Berkeley astronomer in sexual harassment case to resign

[bananas]

Source: Nature

Exoplanet hunter Geoffrey Marcy also quits $100-million hunt for extraterrestrial life.

Astronomer Geoffrey Marcy is stepping down as a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley, following revelations that a university investigation found he had sexually harassed multiple students between 2001 and 2010.

A 14 October e-mail from Gibor Basri, interim chair of the Berkeley astronomy department, said that Marcy had initiated the process to leave the faculty. Marcy has been a professor there since 1999, and maintains an adjunct position at San Francisco State University.

“We believe this outcome is entirely appropriate and have immediately accepted his resignation,” Berkeley chancellor Nicholas Dirks and executive vice chancellor Claude Steele said in a statement.

The sexual harassment case involving Marcy concluded in June but was made public only last week in a report by BuzzFeed News. The disclosure triggered outrage among astronomers, and many Berkeley astronomy faculty and students have called for Marcy to leave the department. The university had not disciplined Marcy for his past actions but arranged an agreement going forward in which he could be subject to disciplinary actions if he again violated Berkeley's sexual harassment policy.

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Read more: http://www.nature.com/news/berkeley-astronomer-in-sexual-harassment-case-to-resign-1.18582?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews

[Liberal_in_LA]

1. he's famous in his field

[Nitram]

2. Now he's infamous in another. nt

[geek tragedy]

3. which is how he got away with it for so long nt

[Xithras]

4. It's very difficult to remove a tenured professor.

One of the biggest problems with removing him was the nature of the complaints. It wasn't until one of his students came forward with the allegation that he grabbed her crotch that they had solid grounds to push forward. Prior to that, the allegations tended to be things like passing touches to arms or necks, or third hand accusations that he was getting inappropriate with undergrads without any identification of the undergrads involved, so it wasn't possible to actually determine whether the behavior was unwelcome. He managed to keep himself in this gray area, surrounded by layers of plausible deniability, for many years. When one of his students finally accused him of a full blown sexual assault, the line was crossed and the university could act.

You have to remember that college and university educators have contracts, and that California law makes it very difficult for state schools to move against them. As an example of how colleges are stymied, you just have to look a little eastward to see what happened in Modesto a few years ago. A junior college tenured faculty member (JC faculty share the same legal protections as university faculty) was accused of forcefully sexually assaulting two teenage girls. The police arrested him, the prosecutors charged him, and he was facing decades in prison. Following the colleges policies on sexual assault, he was terminated from his position.

The jury in his trial decided that the testimony from the two girls was "not credible", and they found him not guilty. He sued the college, got his job back, and is now on track to collect a massive settlement from the $8.5 million lawsuit he filed against the college. This was a guy who was arrested, charged, and was being PROSECUTED for RAPE, and the college is still going to lose millions because they terminated him.

Universities are in a pretty screwed up position with these cases. If they fire, they get sued. If they don't fire, they get sued. Because of that, they tend to be reluctant to act at all without some sort of "smoking gun" that definitively proves their offense.