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Politically Correct Zoology
flynny51 writes "Dr. Dylan Evans of the School of Medicine, University College, Cork, Ireland, has had a two-year period of intensive monitoring and counseling imposed upon him and as a result his application for tenure is likely to be denied. His offense — sharing an article from a peer-reviewed journal on fellatio in fruit bats."
Seriously, grow up. As the paper in question demonstrates, the animal kingdom clearly has at least as many kinks as us humans do. It's not "sinful." Far from it -- if you believe in a deity, it seems obvious that this deity heartily approves of sex in all kinds of variety.
Or, if you can't deal with that, fine, believe whatever you want -- but stop retarding scientific and social progress with your puritanical ideals.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Silly. If a person lies in such amounts about something like this, the "case" should just be dropped. If he has evidence, he should sue her for slander, or whatever the equivalent legal process is in Ireland.
Emotions! In your brain!
For which she provided no proof, and which were only mentioned in passing at the end of the complaint letter as an attempt to bolster her case. It also notes that the external examiners decided that the email exchanges between them that followed cast doubt on these allegation and did not uphold them.
In fact the only part of the complaint that was upheld was that he showed her a published peer-reviewed article in part of a debate on biology.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
As you'd imagine he's not crazy about his career being fucked up by "sexually harassed co-worker" on his record with no warning or recourse.
simply saying that everyone was within their rights is true but at the same time it would also be true if she'd complained about an overly friendly handshake- she'd have every right to avail herself of a standard procedure to file a complaint and the president of the university would have every right to determine any course of action.
1:He wasn't screwing the person.
2:This wasn't an undergraduate or student of any kind.
This was another academic at the university.
And the medical faculty at that.
If a professor in the School of Medicine can't walk into another academics office and show them a peer reviewed paper about fruitbats that pretty much rules out showing them more shocking papers about anal warts and STD's.
He also showed it to a few other people on the way over and the other person in the office at the time.
You can shit on academic freedom all you want but if doctors can't talk about peer reviewed scientific papers which might embarrass the fragile sensibilities of someone where they work then they're not going to be able to do their job for fear of being accused of destroying the mind of the office wallflower.
Sometimes I can go days without having to realize just how much I despise religion. And then something like this happens.
How exactly does religion enter into a potential sexual harassment lawsuit?
What should be extremely interesting, is instead a hair trigger for idiots.
Yes, that would be interesting. Very, very interesting. It's like they all own a "Jump to Conclusions" mat.
I guess the lesson is, if you really want to harass someone and get away with it, use the HR department as a proxy.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
In any setting there are expectations of a professional level of behaviour, and he chose not to abide by them.
This guy is a Lecturer in Behavioural Science at a "supposed" School of Medicine!! What do you think his ***profession*** requires of him? What do you think he's paid to do? Is he required to discuss morally safe topics? Is he required to only talk about the Little House on the Prairie and other PG-Safe topics? What would be the point?
The transmission of diseases rarely limits itself to PG-13 safe topics. Vectors of disease transmissions are rarely that palatable, or clean. A behavioral scientist in a school of medicine is, of course, going to study and lecture about abnormal behaviors. Whatever it is: Eating feces, promiscuity, infections, fellatios, incest, etc. I wouldn't expect anything else from the talks of a behavioral scientist in a "supposed" School of Medicine.
No one in academia can claim not to understand where the line is drawn when interacting with other colleagues.
This word "academia", as accurate as it may be in this case, loses the most salient underlying context. This is not an Art School, or even an English Lit School, the Science of Medicine is an infinitely more practical, pragmatic, and less clean professional environment, than what you would normally find in other Ivory Towers. And for good reasons. When someone gets squimish in Art History, nothing bad happens, but when someone gets squimish in Medicine, people die.
"It was just a joke" has long since ceased to be an adequate excuse for offensive behaviour.
And yes, the accused is taking issue with the "bad joke" interpretation. He's even taking to task one of the investigators for some of the things he said during the investigation. One would think that a panel of faculty members would be a little more willing to find out the facts, and interview witnesses (which they haven't done yet), instead of just editorializing their personal opinions and rendering subjective interpretations.