memos that go “tut-tut”, while continuing to bring in a few women, a handful at a time, to be sacrificial lambs to the frat house meat-grinder. This is a case where they need to burn it to the ground, metaphorically, to clear out the sex pests.

Not literally, of course. Look at the place! It’s beautiful!

Think of all the spiders living on that tropical island…

But then you read about how the assholes mismanaged it (ALL the trigger warnings on that article), and you wouldn’t want to be anywhere near it. It’s not the spiders, it’s the venomous creeps who work inside it.