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Astronomy Community Mounts Stronger Response In Sexual Harassment Case Than UC Berkeley

This article is more than 8 years old.

Institutional responses to allegations of sexual harassment are often unsatisfying for harassment victims. A recent case suggests that scientific communities may do a better job than universities at recognizing the victims' interests as intertwined with the community’s.

Today BuzzFeed reports on the UC Berkeley investigation that found astronomer Geoff Marcy had violated the university’s sexual harassment policies. Four women made formal allegations to the university that Marcy engaged in unwanted physical contact (including groping, kissing, and massages) with students.

The sanction imposed for Marcy’s violations of the sexual harassment policies? He was “given ‘clear expectations concerning his future interactions with students,’ which he must follow or risk ‘sanctions that could include suspension or dismissal.’”

To the extent that the scientific community is just a particular piece of the larger world, there’s no special reason to expect that it wouldn’t contain sexual harassment and sexual harassers just as that larger world does. In the same way, Marcy’s alleged behavior is not markedly different from the kinds of harassing behavior people have experienced in other universities, other scientific fields, other professional environments. What is different here is that the results of the investigation are being discussed publicly, rather than being kept private — and that the larger community of astronomers shows signs of taking Marcy’s conduct rather seriously.

What big picture lessons can scientific communities (among others) learn from this case?

1. Institutional responses to complaints are aimed at protecting the institution's (perceived) interests, not the interests of the complainants.

You might think a university would recognize itself as something like a community, and that it would prioritize protecting vulnerable individuals within the community (like students) from harm. Maybe a university’s institutional policies are even intended to protect students, but in their operation they seem not to work that way. In this case, a professor found to have violated a university policy is essentially told not to do it again — because if he does, maybe the university will suspend or fire him.

This doesn’t seem to do a lot to protect current and future students from the same kind of harm from the same professor.

One might argue that, knowing that his past behavior had crossed a line, Marcy would be unlikely to cross that line again, so the risk to current and future students would be negligible. Based on BuzzFeed’s reporting, this strikes me as a bad assumption:

[I]n her capacity as student representative to the Berkeley astronomy faculty, she says, she [Ruth Murray-Clay, a former UC Berkeley graduate student] spoke with him [Geoff Marcy] several times in December 2004, directly confronting him with complaints from undergrads and graduate students.

After speaking to her in person, he wrote her an email. “Thanks for all those thoughts and hopes,” he wrote. “I feel lucky that you’re helping me see myself better from the outside, and from the inside too.”

But over the next year, Murray-Clay says, more women came forward with complaints.

Firing a tenured professor, even for cause (which violation of a sexual harassment policy may be), is not a simple matter. It usually involves lawyers. If the professor is a star, it likely also involves negative publicity. You can understand how an institution might start with a stern warning and hope for the best. If those hopes don’t pan out, eventually the institution can take stronger steps — but on the way, more members of the university community are harmed.

There is probably a tipping-point where ignoring students’ interests will hurt the interests of the institution (e.g., by hurting its reputation as a good place to be a student, or its financial situation in the event of a lawsuit). Unfortunately, it’s not obvious how to get institutions to prioritize the well-being of students because it’s the right thing to do, rather than because there is some obvious harm to the institution looming from not taking students’ well-being seriously. Moreover, because slots as a student in a prestigious university or department are scarce resources, students themselves might gamble on their own well-being were they in possession of the information that one of their professors had a history of making unwanted advances.

Usually prospective students don’t have this information.

2. The flow of information about harassers is throttled by features of the social arrangements — and power disparities — in the environment.

It isn’t unusual for someone’s sexually harassing behavior to be an “open secret” in a community. Reportedly, a number of Marcy’s unwanted physical interactions with students happened in places others could see them (in his own lab, at an evening event at an annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society) or were present (at a post-colloquium dinner). Others see the behavior happening but do not directly intervene to stop it, sometimes because they are told that they have no standing to file a complaint on someone else’s behalf, sometimes because they have much less power than the person behaving inappropriately (e.g., because they are his students and depend on him, to a frightening degree, for their success in their graduate program and their future prospects in the discipline).

The stakes for the target of the behavior of reporting can be extremely high if their harasser has a strong professional and social network through which he can influence whether she gets access to data or facilities required for her research, whether she gets to present her work at professional meetings, whether she gets connected with collaborators, how she is viewed by other senior people in the field making judgments about the distribution of grant money or jobs.

Neither is it unusual for other senior people in a discipline, hearing a student allege that she was harassed by their peer, to side with their peer. After all, they have had years of productive professional engagement with him, have enjoyed his company at professional meetings, recognize his contributions to the knowledge-building enterprise in their field, and view him as a good guy. Students, on the other hand, are too new to understand how things work in the discipline, too prone to misunderstand what they see, and transients in their universities rather than permanent members of the community.

It’s hard to accept that someone you know as a good guy might have done something bad. Indeed, sometimes the outward signs that someone is a good guy are what leave targets especially vulnerable. Incidents related by one of the complainants against Marcy in the BuzzFeed article provide a stark illustration of this:

She was an undergraduate in Berkeley’s astronomy department when her roommate organized a rally against sexual assault and sexual violence, according to investigation documents. Marcy went to the rally, and Ballard, who was a student in his class, later emailed him to thank him for attending. Marcy responded saying Ballard should call him at his home, but she declined.

At a coffee shop during her junior year, Marcy told Ballard about having sex outdoors with a woman he once dated, the documents say. In another instance, during the summer of 2005, Marcy gave Ballard a ride home from a cafe. Parked outside her home, she opened the car door and stuck her legs out to leave. Then he began to rub the back of her neck. “I felt fearful and uncomfortable,” she told BuzzFeed News.

Marcy, through his lawyer, declined to comment to BuzzFeed News on Ballard’s accusations, and Marcy’s response in the report is redacted.

Ballard says she carried the confusion and shame of the event with her for years, until she heard about other women’s experiences and “realized it was a pattern — it wasn’t just me.”

Speaking up about the bad behavior of a powerful person in your discipline is risky. It opens you to reprisals from that person (or his professional allies) that can be hard to prove, especially in an ultra-competitive scientific milieu. It marks you as a troublemaker rather than someone who can get along in the social interactions that are part of knowledge-building. And it doesn’t even reliably lead to an end of the bad behavior you’re speaking up about.

Nonetheless, people who know try to take steps to share information about bad actors to protect others from experiencing the same harm. One of the complainants in the Marcy investigation describes such efforts to BuzzFeed:

“He’s had a long history of behaving inappropriately, especially with undergraduates,” said [Jessica] Kirkpatrick, who at the time was a graduate student at Berkeley studying astrophysics. “Women discouraged other women from working with him as a research advisor. It was just something that was talked about pretty frankly among the women in the department.”

Kirkpatrick, who has since left academia, continues to run the Women in Astronomy blog, through which she says three other women have approached her with accounts of their experiences with Marcy.

Harvard astronomy professor John Asher Johnson, who was a graduate student of Marcy’s, describes something similar:

Geoff's inappropriate actions toward and around women in astronomy is one of the biggest "open secrets" at any exoplanets or AAS meeting. "Underground" networks of women pass information about Geoff to junior scientists in an attempt to keep them safe. Sometimes it works. Other times it hasn't, and cognizant members of the community receive additional emails, phone calls and Facebook messages from new victims.

Gaps in the flow of information about the bad behavior give the bad actor cover to continue. New targets of that bad behavior are subject to the same power gradients than make speaking up about the bad behavior dangerous. Those who might hear trickles of information weigh it against their prior commitment that their colleague is a good scientist, a good collaborator, a good person. The cycle continues.

3. Those who speak up about bad behavior often do so at the cost of their continued participation in the community.

According to BuzzFeed, Complainant 3 registered her complaint against Marcy eight years after the incident she alleged, “by which time she’d left astronomy — in part, she said, because of the sexual harassment she and other female astronomers experienced.”

Complainant 4, Jessica Kirkpatrick, has left academia.

Ruth Murray-Clay, the former student rep to the UC Berkeley astronomy faculty, who confronted both Marcy and department chair Don Backer about Marcy’s behavior, is still in academia, but as a theorist, her career success does not depend on access to Marcy’s data.

John Asher Johnson, Marcy’s former graduate student, waited until he was safely tenured before speaking publicly about the behavior he witnessed from Marcy. Johnson writes, “Yes, I have greatly benefited from Geoff's letters over the years. But his publication record shows that he has benefitted from my scientific productivity. In 2013 I figured we were square, and I effectively ended our 13-year collaboration.”

It is noteworthy that those who speak out about a bad actor in a scientific community often feel like they cannot stay in that community. Given the typical experience of other whistleblowers, they’re probably not wrong. Even those who are committed to staying within the community may be labeled anti-social by colleagues unhappy that they have upset seemingly peaceful social and professional relations.

The irony here is that strong negative reactions to the people identifying bad behavior make it that much harder for the community to deal with bad behavior and make conditions better for its members and their shared scientific projects. But the Geoff Marcy case offers a glimmer of hope.

4. Professional communities can recognize their own shared interests and choose to deal with bad actors to protect those interests.

A scientific community is distinct from institutions like universities, even if university departments are sites where pockets of that scientific community exist. Because they have a different set of goals, challenges, and constraints, scientific communities may get a clearer view of how their interests are intertwined with those of their members. In particular, where a university may view its permanent faculty as fuller members of the organization than students who are just passing through, a scientific community can recognize that current students represent the future practitioners of the discipline.

This means that a scientific community may decide that regardless of what official sanctions a bad actor’s university chooses to impose (or not), the community is within its rights to consider taking other steps against the bad actor for the good of the community. As BuzzFeed reports:

David Charbonneau, a professor of astronomy at Harvard University, said the matter has broad implications.

“Geoff Marcy is undeniably the most prominent exoplanet researcher in the U.S.,” he said, referring to the study of planets beyond our solar system. “The stakes here couldn’t be higher. We are working so hard to have gender parity in this field, and when the most prominent person is a routine harasser, it threatens a major objective nationally.”

With the biggest exoplanet conference of the year coming up at the end of next month, Charbonneau told BuzzFeed News, he called Marcy on Wednesday. Charbonneau says he told Marcy that, given the concerns that some attendees would have following the investigation, Marcy shouldn’t go. Charbonneau said Marcy agreed not to attend and also stepped down from the meeting’s scientific organizing committee.

Why should the community of astronomy go beyond UC Berkeley’s sanction of laying out clear expectations that Marcy will not violate their sexual harassment policy again? First, because leaving harassment unaddressed (and a harasser in a position of power) would undercut a clear goal within the discipline, achieving gender parity. If it’s in the interests of the community to achieve gender parity, it is in the interests of the community to bench harassers so that women can access full participation in professional meetings. More broadly, because prioritizing the protection of famous senior members of the community amounts to sacrificing the community’s scientific young — and doing so after the investment of significant resources in their training. This is not simply an unjust course of action but one that threatens the future of the scientific discipline.

It looks like embers of the community of astronomers recognize the stakes here. They seem ready to assert that the interests of the harassed, not of the harasser, are the ones their scientific community must protect. If this commitment is durable, it may just disrupt the cycle of harassment.