Michael Balter wrote a piece about sexual harassment accusations against paleoanthropologist Brian Richmond, the curator of human origins at the American Museum of Natural History that was published in Science magazine.
This story has been part of what I hope is a critical mass of stories publicizing sexual harassment in academia. Critical, that is, to stimulating real improvement in workplaces and a decrease in tolerance for sexual harassing behavior on the part of established scientists toward their underlings.
There have been a very disturbing series of tweets from Balter today.
Holy….surely it isn’t connected to….
Oh Christ, of course it is….
but they published it so…?
Well THAT should have a nicely suppressing effect on journalists who may think about writing up any future cases of sexual harassment in academia.
UPDATE: Blog entry from Balter.
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ETA: I am particularly exercised about this after completing, just this week, a survey from AAAS about what the membership expects from them. The survey did not seem to have a check box item for “Fight against scientific and workplace misconduct”.
How you know NIH officialdom is not being honest with you
March 10, 2016
Commenter shrew suggested I repost this on the basis of
it is the time of year where people are gearing up to accept, or have already accepted, their shiny new TT offers.
This post originally appeared 19 Jan 2011
Hoo boy. Dr. Becca has a live one over at Fumbling Towards Tenure Track.
I am got the dream got at a Tier 1 institution. It is what I expected but in reality it sucks. want to find a way out. Be careful what you wish for.
Ouch. Well, upon further probing this DisgruntleProf lets us in on the problem. And it smells to me like we can chalk this one up to RealityCheck.
I think its a combination of worrying about grants, science not going as fast as I want it to, dealing with annoying staff at my institution, not much help from other faculty versus what I had been told there would be, grad students not working as hard as I think they should (don’t people work weekend anymore?)
Yeah. Stuff gets real in a big hurry once you start your own independent laboratory doesn’t it? I’m half surprised this person didn’t mention the magically disappearing space or major equipment that appeared to have been promised in the recruiting phase!
I’ll indulge myself about the trainee issue and repeat my constant refrain- If you won a tenure track job, chances are very good that you were a much better than average postdoc and graduate student. Consequently, the trainees that work for you are overwhelmingly likely to suck worse than you did. Get over it and learn how to make do.
I had so much love and energy for the Science when I was a grad student and post-doc. Being the PI is just a very different business, with business being the important word.
Yup, you have a job now homes. The thing about jobs is that they aren’t always unadulterated joy. Our business is a pretty good one, because we have lots of opportunity for it being Teh Awesomez. But never forget, in your vocational fantasies, that this is still a job and a professional one at that.
Look, no offense but I’m smelling a certain type of career arc here. Excuse me if I’m over assuming but this seems like a type of person that had it unusually good in training. S/he mentions being in a “top tiered graduate school”. Probably the research all went pretty well in a stable and well funded lab. Setbacks were probably minor. The PI shielded the trainees from the mundane stuff and s/he never manged to clue in to what was going on behind the scenes. Publications came. More of the same for postdoc, no doubt. Because after all, if this person is recently appointed at a top institution, odds are good that the CV looks very good indeed.
I’ve said it before. Having it too good in training is crappy preparation for being a PI. It is even worse selection for being a PI. IMO. I’d rather hire someone who had to struggle and overcome some adverse consequences than someone who had a cushy ride to three first author GlamourPubs. Any day of the week.
Having an easy time of it during training sets up unrealistic expectations. Which, IMO, leads to a big old let down when the going gets tough as a newly minted Assistant Professor. And potentially a lack of mental fortitude to buckle down and overcome, as opposed to whining.
I used to love coming into lab everyday. I was the person you hated in your department who always had some really cool idea or experiment to talk about. Not sure how to get that back.
I do feel a little sorry for this commenter. Who would not? It is a bit sad, really. But I have confidence that things will look up. S/he will get through the local paperwork, get some usable data out of a graduate student and land some grant support…eventually. And things will look one heck of a lot better after these successes start to roll in. The trick is to SaqueUppeTM and make successes happen.
How do you get your joy for science back? My opinion is that you have to be gratified, at some fundamental level, by the proceeds of having your own lab. That means that the amount of data crossing your desk, data that you can in no way generate with your own hands by yourself, balances out all of the headaches. If seeing the results of science that you directed, influenced and supported is not enough then there is no point in wanting to head a lab in a professorial level appointment.
It’s the pig-dog field scientists that are the problem
March 10, 2016
But clearly the laboratory based male scientists would never harass their female subordinates.
Field science is bad.
Lab science is good.
This is what the head of the Office of Extramural Research at the NIH seems to think.
Reminder
March 10, 2016
You only get high up in gov bureacracy by being an unusually good liar.
Given this, words are of essentially zero value.
Actions are what confirm intent.
DrugMonkey 