Liberty for the sexual harassers
A pretty story from Inside Higher Ed:
Is there a backlash to the backlash against sexual harassment in astronomy? A group calling itself the Astronomy Underground sent an open letter to leaders of the American Astronomical Society on Tuesday alleging inappropriate, vigilante-style attempts to root out harassers in the discipline.
“We ask [the American Astronomical Society] Council and the [society’s Astronomy Education Board] to publicly explain how these actions have been allowed to occur for so long, and with what license [the society] has acted to investigate its members, damaging their careers, their personal lives and the health of the society in the process,” reads the letter.
The Astronomy Underground alleges that the society is somehow involved in such inquiries, and demands that it publicly explain how it intends to “1) repair the damage done to those who have been ‘investigated’ under the [society’s] name, 2) redirect the astronomy experience for our youngest members who have now spent their entire careers focused on these matters rather than on the science and 3) repair the reputation of astronomy on the national landscape, for the purposes of future recruitment and funding.”
Repair the reputation of astronomy by continuing to ignore sexual harassment? Brilliant plan, highly ethical, can’t possibly go wrong.
The letter follows several recent high-profile cases in which known harassers have been named and shamed by their peers and, in one case, by a U.S. congresswoman. In October, Geoff Marcy stepped down from his professorship in astronomy at the University of California at Berkeley after a series of news reports revealed that he’d been harassing women for years on multiple campuses. Many criticized Berkeley’s response to its own investigation — to warn Marcy not to repeat the behavior, or risk dismissal, rather than move to fire him immediately — and called the public pressure campaign leading up to his resignation a success.
A success if you want sexual harassment to stop. If you want it to continue, well then obviously it’s a disaster.
Don’t you just know which youngest members the writer means? That the cohort referred to almost certainly doesn’t include those people previously know as ‘women’?
It’s blatant and outrageous; the translation out of Newspeak in to English happens refl
“We Manly Men of Astronomy managed to do All The Science before those Silly Wimmins started complaining, making it impossible for us to concentrate on Sciency Stuff. Can we please stop listening to them? It’s distracting Young Men when they have to think about treating women as people. Indeed, could we stop acknowledging complaints, so that those Pesky Girls either stop complaining or (even better) stop applying to join our Manly Science? Then we can keep the Manly Men Scientists who, let’s face it, do All The Discovering.”
Zing!
Maybe we should adopt a giant ankh for our new gender “name”? That could be inclusive, right? Because it would imply nothing about those in the group.
Brilliant rewrite, tiggerthewing. Just what I was thinking myself. As a biologist, I feel deeply ashamed that I forced “uterus-having” self into the manly man world and distracted all those manly men from doing good biology because all they could think about was my…decolletage. On second thought, no, I don’t feel ashamed at all. I think I’ll just sit right here in my biological office and triumph about the total destruction of science as a result of my presence.
Please, everyone, recognize this as sarcasm – I don’t want to see my last comment tweeted on AVFM to prove what our “agenda” really is!