The (Mis)Adventures of a #MeToo Reporter -- Part One: The reporter, falsely accused, resigns from his professional organization

 

A leading #MeToo advocate calls a leading #MeToo reporter (me) a "garbage person"


This month, April 2021, I should be celebrating 35 years of membership in the National Association of Science Writers, an organization of more than 2000 professional journalists, writers, public information officers, and other science communicators. Since I joined in April 1986, I have made many lasting friends in the organization. I have served as a mentor to up and coming science writers; edited the "Our Gang" column for the organization's magazine, ScienceWriters; attended a number of annual meetings; and participated as an active discussant in the organization's many internal debates over policies and principles.

This afternoon, however, I sadly submitted my resignation from NASW to the association's executive director and president, Tinsley Davis and Jill Adams, respectively. The reason: I have been charged with violations of the organization's bylaws and codes of misconduct, allegations which I fully deny. Normally, I would have dealt with these allegations through the procedures laid out in the organization's bylaws, which were controversially modified in fall 2019, although I strongly supported those changes in the belief that they would make it easier for victims of harassment to get justice through the association.

Instead, in my case at least, there have been repeated violations of due process, which I and other NASW members have pointed out in communications with the organization's leaders and in online discussion groups. Most seriously, while someone with access to the relevant documents made the allegations against me public--they are still easily searchable online--I have been threatened with serious sanctions from the organization if I make any mention of these allegations or try to defend myself publicly against them. These conditions are so prejudicial that I cannot accept them, nor should anyone in a similar situation.

To be specific, the charges I must answer, by April 5, involve a long-running and very public dispute between me and anthropologist Kate Clancy of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. When I say very public, I should clarify that for most of the 3 1/2 years this disagreement--which I contend is over strategy and tactics in the #MeToo movement, although Clancy sees it very differently--has been very one-sided. It has consisted of constant, public attacks on my #MeToo reporting by Clancy and her allies, which only intensified as that reporting led to the termination or forced resignation of many well-known figures in archaeology and anthropology.

For much of this time, I said very little publicly about the attacks. Only more recently, when Clancy stepped up her attacks on me and my reporting last fall, have I begun to say more about it on social media.

In the current complaint against me, I am accused of bullying and harassing Clancy, and making disparaging remarks that rose to public humiliation. These allegations are false.

As many readers know, I am currently fighting an $18 million defamation suit from Danielle Kurin, an archaeologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara whose violation of Title IX for retaliation against students and other documented misconduct I have reported on extensively over more than a year now. 

Last December, Kurin's legal team revealed to us that Clancy had been "cooperating" with them in the case against me, although she had now stopped due to my purported "harassment" of her. In her own recent sworn declaration on the matter, in response to a subpoena we issued her, and which Clancy put online, she admitted that she had been talking with the Kurin camp but she had not made a final decision on whether to testify in the case on behalf of Kurin.

Naturally, Clancy's communications with the Kurin camp were an appropriate subject for me to write about on social media, but my comments are now, also, part of the complaint against me.

In the next installment of a long-planned series of posts about my experiences as a #MeToo reporter, I will link to the allegations and provide them in full, along with my defenses and responses to them. And, as should be clear by now, this is why I must resign from the NASW. Its leaders have given me the Hobson's choice in which I can defend myself only if I do it privately, against accusations that are now fully public.


The NASW and due process

 In 2019, in anticipation of the NASW's annual meeting that fall, the NASW board proposed changes in the organization's bylaws that would spell out how to deal with harassment and other forms of misconduct by members, especially at meetings. A number of other professional organizations had adopted anti-harassment rules, and a lot of members felt--rightly, in my view--that it was time for NASW to have set procedures to deal with such issues. Early in the discussion, a number of members raised concerns and objections about some of the provisions being proposed. One concern was about the secrecy of the proposed procedures, in which a committee appointed by the board would investigate a complaint first, without notifying the accused member that it had been filed; only if the committee and the board found that there were charges to answer would the accused be notified of the allegations and invited to respond to them.

Another concern was that the review committee not only brought the charges, the indictment if you will, but that this same body then judged whether the accused's defenses to them were valid or not. The objectors argued that the same body was acting as prosecutor, judge, and jury.

I listened to these objections carefully, and did not feel at the time that they could be lightly dismissed. At the same time, as a very active #MeToo reporter and advocate, I knew that abusers used due process arguments often to try to avoid responsibility for their actions. And we had all seen the way that former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVoss tried to change the Title IX regulations in a way that would make it much more difficult for victims and survivors of abuse to press their cases.

Also, I knew that one of the NASW members objecting to the bylaw modifications had been himself accused of harassment, in a process that took place behind the scenes and remains largely secret today (I do not pretend to know whether the allegations were valid or not and make no judgement about that here.) Also, I strongly believed, and still do, that victims of abuse need to be given a safe procedural space in which to bring their allegations to the attention of their organizations and institutions without fearing immediate retaliation from their abusers.

So, in the end, I not only voted for the bylaw changes but publicly supported them on our discussion lists. It is ironic, and very bad for NASW's credibility in dealing with these issues, that in my own case the due process provisions of our bylaws have already been stretched so far as to result in a miscarriage of justice.


The allegations against me

As I wrote above, in the next installment I will deal with the Clancy allegations in detail. Here I just want to outline how all of this came about. On September 30 of last year, a group of NASW members filed a complaint against me under the provisions of the bylaws. The immediate impetus for the filing of the complaint was an episode involving a individual who was then a student at the University of Chicago, whom I was forced to reveal had lied blatantly and repeatedly about her interactions with me early in 2020. As with the other individuals involved in the complaint, I will provide a detailed account of what happened in the coming posts.

Sometime after the complaint was filed with NASW, I believe soon after, it was leaked. I wrote about the sequence of events in this blog post on January 19, which also describes how the original complaint--which was supposed to remain confidential--became public, and the relationship between the individuals involved in the complaint and the Danielle Kurin lawsuit. I have already described Clancy's role in this; in addition, nearly all of the people named in the complaint were listed by Kurin's team as potential witnesses in the lawsuit. One of them, Akshay Sarathi, now a visiting professor at Indiana University, provided Kurin with a sworn declaration full of falsehoods about me and my reporting, and is now being represented by Kurin's legal team. Sarathi's declaration was put online and made public the day after he signed it.

As I said above, repeated protests by me and other NASW members that under these circumstances due process was impossible, and that the NASW complaint was inextricably bound up with Danielle Kurin's lawsuit against me, went either unheard or ignored. Adding to the prejudicial nature of the process, the board took five full months to investigate the charges, refusing to provide me with any updates even though the accusations were fully public and easily searchable. Meanwhile, Kurin's legal team used the NASW complaint in its opening statement in a letter to the federal judge overseeing the lawsuit. That letter opposed our request to file an early motion for summary judgement in the case and to raise protections afforded by defendants like me under New York's recently modified anti-SLAPP statute.

In other words, the NASW complaint, long before it was fully evaluated and investigated by the review committee and the board, was already being used against me in the most prejudicial manner. To make matters worse, despite taking five months to investigate and bring charges, the board--as I will detail in the next post--failed to either see or consider the entire context for the dispute between me and Kate Clancy, something it easily could have figured out if the investigation had been serious and thorough. Indeed, it should have been a red flag for the board that all of the allegations involved a group of anthropologists; and I believe that everyone on the board was aware that my reporting of abuses in this discipline had been controversial and that some did not take kindly to it. It certainly would not have been the first time that happened to a reporter, as a group of science writers and journalists would surely know. And certainly, the NASW board should have been especially sensitive to the fact that some of the individuals involved in the complaint, most notably Clancy herself, were in communication with the Kurin camp.


Why did Kate Clancy call me a "garbage person"?

There will be much more to say in future posts, which I hope will be spaced out by no more than a week for each. But before closing, I want to explain the screenshot that opens this article--especially as I am accused by NASW of making personal attacks against Kate Clancy.

In this Tweet from April 2019, which was public, Clancy is making a comment about me to BethAnn McLaughlin, a former #MeToo advocate whose well-known Twitter name was @McLNeuro (the fact that I am Jewish makes it sting just a little more, but a dehumanizing statement of this sort is surely not acceptable no matter whom the target.)

I think many readers here will know about BethAnn McLaughlin's own history, but for those who don't: McLaughlin was a neuroscientist at the University of Vanderbilt who became a very public face of the #MeToo and #MeTooSTEM movements. But even at the time of Clancy's Tweet, McLaughlin was falling out of favor with many #MeToo activists for her bullying style, and there were also charges of racism against her. By May 2019, these allegations had already come out into the open, when Peter Aldhous of BuzzFeed did a major story about them and the resignations from the MeTooSTEM organization McLaughlin's conduct had triggered.

As the criticisms of McLaughlin mounted, and more activists distanced themselves from her, McLaughlin fought back, even forcing the cancellation of a workshop for journalists about #MeToo reporting--organized by the New York affiliate of NASW--because it used the public #MeTooSTEM hashtag. (In public Tweets, McLaughlin explained that she was trying to stop my own #MeToo reporting, as I was one of the panelists for the event. In fact, McLaughlin had attacked me personally a number of times, and so did a sock puppet account that she had created, pretending to be a woman of color, and exposure of which led to her downfall last year.)

So what prompted Kate Clancy to call me a "garbage person" to McLaughlin (@McLNeuro)? Although McLaughlin's Twitter account is now suspended for misrepresenting herself, and so is not accessible, she and her sock puppet both accused me of "grandstanding" during an episode that is actually one in which I take a tremendous amount of pride.

In April 2019, during the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, a confirmed sexual predator showed up in the presence of three of his victims. The predator, David Yesner, had been found responsible for numerous counts of sexual harassment and abuse by his home institution, the University of Alaska, denied emeritus status, banned from any campus of his former university, and ordered not to be present at any event that involved University of Alaska students. I became aware of the case through sources at the university, although the actual news was broken by Anchorage's KTVA (for reasons that are  not clear, that original story seems to be missing.)

Two of the victims contacted me upon spotting Yesner at the meeting, and asked me to help them. I was still in my hotel room, but made my way over quickly in an Uber, and went to the conference office to report his presence. An SAA official listened to what I had to say, but did not appear to take it seriously and actually acted like I was a bit crazy. I then made contact with the two victims, who helped me find Yesner, whom I eventually located in the exhibition hall. Without using physical threats, but rather the force of embarrassment, I escorted Yesner out. The next morning, I was kicked out of the meeting by SAA officials, which triggered many months of protests and recriminations against the organization for not protecting victims and privileging their abuser. (For two very accurate reports on what happened, see contemporaneous articles by Science and The Scientist.)

(I do not know who started the rumors that I used physical force to kick Yesner out, that I had fought with security guards, or that I myself had been physically removed from the meeting, but they are all false.)

At the time, neither Clancy nor McLaughlin had any real knowledge of what had happened at the meeting. And far from "grandstanding," I did what I thought was best at the time to protect the survivors, who were not able to attend their desired sessions at the meeting because Yesner was there--and in the face of complete inaction from SAA officials. I did what I hope anyone else would do. Since these events, the survivors have found their own voices; but the two I mentioned did speak up publicly in the face of the criticisms from Clancy and McLaughlin, and I will always be grateful to them for doing that.

As I will emphasize in future posts, this is not really about me, although Clancy and some others have tried to make it about me over several years now. It's about the survivors, and what is best for them, and how colleagues can be real allies and support them--even if they go to reporters as a last resort to get their stories told.

I will have much more to say about all of this in the coming weeks. There have been just too many lies over too many years, and it's time for them to be fully addressed.


Update April 4: As I explained above, the main reason I was forced to resign from NASW is that I was prohibited by the board and officers from making a public defense to allegations that had already been made public earlier. Here are the exact prohibitions from the top of the complaint that I was required to respond to by April 5. In the next blog post, in which I will respond to the allegations in detail, I will reproduce all of them for readers to see. Presumably this is the admonition that anyone else subject to this process will have to stick to, even if the allegations against them are also leaked publicly. One of the ironies of this process is that NASW leadership showed little to no concern that the original complaint was leaked; little curiosity about who did it nor interest in finding out; and no discernible interest at all that it was being weaponized by Kurin's team in the $18 million defamation suit against me (something that could happen to any member of NASW if they delved into controversial reporting.)

Moreover, the severe sanctions threatened below are not supported anywhere in the NASW bylaws, which simply say that complaints should be kept confidential to the extent possible.

This is not just bad for me and my position in the lawsuit, but bad for all journalists, and all NASW members, if their organization is not doing its best to protect colleagues from frivolous lawsuits and in fact makes it easier for litigants to exploit the organization’s internal processes. NASW did resist a subpoena from Kurin for its records concerning me, and that was a good precedent, but what it gave with one hand it took away with the other. I hope as time goes on more people will come to understand that.







Post a Comment

27 Comments

Anonymous said…
This is an extremely disappointing outcome. I still can’t get over the pettiness of it all. You went after Kurin by amplifying the voices of her victims (and faculty members) who want to stop her abuses. In return, she went after you by amplifying the voices of your antagonists who want to stop your reporting. Her sense of vengeance and entitlement knows no bounds.
Anonymous said…
OK, things are starting to make sense now. At first I was surprised when I didn’t see your name mentioned even once in Barb Voss’ two recent publications on harassment in archaeology, even though she cites over 10 blogs between the two articles. The success of your blog in exposing and forcing accountability for the misconduct of some of our colleagues would have made a prime example for her discussion on #MeToo activists, and her conclusions and “evidence-based” solutions/policies suffer for it. But then… I saw who she acknowledges! Ironically, this goes to the heart of what Voss herself identifies as the “obstacles to change in the disciplinary culture of archaeology: normalization, exclusionary practices, fraternization, gatekeeping, and obstacles to reporting.” Very unprofessional and, sadly, only perpetuating anti-survivor culture.
Michael Balter said…
Re the last comment:

Yes, the two Barb Voss papers are symptomatic of the problem I have been trying to deal with. I have already commented on them briefly on two different anthropology Facebook groups, and I am actually planning an entire blog post about them. In addition to ignoring some of the major cases where abusers have been terminated or forced to resign (clearly because I was directly involved in them) the second paper’s description of the Yesner episode in ABQ is filled with errors of commission and omission, as anyone involved in those incidents knows.

Thanks.
Anonymous said…
If you're going to comment on your own posts, at least do a better job of making it sound different, this is embarrassing.
Michael Balter said…
To the last commenter: As I have sworn under oath in the Kurin v. Balter lawsuit, I have never, ever commented anonymously on my own posts on this blog or anywhere else.

That makes you an asshole, doesn’t it?
Anonymous said…
“Indeed, it should have been a red flag for the board that all of the allegations involved a group of anthropologists”

It cracks me up when anthropologists, especially in the US, bitch about journalists gaining from other peoples’ stories. Here’s a profession that was built on, and then perfected the practice of gaining prestige, positions, and, yes, high salaries from telling other peoples’ stories. And I know, because I am one of them anthropologists.
Anonymous said…
To that commenter above who thinks that Balter wrote all those comments. I am not Balter, and yet this is the third time that you or someone like you are attributing my comments to him. I am not sure why you would think that no one else but you are reading and commenting on his blog. I personally know of at least six other close colleagues who regularly contribute with comments, and there are likely many others. Sure, the writing style may be similar, but I suspect that this is only because we read the same #MeToo literature, share the same vocabulary, and perhaps even the same level of education. It is also a common that people will adjust their writing style to suit the medium and readership (for example, I will not use the same prose I do here when I write to my dean or, alternatively, to my grandmother.)
I actually consider Michael Balter an accomplished and sophisticated science writer and journalist, so under normal circumstances should be flattered that someone would think that I write at his level. In this context, I am appalled. What you are basically doing with these comments is trying to silence those who support Balter’s *cause* (note where the emphasis is.) By trying to convince others that everything in this blog is Balter’s words and his only, you are also undermining and re-traumatising the survivors of sexual abuse who approached him to share their tragic story with the world. Since no honest person I know will ever want to do something terrible like that, one may even suspect that this is because you are one of those exposed abusers or you represent *their cause*.
However, if you are not, I invite you to contribute to this discussion in a constructive fashion and expressed your opinion on the topic, not on the author. Feel free to use whatever writing style you want.
Michael Balter said…
Thanks to the last Commenter.

I have now deleted/moderated two nasty comments along the same lines, both pretty vulgar in their personal attacks on me (which I normally do not allow.)

It is interesting, however, to see that people who hate me are still reading what I write. Is that because they know it has some influence and impact and want to be in the know? Or are they just obsessed with me? (Some people clearly are, for whatever reasons.)

When those who hate you still can’t ignore you, it’s a good sign.
Michael Balter said…
A lot of people comment anonymously on my blog, for reasons that are understandable. There is a very reasonable fear of retaliation if one is calling out more powerful people who have either engaged in abuses or enabled them.

Then there are some who are just cowardly, and use anonymity to say very nasty things. The person who just called me a “self-fellating cunt” in a comment I deleted doesn’t seem in need of anonymity, do they? They must have felt sure that I was not really going to publish their comment, but in fact I have now published the most relevant part of it.

So here’s a deal: Those who want to say something really nasty about me, use your real name and I will probably publish it.
Anonymous said…
There is a lot of projection going on among Balter’s detractors. Here’s a running list:
1. He makes money and gets fame from the pain of others.
2. He uses sockpuppets.
3. He centers himself.
4. He is obsessed with individual detractors.
5. He makes up conspiracy theories.
6. He lies and gaslights people.
7. He is a practitioner of DARVO.
8. He false accuses people of stuff.
9. He has an army of stans who mob people.
10. He does not care about survivors or doing right by them.
11. He is just like BethAnn.
12. He enables abusers and their enablers.
13. He harasses women and is a sexual predator.
14. He is a pervert.

Since these detractors are so well educated and have excellent investigative skills and great moral compasses, why haven’t they done more about the abusers in their wake. Why do they remain silent on them and refuse to help survivors in any meaningful way? Why didn’t they see through BethAnn? Who, by the way, admitted in August her whole Galli thing was false: https://mobile.twitter.com/GallivantLab/status/1354164524853563392. So MeTooStem was founded on a huge lie and it did a lot more damage than good for survivors. Most of the old crew is still active and still sowing discord and hate in very insidious ways. They are the ones literally profiting off of the pain of BIPOC and survivors with their prestigious publications, grants, and jobs. I’ve come to realize that most people do not value truth. Most people are extremely influenced by prestige and social hierarchy, even if they claim they don’t buy into it. People on their team can lie and cheat them and they would still blame scapegoats. It’s only when the prestigious people and publication venues start saying what we’ve been saying all along that they feel they have the permission to think differently. They will never admit they were wrong in the first place though.

Anyone can easily search people’s interactions on twitter by searching the relevant handles: @McLNeuro @Sciencing_Bi along with anyone else involved in this silly flame war that has high collateral damage for survivors.
Immediately after BethAnn was exposed, this group that supported her and was quite friendly with her and her circle shifted their attention to Balter, accusing him of being the same as BethAnn. Lashing out from embarrassment? The lengths people will go to to preserve their self-image and ego... None of us are immune to this tendency, and especially not Balter, but before you throw stones at Balter, take a good look at yourself!

And no, I am not Balter. How could I be if Balter never admits his failures?

Michael Balter said…
This last comment can’t be by me because I have never heard anyone call me a pervert. That’s a new one on me.
Michael Balter said…
The chief accusations by Kate Clancy and her followers are that I have hurt survivors by harassing them, pressuring them to talk to me, telling their stories without permission, or “outing” them. None of these accusations are true, but many people believe them—not because they have any direct evidence that they are true, but because they believe Clancy and others when they say they are.

Many of these stories turned up in the original complaint against me filed with NASW on Sept 30, 2020. That document is now public, not through my doing, but by someone who leaked it to the Kurin camp and made it available to many others privately (I have a pretty good idea who did it, and as soon as the evidence is solid I will give my conclusions about it.)

As I indicated in the blog post above, I will examine each of these claims in detail in future blog posts. That will necessitate making the names of the individuals public, because in each case the people involved have deliberately misrepresented the facts, even if some of them are true survivors (survivors are not perfect, either, just ask Tara Reade.)

These individuals include Holly Dunsworth of URI (the Balter-bashing origins story), Clancy, Hilary Leathem, “Student L” of Castillo fame, and Akshay Sarathi, formerly at UW-Madison and now at Indiana University. Each of these people have attacked me publicly on social media, Clancy and Sarathi have cooperated with Kurin, each are named in the first NASWcomplaint, and so they have waived any rights to anonymity long ago.
Anonymous said…
I reckon you don’t do what you do without gaining a few enemies along the way. This is not something I would choose to do myself, though I admire those who are willing to take the heat. Since all this started I lost faith in many individuals I previously thought were trustworthy and decent human beings. I have witnessed how they manipulated the minds of those around them, students too, and encouraged them to either ignore or attack you so to bury this public record of their crimes. Regrettably I still need to work alongside some of them, but Zoom has been advantageous in that sense. I dread the moment when we’re back to normalcy, as I don’t trust myself to keep my mouth shut. Even so it is better knowing who you are dealing with than to persist in that blissful ignorance drilled into us by our administration.
Anonymous said…
Right on cue, here come the Balter-bashers' sockpuppets like poison mushrooms after a fresh blog post. So here’s a heartfelt recommendation for you, one and all. Instead of spending your Saturdays opening yet another anonymous Twitter account that ultimately will only hurt survivors, a more productive use of you time will be to click on any of the links below and start doing the right thing. Thank you.
https://www.endrapeoncampus.org/donate
https://www.nsvrc.org/donate
https://donate.rainn.org/donate
https://metoomvmt.org/give/
https://donate.nomore.org/give/281014/#!/donation/checkout
https://give.joyfulheartfoundation.org/give/174453/#!/donation/checkout
https://www.itsonus.org/donate/
(or any of the like).
Anonymous said…
Can the person or persons making the serious accusation that Michael Balter himself writes the anonymous commentaries on his blog provide some examples as support? For example, this seven-months-long discussion has reached as of yesterday 501 Comments:

https://michael-balter.blogspot.com/2020/08/the-truth-at-last-or-at-least-some-of.html?commentPage=3

Did Balter author all the anonymous comments? And if this is the claim, can you explain how he had access to information that only those deeply involved in the Australian higher education system would know? Looking forward to your reply.
Michael Balter said…
Yes, to hear some people talk, you’d think I don’t have a friend in the world!
Anonymous said…

Of course it’s bullshit and one of the basics of Institutional Retaliation 101: if you want to discredit and silence a whistleblower, you convince the world that s/he’s a lone wolf who are talking to themselves.

No dice, cause the world is intently listening.
Michael Balter said…
There’s an individual who has attempted to comment on this blog post a number of times, each with increasing insistence, and who says they don’t believe that I never comment anonymously on this blog. I routinely reject those comments because basically the person is calling me a liar and I consider that a personal attack, which I do not allow. I’m pretty sure I know who this person is, because they have been obsessed with me for months and regularly virtual signal to their colleagues that they are a critic of my reporting. This individual has now said that they are recording all of the times I rejected their comments, presumably to publish at some point.

I am not obligated to “prove” to anyone’s satisfaction that I do not comment anonymously on this blog. If anyone thinks I would lie about such a thing, that is their issue and not mine, nor that of any of the survivors who have entrusted me with their stories.
Michael Balter said…
Virtue signal, sorry.
Anonymous said…
Ah yes, the classic "comment anonymously and don't talk about it in any other context, public or private" method of virtue signaling. A tried and true method for gaining notoriety among my...many colleagues...(that one is funny because I am colleagues with exactly zero of these people).
Anonymous said…
As I see it these comments are more of an academic MeToo crowdsourcing of sorts. This is why the Blogger option of anonymity is such a powerful thing. In this retaliatory world, it helps me to express opinions that I would never dare state on social media or out loud to my esteemed peers, let alone administrators. And I am learning so much more from the opinion of others, even if I don’t know (or really care) who they are. But crucially, it provides an unparalleled stage to those in position to disseminate critical information that would have never reach us otherwise. No doubt some of it misguided, some hateful, but still many of the comments are backed with verifiable facts such as links to open access data or public court records that anyone can check for themselves. Some provide inside information that, if one cares enough, can be corroborated through online sleuthing or asking around. And some simply point to inconsistencies in statements and actions that I missed since I am not part of that particular conversation. It’s all eye-opening, even if sometimes raw. You may like it, you may not, but you can only ignore it at your peril.
Anonymous said…
Michael-
The only reason this individual is trying to comment on your blog over and over and over again, even if just to badmouth you, is because they realized what the rest of us already know: this is the only grievance channel that works. Ironic and sad that even the naysayers are now forced to use your blog just so they can make themselves heard.
Anonymous said…



Interesting pick for the SAA Ombudsperson for harassment and academic integrity– David Rasch from UCSB, where he also serves at the Office of the Ombuds. Maybe just a coincidence, but then there’s this April 15 presidential session and talk:
[81] SYMPOSIUM PRESIDENTIAL SESSION: WHAT IS AT STAKE? THE
IMPACTS OF INEQUITY AND HARASSMENT ON THE PRACTICE OF
ARCHAEOLOGY
Time: 2:00 p.m.–4:15 p.m.
Chairs: Amber VanDerwarker, Joe Watkins and Maureen Meyers
3:00 Maureen Meyers and Amber VanDerwarker—Regional Contexts of
Sexual Harassment in the United States: A Comparison of the SEAC and
SCA Surveys

Amber VanDerwarker was UCSB’s anthropology chair from 2016-2017, so during Kurin’s Title IX investigation and negative findings. I believe that a couple of Kurin’s grad students were re-assigned to VanDerwarker as a result of the forced administrative leave.
Coincidence or not, should be an interesting session and I recommend everyone who care about these issues to tune in.
Anonymous said…
I will definitely attend the session, but I challenge my more established colleagues to ask Van Derwarker and the other speakers the hard questions that students want to ask but cannot.
Anonymous said…
They should have invited Balter to this Symposium, after we missed the opportunioty to hear him talk in Albuquerque. Many if not most of sexual harassment stories we hear about these days are made public by journalists, not academics, so they too need a seat & voice at the table.
David Appell said…
NASW is a corrupt organization that only looks out for insiders. I left it in 2009 after they abruptly cut off my nasw.org email address -- the one I used for all my freelance business -- after I repeatedly advocated that NASW leadership express support for Obamacare for the sake of freelancers seeking affordable health insurance. Someone got tired of hearing me and had my professional lifeline terminated without warning.

I never went back and don't miss them at all. The few deep inside are petty and power hungry and I'm not surprised to read Michael's story. I'd advise all new science writers to steer well clear of NASW, and I wish Michael the best.

David Appell
http://www.davidappell.com
Anonymous said…
For all those hypocrite academics who say you were "grandstanding", let us see them publish their next #MeToo peer-review article without including their name and affiliation; or not immediately upload it on their academia.edu page; or not use it front–and–center for their grant applications and tenure review. Then they can blame others for grandstanding.