Posts Tagged ‘ Geoff Marcy ’

It all depends on when you start the clock

Oct 18th, 2015 10:11 am | By

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

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She said no

Oct 15th, 2015 10:43 am | By

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

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A good thirty years

Oct 14th, 2015 5:43 pm | By

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

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Geoff Marcy is resigning from Berkeley

Oct 14th, 2015 4:36 pm | By

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

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The culture that champions the voices of predators

Oct 13th, 2015 6:37 pm | By

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

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