4 ms·

Not taking any sides here, but here's an article I read a few months ago before knowing anything about this situation. Certainly offers another perspective: ht

• sebmellen 4y ago
  Reading this article, I can’t help but be despondent about academia. At some point, every scientist has some wild/mad streak. What happens when every slight deviation is punished? Does this kill innovation? > That trainee called the report’s depiction of the lab an “alternate reality,” and the characterization of Sabatini as lascivious and retaliatory “deeply insane.” > “They have the wrong guy,” a female scientist who knows Sabatini and Knouse told me. A female former trainee told me that the climate in Sabatini’s lab was “one of excellence.” She said that Sabatini could be demanding, but he was never demeaning or unfair. “I try to emulate him in my own lab,” another female former trainee said. A third female trainee said the lab could be informal, but it was hardly a locker room. “It just wasn’t in the air.“ And then young academics themselves throw out baseless claims found somewhere on the internet (?) that don’t correlate to reality at all: > They hadn’t read the lawyers’ report, but they had read the internet, and they didn’t like what they’d read. NYU was about to hire a “serial sexual harasser,” as one of the demonstrators put it, trading grant dollars for their trainees’ “safety.” So where should a superstar researcher do his research? Where does the guy who’s going to help cure cancer go? “Uhhh, Prison?” Madeleine Sutherland, a postdoc, told me.