This Professor Fell In Love With His Grad Student, Then Fired Her For It
January 20, 2016 3:56 AM Subscribe

Christian Ott, a young astrophysics professor at the California Institute of Technology, fell in love with one of his graduate students and then fired her because of his feelings, according to a recent university investigation. Twenty-one months of intimate online chats, obtained by BuzzFeed News, confirm that he confessed his actions to another female graduate student.

Amazingly enough, BuzzFeed of all sources is at the forefront of investigating sexual harassment in astronomy specifically and academia generally.

posted by Blasdelb (197 comments total) 36 users marked this as a favorite

Sexual harassment by Geoffrey Marcy, a prominent exoplanet researcher employed as a professor at UC Berkeley, was discussed on metafilter previously.
posted by Blasdelb at 3:59 AM on January 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

He's not young. He's 38. Young is like a 25 yr old professor. This guy is almost 40. Jesus, these gross guys.
posted by discopolo at 4:01 AM on January 20, 2016 [58 favorites]

FAMOUS SCIENTIST DOES SOMETHING BAD
AN UNFORTUNATE EVERGREEN COMIC
posted by Blasdelb at 4:02 AM on January 20, 2016 [50 favorites]

Ott began messaging her late at night online, where they talked about their shared insecurities about work. Sometimes their chats were casual; he’d recommend that she read Charles Bukowski or listen to Leonard Cohen.

Vomit. What do you even do with an advisor like that? Ew. Charles Bukowski. Blech.

And don't call it love. He got obsessed and over infatuated with her. This gross dude.
posted by discopolo at 4:05 AM on January 20, 2016 [82 favorites]

What the fuck do these men have to do to get fired? Jesus wept. You are found to have deliberately harmed the career and life of someone to whom you had a duty of pastoral care, and you need "rehabilitation?

I have nothing articulate to add. It's just a disgrace. The most basic moral and professional priorities having been forgotten, one wonders what can possibly fix this but root and branch replacement and reform.
posted by howfar at 4:16 AM on January 20, 2016 [62 favorites]

In all fairness, after reading the article, isn't "fired" a bit of an inflammatory phrasing for what Ott did to his student? Lots of people switch advisors in grad school if the first one doesn't work out, and it sounds as though she was just in the beginning of her coursework phase, not a month from completion. The article says that the student assumed privately the firing was owing to her poor performance, but doesn't say that Ott put anything false in her file to that effect.

I mean, in a perfect world, men in power would be able to avoid developing creepy infatuations for their subordinates, or given those budding infatuations, would be mature enough to suppress them... but given that he did develop feelings he knew to be prejudicial to his dealings with the student, what would have been a better course of action for him to take? To have kept her on in his lab, knowing he secretly wasn't in a position to deal with her professionally as an advisee and mentee? To have opened up to her about the attraction? To have resigned his position altogether? The article doesn't say whether Ott arranged another advisor for her to transfer to, but if that were in place, the quasi-"firing" described here almost seems like the best possible scenario for the student.
posted by Bardolph at 4:20 AM on January 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

but but publications! And grant money! What are women and their lives in the face of publications and grant money?

I got a PhD and ended up with a great CV. And took a teaching job. Shit like this is why.
posted by hydropsyche at 4:21 AM on January 20, 2016 [10 favorites]

Men who can't work well with women and can't fucking control themselves do not belong on the tenure track. He probably should never have been hired. He certainly should not receive tenure. Doing research involves working with people. All people. Even women.
posted by hydropsyche at 4:22 AM on January 20, 2016 [175 favorites]

"what would have been a better course of action for him to take? . . . To have resigned his position altogether? . . . the quasi-"firing" described here almost seems like the best possible scenario for the student."

So, when given the choice of harming her or harming himself, why is harming her the best option for the student?
posted by oddman at 4:42 AM on January 20, 2016 [64 favorites]

He had several opportunities to do the right thing, beginning with not starting and continuing an inappropriate conversation. Like Hydropsyche says, "Men who can't work well with women and can't fucking control themselves do not belong on the tenure track." Nor do they belong in the university as non-tenured instructors, administrators, or any other role.

I'll bet money that there were hints of this as far back as when he was a grad student and a system that took this seriously might have noticed and took corrective action then.
posted by Dip Flash at 4:47 AM on January 20, 2016 [19 favorites]

In any case, it's not like he unluckily found himself in an inappropriate situation with this one student after behaving like a perfect advisor with the others. The article documents weird and inappropriately personal interaction with 2 other students, including a male one who wasn't sexually harassed but was dumped as a student because he wasn't obedient enough about where he parked his bicycle.

It's clearly not about love or even attraction/infatuation; it's about this guy believing that the purely professional and research-centred role he was placed in was actually a form of feudal overlordship, so that questions of loyalty and obedience and feelings came to dominate his decision-making in an absurd way. I wonder what guidance the university gives to research advisors, and the extent to which advisors are accountable to the larger university community for their professional dealings with their students. That seems like an important preventative question to ask, whether this guy is fired or not.
posted by Aravis76 at 4:47 AM on January 20, 2016 [57 favorites]

what would have been a better course of action for him to take? To have kept her on in his lab, knowing he secretly wasn't in a position to deal with her professionally as an advisee and mentee?

If he was so incapable of behaving professionally around a woman he had his disgusting letch-fit for, I question his competence to work in any professional job. I don't think we need to imagine an "ideal world" in which men are capable by some miracle of not sexually harassing or discriminating against women whom they happen to find attractive. It is basic professional conduct; if you can't maintain it, why does the world owe you a job as a teacher?

And in any case, even if he were so incapable of treating a woman like a human being, rather than an object of his lust, and we think that it is OK to have teachers who are that emotionally twisted, was it impossible to speak to his own manager about his own problems and arrange to have his student provided with an alternative supervisor in a manner which clearly avoided adverse implications for her?
posted by howfar at 4:49 AM on January 20, 2016 [53 favorites]

In all fairness? And his state of mind?

It's what he did as well as "fire" her (like posting 86 love poems online) and confessing/confiding to another student about it. And similar scenarios with students prior to this one. How can anyone miss that? Its predation through his authority.

And Buzzfeed has (for a year now?) demonstrated an interest in legitimate journalism. With the cratering of authentic news sources over the last decade (to pick a number), I'm no longer surprised a brand seeks to attract serious investigators and reporters. It's a vacuum.
posted by lazycomputerkids at 4:49 AM on January 20, 2016 [36 favorites]

In all fairness, after reading the article, isn't "fired" a bit of an inflammatory phrasing for what Ott did to his student?

No. He directly told her that she could no longer work with him because of her actions. He did not in any way take responsibility or spin it as him being unable to be an adequate advisor for her. He didn't go to the department and say, "I have a conflict of interest in supervising this student, can we work something out for change of advisors so that her education is not impacted?" He didn't step away; he shoved her out, and directly told her that it was because she wasn't spending enough time on research for him, as is clearly noted at least twice in the article. Also, if she was doing research for him as all or part of her graduate funding, she would have been paid by his grany money, in which case, yes, that was absolutely a firing in the traditional economic sense.
posted by eviemath at 4:50 AM on January 20, 2016 [100 favorites]

In all fairness, after reading the article, isn't "fired" a bit of an inflammatory phrasing for what Ott did to his student? Lots of people switch advisors in grad school if the first one doesn't work out, and it sounds as though she was just in the beginning of her coursework phase, not a month from completion. The article says that the student assumed privately the firing was owing to her poor performance, but doesn't say that Ott put anything false in her file to that effect.

Nothing in the article suggests that he handled this in any way appropriately, professionally, or with any actual care for the well-being of his students. If he felt truly incapable of continuing in an advisory position, he could have called on the department's director of graduate studies and/or chair to help negotiate a new director for her, after which he should have stepped aside and not discussed the matter any further with any other graduate student. (And maybe, just maybe, he could have refrained from publishing poetry about her on line.) All of his behavior, as described here, sounds incredibly manipulative and invasive, and there's clearly a pattern.
posted by thomas j wise at 4:50 AM on January 20, 2016 [21 favorites]

(I think "young" in research terms extends to your early forties or else is determined by your time in research, depending - you can qualify for various "young" investigator programs through both your institution and federal bodies, etc. It's a term of art here, partly because this is a field where even if you go straight for the PhD while you're 21/22, you're still going to be coming out of school at the end of your twenties and quite possibly doing a postdoc before you're actually faculty. A truly "young" faculty member in a PhD-bearing field would almost always be older than 28. But either way, falling in love with a grad student and then firing her would be shitty at 28.)
posted by Frowner at 4:52 AM on January 20, 2016 [11 favorites]

discopolo: "He's not young. He's 38. Young is like a 25 yr old professor. This guy is almost 40. Jesus, these gross guys."

The incident took place in 2012, where he would have been around 35. He got tenure at 36, which is quite young.

That tenure is probably also the reason he hasn't been outright fired.
posted by brokkr at 4:57 AM on January 20, 2016 [6 favorites]

preface: I have less than zero sympathy for this prof.

but, it's funny that grad students *have* to put science literally above everything else in their lives, work 80 hr weeks, learn to read and respond to the whims of their research advisors if they expect to have a career, and internalize all of these expectations and feel like a failure as a result... but a professor says it all upfront only if he is an abusive monster.
posted by ennui.bz at 4:57 AM on January 20, 2016 [6 favorites]

Is there any evidence she wasn't putting science ahead of everything and working an 80hr week etc? It seems like his view of her was coloured by the feelings that led him to write 86 love poems to her, and she clearly is pushing ahead with her career and finishing up her research at UC Berkeley. I also think "learn to read and respond to the whims of your research advisor if you want to have a career" isn't just the way of the world, it's a terrible norm that facilitates abuse of power, and universities have a responsibility to do more to weaken that norm.
posted by Aravis76 at 5:02 AM on January 20, 2016 [6 favorites]

This sounds vaguely like a case in Iowa a few years ago where the Iowa Supreme Court actually found in favor of the employer. Sheesh.
posted by hwestiii at 5:02 AM on January 20, 2016 [3 favorites]

“It’s not good if a person in power is out of their fucking mind,” Ott wrote to her in December 2014, referring to an issue with another student.
“Well we are all out of our minds,” Gossan replied.
“Yeah, but your insanity does not affect other people’s lifes,” he said.

Ah, the asshole classic: pitying yourself for your own awfulness, expecting sympathy and comfort from your victims.
posted by sively at 5:04 AM on January 20, 2016 [32 favorites]

but, it's funny that grad students *have* to put science literally above everything else in their lives, work 80 hr weeks

In my experience, pretty much only abusive professors expect their grad students to work 80 hour weeks. Yes, there are a lot of abusive professors out there and universities turn a blind eye because of the money they bring in off the back of underpaid labor
posted by muddgirl at 5:09 AM on January 20, 2016 [11 favorites]

The Iowa case is idiotic, but this professor wasn't actually even the grad student's boss. He was in a position of power and responsibility over her, but it's Caltech as an institution that is ultimately responsible for them both. The equivalent would be if the dentist's assistant had fired a receptionist because he was attracted to her; even if that's not illegal (NB. It should be) the dentist would have a right to fire an assistant who made such a stupid decision on such inappropriate grounds.
posted by Aravis76 at 5:09 AM on January 20, 2016

"He didn't go to the department and say, "I have a conflict of interest in supervising this student, can we work something out for change of advisors so that her education is not impacted?"

I do feel like maybe professors and people in leadership positions should get some education about what the right thing to do is- because I think this kind of thing is bound to happen, and I'm not sure it's acceptable to openly state your feelings for someone might interfere with you work relationship with them and ask to be transferred.

I've had to end at least one friendship out of having feelings for the guy (I guess given we had dated it made more sense) but I feel like having to work intimately with someone it should be ok to need to have multiple advisor options, or something?

I don't know. It just seems like a very human thing to find people attractive and find it hard to grapple with-- this does NOT make it ok to mess up the other persons life- but I also think saying people shouldn't have these feelings or are inferior for having them doesn't feel right to me. Being human is hard. I feel like being more understanding these things will happen and making it more ok for supevisors and people in power to request a change for that reason (for themselves not to mess up the other person) should be ok? Maybe?
posted by xarnop at 5:18 AM on January 20, 2016 [5 favorites]

To be clear, he didn't actually take responsibility for what went wrong. He blamed her for his attraction to her, and then said she was using that attraction to get away with doing less work. That's not just "oh I don't know what to do with these feelings", that's misogyny and abuse of power.
posted by Aravis76 at 5:20 AM on January 20, 2016 [85 favorites]

The exact quote is: "The reason he had fired her was because he was concerned she was using her sexual influence over him to not do any work."
posted by Aravis76 at 5:22 AM on January 20, 2016 [14 favorites]

I do look forward to the day when men who can't control their penis-feelings at work are not considered to have minor personal pecadillos, but are viewed as so immature and irresponsible and such a liability risk to the organization that they cannot be trusted with any responsibility or authority.

I mean, honest to God, we're talking mature adult men in positions of authority letting hormones make their professional decisions. Somehow when it's men, they're not "too emotional," though.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 5:23 AM on January 20, 2016 [165 favorites]

What a complete embarrassment of a man. How can anyone take him seriously after this? He has undermined his own authority and respectability. Why is emotional intelligence still not considered an important feature in the assessment of a man's character?
posted by ihaveyourfoot at 5:34 AM on January 20, 2016 [3 favorites]

but I also think saying people shouldn't have these feelings or are inferior for having them doesn't feel right to me.

I don't think anyone is saying that. What people are saying, though, is that a person in a position of authority shouldn't have those feelings and choose to act on them.
posted by palomar at 5:35 AM on January 20, 2016 [10 favorites]

given that he did develop feelings he knew to be prejudicial to his dealings with the student, what would have been a better course of action for him to take?

I mean, do you think it's appropriate for any manager to fire an employee because the manager has an unrequited crush? Try looking at it through that lens. What would you expect your manager to do for you, if your manager had an unrequited crush on you? Would you hope that that manager would do the right and not exactly difficult thing of having you moved into a position that didn't report directly to them? Or would you be like, "it's cool, I totally get that I can't work here anymore because of your boner", and quietly accept that you lost your job through no actual fault of your own?
posted by palomar at 5:42 AM on January 20, 2016 [39 favorites]

That tenure is probably also the reason he hasn't been outright fired.

Which I find bizarre (not that I'm doubting you). Tenure is about protecting profs from social pressure when they do research and get results other people don't like. It's not about protecting bad conduct.

I have known profs who have been fired for a lot less (and quite a lot more, criminal in a couple cases at UBC). Tenure isn't for protecting profs who can't control their behaviour.
posted by bonehead at 5:44 AM on January 20, 2016 [20 favorites]

It sounds like the professor is some sort of genius in his field and the university isn't quite ready to let go of its investment.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 5:53 AM on January 20, 2016 [3 favorites]

I have a preference for not working with men due to not only these issues coming up but to feeling really awkward when it seems like they have feelings and I'm not allowed to set the boundaries I want because I can't know "for sure".

I'm just trying not to have a double standard that some men might find it hard to work with women... like I just kind of wish it was ok to work better with people of particular genders.

I wish I could only work with women but I know that's considered sexist by some. Since I usually work childcare that has fortunately been a benefit of the job. I've never needed to quit over a crush but I did know once that a boss hired me because of a crush (I didn't think I could be "right" about this hunch though) and then we dated after he quit.

It's been an issue that has come up at a lot of my jobs. I have one old supervisor I ask to put on resume's and he asked me out for coffee and I had no idea what to do because I need him as a reference as it was one of my better jobs, and I did like him but I figured that could really mess up my reference.

This guys behavior is really really awful, but I just have never seen it be ok for people to just openly say "Hey this won't be a good fit because of my feelings" which I feel like should actually be an ok reason to not be able to work intimately with another person on a regular basis. I do think women are more likely to handle crush by taking responsibility for it and men are socialized to think it's the woman's fault which is totally fucked up.... but I think asking people to just keep harboring a crush that is interfering with work silently and not giving them any option out sounds kind of sucky also. Maybe it's just because I'm a lover and a feeler and I am more in tuned to people's feelings than anything else going on, but I can't work with people who have crushes on me either and I usually try not to get crushes on co-workers but I also minimize working with men and I will switch jobs if I get one because that makes things really messed up for me.
posted by xarnop at 5:53 AM on January 20, 2016 [4 favorites]

What would you expect your manager to do for you, if your manager had an unrequited crush on you?

Isn't the right and not exactly difficult thing for someone in Ott's position to deal with their own shit on their own time? See a therapist, get laid, get drunk and complain to friends who are not also your grad students? Or do we really have such low expectations of men that we just accept that they are powerless in the face of their emotions, and the only possible solution is to force their unrequited crush to accommodate their feelings.

As for "working intimitely," this guy has more than 20 students in his lab, including lots of post-docs. How fucking intimately did he need to work with a first year PhD student, for reals?
posted by muddgirl at 5:56 AM on January 20, 2016 [48 favorites]

If you (any "you") find it hard to work with someone because of feelings then it should be your responsibility to go work where they are not, and not, when you have the power especially, to make them lose their job or other career opportunities.
posted by rtha at 5:57 AM on January 20, 2016 [17 favorites]

It's also an issue in which I've been in abusive situations with men in this situation and spent a lot of time feeling bad for them, so I'm saying my perspective is correct. I guess I'm thinking back to the guy I worked with who had a wrong bad crush on me (as I was illegal age) and I wish he had been educated that having feelings is ok, and he can pick a different job. Instead of telling me his feelings make him want to die and he's going to buy a gun and starting a really messed up abusive "relationship" with me in which I try to make him feel better for everything. I find it hard not to still feel horrible concern for men in this situation because OMG they hurt and I don't want them to die.

So if my comments sound a bit out of character in sympathy for the guy there, you may be hearing a bit of that. I can observe it but I still, feel bad for the guys and I'm still trying to come up with a solution that is not them feeling required to keep working with someone they have painful feelings for and trying to suppress if they just can't.
posted by xarnop at 6:01 AM on January 20, 2016 [3 favorites]

ihaveyourfoot: "What a complete embarrassment of a man. How can anyone take him seriously after this? He has undermined his own authority and respectability. Why is emotional intelligence still not considered an important feature in the assessment of a man's character?"

I mean, emotional intelligence certainly features prominently in just about everyone's evaluation of just about every woman ever.

It is seriously only men we tolerate failure in anywhere near this dramatically. Just think, if it were a female professor getting so obsessive about a subordinate and acting so erratically and dishonestly, would she even escape institutionalization much less keep her job? Its absurd that we coddle men in being so unable to cope with basic fucking shit, so aggressively insecure, and ultimately so hostile to the interests of everyone around them as well as their institutions. Penis-feelings are not an excuse for anything, being unable to cope with penis-feelings as a grown ass man is not an excuse for anything, and its high time we start holding men accountable in the way we already do to women.
posted by Blasdelb at 6:02 AM on January 20, 2016 [86 favorites]

but, it's funny that grad students *have* to put science literally above everything else in their lives, work 80 hr weeks

It's not eighty in most situations, but it's not a regular workweek either. (I work with grad students in the sciences and have observed this stuff for some years now.) I'd say that people are literally here-like-it's-a-job here about forty-five to fifty hours a week, plus grading, the class work that's not done while on-site and some remote work - so let's say 55 to 60. People usually arrive after I get here and leave around the same time I do, plus some staying late or weekend work - and I work a very standard forty hour week most of the year.

Honestly, being a grad student and being in the sciences is way the hell easier than being in a working class job. It's exploitative a significant percentage of the time, but it's really nothing like having a career as a cleaner or a grocery store stocker or a delivery person.

For instance, there's a disgraceful pressure on women grad students to put off having kids - and since you're usually doing your PhD until you're at the end of your twenties to your early thirties, that's a big deal. I have seen grad students who have kids get pushed out of certain professors' labs on the theory that their maternity leave will prevent them from doing good enough work. But at the same time, having a kid is becoming a luxury item for working class people, and you can get outright fired for it, basically.

I'm not saying that things couldn't be improved - I've certainly heard about some disgraceful behavior, although nothing that's a patch on Ott - but frankly, grad students in the sciences get stipends in the $30,000/year range, they're on a professional track (at worst they'll go corporate or make fifty to sixty thousand a year as professional lab staff) and they're doing something that commands social respect.

If anything, I'd say that academia is a bit unusual because Ott is getting national censure. Down at the bank or the convenience store, this type of thing goes on and the women just get fired and that's the end.
posted by Frowner at 6:02 AM on January 20, 2016 [27 favorites]

From my facebook feed: "These men really don't belong in science, all they do is fall in love...".
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 6:03 AM on January 20, 2016 [33 favorites]

Casey Handmer was a grad student in Ott’s group until June 2013, when he was fired partly because Ott didn’t want him to keep his bicycle locked up inside.

Is this how science is done at Caltech?
posted by grounded at 6:03 AM on January 20, 2016 [4 favorites]

Nature just published a first-hand account of being sexually harassed by a supervisor and the awful professional ramifications.
posted by leesh at 6:04 AM on January 20, 2016 [12 favorites]

Isn't the right and not exactly difficult thing for someone in Ott's position to deal with their own shit on their own time?

Yes. However, would you want to continue working for that manager while they try (and potentially fail) to deal with their shit in a way that does not impact you? Or would you like an opportunity to get out of the way without it fucking up your career, regardless of what choices this other person makes in regards to their mental health treatment?
posted by palomar at 6:04 AM on January 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'd like to just jump in to mention the huge amount of emotional labor he put on Gossan. It was manipulative and weird, in addition to an extra burden. I suspect the school only really has harassment as a remedy, but they should be talking about that- that he used her for his inability to cope with the emotional weight of his feelings, and foisted that onto her. Singling Gossan out at a "sane" female student he could talk to is gross and says a lot about how he feels about women in general. It also reinforces gender stereotypes at a young woman who has probably had more than her share by virtue of just being a woman.

Seriously. Woman are told we're irrational and crazy all the time. This guy basically makes it his rationale while unloading his volatile mental state on a female student and inferring that woman are the problem.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 6:08 AM on January 20, 2016 [54 favorites]

Backing up a bit, I don't understand how he didn't raise flags for CalTech when he basically couldn't get any of his students through the PhD. I'm sadly not suprised when an institution is slow about responding to sexual harrassment and male professors trying to gaslight their students (oh, the stories I could tell), but his abysmal track record with his students in a quantifiable area (completes a PhD in his lab yes/no?) should have raised eyebrows. That does not seem tenurable to me.
posted by TwoStride at 6:10 AM on January 20, 2016 [11 favorites]

Or would you like an opportunity to get out of the way without it fucking up your career, regardless of what choices this other person makes in regards to their mental health treatment?

I guess I'm confused as to what your argument is. If a research professor isn't capable of supervising students without putting his shit onto them, then he shouldn't be in a position of authority. PhD students should not, absolutely should not, be expected to have to decide between putting up with sociopathic professors or uprooting their whole life and career path by switching to a different school to get away from them.
posted by muddgirl at 6:11 AM on January 20, 2016 [12 favorites]

Honestly, being a grad student and being in the sciences is way the hell easier than being in a working class job. It's exploitative a significant percentage of the time, but it's really nothing like having a career as a cleaner or a grocery store stocker or a delivery person.

I don't know; I think there's probably a lot of variation. I worked as a stocker for six years, and then after I met her I saw what my wife went through as a grad student. The difference was, when I was done for the day, I was DONE. The moment I clocked out, I was free to do whatever. She was never "done". There was always more work.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 6:12 AM on January 20, 2016 [8 favorites]

The difference was, when I was done for the day, I was DONE. The moment I clocked out, I was free to do whatever. She was never "done". There was always more work.

I know it's off-topic, but I wanted to clarify - being a grad student in the sciences is hard, but it's respected and it leads to a professional career track. Being a stocker is hard, it leads nowhere (unless you rise to manager) and it kills you over time, plus you spend your entire life without making much money. It's not the six years as a stocker, it's the forty-five years. Right now, for instance, I make more than a grad student and I get to go home at the end of the day. But when the grad students are my age, they'll make more than I do now by quite a lot (in most cases; it's a field with good prospects), they will have better working conditions, they'll have better benefits, and people won't think they're stupid, lazy and entitled [because working class people are always entitled when we don't want to work for a dollar an hour] based on what they do for a living. Middle class people typically do working class jobs for a few years, then they move on. It's the career that gets you.
posted by Frowner at 6:18 AM on January 20, 2016 [31 favorites]

And at the same time, I can't help think about this being a good example of how the patriarchy harms men. Growing up in a world where men are taught that woman make them do bad things and that unrequited love is honorable, it's not too surprising that these situations happen as much as they do. I feel if CalTech really truly understands this, an education/rehabilitation should be the compassionate answer. I'm doubtful because of the pressures of society at large that this will be the case.

. . . That's not at all to suggest that he isn't to blame for this, but there is more to this than "he's a bad guy" full stop. This is what happens when you socialize men that they have no responsibility with their feelings towards women and when you teach women they do have a responsibility for the emotional lives of men. Of course this is bound to happen. It's bad for everyone involved.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 6:23 AM on January 20, 2016 [13 favorites]

muddgirl- I think the issue is that a lot of men think they are suppressing it but it's still impacting the situation and it's really hard as the less powerful person because you can't dare question it or even admit your suspicions are right, you want to give them the benefit of the doubt but then they are standing really close to you and your insides are screaming get away from this person, but you have to just tolerate it because men are expected to keep working with you and "deal with their feelings".

On my end I wish it were more ok for people to just be open about it and switch to another department or find some other solution than continuing to be close to you and making you feel weird like that.
posted by xarnop at 6:25 AM on January 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

that the student have the opportunity to be moved to a different advisor if they'd like

I think the issue is that moving to a different advisor, at PhD level, isn't a minor administrative change. It may be that there is no one else in the institution whose research interests qualify them to supervise you. Even if someone else can take over and is willing to, you'll lose time and possibly direction in dealing with the new person and getting them up to speed with your project. Everyone I personally know who had to change research supervisor - because of retirement, illness, lack of fit etc - ended up taking at least a year longer to complete. It's not an insignificant burden to impose on the student.
posted by Aravis76 at 6:29 AM on January 20, 2016 [39 favorites]

Since Ott joined Caltech’s faculty in 2009, just two of his graduate students have completed their degrees.

Bad odds. Bad waste of resources. Too many red flags with this man all around. He pretty much admitted to having no control and he was put in charge of guiding students whose future depend on him? This is purely dysfunctional.
posted by Alexandra Kitty at 6:29 AM on January 20, 2016 [3 favorites]

he’d recommend that she read Charles Bukowski

Oh that's a firin' right there.
posted by octobersurprise at 6:33 AM on January 20, 2016 [47 favorites]

Earlier,Nature story mentions Ott and student stress.
posted by Ideefixe at 6:41 AM on January 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

I was sexually harassed in college. The term sexual harassment didn't even exist yet. My sister was sexually harassed in law school. The term sexual harassment existed, but bringing a charge of any sort would have tanked her career. Assholes abuse their power. It isn't acceptable.

I would add to any student orientation that if someone recommends you read Bukowski, you should be very wary. In my bookstore days, it was a great dogwhistle for asshats.
posted by theora55 at 6:41 AM on January 20, 2016 [22 favorites]

I feel if CalTech really truly understands this, an education/rehabilitation should be the compassionate answer.

I'm not sure why that would be CalTech's job. There are so many more Ph.Ds than positions that there is probably a line of people waiting to do this guy's job, but who wouldn't need rehabilitation.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 6:46 AM on January 20, 2016 [6 favorites]

I guess I'm confused as to what your argument is. If a research professor isn't capable of supervising students without putting his shit onto them, then he shouldn't be in a position of authority. PhD students should not, absolutely should not, be expected to have to decide between putting up with sociopathic professors or uprooting their whole life and career path by switching to a different school to get away from them.

You'd think this would be true, but in grad school I knew a number of fellow-students in the sciences who had crazy-ass advisors (in a wide variety of generally nonsexual ways), and who went on to have terrible advising interactions for reasons that were 60-100% the advisors' fault. For the advisor to have had the self-awareness to identify near the beginning that the personal side of the relationship wasn't working out, and to have maturely advised the student to move on to a different lab, would have been sad and inconvenient for the student, but a huge gift compared to what generally did happen, which was that the PI remained in denial and continued to subtly fuck around with the student in a myriad of ways until the student's project died or they left the program in despair, generally after investing 2-6 years.

I'm just saying, maybe hard-science professors should be hired for their personal maturity, professionalism and excellence as human beings, but empirical experience suggests that this is very frequently not the case, and that it does continue to harm even those students who escape being actively perved on by their advisors. Not sure what to do about that without changing the whole structure of mentorship and advancement in the sciences.
posted by Bardolph at 6:48 AM on January 20, 2016 [10 favorites]

I mean, why wouldn't it be possible to change the whole structure of mentorship and advancement in the sciences (and in academia generally) so that it doesn't have this single, intense, one-to-one and essentially unstructured relationship at the heart of it? Some options might be more co-supervision, more and better training for advisors, and more university-level engagement with graduate students, so that they are integrated into the research community as a whole, rather than just being an appendage to the advisor.
posted by Aravis76 at 6:53 AM on January 20, 2016 [9 favorites]

Oh wow this is weird. This guy and me posted on some of the same websites and we were friends for a while many years ago. I broke off contact because he seemed kind of skeezy and I was creeped out by the way he fetishized and used smart women.
posted by snownoid at 6:53 AM on January 20, 2016 [23 favorites]

My view:
1. for the comment that young prof would be around 25...you will not find many that young in a position to be directing grad students.
2. the comment that he should not have been given tenure. He got it on merit, we must assume, and what came later on is a new twist in the guy's career.
3. Colleges are stricter now on such things than had been in the past--I was a prof back then.
4. not all such situations end badly: I married an undergrad from my university the day she graduated and have been happily married to her going on 33 years and two children later.
posted by Postroad at 6:54 AM on January 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

If you recognize that you're having trouble supervising students, your responsibility as a faculty member is to meet with your chair and seek help with mentoring. Speak to the University Center for Teaching. Look up resources. Go to mentorship conferences. If you ultimately can't handle it, then you work with other faculty members in your department to find them a new supevisor (if there's someone who does similar or relevant research), develop a co-advisorship (if there's nobody else who does similar research, but someone who's willing to take on a lot of the day-to-day advising, maybe), or start reaching out to your colleagues with similar research projects and explain that you fucked up but you'd like to make sure this student lands on her feet and she's great.

Your responsibility is not to fire her from your research project, and then tell another young female graduate student “The reason he had fired her was because he was concerned she was using her sexual influence over him to not do any work.”

AND the existence of abusive and exploitative graduate advisors does not make Ott's model of advising OK. Graduate students being exploited and overworked by their advisor is a serious problem. Graduate students being sexually harassed by their advisor is a serious problem. One is not preferable to the other. We can (and should) focus on, and solve, multiple problems with the way graduate training in the sciences. Otherwise, we lose promising researchers on a bunch of different axes (as we're already seeing in astronomy and the other sciences: see #astroRH and #astroSH).
posted by ChuraChura at 6:57 AM on January 20, 2016 [23 favorites]

Bad odds. Bad waste of resources.

Just an aside on the whole graduating only 2 students thing. If he started as faculty sometime in 2009, and it's now just barely 2016, that's somewhere between 6 and 7 years of student supervision. I'm not sure what it's like specifically at Caltech, but it typically takes 5-6 years to finish a PhD, so it would be unlikely to have many students graduate in his time there up till now.

They man is obviously in the wrong here, and 7 students leaving his lab in the duration is obviously a point of concern, but I thought I'd just chime in on those wondering how he was granted tenure with the 2-student graduation record.
posted by LtRegBarclay at 7:00 AM on January 20, 2016 [4 favorites]

feel like maybe we could help more men select themselves out of such positions by making it more ok to admit you have this in your character and need to not work with young vulnerable women without claiming any man who has such feelings in a crippling way is innately bad, like it's ok to realize you need to not be working with young women.

A friend of friend was studying to be a teacher and planned to teach high school. After his student teaching, he realized that he was tempted to behave inappropriately with high school girls and took affirmative steps to switch and focus on teaching younger children with whom he didn't have any problems behaving appropriately. I've never met the guy, but I've always found his response to learning something uncomfortable about himself admirable in an odd way.
posted by Area Man at 7:01 AM on January 20, 2016 [14 favorites]

I saw these sort of situations again and again throughout my grad school days (mid to late 90's). It was terrible but I felt powerless to do anything other than provide a supportive ear as I didn't want to destroy my career (with hindsight, a cowardly decision). Harassment and abuse of grad students was pervasive.

Unfortunately, the job selects for extremely competitive people willing to put in insane hours in the lab to the detriment of everything else, like an actual mature social life. Someone upthread (muddgirl?) asked why Ott didn't talk about these issues with a friend. In my experience (my professor had a similarly weirdly incestuous relationship with his grad students), that's because he probably didn't have any peers as friends (just competitors) and only felt comfortable opening up to a subordinate. Sadly, as long as we keep rewarding dysfunctional people with positions based solely on their publication records, we're going to keep seeing professors without the basic social skills and emotional intelligence to interact professionally. It's encouraging to see that Title IX is a route people can take with this, but I'd prefer to see it addressed even more effectively (i.e. dismissals).
posted by Hutch at 7:02 AM on January 20, 2016 [4 favorites]

Being an astronomist, perhaps this quote is apt: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves"
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 7:02 AM on January 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

Since Ott joined Caltech’s faculty in 2009, just two of his graduate students have completed their degrees.

Bad odds. Bad waste of resources.

To add to what LTRegBarclay said, the average physics Ph.D takes a ridiculous amount of time - 7 to 10 years is not unusual, as awful as that sounds. The guy's been there for 7 years, and you wouldn't want to take on more than 1 or 2 grad students in your first couple years.

Yeah, this guy is creepy and weird. He acted very, very inappropriately. But I'd like to also chime in that suggesting a student switch advisors is not firing. He wasn't getting her ejected from the program. God knows that I know what it's like to have a huge personality disconnect with your advisor - half of my questions have to do with how much I hated my advisor and tried for years to extricate myself without torpedoing my career. As others have said, what really gets me here is faculty need to have a better idea of what do with students that they can't get along with, whether it's an inappropriate sexual attraction, or an angry personality mismatch. There needs to be a policy, and probably some kind of ombudsman or mediator to figure out next steps.

The professor-student relationship is NOT a manager-employee relationship. It's just not. To explicitly compare it to that is to miss the reality on the ground. It's a weirdly intimate thing, and if it goes wrong it's more like a personal relationship going wrong than a manager employee relationship going wrong. I'd personally like to see that change, but in my view from a few different academies, that's just the way it is right now.
posted by permiechickie at 7:03 AM on January 20, 2016 [6 favorites]

Not to take away from the specific case of Ott, but there's currently a host of sexual harassment stories in astronomy popping up. Including being brought up on the floor of Congress and a survey showing how severe the problem is.
posted by miguelcervantes at 7:08 AM on January 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

My graduate career was a shit show and when I wanted to switch advisors because he was, frankly, flaky, uncaring and downright abusive (toward the end) I was advised not to in order to avoid rocking the boat. This fellow had been kicked out of another department and for some reason my complaints were met with "well YOU wanted to work with him!" Yeah. Academic departments aren't always on top of their professional game.

The fact that the director of graduate studies that advised me to basically "deal with it" is now the chair of a similar department at UMass really disturbs me.
posted by Young Kullervo at 7:08 AM on January 20, 2016 [5 favorites]

Except that he explicitly framed it as firing her, and he's the one who - out of nowhere - instigated the end of her research project with him. He didn't suggest that she should switch advisors, he told her he could no longer work with her, out of the blue. Everyone I know who has switched advisors has done so after discussing in detail with their current advisor and their future advisor exactly how their research interests fit, what will happen with their research project, and so on. I don't get the impression that Io had any idea this was coming, or that she'd had the opportunity to find another advisor in the department.
posted by ChuraChura at 7:10 AM on January 20, 2016 [18 favorites]

The professor-student relationship is NOT a manager-employee relationship. It's just not. To explicitly compare it to that is to miss the reality on the ground. It's a weirdly intimate thing, and if it goes wrong it's more like a personal relationship going wrong than a manager employee relationship going wrong. I'd personally like to see that change, but in my view from a few different academies, that's just the way it is right now.

It's only "weirdly intimate" if you believe utterly in the master-apprentice model with all that those words imply (especially the former). The academy, and the rules of US universities described in every faculty handbook that proscribe the university contract with the faculty have explicitly forbade this kind of interaction for decades, but old cultures die hard.

The fact that this isn't white or blue collar work, but rather intellectual work DOES NOT CHANGE THINGS. That this intellectual work requires particularly close collaboration and long hours together and occasionally (far less frequently than romantic self-observers of the academy would admit FWIW) form of intellectual intimacy does not negate the fact that in legal terms, it IS a manager-employee relationship and all your special pleading will do nothing to dissuade me (and other members of the academy). The advisor has tremendous power over the life and career prospects of any advisee - this is why relationships between student and advisor are forbidden.
posted by lalochezia at 7:10 AM on January 20, 2016 [14 favorites]

Being forced to let a man have that much power over me to get a degree sounds horrifying to me. I personally wish it were ok for women to request female advisors the same as I feel it should be ok for women to ask for female gynecologists if preferred.

I wonder if this problem is happening in the same numbers with women behaving inappropriately as supervisor.
posted by xarnop at 7:17 AM on January 20, 2016 [4 favorites]

I'm a male professor who supervises graduate students, and I just don't get the sympathetic responses. I'm "young" (which does mean something like, between 30 and 45 in this context), have supervised both male and female grad students, and have never had anything remotely like a crush on any of them. I also have received training in what constitutes sexual harassment and appropriate supervisory relationships, and this situation is obviously, obviously, really messed up, towards both graduate students mentioned. Identifying that some potential action is deeply inappropriate (e.g. chatting late at night with another female advisee about your crush on the first one who you kicked out of your lab) isn't rocket science, though I guess it requires some very minimal self-awareness and self-control. This guy should be flat-out fired, and tenure doesn't protect against being fired for sexual harassment. I have zero sympathy for him and the time for rehabilitation or whatever sounds like it is long past; men who are unable to take responsibility for their actions in this domain shouldn't get a pass in this day and age. The advisee-advisor relationship is one of management in terms of power dynamics (if anything, the advisor has more power than your usual manager).

(I mean, I do know enough about the politics of elite R1s to know why it doesn't usually work that way.)
posted by advil at 7:20 AM on January 20, 2016 [54 favorites]

As a long-time outside observer (and also as someone with many grad student friends and some faculty friends) it seems like while there are definite benefits to the flexibility and intimacy of grad work as it is now conducted, the drawbacks seem to outweigh them. It's unfortunate, because there are definitely wonderful aspects to the quirkiness and informality of academia.

But over and over again, I observe people who rise to become graduate mentors and who have never had to interact in a professional context with anyone - never held a meaningful job outside academia, never been held to what most people consider "normal" working standards, never been exposed to those models. So even people who would never dream of pursuing a romantic or sexual relationship with a student often have really inappropriate expectations in terms of poking into their students' private lives, or "take sides" in disagreements among grad students, or use their influence inappropriately for favorite students, or are completely unbothered by the fact that they've never mentored a woman or a person of color, etc.

While sometimes these are terrible humans, most often they're people who have the equivalent of a teenager's experience with actual professional behavior - they have never seen anyone not get intrusive with colleagues and students, they've themselves grown up in a playing-favorites milieu, etc.

I mean, I have seen people I basically respect and like actually take sides in grad student interpersonal and ideological squabbles, and not just in a "Johnny is a Lacanian and I'm a Lacanian too, so I find his argument sympathetic" way.
posted by Frowner at 7:21 AM on January 20, 2016 [12 favorites]

lalochezia, what I'm saying is not that it's a good thing to see it in a master/apprentice type way, but from my experience at 3 different universities, and talking with many, many people that have done Ph.Ds at different universities, that's the way it's still perceived now by many professors. And I'm not saying at all that personal relationships should be condoned (NO way), but that the problems that occur when an advisor/student relationship go haywire reminded me more of a bad personal relationship than a bad employment relationship.

There's nothing more I'd like than for that to change. It has hurt me personally that my department saw the advisor/student relationship this way. Personally, I'd like to see a route to do a Ph.D in industry (avoiding the academy entirely or almost entirely) for engineering and science.
posted by permiechickie at 7:21 AM on January 20, 2016

if you believe utterly in the master-apprentice model

I suppose it may work differently in different fields of academia. I'm only familiar with the so-called hard sciences and related theoretical fields, and then only because my parents had 50+ year careers as research scientists in academia. But in that milieu, anyway, this seems like a very good description of how it works. You join someone's research group because you're interested in the research they are doing, and in working towards your PhD they effectively mentor you through some piece of research in their area of inquiry. Not that different from the relationship between, say, a master carpenter and an apprentice carpenter.
posted by slkinsey at 7:25 AM on January 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

I guess part of me just thinks (problematically) men are predators and they can't help it and maybe they just shouldn't be put in positions of power over women and young girls so often- and while it's true "not all men" I feel like maybe we could help more men select themselves out of such positions by making it more ok to admit you have this in your character and need to not work with young vulnerable women without claiming any man who has such feelings in a crippling way is innately bad, like it's ok to realize you need to not be working with young women.

Some men are predatory. However, men are not predators by nature. "They just can't help it" is a bullshit excuse that does more far harm than good. Preying on young women is not normal and not acceptable. And the idea that we as a society or the university as an institution or any other workplace should somehow accommodate such behavior is insane.

We stop predators by removing the tools by which they operate. In a world where rapists and harassers routinely get away with it because they know they're preying on the powerless, you give their potential victims the power and assistance to shut them down. Create a vocal support system for women that they can turn to and rely on to believe them and protect them. An environment that doesn't support the predator but their targets. You shine a harsh spotlight. Don't move potential or actual predators from place to place like the Church did with pedophile priests, so they could prey on new victims. You make damned sure people know that you have a zero tolerance policy and if they cross the line you'll fire their asses for harassment to send a message that it's unacceptable.

For heaven's sake. Men who do such things need to be stopped and held accountable for what they have done. Not excused with "they just can't help it."
posted by zarq at 7:25 AM on January 20, 2016 [51 favorites]

We stop predators by removing the tools by which they operate.

Yes. Exactly.
posted by OmieWise at 7:29 AM on January 20, 2016 [3 favorites]

lalochezia, what I'm saying is not that it's a good thing to see it in a master/apprentice type way, but from my experience at 3 different universities, and talking with many, many people that have done Ph.Ds at different universities, that's the way it's still perceived now by many professors.

And that's society's problem...how, exactly? The answer to the problem is not for us to be understanding of these professors, but for these professors to be told, very clearly, that society is no longer in the business of entertaining their delusions about the model of employment involved. And if they can't adapt, well...the door is right over there.

It's time we stopped turning a blind eye to people being horrible just because they're exceptional in one socially acceptable field.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:30 AM on January 20, 2016 [8 favorites]

I was a graduate student with a very supportive and reasonable (and female) advisor. But I have known or known of many, many graduate students who are abused and harassed by their advisors in myriad ways (as mentioned by others in this thread). But from what I've observed, students only have recourse against such advisors if they are willing to risk their academic careers. Because the truth of the matter is that in almost all cases, the rest of the field (which is small) will always side with the professor. The fear is that you as the student will never be hired by any department because of what you did to a respected colleague, who certainly won't give you a letter of recommendation.

The other aspect of harassment in academia which I think is worth pointing out, is that changing advisors/programs/schools is incredibly disruptive, both personally and professionally. Many PhD students have moved far from their homes to pursue this work, which will take many years, and switching research focus will delay the process, not to mention potentially uproot a family. Many universities are in small college towns, where you can't just switch universities to continue your work (which would prolong your graduate school experience anyway), so many students just suffer in silence, trying to get out quickly with the least amount of disruption.

And the last thing I will say is that in all instances of this type of harassment that I have heard about, of the cases that are so egregious that the student risked everything to report it, the administration has really viewed the whole incident as the student's fault, and as an unfair burden that the student has placed on the department and the university. For example, if a student has a restraining order against a professor and hence cannot take classes with that professor, often when that professor is the only instructor teaching that course, the administration must find a way to allow that student to meet all course requirements. And from what I've seen, the administration blames this entirely on the student, and makes the student know it, hoping the student will just quit, thus eliminating the problem.

The system is just so broken, and offering seminars to professors to improve their mentoring skills is never going to fix it.
posted by joan cusack the second at 7:30 AM on January 20, 2016 [18 favorites]

Speaking on behalf of the university, Fiona Harrison, chair of the division of physics, mathematics, and astronomy, told BuzzFeed News that the sanctions were appropriately severe. Ott committed “gender-based harassment and discrimination, and we have zero tolerance for that here at Caltech,” she said. “I think our actions actually demonstrate that.”

No, Fiona, your actions do not demonstrate that whatsoever, because in pretty much any other place of employment outside of academia, his actions would be grounds for immediate dismissal.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:37 AM on January 20, 2016 [15 favorites]

I can't put it any better than howfar did.
posted by Gelatin at 7:38 AM on January 20, 2016

So here's a student (Io Kleiser) who is super-interested in astronomy! She's going to Caltech! She wants to study supernovae! For Christ's sake, she's named after one of Jupiter's moons! This is the kind of student where if you have any interest at all in the future of science, you want to do everything you can to support her and to give her the right environment to pursue her studies and hopefully produce some original and valuable contributions to the field. It's maddening to think that, instead, students like Io have to go through this kind of crap.
posted by math at 7:41 AM on January 20, 2016 [9 favorites]

I do know enough about the politics of elite R1s to know why it doesn't usually work that way.

My feeling is that this is the entirety of the reason he's being protected and not out on his ear. He's well connected enough, enough of a star to bring in the grant dollars and attention (both professional and popular) that they're trying to keep him.
posted by bonehead at 7:42 AM on January 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

He's well connected enough, enough of a star to bring in the grant dollars and attention (both professional and popular) that they're trying to keep him.

And to think that some people think this is only the case with athletes. The fact is that it's true for "star" people in most any field.
posted by slkinsey at 7:45 AM on January 20, 2016 [3 favorites]

The professor-student relationship is NOT a manager-employee relationship.

I'm a scientist who manages other scientists as well as a few grad students (two right now, for example). It is very much the same sort of relationship. Students get a bit more mentoring and it's a bit more structured, but I treat (and try to develop) my permanent staff in the same way, according to their professional needs and levels of work. As I was taught by my mentor before me.
posted by bonehead at 7:46 AM on January 20, 2016 [3 favorites]

enough of a star to bring in the grant dollars

This is the problem, and where the change needs to happen. People who have been found to have harassed students or other faculty should not be eligible for grants. It'll never happen, and there are due process concerns, but it's the way to stop this shit.
posted by OmieWise at 7:46 AM on January 20, 2016 [3 favorites]

In my experience, pretty much only abusive professors expect their grad students to work 80 hour weeks.

Reading down as I go, but: this. This is absolutely true. My adviser doesn't expect this and has been known to tell students working late in the lab to go home already, as well as telling students that he likes it when they have hobbies outside of work. I have several friends whose advisers tacitly or explicitly encourage them to have lives outside of work. Some of this is down to discipline culture--the ecology/evolution people are in my experience better about this than the cell/molecular people I happen to know, which is explicitly why I'm in this field--but some of it isn't.

Not all advisers are abusive douchebags, and I think it's important to point out that this shit is abusive behavior and is not something that you just have to put up with if you want to be in academia.
posted by sciatrix at 7:57 AM on January 20, 2016 [8 favorites]

I've engaged on Twitter with some "budding MRA" types who were cluelessly naive (wish more people read MeFi) about why women would be discouraged from science careers (never read the comments on any "women in science!" Facebook posts either BTW) and I've explained some of the more basic social biases that lead thoughtless men to shrug and say "maybe men are just better" but this sort of shit just makes my blood boil. No asshole, nobody applied and fought to get into Caltech to manage your boner and feelings. This guy is a narcissist, seems pretty open and shut. The worst thing about narcissists is they constantly convince people they need to be tolerated and kept in power.
posted by aydeejones at 7:59 AM on January 20, 2016 [5 favorites]

"But you need a tortured genius with boner feelings to run these supercomputer simulations!" No, it sounds like you're doddering around insecurely and trying to share the fact that you're a half assed miscreant rather than striving to demonstrate any leadership.
posted by aydeejones at 8:01 AM on January 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

Is #notalladvisors the new #notallmen in terms of deflecting responsibility of dealing with this sort of systemic behavior in academia?
posted by Young Kullervo at 8:03 AM on January 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

In terms of bringing in funding: a knock-on effect of the tight funding environment and declining state support for research is that people who can bring in research dollars become ever more precious.

Although honestly, I know a number of faculty who have been steadily funded in a bad research climate and who treat their grad students well, treat staff well, etc etc. It's not as though being able to write a grant equates with having terrible personal characteristics.
posted by Frowner at 8:12 AM on January 20, 2016 [3 favorites]

Isn't this literally Reed Richards
posted by shoe at 8:12 AM on January 20, 2016 [5 favorites]

Well, that depends. Does saying "this behavior should not be normal and discussing it as if it is normalizes the abuse of graduate students" deflect responsibility? Because in academia, my experience is that overwork and adviser abuse does get normalized. If we're going to identify this behavior as abuse, it's important to point out that there's a gradient of healthiness in academia and that you can still be a productive scientist while having healthy attitudes towards work and mentoring. There's this persistent idea that this unhealthiness is necessary for academia to "work," or that it's a normal part of academia that you just have to tough it through in order to succeed in science. My point is that it is not and you don't have to do that.

It also feels sort of weird for me as a female PhD student commenting on my observations of healthy PI/student relationships to be characterized as part of a criticized group trying to deflect that criticism away from myself, but that's a little beside the point.
posted by sciatrix at 8:13 AM on January 20, 2016 [9 favorites]

This strongly reminds me of the episode of Beavis and Butt-Head where they sue a classmate for "sexually harrassing" them:

Butt-Head: Right now, I'm being sexually harassed by Kimberly.
Kimberly: WHAT!?!
Beavis: Yeah, me too, she's giving me a stiffy.

This guy is being more ridiculous than Beavis and Butt-Head, who are ficitional and too dumb to function in reality. And people are buying it.
posted by Metroid Baby at 8:19 AM on January 20, 2016 [4 favorites]

Young Kullervo: "Is #notalladvisors the new #notallmen in terms of deflecting responsibility of dealing with this sort of systemic behavior in academia?"

But in fact not all advisors are shit, not all departments will hire shit PIs or leave students hanging if confronted with one, and not all scientific communities have reacted to the rampant hostility to women that modern academia has inherited in the same way. Being able to recognize what is actually healthy is just as important as being able to recognize what is unhealthy for giving students the tools we need to at least attempt to protect ourselves from abusive PIs. There is a big difference between communicating the nuance that huge cultural shifts have already created, preventing shitheads from scaring away women from healthy contexts too while clarifying lines that have no business being at all blurry, and suggesting that just because some advisors are great means shitty ones don't need removal.

Each of us is responsible for the behavior we tolerate in our lab, our department, and our community. Its not just fine but really helpful to talk about great PIs because we will only ever actually succeed by making it super abundantly clear both what is and isn't ok. Normalizing good PIs inherently problematizes abusive ones, and that is a great thing. What is maybe not so great is attacking the women we are lucky enough to have in this thread who are sharing their experiences.
posted by Blasdelb at 8:24 AM on January 20, 2016 [7 favorites]

It also feels sort of weird for me as a female PhD student commenting on my observations of healthy PI/student relationships to be characterized as part of a criticized group trying to deflect that criticism away from myself

Most advisor-student relationships are healthy. People like to simplify because that makes the problems easier to talk about, but we shouldn't forget that the great majority of students have good, or at least mutually beneficial, relationships with their supervisors. #notallmen/advisors is a way of signaling that shorthand (and so avoiding derails), but it can't be read as literally true.

There is indeed a real conversation to be had about the pressures placed on students. It's not an entirely gendered one, but it also seems to be one of the biggest leaks in the pipeline for women from undergrads to new scientists. But, in this context, I feel that that's one of the derails.

This isn't even about a lack of official university policy. CalTech has a sexual harassment policy that outlines zero-tolerance---in theory.

This story, beyond Ott's appalling behaviour, is largely about his social/political clout and how policy isn't applied when it comes to guys in the club. Caltech isn't practicing what they preach and that's a huge problem.
posted by bonehead at 8:27 AM on January 20, 2016 [4 favorites]

maybe hard-science professors should be hired for their personal maturity, professionalism and excellence as human beings, but empirical experience suggests that this is very frequently not the case

Yeah, I think this is a major piece of the problem. It's a broken hiring system.

Anecdata: one of my close friends was hired as a Visiting Assistant Professor in a small academic department. She was immensely qualified (prestigious new PhD, solid publication record, great teacher). She was filling in a spot for a professor who'd left abruptly, and she stayed for two years, getting great teaching reviews, getting along well with her fellow professors, making strides in her research - doing basically everything one would expect from a successful young professor.

When her VAP term expired, what did the Department do? Did they say, here is a known entity, a warm, professional, and capable person who has shown herself to be highly competent not just intellectually but in all the intangible, interpersonal, but very meaningful ways that are hard to assess in a written job application or in a one-day campus visit? (And has also not sexually harassed anyone or demonstrated major red flags that might suggest a difficulty in maintaining appropriate personal boundaries?)

No. No, they did not. They started the job application process from scratch, garnering thousands of applications from all across the country, having the usual academic debates about research quality and elite levels of achievement, and my friend was treated as just one of many potentially qualified hires, and they gave her a good look, but then the job went to someone the hiring committee deemed to be marginally more qualified than she was (everyone who is competing for these positions is massively qualified) and she left the department and started all over from scratch.

I think the lesson there is that precisely those qualities that are hard to capture on paper - personal maturity, professionalism, and excellence as human beings - simply don't have a place in the hiring process. The mania for prestige above all else means that departments won't settle for hiring a known quantity. They want the best of the best of the best and departments are constantly fighting each other for the next potential superstar. Most schools have boatloads of qualified professionals serving as VAPS and adjuncts, on whose back the actual work of running the department rests, but when a tenure track line opens up, none of those people have a chance in hell of getting hired, because the fact that they've managed to function successfully in the department day-to-day counts for exactly nothing.

I feel like a lot of departments don't realize they're hiring actual people who will have to interact with other actual people- they're hiring ideas, dissertation abstracts, lab results. And when the actual person associated with those lab results shows up and turns out to lack basic human skills, everyone throws their hands up and acts terribly shocked and confused, like 'How could we ever have known?' And it's like, actually, you damn well could have known if "hiring a decent, mature human being" had been anywhere on your priorities list, but it wasn't, and now you're dealing with the fallout of that.
posted by pretentious illiterate at 8:33 AM on January 20, 2016 [22 favorites]

This is from an anonymous commenter.

My mind is blown by the folks who are chalking up Ott's behavior as the result of someone who is poorly socialized or who hasn't had meaningful experience outside of academia. It's so much more pernicious than that. What he was able to get away with for so long points to a culture that not only accepts, but forgives, his egregious behavior.

How do I know this as a non-scientist? I've met him. I dated one of his friends, also a physicist. That man stalked me after our breakup, nearly breaking the door to my apartment down one night. After I cut off contact with him, he had one of his grad students call and text me. I later met someone else who had had the same experience with him. I can't imagine that he treats his current grad students with kindness and respect, especially if they're women.

While we were going out, I got to hear about how astrophysicists who are women are always DTF at the conferences that they attended and other assorted garbage that made it clear that the women in their field were regarded at the basest level possible. That guy continues to publish extensively and is well respected.

posted by cortex (staff) at 8:40 AM on January 20, 2016 [73 favorites]

Well, gross.
posted by sciatrix at 8:43 AM on January 20, 2016 [4 favorites]

I used to do employment law (on the side of the plaintiffs) and handled many sexual harassment cases. There is a taxonomy of sexual harassers, and I feel pretty confident in my opinion that this guy is just a harasser by nature and this has nothing to do with his socialization or lack of experience outside of academia. He'd be the same wherever he worked. Now there ARE guys who do legitimately get in over their heads and have poor social skills, in a way that ends up effectively harassing their employees. But that really does not seem to be the story here.
posted by yarly at 8:46 AM on January 20, 2016 [10 favorites]

I feel like a lot of departments don't realize they're hiring actual people who will have to interact with other actual people

Not sure I agree with this -- they are hiring people who have to interact with people (in particular, who have to interact with the current professors) and they want to hire people who are a lot like themselves.
posted by jeather at 8:57 AM on January 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

I have so many reactions to this I'm not sure where to begin. I guess the first is that while I don't think the majority of male professors behave in this way or confuse deep engagement in intellectually fascinating and exciting problems as 'love', some do. And when this happens, the wreckage is likely to be long term emotionally for the student and long term for their career and struggles to develop their career. What is also true is that the fallout for the rest of the lab can be nearly as devastating. Whether the student welcomes the attention or not, the rest of the lab may be left behind in how resources are made available. I have direct experience with this. The emotional fallout for all of the students is that it becomes unclear whether the attention is based on merit, infatuation or some really complicated mixture of both.

The second reaction is that a mentored relationship in science is the norm and this contributes to the first problem. Working on difficult thorny problems and figuring something out in the way that science works is unlike any other profession I know of (except maybe algorithmic data science) - the director of the lab may be the 'boss' but a good lab gives there members freedom to explore within the general topic of the lab. This makes it unlike any typical employer-employee relationship and encourages the mentor-mentee relationship.

I completely agree that this guy is clearly difficult to work with, emotionally immature and most likely intensively driven (this may explain his inability to get students through the program but I would also like to know the attrition rate at caltech). What he did to this grad student is inexcusable and I can't quite wrap my head around his decisions - they all seem bad - and it surely suggests he perceived himself to be above any institutional edicts.

And this last point may be the rub. Individual labs, how they are run and their operation are, in high powered research universities anyway, entities separate from the university to a large extent. No one was likely to be paying attention to this lab other than looking at grant money and publications. And if anyone DID see any weird dynamic, these are likely to be friends/colleagues who could attribute his behavior to 'a bad student' or 'that's just the way he is'. The dynamics in academic depts when it comes to successful colleagues/friends can be really weird, especially if there are collaborations going on.

Perhaps the tl;dr version is that it is very easy (and usually the easy way) for academic institutions to ignore obviously crazy behavior and the two students who reported what was going on were very brave to do so. They have my utmost admiration.
posted by bluesky43 at 8:58 AM on January 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

My mind is blown by the folks who are chalking up Ott's behavior as the result of someone who is poorly socialized or who hasn't had meaningful experience outside of academia.

Apologies if I restricted my comment to that aspect of things. I do agree that's only a part of the problem, there can be a particularly pernicious culture in academia where these sort of things are brushed off. I guess I'm trying to say that he is both messed up AND the system does nothing to prevent people like him from rising into positions of power.
posted by Hutch at 8:58 AM on January 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

A few comments removed, feels like there was sort of a cart-before-horse thing going on there that we should skip.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:15 AM on January 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

it's about this guy believing that the purely professional and research-centred role he was placed in was actually a form of feudal overlordship, so that questions of loyalty and obedience and feelings came to dominate his decision-making in an absurd way.

A greater than zero percent level of the professors I met in grad school had substantially impaired interpersonal skills or paranoia that manifest itself as demanding loyalty yet not rewarding it. Not my advisors or instructors, fortunately, but behavior issues by grown men who treated the powerless like shit contributed to my leaving academia.
posted by zippy at 9:17 AM on January 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

Caltech should rename it to a "finite-tolerance policy."
posted by anifinder at 9:18 AM on January 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

This is textbook discrimination based on sex. There are thousands of cases where employers have lost on this fact pattern.

Sadly, the confession might be hearsay, unless it is ruled a statement against interest.
posted by Ironmouth at 9:21 AM on January 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

There are days when I long to be in HR and teach a class titled "Your Boner-Feelings: Never an Excuse in Any Way, Ever, for Causing Problems to Other People."
posted by emjaybee at 9:21 AM on January 20, 2016 [35 favorites]

I also think "learn to read and respond to the whims of your research advisor if you want to have a career" isn't just the way of the world, it's a terrible norm that facilitates abuse of power, and universities have a responsibility to do more to weaken that norm.

on the contrary, the university depends upon this norm, and this kind of openly abusive behavior threatens it. as long as grad students internalize the abusive expectations of the system everything is fine... it just can't be out in the open.
posted by ennui.bz at 9:30 AM on January 20, 2016

While we certainly shouldn't discount the fact that this guy is apparently gross even outside of academia, it's worth pointing out that the permissive culture of academia, or at least hold your nose and look the other way while he brings in grants culture of academia, is a great shield for harassment, especially if the harasser is talented. This guy is apparently a serial harasser, but his behavior isn't the most egregious example of sexual harassment - not in astrophysics, and not in other fields or academia in general. We shouldn't let academic science as a culture off the hook for this - we need to change the culture so that the safety and welfare of our students come first and we stop ignoring warning signs and evidence and sheltering harassers or abusers.
posted by ChuraChura at 9:30 AM on January 20, 2016 [10 favorites]

i'm just getting started on reading this thread after finishing the article, but i wanted to say that azeen and i went to berkeley together and i love reading her work and hearing her on science friday on npr and all of that and basically i'm very proud to be her friend!
posted by burgerrr at 9:33 AM on January 20, 2016

There are days when I long to be in HR and teach a class titled "Your Boner-Feelings: Never an Excuse in Any Way, Ever, for Causing Problems to Other People."

It wouldn't help here. Professors never get to take any HR classes. Or any teaching ones, beyond maybe a not-for-credit seminar before they start TA-ing.
posted by Mitrovarr at 9:35 AM on January 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

And that's the whole thing - academia needs to realize two things:

One, their shit most certainly stinks.

Two, if they refuse to clean it up, it will be cleaned up for them. And they are not going to like that.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:35 AM on January 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

Or any formal training on how to mentor, for that matter. Everything is informal and the quality of education you get on how to be a mentor depends very heavily on who *your* PIs were as a graduate student and postdoc. Which is not a recipe for success, generally speaking.
posted by sciatrix at 9:47 AM on January 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

i can't agree enough with [insert clever name here] about the disgusting amount of emotional labor that Ott forced on Gossan - it made me feel anxious and stressed just reading about it. and i also agree with other comments about how this isn't love, it's an obsession that somehow managed to be both extremely childish and dangerous at the same time. it doesn't even seem like Ott thought of Kleiser as an actual person - i mean, she's an accomplished, wildly smart, driven woman, and he reduced her to some object of his immature desire
posted by burgerrr at 9:48 AM on January 20, 2016 [9 favorites]

I remember a moment in my 20s when one friend was navigating a troubled relationship with her graduate school advisor and another was working in a non-profit advocacy group that was incredibly toxic internally (though it did important work), and I realized that there was something nice about the professionalism with which my corporate employer was run.
posted by Area Man at 9:53 AM on January 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

Where I work there are three things that will get you immediately* terminated:

Theft
Bringing a weapon into work
Sexual harassment

I didn't know about the third until someone I occasionally worked with suddenly was no longer at work. There's no reason that academia can't adopt that same attitude.

*Termination for anything else requires months of documented transgressions during which the employee is free to find a position elsewhere in the company.
posted by tommasz at 9:56 AM on January 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

I can't comment here. As a woman who was in science and experienced or knew of others who experienced many of the issues discussed here, I'm not comfortable discussing them in even a semi-public arena.
posted by sciencegeek at 9:58 AM on January 20, 2016 [12 favorites]

pretentious illiterate Did they say, here is a known entity, a warm, professional, and capable person who has shown herself to be highly competent not just intellectually but in all the intangible, interpersonal, but very meaningful ways that are hard to assess in a written job application or in a one-day campus visit? ...

No. No, they did not. They started the job application process from scratch, garnering thousands of applications from all across the country, having the usual academic debates about research quality and elite levels of achievement, and my friend was treated as just one of many potentially qualified hires

To be fair, this kind of open search is frequently required by university policy / HR rules, in order to prevent nepotism / lawsuits.
posted by yeolcoatl at 10:00 AM on January 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

yeolcoatl - I know, and I think it's nonsense and leads to exactly the kind of situation that Caltech is in.
posted by pretentious illiterate at 10:03 AM on January 20, 2016

I wonder if this problem is happening in the same numbers with women behaving inappropriately as supervisor.

Any relationship with an advisor has the potential to go wrong in a bad way, disrupting your entire life. But I would argue that women supervisors don't mess with their grad students' lives like Ott did with Gossan.

To paraphrase a saying, it's not that your life won't be hard and your relationship with your advisor won't be dysfunctional, but your life won't be hard because your advisor falls in love with you.

As Frowner astutely points out, lots of advisors in academia never have had to follow the norms of the professional world, and their social development and interactions reflect that.
posted by deanc at 10:04 AM on January 20, 2016 [6 favorites]

I think it is interesting that the piece in Nature also referenced and linked above -- has had all commenting disabled on it.

Too afraid that Lewis's Law will be displayed in all its glory?
posted by jfwlucy at 10:04 AM on January 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

I wonder if this problem is happening in the same numbers with women behaving inappropriately as supervisor.

Well, but it isn't as if the top ranks of scientists are overflowing with women as of yet, so I think the "same numbers" question is moot.
posted by jfwlucy at 10:06 AM on January 20, 2016 [7 favorites]

the problems that occur when an advisor/student relationship go haywire reminded me more of a bad personal relationship than a bad employment relationship.

"Maybe I'M the problem..."
"Maybe if I just work harder, he'll see how valuable I am and he will change and treat me better..."
"I know I can't stay, but I can't leave, either! I have no place else to go!"
"That's just how he is. He just has his own way of show that he likes you."
"Honestly, I should be thankful that I've found someone..."
posted by deanc at 10:11 AM on January 20, 2016 [5 favorites]

I don't know the requirements in the CalTech system, but many universities require that faculty and staff take yearly HR short courses on various topics like sexual harassment (along with things like lab safety, human subject protections and so on). While this is a step in the right direction, I very much doubt that any of these courses would be sufficient to deter the kind of sexual harassment reported here. These are truly egregious cases and I'm hopeful these things will become public with consequences more often.
posted by bluesky43 at 10:27 AM on January 20, 2016

To paraphrase a saying, it's not that your life won't be hard and your relationship with your advisor won't be dysfunctional, but your life won't be hard because your advisor falls in love with you.

Actually, I have specifically heard of this happening. It's probably not as common, though (even proportionally).
posted by Mitrovarr at 10:28 AM on January 20, 2016

In any endeavor, you need more than an annual class in dtrt to make the right thing happen; you also need enforcement and advocacy for those whom the wrong thing was done.

The power difference between advisor and advisee is in many ways as great as that between an upper class family and an undocumented part time laborer; if the powerless party goes to the authorities with an issue, they are likely to lose much of what they care about, even if they win.
posted by zippy at 10:36 AM on January 20, 2016 [4 favorites]

The power difference between advisor and advisee is in many ways as great as that between an upper class family and an undocumented part time laborer; if the powerless party goes to the authorities with an issue, they are likely to lose much of what they care about, even if they win.

ding ding ding ding. and no amount of HR sensitivity training is going to change that. in fact, the point of HR rules about sexual harassment is to make sure that abusive behavior doesn't threaten the power relationship between management and managed.

its just so "funny" that this is a metafilter thread of people saying the university should be run more like a business...
posted by ennui.bz at 11:26 AM on January 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

Sorry for being a dummy but in this sentence: ...astrophysicists who are women are always DTF at the conferences that they attended... what does "DTF" stand for?
posted by orrnyereg at 11:29 AM on January 20, 2016

down to fuck
posted by MCMikeNamara at 11:31 AM on January 20, 2016

ugh do I regret answering that so quickly, but here we are.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 11:32 AM on January 20, 2016 [18 favorites]

What's worse than that is that anywhere women attend--conferences, cons, concerts...hell, anywhere where women (we're people too!) might take an interest in something that involves large gatherings, it is assumed we are always "DTF."
posted by Kitteh at 11:40 AM on January 20, 2016 [8 favorites]

We men seem to always keep a major portion of our brains in our dicks. Same as it always was. (I have made bad decisions over women more times than I would care to reveal. I am so much better at controlling it now that I am an old fart.)

It's not like women have sexual feelings, of course, or are ever tempted to make bad decisions over men or women. That's the reason why women generally don't do this stuff, not the fact that men are allowed to do it and indeed expected to do it, considered to be unable to help where they keep their brains, etc.
posted by Frowner at 11:43 AM on January 20, 2016 [35 favorites]

We men seem to always keep a major portion of our brains in our dicks. Same as it always was. (I have made bad decisions over women more times than I would care to reveal. I am so much better at controlling it now that I am an old fart.)

That's sexist as hell, and I frankly expect better out of the men in my life. "We just can't help it" is a bullshit excuse. I fully believe men are capable of being attracted to somebody without letting it interfere with their professional relationships - it's funny how this only seems to happen when men are in positions of power over the women they're attracted to. You never hear this shit about somebody "not being able to help themselves" when it's their boss they're attracted to or somebody else that has the power to punish their shitty behaviors. They only do it to the powerless because they know they can get away with it.
posted by zug at 11:52 AM on January 20, 2016 [39 favorites]

I went to grad school late. My academic advisor missed the first three critical appointments, then showed up for my classroom eval without an appointment. By that time she was no longer my advisor. I documented everything, so nothing came as a surprise to my program director, even when my badvisor tried academic drama, it was too late. My new advisor was the second in charge of the program, and I got my degree. I felt I was being subtly manipulated into some sort of inappropriate, beggy, guru/chela relationship, since I was paying for mentoring and a degree I made sure to get what I paid for.

My experience was much lower stakes than Cal Tech, but the same principle was at work. Instead of calling, pleading, trying to set up meetings over coffee, off campus, I made it what it was about, her commitment to her contract and her performance, and my investment in my education. If the school had not cooperated, I would still be on the hook for loans, with no degree.

I think it is strange when schools do not honor their commitments to students, and put faculty first. There should be a contract for students.
posted by Oyéah at 11:53 AM on January 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

We men seem to always keep a major portion of our brains in our dicks.

Assholes keep a major portion of their impulse control in their dicks, perhaps.
posted by OmieWise at 11:58 AM on January 20, 2016 [4 favorites]

The problem is more that some guys (I can't even believe I'm doing notallmen) always think women are DTF. Doesn't matter if it's large or small gatherings. Those men shouldn't be profs because that's not what being a good, or let's put the bar on the floor, adequate prof thinks.
posted by hydrobatidae at 12:02 PM on January 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

This is too close to home, so I don't really want to comment. But I'll link this, at least, since grant funding has been brought up:

Letter from NASA Administrator Charles Bolden to grantee institutions running NASA-funded programs regarding harassment policies. "Science is for everyone."

If you want to see the extent of the problem, you might be interested in #AstroSH, the tag being used for astronomy sexual harassment anecdotes. Fair warning, it is grim. Much grimmer than you'd expect, and if you're close to this area it might make you cry. Also, article in Nature. (Linked above already, I believe. Sorry if the other links are also repeats.)

And they say never read the comments, but if you didn't look, you'd miss this gem: "And yet, they failed to address the crime of being 38 and having a Tumblr page."
posted by RedOrGreen at 12:03 PM on January 20, 2016 [5 favorites]

Vaguely threatening statements like "if they refuse to clean it up, it will be cleaned up for them" don't really help. This is a systemic problem, with no easy fixes.

Here's the statement from Meg Urry, president of the American Astronomical Society (our primary professional organization), after the Marcy case.

It's not like NASA and the NSF and the AAS are not taking the issue seriously. But it is a deeply entrenched problem, and believe me, we're ahead of the curve on this compared to some other STEM fields. There's a LOT more dirty laundry where that came from.
posted by RedOrGreen at 12:12 PM on January 20, 2016 [3 favorites]

We men seem to always keep a major portion of our brains in our dicks. Same as it always was. (I have made bad decisions over women more times than I would care to reveal. I am so much better at controlling it now that I am an old fart.)

Speak for yourself. I'm male, I'm more than capable of keeping my hormones in control, and it fucking incenses me when men try to blame their own personal failing of not exhibiting enough self control and ownership over their libido on their gender, because it unfairly debases me.

Whatever lack of control you have is on your own head, not your gender.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:33 PM on January 20, 2016 [33 favorites]

It's not like women have sexual feelings, of course, or are ever tempted to make bad decisions over men or women. That's the reason why women generally don't do this stuff, not the fact that men are allowed to do it and indeed expected to do it, considered to be unable to help where they keep their brains, etc.

Indeed. I work in an organization that has about 40% women in senior management roles (and is about 60% female in total). We must have been imagining those unfortunate events a few years ago where a senior manager was caught playing sexual favourites with her directors. As here, the junior staff were forced out, the senior manager escaped with a wrist slap.

I view harassment, sexual or otherwise, as a problem humans have in general. Response to it, male or female isn't perfect (or even passing fair). There are many more male-driven problems in academia now because there are vastly more male PIs than women ones.

That all said, this is just another derail.
posted by bonehead at 1:02 PM on January 20, 2016

Five days later, around 1 a.m., Ott messaged her online. “Of all my students I cared most about you and I failed in the worst way,” Ott typed. “My problem is that I don’t want to be in a power position, but I factually am.”

I hope this quote has made its way to every potential applicant to this department, and I hope they get a measurable decline in good applicants because this asshole freely admits he has no desire to use his power as tenured faculty - which yes he fucking has - to actually help his advisees advance their careers.
posted by nakedmolerats at 1:19 PM on January 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

In Nature: Harassment victims deserve better. Sexual harassment is rife in science. Universities must stop trying to save face: they must discipline perpetrators and support victims.

How many senior scientists — usually men and usually with significant power over the careers of those in their labs — have been sanctioned and disciplined by their universities for sexual harassment? Nobody knows, especially not young researchers who eagerly apply for their first jobs, spend long hours on fieldwork and feel under pressure to socialize and make contacts after hours and at academic conferences. How many times have colleagues turned a blind eye to inappropriate comments and actions, and made excuses for people who should know better — and who are morally, legally and contractually obliged to behave better? How many young scientists have left positions, or left science completely, because of such behaviour, or because it is seemingly not taken seriously?

posted by ChuraChura at 1:31 PM on January 20, 2016 [6 favorites]

> I hope they get a measurable decline in good applicants

Ha ha ha ha sob. Look, not to stand up for the guys at Caltech, but they took a more proactive stance and actually took action to stop this abuse. That is so much more than so many other places. Please look at the #AstroSH link above.
posted by RedOrGreen at 1:33 PM on January 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

Oh yeah and the overriding fallacy; the professor did not fall in love with his student. The narcissistic tool fell in love with his ideas about someone else, and in a rush to cover up the abuse of his position of trust, and power; fired the discomfiting stimulus for his narcissist self romance. Because his narcissism blinded him to the absolute onesidedness of his "one handed romance" he involved another grad student to make it seem more real, again, for his narcissistic gratification.

Fell in love, what, like a sad little shooting star? This until he finds some other object to capture with the gravity of his magic (grading program?)
posted by Oyéah at 1:42 PM on January 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

There are many more male-driven problems in academia now because there are vastly more male PIs than women ones.

Sorry, no, I don't buy that it's just a numbers game and that if there were equal numbers of men and women PIs that the harrassment would be conducted in equal numbers by both sexes. That completes ignores that we are steeped in a culture where men are valued more than women, women are objectified and degraded and their efforts rendered unimportant and/or invisible on a daily basis. I'm sure someone else can give more a coherent and eloquent rebuttal but basically I couldn't disagree with this point more.
posted by JenMarie at 1:43 PM on January 20, 2016 [13 favorites]

Look, not to stand up for the guys at Caltech, but they took a more proactive stance and actually took action to stop this abuse.

Bullshit. Caltech had the evidence, grounds, and policy to fire him. We should not be praising them, but holding them accountable for once again allowing a bad actor off the hook for his actions.

And if you don't want to stand up for them, stop standing up for them. Part of why this behavior happens is because people like you keep saying that we should be praising the fact that something was done, even though we all know what was done was unacceptable.
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:55 PM on January 20, 2016 [3 favorites]

I view harassment, sexual or otherwise, as a problem humans have in general.

The statistics do not support your view. Men are massively disproportionately likely to commit acts of harassment, violence and sexual violence. I don't think that's because men are inherently wicked, but rather that we have a society which systemically enables and supports male abusers in an unbelievable diversity of situations. It's historically contingent, but in a much more complex way than "whoever has organisational power will necessarily harass" would suggest.
posted by howfar at 2:14 PM on January 20, 2016 [15 favorites]

Couple comments removed; terse speculation about mental illness isn't a great way to go when jumping into just about any discussion, for a variety of reasons.
posted by cortex (staff) at 2:28 PM on January 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

Vaguely threatening statements like "if they refuse to clean it up, it will be cleaned up for them" don't really help. This is a systemic problem, with no easy fixes.

Well, yeah -- if you take actually punishing the unambiguously sole wrongdoer in the situation off the table, there aren't going to be many fixes at all.
posted by No-sword at 2:58 PM on January 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

"Men are massively disproportionately likely to commit acts of harassment, violence and sexual violence. " I actually think it may be more complex than just "they are permitted". This seems to be true of cultures on the whole, so if it's not an inclination men are naturally inclined toward why is it so common across cultures if it's just cultural variables that cause it? This is an important thing to consider when we claim we know the sole cause because it may impact the kinds of solutions we need to employ.

I was reading about how experiencing war, working in slaughterhouses and other violent professions that we have tended to put men in, tends to increase violent behaviors and domestic violence and sexual assault. I mean, I just feel like it's worth considering if biology doesn't play a role because I honestly don't think there is honor in shaming people with an actual difficulty just for having it... like maybe some men really do have a higher difficulty with impulse control or needing to dominate or whatever the shit it is. I was going to pull up some studies on this just because I like studies but I ran across this one about aggressive behavior potentially benefitting the perpetrators immunity.

And now I'm just sighing. I want to know why and I don't think "culture causes it" is true. Maybe it is, but when reading about the factors involved and the research I'm not seeing that coming out as the only or sole issue but like most things is multifactorial and treating men and women the same in order to not be sexist might actually limit understanding what exactly is going on here if biology does have something to do with it.
posted by xarnop at 3:13 PM on January 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

advil: I'm a male professor who supervises graduate students, and I just don't get the sympathetic responses. I'm "young" (which does mean something like, between 30 and 45 in this context), have supervised both male and female grad students, and have never had anything remotely like a crush on any of them.

The fact that you've never had anything remotely like a crush on any of your students may explain why you don't understand the sympathetic responses. :-) Area Man's friend-of-a-friend sounds like someone who would have both sympathy for the situation and an understanding of the things that Ott should have done instead of what he did do.
posted by clawsoon at 3:19 PM on January 20, 2016

I don't think it's fair to say you're shaming people for having difficulty when we're actually shaming people for their actions and their lack of work on their difficulties. Compare with the high school teacher mentioned above, where the guy had difficulties and so removed himself from temptation. That's awesome, that's what people should do.

This wouldn't translate exactly to graduate advisors, of course; you can't have a professor who refuses to work with women.
posted by jeather at 3:19 PM on January 20, 2016

but this professor wasn't actually even the grad student's boss

Can we lay this misunderstanding to rest? Kleiser was doing research for Ott, in Ott's lab, according to the fpp article. Yes, this professor was actually even this grad student's boss.

A boss is someone who has the power to hire you to perform specified tasks for money, or fire you from performing specified tasks for money.

Graduate students (the ones who get funding) get paid in only a few possible ways.

1. Teaching assistantships - the graduate student works for the department, under sometimes very indirect supervision by a professor, in assisting with instruction of undergraduates (running labs/recitations/workshops, marking, or sometimes as a full instructor for a course). In this case, a departmental committee or program coordinator makes hiring and firing decisions, so is the boss for teaching assistants. According to the Buzzfeed article, "Kleiser was taking a full load of classes as well as doing research with Ott", which does not include teaching duties. So I think we can safely surmise that she did not have a teaching assistantship.

2. Fellowships for graduate study - i.e. a scholarship; generally supplied by an external granting agency such as the NSF, the funding is the grad student's own grant, and usually follows the grad student, even through different advisors or departments/institutions (within the same subject area). The granting agency makes "hiring" and "firing" decisions - decides who to award fellowships to and (in rare cases) rescind fellowships from, so is the boss for grad students on fellowships. The "job" in this case is usually just studying and performing research directly related to the grad student's dissertation, however. That is, a grad student with a fellowship does not need to "struggle with [their] workload": they are free to not work on a research project while taking a full courseload in their first year of graduate study, and free to only do research directly related to their dissertation when they get to that stage of their progam. As well, even at Tier I research institutions like CalTech, these are not super common; and in my experience, grad students who come with their own money and thus are free labor for a research lab when they do start the research component of their degree do not have delays in finding advisors. I think that we can safely surmise that Kleiser did not have such a fellowship.

Which leaves:

3. Research assistantships - the graduate student is hired by a faculty member and paid from a research grant on which that faculty member is a PI to do research for that faculty member. This is the most common form of funding for grad students in the experimental sciences. Grad students generally work as research assistants for their own advisor and not a different faculty member, because the grad student workload is high, and they can get paid to do work that will go into their dissertation rather than doing unrelated research on the side. That is, a grad student's dissertation research is generally a subsidiary project of their advisor's research program, because that is most efficient for both the faculty member and the grad student, precisely because grad students then get paid to work on their dissertation research rather than effectively holding down an unrelated or only tangentially related part-time job. But a research assistantship is still a job in the normal, legal sense that the grad student is getting paid to perform specified job tasks, state and federal employment-related taxes are deducted from that pay, the research assistant is reported to state and federal agencies as an employee, and so forth.

Even though faculty write grants and the grants are designated as being for the faculty member's use in their research program, the university will administer the grant and thus be the overarching employer for grad students on research assistantships in the same sense that, for example, the US Government is the overarching employer for staff of an individual Congressperson's constituency office in that Congressperson's home district. But the PI has hiring and firing powers - the power to define job tasks and the decision of who to start paying and who to stop paying rest, primarily and sometimes solely, with the faculty member. It really does sound like Ott fired Kleiser, from her job as a research assistant in his lab, in the legal sense and not just in some colloquial sense. As in, she was being paid for performing certain work and both the pay and her performing of the work stopped, because Ott said so, because Ott had hiring and firing power over Kleiser in that work context.

In summary: a research assistantship (which is what Kleiser almost certainly had) is a job - in the full, legal sense; and Ott was thus her boss - in the full, legal sense.
posted by eviemath at 4:15 PM on January 20, 2016 [21 favorites]

I was reading about how experiencing war, working in slaughterhouses and other violent professions that we have tended to put men in, tends to increase violent behaviors and domestic violence and sexual assault. I mean, I just feel like it's worth considering if biology doesn't play a role because I honestly don't think there is honor in shaming people with an actual difficulty just for having it... like maybe some men really do have a higher difficulty with impulse control or needing to dominate or whatever the shit it is.

1. This guy is an astrophysicist, not a solider. His environment was not making him be a sexist piece of shit, or contributing to it. We was not traumatised by his work and acting out.

2. It literally does not matter why he is a sexist piece of shit. Any consideration for physical contributors ceases at the point that he is hurting other people. If he has some mystery physical condition that makes him abuse women under his direction and care and he cannot control himself, he should not be in a teaching role.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 4:36 PM on January 20, 2016 [18 favorites]

Two, if they refuse to clean it up, it will be cleaned up for them. And they are not going to like that.

Possibly relevant thoughts along those lines.
posted by PMdixon at 4:40 PM on January 20, 2016

I mean, I just feel like it's worth considering if biology doesn't play a role because I honestly don't think there is honor in shaming people with an actual difficulty just for having it... like maybe some men really do have a higher difficulty with impulse control or needing to dominate or whatever the shit it is.

Clearly some men* do have these problems, but my feeling about that is basically, so what?

I'm an alcoholic. I can't control myself around alcohol. It's just a fact. I spent a few not very pleasant years getting that through my head and getting sober, but now I am sober, and I prioritize staying sober above pretty much everything else.

So if this guy, or any other person, can't control themselves around someone of their preferred gender(s), then they should organize their life so that they are never in a position where this uncontrollable urge could harm someone else.

Now, with that being said, whether or not this is the case with Ott, I think there are a lot more people, men especially, who could control themselves if they had the right incentives. For example, if they had a culture that punished them rather than rewarding them or turning the other cheek for this behavior.

Ott should have been fired as soon as these facts were brought to light. And his actions should have made him persona non grata at any other university as well. This should happen every single time something like this occurs, anywhere, whether in academia or outside of it.

Of course, I'm not holding my breath for that to come to pass in my life time, but if it did, I'd bet we'd suddenly see a lot more people finding a way to control these impulses. Again, I totally believe there are some people for whom this situation is fundamentally untenable in the same way that I would never be able to work at a bar, but I think that's got to be a very small percentage of the population.

*And yes, women as well, but without having any numbers on hand, I'm still willing to bet this is disproportionately a problem with men, not because of any innate biological factors, but because of a whole host of social factors that allow this shit to happen over and over again.
posted by litera scripta manet at 4:56 PM on January 20, 2016 [12 favorites]

It's different this time than back when the earth was still cooling and I was in grad school, say, the 1980s. However infrequently, the word about this kind of (usually) gendered harassment is *getting out in public*. The harassed students are (not enough, but at least sometimes) getting their experience to their administrations *and the public* who, as we are here, responding with righteous indignation, and even better, organizing for and supporting moves towards justice and equality based on performance.

The academic mentor situation, particularly in STEM, is sexist as hell. But now we have ways of getting the problems out in public, naming and shaming and hopefully changing.
posted by Dreidl at 5:47 PM on January 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

I find it fascinating that CalTech made such an effort to handle this in-house and keep the particulars secret, spinning the story in a way that made the school sound progressive and concerned. Meanwhile, the (clearly and justifiably furious) graduate students involved were already shopping the story around to the press. Maybe the question administrators should be asking before signing off on punishment for a tenured creep is "are the victims going to feel satisfied?"

And this stuff happens in the humanities, too. The financial stakes are lower, but it's no less disgusting.
posted by Scram at 6:31 PM on January 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

xarnop, please let this drop. Thanks.
posted by restless_nomad (staff) at 6:32 PM on January 20, 2016 [6 favorites]

Can we lay this misunderstanding to rest? Kleiser was doing research for Ott, in Ott's lab, according to the fpp article. Yes, this professor was actually even this grad student's boss.

Just to be clear, I wasn't denying that he had fired her in every important sense of the word. I was saying that - in the event that she decides to sue for unfair dismissal/wrongful termination - that Iowa dentist precedent, which someone brought up, is unlikely to apply. In the context of that decision, being an employer in the full legal sense = being free to fire someone without giving any reason (discrimination aside) because it's your contract with the employee and you were free to define its terms to include an at-will clause. I would be surprised if Kleiser's actual employment contract was with Ott, rather than with Caltech, and if Ott's own contract with Caltech gave him genuine fire-at-will powers over his research assistants.

If Kleiser were to sue, I'm pretty sure it would be Caltech that she sued, not Ott. And if anyone were to sue Ott, or otherwise enforce legal duties against him, it would probably be Caltech, arguing that he had breached his own duties to it by making an unreasonable decision based on irrelevant factors. I doubt that he counts as her boss in the sense that a court would uphold his right to fire her at will, as against his own employer as well as against her. That was the only limited point I was making. Ott's de facto power to make hiring and firing decisions doesn't give him the legal (as well as moral) right to make those decisions as if his job was his private fiefdom.
posted by Aravis76 at 11:44 PM on January 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

"I do look forward to the day when men who can't control their penis-feelings at work are not considered to have minor personal pecadillos, but are viewed as so immature and irresponsible and such a liability risk to the organization that they cannot be trusted with any responsibility or authority."

Hear, hear.

"Or would you be like, "it's cool, I totally get that I can't work here anymore because of your boner", and quietly accept that you lost your job through no actual fault of your own?

But it was your fault, because you were just so darn pretty and fuckable!

"Or do we really have such low expectations of men that we just accept that they are powerless in the face of their emotions, and the only possible solution is to force their unrequited crush to accommodate their feelings."

I think it's more like men are so powerFUL that the only possible solution is to cave in, because otherwise they ruin your life if you try to not fuck them.

"This is what happens when you socialize men that they have no responsibility with their feelings towards women and when you teach women they do have a responsibility for the emotional lives of men. "

But the only person we have control over is ourselves, and it's up to us to stop men from chasing after us!

"I just feel like it's worth considering if biology doesn't play a role"

I actually strongly suspect this is true, because of how incredibly common it is that men behave like this around women, and it's very rarely happening in the other direction. We don't hear too many examples of a woman sexually harassing the shit out of a guy so that he ends up out of work. I haven't heard too many of say, one gay guy doing that to another gay guy or a lesbian doing that to another lesbian either. There seems to be something in a lot of men beyond crappy socialization that brings this behavior out.
posted by jenfullmoon at 5:58 AM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]

Well sure, Aravis76, because Ott was like a regional branch manager in this situation, and because Kleiser would have been technically a Caltech employee supervised by Ott and not an employee of Ott Enterprises or something, because universities administer the external grants obtained by faculty such as what I'm hypothesizing was the revenue source from which Kleiser was being paid, the university gets to set some rules around hiring and firing or around Ott's conduct as a manager. In fact, they have some rules around sexual harrassment which were their legal justification for suspending Ott from his job with them without pay for a year (not, I note, because he somehow convinced Kleiser that she was fired from his lab when he didn't have such authority). And that makes them potentially legally liable in potential lawsuits, as well as Ott.

That doesn't mean that Ott didn't have hiring or firing power. I mean, by that reasoning, states that are not at-will states, or any unionized workplace where a collective agreement specifies a review process to be followed before firing an employee, don't have any bosses. Or, a regional branch manager of a branch of a big company (not some legal convenience like a franchise or a sub-company or a shell corporation) is not a boss. That employers in such situations have some constraints on, review over, or some sort of accountability mechanisms (beyond just state and federal employment law) for their hiring and firing decisions doesn't make them not really a boss, or the firing not really a firing. This thread is debating, in part, whether it should be the case, but the current situation on the ground is that faculty really do have a fair degree of control and autonomy over who gets to work in their research labs, funded by external grant money awarded to the faculty member but administered by the university. That financial situation being the source of the power/autonomy that Ott had here.
posted by eviemath at 6:10 AM on January 21, 2016 [2 favorites]

zippy, thank you for articulating this:

substantially impaired interpersonal skills or paranoia that manifest itself as demanding loyalty yet not rewarding it

I need to really get the idea that loyalty is a two-way street into my bones and this will help. Thank you.
posted by brainwane at 6:19 AM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]

(Perhaps to clarify: yeah, "boss" isn't a legal term so my expression of 'boss in the legal sense' was technically inaccurate. In common parlance from the labor side of things, your boss is the person who makes hiring and firing decisions, not (except in cases of sole proprietorships) the legal entity that would be referred to legally as your employer, however, and that is the sense in which I have been using the term "boss".)
posted by eviemath at 6:47 AM on January 21, 2016

This kind of reminds me of the discipline-wide shakeup about sexual harassment (and worse) in philosophy. I do think there is something systematically bad in a discipline filled with men who for their whole lives have been considered (and consider themselves to be) the smartest ones in the room, coupled with intellectual commitments that might seem to exacerbate notions of individuality/amorality.
posted by yarly at 9:39 AM on January 21, 2016

I really like litera scripta manet's parallel to addiction, and was thinking something similar last night. When I go into addiction threads, I'm always a little shocked at how much sympathy is expressed for the addict, given how much damage they have demonstrably done to people around them. (Often including, most horribly, their own children.) However, it's easy - too easy - for me to condemn them, because I've never been tempted by a substance addition, let alone overwhelmed by one.

I suspect there's a similar dynamic going on in parts of this thread. And, again, solutions like litera scripta manet's and Area Man's may be the only option for people like Ott if they have repeatedly demonstrated that they can't/won't control their actions when placed in a situation with vulnerable people.
posted by clawsoon at 10:30 AM on January 21, 2016

eviemath, we don't disagree. My only point, in the sentence you quoted, was to point out that even the idiotic Iowa decision wouldn't justify what Ott did here. What he did is plainly legally and morally wrong even if you believe the dentist who fired his assistant on similar grounds was legally and morally right. (I don't.)
posted by Aravis76 at 11:16 AM on January 21, 2016

I don't understand the biology plays a role position at all. It seems like there are at least two things that it could mean.

1) Biology leads to lust (or whatever you want to call it); and,
2) Biology leads to an absence of control.

For the sake of argument, I'm willing to grant #1, even though I think it's a pretty simplistic way to talk about human nature. But I can't work out how it matters. We expect in all sorts of instances that people control their desires. This is especially true when the expression of those desires might harm someone else. We spend a long time socializing children to contain their desires. This is, arguably, what society is. I have no idea why this particular desire should be given "understanding" just because it has a biological cause.

Number 2 is just weird to me. Again, growing up is largely a process of learning self-control. Sure, people have all kinds of problems with it nonetheless, but we don't tend to excuse a lack of control when it affects someone else. We don't say that murders are excused if they have impulse control problems, or pathological liars and con artists. On the contrary, we consider people who display this kind of lack of control more dangerous and in need of an external locus of control.

It's just super weird that biology gets trotted out to excuse this kind of behavior.
posted by OmieWise at 11:17 AM on January 21, 2016 [9 favorites]

It's not weird, it's one of the many ways our society tells men that their poor behavior is not their own fault. Because if it was their own fault, then they would have to take responsibility for not developing and exhibiting control over their libido, and that would mean they would only have themselves to blame for the repercussions.
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:26 AM on January 21, 2016 [2 favorites]

Absolutely, I meant it's weird that anyone takes it seriously as anything other than what you said.
posted by OmieWise at 11:33 AM on January 21, 2016

"I couldn't help myself" is a legitimate defense in some cases, and is recognized by the law as such. In many more cases, it's used in the hope that other people will believe it, even if it's not true.
posted by clawsoon at 12:06 PM on January 21, 2016

"I couldn't help myself" only works if you can show you have a genuine medical problem diminishing your responsibility. "I never learned self-control" doesn't count.
posted by Aravis76 at 12:22 PM on January 21, 2016 [6 favorites]

I'm willing to bet that defenders of this guy will claim Asperger's as a genuine medical problem diminishing his responsibility.
posted by clawsoon at 1:17 PM on January 21, 2016

"I couldn't help myself" is a legitimate defense in some cases, and is recognized by the law as such.

In the interest of accuracy, I think you ought to add the point that cases for which "I couldn't help myself" is a legitimate defense tend to be connected to physical assault, and the crime in question tends to be an attack with the intent to injure or kill rather than seduce. Which strikes me as an apples-and-oranges comparison.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:45 PM on January 21, 2016 [1 favorite]

What brought it to mind was the kinds of things that people with frontotemporal dementia do, to take this completely off-topic. (I was a bit skeptical in that case, as it happens, since the guy seemed like a successful sociopath the whole way through the story. But I digress...)

To get it back on topic: How common are research careers in which mentoring isn't expected, so that a wiser version of a guy like this could take himself a bit further away from temptation?
posted by clawsoon at 1:57 PM on January 21, 2016

I'm willing to bet that defenders of this guy will claim Asperger's as a genuine medical problem diminishing his responsibility.

I don't know of a jurisdiction where Asperger's could function as a defence. The relevant questions to insanity type defences, in common law jurisdictions, are, essentially "did he know what he was doing, and did he know that it was wrong?"

It's pretty clear that he knew both of these things and did it anyway.
posted by howfar at 2:17 PM on January 21, 2016 [5 favorites]

How common are research careers in which mentoring isn't expected, so that a wiser version of a guy like this could take himself a bit further away from temptation?

Who cares? And I mean that seriously. I'm tired of the focus with these cases being "how can we change things to preserve the dignity of this man who has been caught acting atrociously?"

Allow me to simply say fuck that shit.

I'm sorry, but if some man reaches the age of 38 without grasping how to interact in a professional manner with female subordinates, we need to stop excusing that behavior, or looking for ways to hide it. If this individual can't act like a professional, then there should not be a place for him in academia.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:24 PM on January 21, 2016 [14 favorites]

Is there a goddamn reason to bring autism up here? It's legally and morally irrelevant, and frankly as a woman on the spectrum the constant use of Asperger's to help build shelter for abusive creeps is.... angering. Why are we speculating that this man is mentally ill? Plenty of neurotypical men choose to be abusive when they can get away with that. Research on rapists and their ability to hear "no" in other contexts--even soft "no"s!--bears that out.
posted by sciatrix at 2:39 PM on January 21, 2016 [13 favorites]

Ouch, I missed that he raped her.

And agreed 100% - many men are abusive, and they are typically rewarded for it. (I recall that one of the answers in "Why Does He Do That?" was "because everybody rewards him for it"), and that dynamic plays into this case.
posted by clawsoon at 2:51 PM on January 21, 2016

I think it was an analogy between different kinds of abuse - there's no accusation of any physical assault by him, just creepy and (non-criminal) reprehensible behaviour at work.
posted by Aravis76 at 3:04 PM on January 21, 2016 [2 favorites]

NoxAeternum: I'm sorry, but if some man reaches the age of 38 without grasping how to interact in a professional manner with female subordinates, we need to stop excusing that behavior, or looking for ways to hide it. If this individual can't act like a professional, then there should not be a place for him in academia.

So like someone who fails to control their drinking simply shouldn't work in a bar, or a pedophile who fails to control their fondling simply shouldn't work in childcare, a man who fails to be professional with subordinate women simply shouldn't work in academia?
posted by clawsoon at 3:17 PM on January 21, 2016

howfar: "I couldn't help myself" only works if you can show you have a genuine medical problem diminishing your responsibility. "I never learned self-control" doesn't count.

I believe that's the affluenza defense, more-or-less.
posted by clawsoon at 3:29 PM on January 21, 2016

So like someone who fails to control their drinking simply shouldn't work in a bar, or a pedophile who fails to control their fondling simply shouldn't work in childcare, a man who fails to be professional with subordinate women simply shouldn't work in academia?

Yes. Or more to the point, we shouldn't be stressing to find him a space to exist in academia - the onus should be solely on him to properly coexist.
posted by NoxAeternum at 4:04 PM on January 21, 2016 [7 favorites]

Who the hell still talks about Charles Bukowski once they're out of their twenties? Gross.
posted by turbid dahlia at 5:03 PM on January 21, 2016 [3 favorites]

The worst relationship I ever had was with a woman in her 30s who was really into Bukowski.

I wish I had known the red flag.
posted by clawsoon at 8:10 AM on January 22, 2016

What's with all the Bukowski hate? If someone honestly reads Bukowski and comes out the other side with contempt for women, they're doing it wrong.
posted by Scram at 12:10 PM on January 24, 2016

The National Science Foundation takes a baby step forward, states that they may withdraw funding from organizations that are not Title IX compliant.

Why couldn't it be "will"?
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:30 AM on January 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

Meanwhile, another case of sexual misconduct in academic science was covered today in the NYT: Chicago Professor Resigns Amid Sexual Misconduct Investigation
posted by en forme de poire at 2:09 AM on February 3, 2016 [4 favorites]

Meanwhile, another case of sexual misconduct in academic science was covered today in the NYT: Chicago Professor Resigns Amid Sexual Misconduct Investigation

I just read that article and hoped someone would have linked it here. It's amazing that they hired him knowing about some of his previous misbehaviors, and knowing that he was leaving Princeton under mysterious circumstances. The article doesn't say whether he is going to be facing any criminal charges as well, given that he apparently 'engaged in sexual activity with a student who was “incapacitated due to alcohol and therefore could not consent.”'
posted by Dip Flash at 2:26 AM on February 3, 2016 [3 favorites]

The article infuriated me because of this bogus "we have to pretend we don't know anything if they weren't convicted" strain that runs through these conversations. Innocent until proven guilty is a legal standard and maintaining it in civil society as a standard for conduct does a lot of harm. I certainly don't think that people should be condemned on a whisper, but of course people should make nuanced decisions that take into account all of the facts, rather than just putting some (very relevant) facts outside consideration.
posted by OmieWise at 7:20 AM on February 3, 2016 [5 favorites]

Yeah, the LGM folks ripped apart how bullshit their arguments were. As they pointed out, there were a lot of massive red flags here that got overlooked, most likely because he was considered a rainmaker.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:09 AM on February 4, 2016 [5 favorites]

Thanks for that. It was satisfying.
posted by OmieWise at 7:58 AM on February 4, 2016

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