S11, E3: Breaking Radio Silence
S11, E3: Breaking Radio Silence
Rebooting Series 11: The Collateral Damage of Revenge in Science
Previously…
This series was started in the summer of 2023 with the first two episodes put out in a timely manner. The intention was to publish the remainder within a few weeks but once they were all in drafts I had a rethink. I won’t waste words going into why - it will come up from time to time.
The mission of this episode to summarise and reboot the series. This contains some claims and questions that will be justified/answered later.
Astronomer and one of the founders of the exoplanet field of study, Geoffrey Marcy, was accused of sexual harassment at UC Berkeley. In 2015 a Title IX investigation concluded that on the preponderance of evidence he was guilty. Several restrictions were placed upon his campus activities although these were not publicly disclosed at the time.
A Lesson From History
After the investigation had concluded a leak to BuzzFeed News exposed Marcy as being the subject of a Title IX case. S11, E1: In the Eye of the Swarm set out how the subsequent social media campaign forced Marcy’s resignation. I drew comparisons to an historic abuse of process which led to the lynching of teenager Jesse Washington in 1916.
Looking at history can help us see patterns and avoid the repetition of mistakes. What happened to Marcy was not equivalent to the atrocity inflicted on Washington but the mechanisms were similar. Regardless of guilt or innocence what happened in both cases was unjust.
As I tried to understand what happened to Washington I noticed some things that I felt compelled to write about. To give the story the respect it deserves I have written a set of companion episodes to this series, or B-Sides, and cross-referenced them. The first will be linked at end of this piece.
White Knight Misogyny
What brought the Marcy case to my attention was the attempt to ruin the academic career of
, a woman who worked with Marcy many years after the Berkeley affair. She later described being agnostic on Marcy’s guilt because it wasn’t determined by a court of law. Yet why was she attacked when many others who collaborated with him since 2015 weren’t?Her persecution was not only made possible by the failure of certain academics and organisations to withstand the social pressure but made worse by their willingness to betray some basic principles. This included the proposed redefinition of ‘research misconduct’ by one organisation as discussed in S11, E2: The Fly Papers.
Answering Different Questions
The accounts that form the complaints are of dubious provenance and it is known that people were canvassed for anecdotes and testimony was solicited. I don’t know whether Marcy was innocent or guilty, but based on what’s in the public domain, the Title IX office couldn’t know either.
Is it possible there is more incriminating evidence in the report that was not disclosed? Unlikely, because if there were, it would have been leaked too. So I am using the same information as those who started to write open letters and mobilise protests on the back of a BuzzFeed article.
In August 2023, after placing what I thought was the last episode in drafts, I was left with a spaghetti monster of loose ends. Certainly, women should have protections from predatory behaviour in institutions, but was that really what this was about? I started to ask new questions:
Why would anyone think persecuting female astronomers was a means to combat sexual harassment?
What motivated the organisation of complaints, campaigning, media leaks and protests?
Who might have benefitted from the destruction of Marcy’s career?
An Emulsion of Anger and Judgement
The campaign against Marcy and later Villarroel, harnessed genuine anger about sexual harassment and assault, but I argue it was misdirected.
Anger is prejudicial because it carries the assumption of one side being at fault which undermines the ability to objectively assess the evidence. What would be the point of the crowd protesting if there were no expectation that they would be appeased. Effectively, they forced the Title IX investigation to take the emotional subjectivity of the crowd into account.
Justice was skewed until it ceased to be justice. Were the organisers of this campaign doing this for victims, to protect other women, or were those just pretexts for a different agenda?
Chum in the Water
Beneath the anger of ‘the crowd’ were genuine concerns about female safety on campus and in wider society. The Title IX office were trying to avoid appearing indifferent but that was a mistake, because that is precisely what impartiality should look like and without it, there is no justice. Consequently being dispassionately-objective became a political risk.
My reading of the available material suggests the conclusions reached by the Title IX investigation were unjustifiable by any objective standard. I believe that finding Marcy guilty was not the outcome of a process but a political miscalculation; an attempt to appease activists that backfired spectacularly. Instead of closure there was chum in the water.
Drawing Hatred and Contempt
Any atrocity or miscarriage of justice you can think of invariably results from a well of human hatred. All it takes is a malevolent force willing to dip its bucket. Now social media makes that possible to do remotely without personal jeopardy.
We know that after the Title IX investigation had concluded, the core anti-Marcy campaigners (having been denied the result they wanted), leaked confidential information from the Title IX investigation to BuzzFeed. They were safe in the knowledge there would be no consequences so took no risk. Unlike in a court of law, the contempt went unpunished, which paradoxically makes that contempt deserved.
Righteous Narratives
The story became about a failed Title IX investigation, that had found someone to be a serial harasser, but had fallen short of recommending the termination of employment. This was used to suggest he was being protected, a narrative that was repeated and built upon by other outlets, until it became real in the public consciousness.
But that was only one scenario and BuzzFeed did not consider any other explanation. Yet if you believe the investigation was flawed why would you accept its conclusions about guilt? A close reading of what is known from various accounts plus the known statements of individuals suggests a more plausible explanation; the Title IX office were unconvinced of Marcy’s guilt but were unable to say so.
The campaign to force his dismissal apparently arose from spontaneous revulsion but that anger was clearly carefully orchestrated. Here it is important to realise that the original BuzzFeed article was not the prime mover; it was the outcome of a concerted effort that culminated in a deliberate breach of the Title IX confidentiality rules.
It was the apex of a campaign had been underway since 2011 at the latest. Certainly the accusations come from an earlier period, so it is a conservative assumption to suppose that the uninterrupted initiative to oust Marcy started in 2011, rather than five years earlier.
Motivations
Marcy’s reputation as a pioneer, his celebrity-scientist status plus an exceptional ability to draw major research funding, were all given as motives for a conspiracy to protect him at all costs. The perceived lenient treatment of Marcy fitted into the narrative that Berkeley prioritised politics, prestige and money, over the protection of women on campus.
Of course there were huge sums of money at stake so cronyism is plausible and I have not shied from looking at that. Being open minded on that enabled me to wonder what other universities might do for research funding. Why for instance, did the pressure to launch a case against Marcy come from other universities, while those on the Berkeley campus were completely blindsided by the allegations?
The notion that sexual harassment complaints at Berkeley were routinely ignored became widely accepted in the aftermath of this scandal. What you find from reading of the federal and state audit reports is quite different. Most interesting was what those reports didn’t say despite the evidence. This was either because they did not make the connections (incompetence would explain much besides this) or they believed some conclusions would be too contentious.
On Evidence
My criticism of the evidence is not that it was already old when presented (that alone should never preclude an investigation into wrongdoing) but that most of the testimony was not even corroborated by the alleged victims. The majority of the statements were made by people who claimed to have either witnessed incidents or to be speaking on behalf of undisclosed parties. As with many themes mentioned in this hiatus-buster, these are to be addressed later, when room will be made for them over several episodes.
The B-Side
From March on selected series I will provide some paid companion ‘episodes’ (my work is typically episodic). These will generally complement the free episode without being essential to it. If this is unclear or you are curious about what this is about please see ‘The B-Side Explainer’.
The link below is to a free B-Side.
Thank you. If you do not yet have the Public Record from UCB of the Marcy investigation, let me know and I will send it to you. Please provide your email, if so.
See my note in the B-side explainer. I can’t wait to see how this works out for you.