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The Sexual Misconduct Case That Has Rocked Anthropology (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit writes: An investigative report in Science describes allegations of sexual misconduct against noted paleoanthropologist Brian Richmond, as well as the field's response. The story highlights a major shift in how academic communities deal with sexual misconduct, going beyond delineating rules on paper to striving to change the culture of the field at the institutional level. This shift – "a long time coming," according to many researchers – was spurred in part by recent high-profile cases in astronomy and biology. Now, as Balter notes, "paleoanthropology is responding to its own complex case." The first public allegation against Richmond, the curator of human origins at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, inspired a cascade of other allegations about him. This in turn motivated several senior paleoanthropologists, including one of Richmond's key mentors, Bernard Wood, to explore the allegations with peers. "As I talked to more and more current and former students at [George Washington University]," Wood said, "I became more concerned and alarmed about what I heard." In light of their findings, Wood and others in the field of anthropology are now tackling sexual misconduct head-on. The article details additional institutional efforts to stop sexual misconduct in science while trying to balance the rights of victims and accused, and provides the latest update on investigations into Richmond.
Anthropology covers human behavior; maybe some relevance in mis/applying domain knowledge?
Seems like alcohol played a role in these accounts,... You wanna run him out of the field for thes???
I'm sure I'm far in the minority, here, but having actually read the article, I found the heavy drinking to be more troubling than the sexual messing around.
My own PhD experience (biomedical research) was that everyone understood that there was too much at stake professionally to risk getting drunk with one's PhD supervisor. Even leaving aside risks of sexual misunderstandings, the risk of getting drunk and saying or doing something offensive or insulting to one's supervisor was an unthinkable risk. Even under the best of circumstances, it's very very difficult to land a long term position doing biomedical scientific research. And the good will of one's PhD supervisor is critical. Why risk throwing that all away with a single night of drunken stupidity?
If there was pressure on the subordinates to get drunk in order to maintain their relationship with their supervisors then that's a huge issue. Even if there wasn't pressure, it still shows poor judgment on the part of the supervisors to get drunk with their subordinates.
Having said that, if going out together for a night of heavy drinking was completely voluntary then the subordinates who did get very drunk should understand that some bad choices are inevitably going to get made - leading to awkwardness between subordinates and supervisors and all the various spouses and significant others.
The way the tenure system works you really, really don't want to make an enemy out of the powerful people above you. From what I can see it's much worse than getting hit on by your boss at a job - you can always quit an office job and get another. But in academia if you just up and leave a tenure track position or don't get tenure because you've alienated someone important, your career is pretty much over.