Tag: Geoff Marcy

  • It all depends on when you start the clock

    Katy Murphy and Thomas Peele at Inside Bay Area ask if the “swift” departure of Geoff Marcy signals “a profound shift in how society reacts and responds to sexual harassment and abuse on campus and in corporate boardrooms?”

    No, it doesn’t, because it wasn’t “swift” at all. It took years. See astrokatey on Twitter:

    Katey the Astronomer ‏@astrokatey Oct 16
    @dalcantonjd 3 years to compile stories. 3 to find ppl willing to come forward. Hours of phone convos about strategy. It succeeded.

    Three stinkin’ years, and all that hard work. This is no swift departure.

    Back to Murphy and Peele:

    But in a flash last week, the white-hot glare of social media revealed the darker side of the UC Berkeley professor, a titan in the field who sexually harassed aspiring female scientists. And just as notably, it exposed how many of his colleagues and institutions appeared to know about his behavior — but were either too intimidated or indifferent to stop him.

    After years of inaction, it took just five days for an international firestorm to force Marcy to resign from his prestigious posts at UC Berkeley and the $100 million Breakthrough Listen project to study extraterrestrial intelligence.

    But that’s just it – there were years of inaction. It took years plus five days.

    The question many are asking now is: Is Marcy’s undoing simply a rare example of the stars aligning? Or does his swift departure signal a profound shift in how society reacts and responds to sexual harassment and abuse on campus and in corporate boardrooms?

    No. No, it doesn’t. Not at all, any more than Mark Oppenheimer’s reporting on Michael Shermer or the string of accusations against Bill Cosby did. All this tells us is that eventually, if enough people are willing to put in a lot of work and take a lot of risk, maybe one harasser will feel compelled to resign…at age 61, when most of his harassing days are in his past.

    What’s so extraordinary about Marcy’s case is that once it made headlines “so many people across the board were able to publicly say, ‘I know this guy is in the running to be a Nobel laureate, and I don’t think he should be in our field,’ ” said Robin Nelson, an assistant professor of anthropology at New York’s Skidmore College and who published a study last year on sexual harassment in academia.

    I don’t see anything extraordinary in that at all. Once it made headlines, it was dead easy to say that. Once it made headlines it was safe to say that. Once it made headlines it was even popular to say that.

    Nelson said she senses a groundswell of changing attitudes over sexual harassment behind the digital expressions of moral outrage over #GeoffMarcy. Ever-greater numbers of women in the workforce, growing activism against campus sexual assault and high-profile exposés of rape and harassment in the military have shined a bright light on similar issues, Nelson said.

    Meh. It’s not as if this is a new issue.

    Two women said in interviews last week with this newspaper they tried to report Marcy for similar behavior when he taught at San Francisco State University in the mid-1990s. Both were sickened to see that he was found to have harmed other students at Berkeley — yet allowed to keep his position.

    Preet Dalziel, who now lives in Walnut Creek and teaches at a Bay Area high school, said she worked for Marcy as a graduate student; he was also her master’s thesis adviser. At first, Dalziel said, she tried to ignore off-color comments and back rubs he would give to other students. But one day, as they were looking at code on his office computer, she said, he touched her breast.

    So she tried to report him – and was shut down. A classmate made the same attempt and got the same response. Dalziel had wanted to work at NASA, but after that experience she felt discouraged, and pessimistic about getting a reference from Marcy, so she left the field. Geoff Marcy stomped out her dream because he wanted to grab her tit. Nice guy.

    She said she hopes the outcry over UC Berkeley’s response forces universities to take their students’ complaints more seriously.

    “It just kind of hurts me because it’s not right,” she said. “I don’t want professors to feel that they can get away with this stuff because they have tenure or they did something great.”

    Yes but you see that’s exactly it – the stars can get away with it because nobody wants to lose the stars. Nobody wants to alienate the Bill Cosby, the Michael Shermer, the Geoff Marcy.

    At the UC Santa Cruz Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics’ “Evening with the Stars,” celebrating the university’s 50th anniversary in August, Marcy was “the star,” lecturing on behalf of his alma mater at the Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton. As for the brilliant professor’s darker side?

    “We didn’t know,” said Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz, chair of UC Santa Cruz’s Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

    Yet others, like Harvard astronomy professor John Asher Johnson, who was one of Marcy’s key assistants at Berkeley, revealed on a blog post last week that his “inappropriate actions toward and around women in astronomy is one of the biggest ‘open secrets’ in astrophysics.”

    So, is it plausible that no one at UC Santa Cruz’s Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics had a clue? No, it’s not.

    Maybe the department chair is relying on a lawyerly meaning of “know” – they didn’t know for sure; they knew of allegations but they didn’t know for sure they were true. That of course is entirely plausible…but since the lawyerly meaning is not the only one in play, it’s not altogether honest.

    Marcy enjoyed “considerable power” in the field, Johnson wrote. “Underground networks of women pass information about Geoff to junior scientists in an attempt to keep them safe. Sometimes it works. Other times it hasn’t, and cognizant members of the community receive additional emails, phone calls and Facebook messages from new victims.”

    Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said when she attended UC Santa Cruz in 2005 she was told as she pursued her career to “stay away” from Marcy. She’s passed the same advice to others.

    So people at UC Santa Cruz warned her in 2005, but the chair in 2015 said they didn’t know. Didn’t know what? That Marcy was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt? Or that women were warned to stay away from Marcy if they didn’t want to be groped?

    Deniability can be so helpful to department chairs and studio executives.

    The “current academic hierarchical structure ensures that predators like him have significant safety once they enter the higher ranks,” said Prescod-Weinstein, the MIT postdoctoral fellow. “It is very easy for professors to get away with racist and sexist behavior — and they do — because junior researchers don’t have the power to push back.”

    Alex Zalkin, a San Diego lawyer representing three former Berkeley students suing the university over the way it handled sexual assault allegations they filed, said the light punishment Marcy received is indicative of campus culture that gives predators a pass.

    “There is an institutional problem,” he said, that is similar to what his clients faced in trying to force investigations. The women, he said, “aren’t surprised” about how Marcy was treated. “I am not optimistic anything will change.”

    I’m not either. I’d like to be, but I’m not. Universities aren’t going to become eager to get rid of their stars overnight.

    But Nelson, the Skidmore College professor, said Marcy’s remarkable downfall could send a bigger message to powerful men everywhere.

    “What this story kind of tells us,” she said, “is if you get caught and this catches up with you, your career will end in a week.”

    But only if you get caught, and the catching takes literally years – so your career will end “in a week” plus 30-odd years.

  • She said no

    The Chronicle of Higher Education tells us that astronomy colleagues have been trying hard to get Geoff Marcy to stop being a creep for a long time.

    Ruth Murray-Clay, an assistant professor of physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara who earned a Ph.D. in astrophysics on the system’s Berkeley campus in 2008, says it was in 2004 that she first decided to approach Mr. Marcy about what she saw as his inappropriate behavior with young women. Ms. Murray-Clay was the graduate-student representative to Berkeley’s astronomy faculty at the time and was meeting with students about putting together an annual holiday play in which they would poke fun at faculty members.

    “Someone suggested putting in a joke about Geoff chasing undergraduates, and the room got really quiet and uncomfortable,” says Ms. Murray-Clay. “I knew that if this was something that couldn’t even be joked about, I needed to go have a conversation with him.”

    She’d already heard several stories about him and his creepy touching (aka “inappropriate” touching, which is a nice way of saying creepy). So she talked to him – and he said the young students who told the stories had misinterpreted his creepy touching, but also that he would change and it wouldn’t happen again. (So he told himself: no more creepy touching, because they will misinterpret it.) (Or he told Murray-Clay he was telling himself that.)

    But it did happen again. Repeatedly. So much misinterpreting.

    Ms. Murray-Clay went back to talk to Mr. Marcy several times about his behavior before she left Berkeley, in 2008, she says, and so did other students. She also complained to the astronomy-department chairman, in 2005, and to Berkeley’s Title IX office, in 2006. But, she says, nothing happened.

    It so often is nothing that happens, isn’t it.

    Female faculty members and students have complained for decades of discrimination and harassment in male-dominated scientific fields. In astronomy a 2013 survey found that 29 percent of assistant professors, 21 percent of associates, and just 15 percent of full professors were female.

    Gender complaints are not limited to science. Female philosophers have also cited a hostile climate for women, and universities have recently removed or forced out several male philosophers following complaints of sexual harassment and assault.

    Well, if you get depressed about it, just have a chat with Christina Hoff Sommers, or watch some of her videos for the American Enterprise Institute; she’ll tell you it’s all exaggerated.

    Or you could check out Michael Shermer on Twitter – he’ll tell you you’re making victimhood your identity and you should quit it.

    Michael Shermer ‏@michaelshermer

    “In a victimhood subculture, the only way to achieve status is to either be a victim or defend victims.” @JonHaidt https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/nation-wimps/201510/where-did-colleges-go-wrong …

    Take note SJWs: “When victimhood becomes your identity you will be weak for the rest of your life.” @JonHaidt https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/nation-wimps/201510/where-did-colleges-go-wrong …

    Back to the Chronicle:

    Joan T. Schmelz, who just completed her second term as chair of the American Astronomical Society’s Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy, characterizes Berkeley’s treatment of Mr. Marcy as a “slap on the wrist.”

    In 2010, after learning of complaints about Mr. Marcy at a party following that year’s astronomical-society meeting, Ms. Schmelz quietly began working with women who felt he had harassed them. At that party, in Seattle, several people saw Mr. Marcy hanging out with one of his female undergraduates, buying her drinks, touching her, and then leaving the party with her in a taxi.

    “A small group of people decided this was really important, and we contacted the people who had been harassed,” says Ms. Schmelz, a professor in the department of physics and materials science at the University of Memphis. “We got more and more names, and finally four decided to file complaints after they had left Berkeley.”

    As she talked to all these people, she realized Marcy had a pattern, a “play book.”

    “I heard this so many times,” she says, “that I realized it was standard practice for him.”

    Mr. Marcy, she says, would isolate a female student in his lab or find a way to talk to her privately on the campus, away from others. During the talk, he would make a slightly inappropriate comment, touch or kiss the student, and then apologize, according to what women told her. Depending on the reaction he got, she says, he would either back off or take another step forward. Students, she says, complained that he had given them rides home, taken them out to coffee, and told them he and his wife had an open relationship. The four women who complained, she says, are “just the tip of the iceberg.”

    He got away with it, she says, because “people don’t trust the system to protect them.”

    Of course they don’t. For one thing the system is stuffed with people who approach the subject the way Sommers and Shermer do. For another thing universities love their stars, and Marcy is a star.

    This summer, after Berkeley had concluded its investigation of the complaints against Mr. Marcy and found him responsible for violating its policy on sexual harassment, Ms. Murray-Clay says Mr. Marcy asked if he could meet with her. He drove five hours, she says, from Berkeley to Santa Barbara, where he asked her to contact Ms. Schmelz and other members of the Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy to say that his behavior toward women in the field had changed. But Ms. Murray-Clay doesn’t find him convincing anymore. She said no.

    Ten hours of driving, wasted. Of course there are also all those women who left astronomy, but oh well, they’re only women.

  • A good thirty years

    Pauline Gagnon tells another, a different, horrifying story about Geoff Marcy.

    I suspect that what has come out so far is only the tip of the iceberg. His inappropriate behaviour goes back a good thirty years, when he was teaching at San Francisco State University.

    This is where I met him in 1985 when we both worked in the Physics and Astronomy Department while I was a Master’s student and a lecturer. It was well known that he had intimate relationships with several of his female students. But it is not the only aspect where I felt Marcy’s ethics were questionable.

    In 1987, Marcy’s colleague in the search for exoplanets realized that he had handed her a revised copy of their joint grant proposal. On the copy Marcy had given her, both their names appeared, his as main investigator and hers, as co-investigator. But Marcy’s official copy, the one he had submitted to the funding agency, bore only his name.

    She reported this to the department head, who fired her on the spot. Marcy was the rising star of his department. She then filed a formal complaint for professional misconduct against Marcy. But she was unable to recover her position and she left the field of astronomy.

    Holy crap.

  • Geoff Marcy is resigning from Berkeley

    Dennis Overybye reports in the Times:

    Geoffrey Marcy, the renowned astronomer who was found guilty ina campus investigation of sexually harassing students, is resigning from the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, where he has been a professor for 16 years.

    In an email to members of the astronomy department on Wednesday, the interim chairman of the department, Gibor Basri, wrote, “This is to inform our community that Geoff has initiated the process that will lead to his no longer being a faculty member at U.C. Berkeley.”

    In a statement announcing Dr. Marcy’s resignation, the university’s chancellor, Nicholas B. Dirks, and the executive vice chancellor and provost, Claude Steele, said they had accepted Dr. Marcy’s resignation and added: “We want to state unequivocally that Professor Marcy’s conduct, as determined by the investigation, was contemptible and inexcusable. We also want to express our sympathy to the women who were victimized, and we deeply regret the pain they have suffered.”

    Better late than never, I guess.

    The announcement of Dr. Marcy’s resignation came two days after some two dozen colleagues — an overwhelming majority of the astronomy department — issued a vote of no confidence in a letter saying they believed that he could no longer “perform the functions of a faculty member.” In separate statements, the department’s graduate studentsand postdoctoral fellows concurred.

    “This should put sexual harassers on notice: No one is too big to fail,” Joan Schmelz, a former chairwoman of the American Astronomical Society’s Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy, said Wednesday.

    Azeen Ghorayshi has more at BuzzFeed:

    “It’s a relief to know that Geoff Marcy will no longer have access to UC Berkeley students,” Jessica Kirkpatrick, one of the complainants in the sexual harassment investigation, told BuzzFeed News. “I hope the university is using this opportunity to re-evaluate it’s process and policies so that vulnerable students have better protections in place to guard against sexual harassment from faculty moving forward.”

    Many academics are upset that Berkeley didn’t take stronger disciplinary actions against Marcy after the investigation concluded that he had violated sexual harassment policies. He was given a “strict set of behavioral standards” to follow, and was told that if another complaint was filed, he could be sanctioned or fired.

    In a statement issued Wednesday afternoon, the university defended its decision not to fire Marcy, citing University of California policy.

    “UC Berkeley’s reaction to the finding that Professor Geoff Marcy violated the University’s sexual harassment policies has been the subject of understandable criticism and anger,” Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks and Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Claude Steele, said in the statement.

    “We want to state unequivocally that Professor Marcy’s conduct, as determined by the investigation, was contemptible and inexcusable.”

    I wonder if there will be another uproar about political correctness persecuting a great scientist.

  • The culture that champions the voices of predators

    245 – two hundred forty five! – astronomers and physicists have written a forceful letter to the New York Times objecting to its article on Geoff Marcy.

    Dear NY Times Editors,

    We are writing to give feedback on a story which appeared in the October 11 edition of the NYTimes, titled “Geoffrey Marcy, Astronomer at Berkeley, Apologizes for Behavior” by Dennis Overbye. Appended at the end of this letter is a Letter to the Editor to be considered for publication.

    The authors of this letter are all professional astronomers and physicists, from across the world. Women are dramatically underrepresented in our field and other sciences, in part because of the sexism and misogyny that this article reinforced.

    This article epitomizes the culture that champions the voices of predators and minimizes the experiences of survivors. Mr. Overbye’s piece repeatedly sympathizes with Marcy, portraying him as a misunderstood, empathetic educator. This viewpoint is captured in the title of the article, and it is reinforced by quotes from Marcy and his wife that Marcy was “condemned without knowing all of the facts” and “the punishment Geoff is receiving here in the court of hysterical public opinion is far out of proportion to what he did”. Not only are these statements false (see the next paragraph), but they employ the damaging tactic of painting female targets and their supporters as overly sensitive trouble-makers.

    And we do know the facts. Berkeley undertook a formal investigation and found Marcy guilty of repeated harassment over almost a decade. Marcy abused his position of power, betrayed his responsibilities as an educator, and sexually assaulted students. Despite these truths, Marcy was not punished.

    This article downplays Marcy’s criminal behaviors and the profound damage that he has caused to countless individuals. It overlooks the continued trauma that Marcy inflicts to this day as a Berkeley professor, and it implicitly condones his predatory acts. In doing so, it discourages women from speaking out when they have been violated, and it undermines the safety and learning environment of all students.

    Mr. Overbye has a serious conflict of interest in reporting this story as Overbye has a longterm collegial relationship with Marcy and has championed Marcy’s work in previous NY Times articles (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/13/science/finder-of-new-worlds.html). Overbye’s bias is evident when Overbye refers to this situation as “Dr. Marcy’s troubles” and when devoting three paragraphs at the top of the story on Marcy’s wife’s opinions of the crimes.

    I’ll just quote those three paragraphs for you; they are gruesome.

    Dr. Marcy’s wife, Susan Kegley, a pesticide researcher, said she supported him, pointing out that he had cooperated fully with the investigation and apologized.

    She defended her husband, writing in an email, “Others may interpret Geoff’s empathy and interest as a come-on. I can’t change their perspectives, but I think it is worth all of us examining how quickly one is judged and condemned without knowing all of the facts.”

    “The punishment Geoff is receiving here in the court of hysterical public opinion is far out of proportion to what he did and has taken responsibility for in his apology,” Dr. Kegley wrote.

    And yet, I venture to guess, she wasn’t there when Geoff groped his students, so how does she know “the punishment Geoff is receiving” is far out of proportion to what he did? How does she know what he did? Because he told her? And had no possible reason to lie or minimize?

    What a clusterfuck.