You buried the lede. She used to be at Ohio State, like all good people.
I wish those stories were dated. I mean, they're all bizarre as taking place any time after 1980. but I'd love to know which of them had taken place even more recently than that.
2: Someday, that will be the epigram for a history of the Trump administration.
I just read the first couple and they are good and infuriating stories.
The urinal post reminded me of Alyssa Mastromonaco's story about getting a tampon dispenser installed in the White House
Though it's changing, there aren't a ton of women in the West Wing, and many have already gone through menopause. Those of us who still got our periods developed an understanding that it was cool to rifle through someone's bag or drawer for a Tampax while she was out. Still, it wasn't uncommon to find yourself in a code red.
...
That day was extremely busy, and I exhausted my tampon supply. As the dinner approached, I realized I needed to change my tampon--soon. I began to panic. Neither my deputy, Danielle Crutchfield, nor the girls downstairs had anything to help me. The toilet paper wasn't absorbent, so you couldn't do the thing where you roll it around your underwear. I'd have to run to CVS. No luck. A meeting ran long, POTUS had a question to research. I ran out of time and barely made it to dinner. Then someone said something funny, and my "Ha!" turned to "Oh, my God, no no no." I began to bleed through my favorite pants--J. Crew blue-and-white houndstooth capris. Of all the women at the table, probably four of us still got our periods; I knew they didn't have tampons because I'd already asked. I told my friend Kathy Ruemmler, who was White House counsel, what was happening. She escorted me to my car, where I bled on the seat as I made my getaway.
The next day, it became my mission to get a tampon dispenser for the women's restroom. If we were serious about bringing more women into politics, the West Wing should have a basic level of comfort. There was no objection to my proposal--it just seemed like no one had thought of it.
A couple of weeks later, I walked into the senior-staff meeting--populated by 20 or 25 people, including a lot of men--in the Roosevelt Room, a stately space where FDR once kept an aquarium. Today it's decorated in subtle beiges, with a painting of Teddy in Rough Riders gear and a little statue of a buffalo. It was here I announced that the West Wing would be installing a tampon dispenser in the women's room that day. No one said a word, but it felt really good.
I wish those stories were dated
Well, this happened in 2012.
I was about to ask 6, hoping that there was a good or at least not-bad outcome.
Looking back at 5 still amazes me. I've done a lot of employment discrimination defense, and if a client of mine had ever been up against a plaintiff with facts that strong, we would have surrendered abjectly in a heartbeat.
What happens if (when?) the sexual harassers starts harassing the lawyer defending him or his employer?
I'm trying to think of a way to create a Matryoshka doll of lawsuits.
5: did it turn out that all of the faculty in that department were aware of that policy, or was it sort of unilaterally enforced by a department chair or DGS who steered students away from the harasser (without everyone else necessarily knowing about it)? I can imagine departments where people quietly like to pretend that problems don't exist, but I'm curious about how they end up with a(n official?) rule that acknowledges the problem but doesn't really solve it.
I'm an expert at pretending problems don't exist. Step 1 of pretending problems don't exist is "Don't tell the people on whom you are imposing the costs of the solution to the problem that they are being hurt because of the problem."
For that, you need to find an expert in pretending nobody cares about the problem.
||
NMM to Tom Petty.
Somewhat on topic because of that music video.
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That was what threw me about 5! 14 is excellent advice for dirtbag organizations, but they fucked up and told her what was going on!
It's actually more like step 2 or 3. But still, it's not an optional step.
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The title of the OP makes me think of Alice In Puzzleland (sample chapter available here (via)).
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The title of the OP made me think of a Simpsons episode.
16: huh. He's sort of a hometown hero but also supposedly an ass, but who isn't. Younger me would be upset but older me is not in touch with my younger self on Tom Petty.
I CAN HEAR THE CARS ON OLD 441 LIKE THE WAVES CRASHING ON THE BEACH FOR BREAKFAST.
It's looking more and more like Bob Dylan will be the only member of the Traveling Wilburys to get a Nobel.
16: It looks like there might be a small window left. LAPD retracted its statement on Petty.
Why is LAPD issuing statements on this? Did they shoot him?
5 etc: For my sins, I get to play a management-side role in dealing with the resident Title IX problem in my current organization. To our collective credit, the people pushing hardest for a lasting solution are (some of the) faculty, and no one pushes back when I point out that being a good researcher and working effectively with male grad students does not mean we can solve the problem by warning away women, but people can get smarter about avoiding sanctionable conduct without becoming any less toxic.
but people can get smarter about avoiding sanctionable conduct without becoming any less toxic.
Change we can believe in.
No formal statement was ever given; they just now tweeted "Initial information was inadvertantly [sic] provided to some media sources". It looks like the sheriff's department, not PD, is the proper source. Not sure the basis, but neither his attack nor hospitalization was in LA City.
29: I am a lawyer and a university administrator. That's not quite Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot, but apparently I'm getting closer.
This is how the Russians are able to take over. It was a heart attack.
Objectively, somebody had to do that.
19, 20: I thought the title of the OP was referring to how this morning's headlines made me feel compared to yesterday.
It worked out fine. Another professor with oodles of grant money invited me to be his student, I graduated, I got a private sector sellout job and am working on living happily ever after.
Is Stephan Douglas still free to sexually harass his way out of mentoring half the students?
Can I just say, if we can't ban guns, can we ban white men?
There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead.
She was an assistant prof from 1984-1990, so that puts a date range on some of the stories.
She was working as an assistant professor in a land-grant school,
when he met her.
42: The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy who can make a head-shot with a pistol at 400 yards firing into a dark room with a gun.
The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy who can make a head-shot with a pistol at 400 yards firing into a dark room with a gun.
Apparently one of the members of the band wrote about the limitations of trying to use a firearm in self-defense in that case.
I've been a proponent of the 2nd amendment my entire life.
Until the events of last night. I cannot express how wrong I was. We actually have members of our crew with CHL licenses and legal firearms on the bus.
They were useless.
We couldn't touch them for fear police might think that we were part of the massacre and shoot us. A small group (or one man) laid waste to a city with dedicated, fearless police officers, desperately trying to help, because of access to an insane amount of fire power.
Enough is enough. . . .
47: Kind of amazing that it took actually getting shot at to figure that out.
45: What could be a better place than a land-grant school?
Shit. Also a land-grant school. Who knew California had that?
I'm surprised that anyone is surprised that these stories are recent. I got my PhD in 2015. It's only last year that a long-time sexual harasser was forced to retire. There had been an official university policy that he was not allowed to have students over to his house or to have drinks with students, but this had not been enforced at all. None of the students of my generation knew that this was even a policy, because a lot of us had done that and put up with creepy behavior. The faculty knew of the policy but did nothing to enforce it. The only reason he was finally forced to retire is that for independent reasons, none of the current students are working with him, so when they got fed up with him, there was no internal opposition in the student community to mobilize to get rid of him. Plus, a few exceptional individuals worked really hard to make a good case against him. A lot of his former students were really pissed when they learned about his being forced out, because they felt it would reflect badly on them. The old boys' club aspect of academia makes it really hard to shit on people who are terrible people but whom you rely on for your career.
Also, I suspect I suffered retaliation from reporting some other professor for sexual harassment, but I can't prove it.
And yeah, just look up any of the recent incidents of sexual harassment in philosophy. A lot of these people still have jobs after doing much worse things than related in the article.
I've also experienced that anecdote about people who think they are really pro-diversity but only make offers to white men. A certain institution is advertising for the same job, in my field, for the third year in a row. I went to this department's events on a semi-regular basis and they liked to present as super self-aware about implicit bias and so on. Last year, they interviewed only white men who had inferior CVs to mine. Like, strictly fewer publications and fewer (and less prestigious) awards. Then, the white men all rejected them. The same thing had happened the year before, and they'd complained with a total lack of self-awareness about how unfortunate they have been in their searches. The only non-white male philosopher in their dept is never on the hiring committees for reasons out of her control, and she apologized to my woman friend for how the search went.
Then, the white men all rejected them.
We found a manic pixie dream university who taught us how to life to the fullest.
God, that Vegas cluster. Vegas is similar what this guy was trying to pull. Our guy was trying to get up to high ground in the Grand America Hotel but fortunately one of the ladies at the front that day was one of our retired secretaries who recognized he was acting off and basically pushed him out the door and locked it. Our suspect also had a long gun and several hundred rounds on him. I was very close to that call and helped swarm that scene. If he'd gotten high ground like he wanted there's a pretty good chance I'd be dead.
This guy was practically a whale. I bet a hotel in Vegas isn't going to be as eager to notice that as a hotel in SLC.
Anyway, it's good they stopped him so quickly. I don't know what you can do about a place like Vegas. When I was there this spring, I was at a different hotel, but it was easy to check in and out without talking to a single human hotel employee.
OK, NMM to Tom Petty, for real this time.
I stayed in that hotel last year, for a wedding in the suite that, based on photos, was three floors right above the shooter's room. I remember looking out the windows, with their excellent view, and being surprised that there were empty lots so close to the strip.
Some fucks are going to ask to stay in the mass murder room because people are horrible. I suppose the hotel might refuse to rent it out again.
Or charge extra. I mean, Vegas, right?
|| So, it's snowing. |>
I killed four mosquitoes inside my car while driving to work this morning, no joke.
How many people did you run down while so engaged?
It's no joke. That's how I will die, in a car crash because there are mosquitoes in the car.
Do you roll up the windows at night?
OT: Why does the internet think I should smell like Jon Snow talking to a bunch of working class Italians?
Why do you think the internet thinks you should smell like Jon Snow talking to a bunch of working class Italians?
Do Italians even exist in Westeros?
Maybe they are Russians? It's a Dolce and Gabbana ad. I think I might be the least Dolce and Gabbana person around.
Definitely Italian. Has anyone ever spent so much money making such a terrible ad?
In seven series of that programme, Jon Snow has been conscripted, ridden about five hundred miles, climbed a two hundred foot cliff, been stabbed, stabbed loads of other people, punched some people, had a lot of sex, fallen in the mud a lot, been in a fire and wrestled with a zombie. Throughout these events, which cover a period of (I would guess) at least eighteen months, he has changed his clothes twice and taken one (1) bath. I don't think you should want to smell like him, whatever the internet says.
And now he's marrying a dead woman with whom he had a lot of sex while she was alive- dude just can't let go.
I'm glad it worked out for you, AL, but I take it there were no changes to the department policy? Or were there?
That thread brings back memories. My first impulse was to wish it were 2012 again -- but I don't think I really want the personal-life questions that are settled now to be unsettled again. The real question is: five years from now, how would I want to have spent the last five years? That's the "do-over" you actually get to do. Oh, it's so much less fun when it's not fantasy.
52 et al: I've recently designated myself as the official pain in the ass about our local organization that just can't see why they shouldn't continue to employ known harassers. I'm tenured, I'm sick of it, and I'll make time for this.
The demoralizing thing - well, beyond that they're pulling this shit in public view, that they're making wholly insufficient attempts to make up for it in other ways (as though that even makes sense?), and that I don't have a lot of company in this new position - is that I probably won't get anywhere, but I can't let it go.
77.2: I know. With the recent sale of my Cleveland place, I feel like the disruption to my life caused by moving to a different university in 2012 has only just finally been settled.
OT: do we need a Nobel thread? LIGO wasn't much of a surprise. Any bets on CRISPR for Chemistry tomorrow? I'm guessing there won't be a CRISPR prize awarded until the patent fight is settled.
Will they still award the Nobel in this, the After Time?
For you, Academic Lurker, I don't think you do the twitter thing but recently recall you mentioning a penchant for things Austrian-Hungarian and WWI
https://twitter.com/PikeGrey1418
I would have said with utter confidence that was from WWII. Dunning-Kruger.
80: IKR? Merkel and Macron will share the Peace prize. The lit prize will go to George R. R. Martin. The Economics prize money will be paid in Bitcoin.
81: Cool. Thanks.
84: Surely the Nobel committee should require that George R. R. Martin finish the damn series before they give him the prize.
Martin is clearly not going to finish before he dies and you can't give the Nobel to dead people.
They gave one to BHO before he even finished the first volume. Even granting that the series ended up twice the length initially planned, that was just ridiculous.
I don't think they should have done that. Foreigners try too hard to encourage our better instincts.
And he went over and gave a lecture defending war. That'll teach 'em.
I doubt CRISPR yet. Smart money is on John Goodenough for Li ion batteries, if only so people will stop making the joke every year that he wasn't Good Enough. Potentially they'll go chemistry as medicine for immuno oncology.
Any bets on CRISPR for Chemistry tomorrow?
God, the thought of someone my age (slightly younger, even) being a serious Nobel contender is terrifying. Why do I even bother to show up at work?
I hope it's not because you can sexually harass there.
If I win the lottery, it goes on my vita as "Statistically Exceptional Performance Award, State of Pennsylvania."