If you haven’t read it yet I hugely recommend a read of Suzy Weiss’ article on David Sabatini. He’s a brilliant cancer researcher who was hounded out of his position by the “usual mob”. Read it and see if, like me, you can’t avoid thinking of the old cliché “Hell hath no fury . . .”
The ins and outs of this sorry affair, or perhaps less suggestively I should say the rights and wrongs, are probably lost to time now, but it’s hard to see this as anything other than a relationship gone sour. Nothing about the evidence presented in this article screams “abuse” on the part of Sabatini. They had fun together, it cooled off, she wanted more, he didn’t, she subsequently claimed harassment (despite sending texts to him expressing her longing to rekindle their romance).
Without seeing all the exchanged texts my suspicion is that the harassment here is perhaps in the other direction?
But as sad as this story of a relationship breakdown is (and it does seem to be more of a ‘friends with benefits’ kind of set up) this isn’t what piqued my interest. A team of lawyers was hired by his employers to investigate the claims of harassment and they produced a 248 page report which basically accused him of violating a no-fraternisation policy - a policy that had been instituted after the relationship began. And that’s about it. It appears that the lawyers had to really struggle to find damning evidence, such as the following:
While we have not found any evidence that Sabatini discriminates against or fails to support females in his lab, we find that Sabatini’s propensity to praise or gravitate toward those in the lab that mirror his desired personality traits, scientific success, or view of ‘science above all else,’ creates additional obstacles for female lab members . . .
You mean the guy gravitated towards, and praised, those who shared his passion for excellence and science? Jeez - the guy is an absolute fucking monster. I mean, why did you guys hire him in the first place? We don’t want the pursuit of excellence in any of our institutions, thank you very much!
Apparently, such attitudes create “additional obstacles” for female lab members. Yeah - coz we don’t expect those female things to actually be good at anything, or want to be good do we?
It beggars all belief.
There is something rotten in the State of Science.
Back when I was doing my physics PhD the research group I worked in was run by a guy (also brilliant) who pretty much shared the same ethos as Sabatini. Excellence, fun, inquiry, hard work - probably all a bit too white-supremacy these days. And we had a pretty diverse group - even by today’s standards. None were chosen because of their wobbly bits or pigmentation, but because they were bloody good at what they did, or had the potential to be so.
But back then there wasn’t this culture of looking at a group and making sure all the wobbly bits were represented in the right proportion, or that the group photograph had a suitably diverse tonal palette.
Today, it seems, mediocrity is a desirable thing. How else are we to interpret the recent call to rename mathematics so that it sounds more friendly, more cuddly and warm, and not so scary?
Teacher : You, Jones, where are you going?
Jones : Sorry, Sir, I’ve just had my county-wounty class and got a bit lost on my way to the talkie-writie class
As one person on Twitter noted:
In my youth car owners manuals would tell you how to adjust the valves. Now they tell you not to drink the battery acid
It’s like those little sachets of silica gel that are used as a desiccant in packaging. They have “do not eat” in big letters. I’m grateful for this advice, because the first thing I do when opening up the latest delivery from Amazon is to eat the packaging.
It gets worse. Science, we are told by some, must be decolonized. It stems from some weird idea that science itself is systemically racist and something done primarily by old dead white men. Here’s what the premier science journals Nature and Science had to say
Nature :
We recognize that Nature is one of the white institutions that is responsible for bias in research and scholarship. The enterprise of science has been—and remains—complicit in systemic racism, and it must strive harder to correct those injustices and amplify marginalized voices.
Science :
The U.S. scientific enterprise is predominantly white, as are the U.S. institutions that Science’s authors are affiliated with. The evidence of systemic racism in science permeates this nation . . . Why do students who are people of color have to remind society that they are almost never taught by someone who looks like them? Why has the United States failed to update its ways of teaching science when data show that people of color learn better with more inclusive methods?
Apart from the fact that I have not one iota of an idea what a “more inclusive method” actually is (how does one teach the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus, or the solution of Schrödinger’s equation, in a more inclusive way?) this notion that we should be taught by people who look like us is stark raving bonkers. What has that got to do with anything?
I’m sorry, Miss, I don’t get this proof - could you perhaps try to look a bit more like me so I can understand it better?
It was actually my chemistry teacher in high school that got me interested in pursuing a career in physics. He looked nothing like me. Well, he was vaguely humanoid I guess, but he was old (everyone over 40 looks ‘old’ when you’re that age). He was going bald. He had a big lower lip. He had sticky out ears. But he was awesome.
We’re encouraging an attitude of superficiality rather than depth. That person can’t possibly have anything good to say - wrong gonads and no melanin, is one egregious example of this obsession with surface characteristics. Authors these days are dismissed for not being the right colour, or the wrong gender or sexuality. Why we focus on such superficial characteristics is beyond me. I don’t give a flying fornication whether the book I’m reading has been written by a left-handed, pangendered, queer, black person - is it any good?
The rot has been setting in for some time. I recall going to my daughter’s school to discuss her options for A levels (in the UK these are exams taken at around age 18 - not sure what the US equivalent is). The discussion I had with the physics teacher was illuminating, to say the least.
He happily informed me, as if to be reassuring, that there wasn’t much maths involved in taking physics - maybe the integration of the exponential function exp(x) was about as difficult as it got. For those of you who have forgotten, or don’t know, this is one of the easiest integrations possible. The integral of exp(3x) is just (1/3)exp(3x) plus some constant, for example.
This was about 17 years ago. I expressed my surprise and told him that in my A level physics syllabus we had to solve the 2nd order differential equations for damped oscillation and to be able to understand resonance and apply it to LCR circuits (if that sounds harder - it’s because it is). I asked him why the syllabus had been dumbed down so much.
Naturally he took offence at this and said that the students learned a wider range of things. OK, I said, so you’ve sacrificed depth for breadth - a sacrifice of deeper insight for superficiality. Not a good idea. I did not make myself popular with the school’s science team that night.
At my old university they gave a physics/maths multiple choice exam for the new intake to the physics degree. Same exam, same questions, every year. It was administered in the first week. It was not assessed as part of the degree - it was to gauge the level of ability of the intake and where they might need to focus their resources. When I returned to my uni some years later and spoke with some of my old lecturers they told me that scores on this exam had been steadily dropping - and the drops could be correlated with changes in educational policy. I have no idea whether they’re still doing this - but it is revealing, I think.
That’s just standards, though. Things are more worrisome than this. There has been a big push to “decolonize” science, and maths. Apparently too many old dead white guys were good at this stuff and that’s just unacceptable these days because mumble, mumble, white supremacy, mumble, mumble, colonialism, mumble, mumble, patriarchy, mumble, mumble, power structures, mumble, mumble, oppression.
The verbal diarrhoea that is post-modernism is liberally pebble-dashing our once august and rigorous institutes of higher learning (not to mention the perversion and subversion of our younger kids that’s going on).
This post-modernist drivel can be readily seen in efforts to “decolonize light”. Yes, you did read that right. And, no, I’m not making this up. You can read all about it here. Once again I stress - this is not a parody.
The quotes from this group of modern day buffoons are jaw-dropping
A physicist by training with a passion for the Northern Lights, Tajmel questioned the colonial assumptions made in the way Western science evaluates light and what it considers knowledge.
I always consider the colonial assumptions underpinning photons when I’m trying to work out the properties of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer. These colonial devices have been used to oppress light in the laboratory for decades and this has to stop.
Indigenous ways of knowing have been suppressed and marginalized throughout academic history and we are finally gaining momentum in elevating Indigenous knowledges as equally valid to Western science
Yes, they have been suppressed and marginalized - no question about it. But it’s nothing to do with race or ethnicity or culture or colonialism - it’s because the ideas are generally, scientifically speaking, shit. Shitter than a shitty thing with shit blisters on it.
If some culture is going to tell me that light shines out of the arse of the great God Nunga-Nunga-Jiggly-Jugs and that I should consider this to be equally valid as (so-called) ‘Western’ science I have 7 letters forming two words to give you - and three of those letters are ‘f’.
I am being deliberately offensive here - because I’m angry - and because this crap has to stop. Right now.
There aren’t “equally valid” ways of knowing when it comes to science. There is no ‘indigenous’ science, or ‘feminist’ science, or ‘white’ science, or ‘colonialist’ science, or ‘western’ science - or whatever qualification you want to use. There is just science. Full. Fucking. Stop.
And what are we to make of this tosh?
Everybody knows light and every culture has knowledge about light. However, only the physical knowledge is regarded as scientific. We are interested in investigating how colonial scientific knowledge authority was and is still reproduced in the context of light. Decolonizing Light follows complementary approaches: We are engaging Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies for knowledge creation, we are studying colonial anchor points in the history of physics in the context of light, we are studying the views of scientists on colonialism, we’re investigating the discourse on contemporary largescale light experiments.
Not quite Judith Butler levels of pseudo-intellectual gibberish, but close.
And too damn right only physical knowledge is regarded as scientific. I can gaze at the light from a stained glass window playing on my navel all I want, but how it makes me feel, whatever mystical connections I may perceive, whatever experience it engenders, how it makes my spirit soar - all of these have bugger all to do with science or the scientific understanding of light.
It doesn’t mean that these things are of no value. They may be of great value to me and maybe my culture - but they are of no value to science.
If these post-modernist decolonizing lunatics get their way it will be even worse than following The Science™ promoted so heavily by governments across the world in response to the covid ‘crisis’.
If you’re going to ‘follow the science’ - make sure you know what the fuck you’re following - otherwise you might be praying to Nunga-Nunga-Jiggly-Jugs to cure covid (and we might as well have been doing that anyway - probably more effective than anything our governments have done to combat covid).
I strongly support the demand that only the exp() function should be integrated until all the other functions have learned how to properly integrate. Can you believe that cos() culturally appropriates sin() when it is integrated?
I met my wife at university, and among our friends there are many couples where it worked the same way. Of course there were some excesses (a professor drinking too much at a party and kind of becoming too interested in certain female students, research assistants keeping a mattress in their office because it might come in handy, things like that) but that became part of the folklore. And this was *mathematics*, and in *Germany*.
I read Bari's column yesterday, and while it's a no brainer that getting involved with a cowrker is a bad idea Sabatini wasn't actually a coworker, nor a subordinate. They worked in different fields in the same building. There was a significant age difference, but the woman was an accomplished adult in her own field.
But the real problem is one created by the absolutely ridiculous proposition that men and women are "equal." Now I believe men and women are entitled to the same exact "Rights" the reality is men and women are different in significant ways. One way that comes into play here is that women tend to become more emotionally involved than men. That is a factual evolutionary trait. And based upon the text messages and other communications it seems clear they both agreed to keep it casual, but she became emotionally involved and couldn't let go. So she punished him.
It also helps that Bari (a left/liberal woman) who has seen all of the evidence is a trustworthy with source and has demonstrated a principled dedication to actual journalism.