The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘After Being Denied Tenure …’

Posted on | August 5, 2020 | 2 Comments

 

How many readers recall Deborah Frisch, the former psychology professor who eventually went to prison for harassing Jeff Goldstein? Frisch was the original inspiration for my oft-repeated observation that Crazy People Are Dangerous. We haven’t had occasion to mention Frisch since she was arrested in December for violating terms of her parole, and we may hope she’s now in a padded isolation cell with no Internet access, so there won’t be any new updates on her case for a while.

What brought Frisch’s name to mind today was a story about a former Vanderbilt University assistant professor who got busted for creating a fake sockpuppet account on Twitter. Researching the long, sad story of BethAnn McLaughlin, I noted these sentences on her Wikipedia page:

After being denied tenure in 2017, she sought to have the decision overturned. The decision to deny tenure was upheld and her employment at Vanderbilt ended in July of 2019.

Ooohh! Shades of Deb Frisch! Readers familiar with Frisch know that her downward spiral into madness seems to have started when she was denied tenure at the University of Oregon, where she had been on the faculty since 1988. She left Oregon after 2001 and took an adjunct position at the University of Arizona, which is where she was working when she began using her university account to harass Goldstein in 2006. That resulted in her resigning from the university, and thereafter she went further and further into psychotic derangement.

So, what happened to #MeTooSTEM activist BethAnn McLaughlin?

It might be the nail in the coffin for a polarizing figure in the MeTooSTEM movement. Beyond the person at the center of the apparent death hoax, the weirdness that recently overtook science Twitter says something about this already strange time in academe — and the country, too.
Where to begin? Probably on Friday, when BethAnn McLaughlin, founder of the advocacy group MeTooSTEM, announced that a friend, @Sciencing_Bi on Twitter, died from COVID-19.
“She was a fierce protector of people,” McLaughlin wrote on her account, which has since been suspended. “No one has ever had my back like that.”
Sciencing_Bi, who always remained anonymous but identified as an anthropologist at Arizona State University and member of the Hopi Tribe, made a “million first nations Indigenous contacts for MeTooSTEM,” McLaughlin added. . . .
McLaughlin later held a small online memorial service for Sciencing_Bi, and that’s when things begin to unravel. Some in attendance sensed holes in McLaughlin’s account of her friendship with Sciencing_Bi. Others, wanting to hold Arizona State accountable for the death of a faculty member due to teaching-related COVID-19, could find no death announcement or any other public clues about who she was. The institution is huge — in retrospect, the perfect place to situate a fake ally — but the total silence rang alarm bells.
Arizona State eventually put out a statement saying, “Unfortunately, this appears to be a hoax. We looked into this over the weekend and were unable to verify any connection with the university. We were in touch with several deans and faculty members and no one was able to identify the account or who might be behind it.”

 

Twitter suspended McLaughlin as a consequence of her sockpuppetry. More importantly, what this tawdry episode of online deceit appears to reveal is that McLaughlin is fundamentally dishonest and therefore is undeserving of holding any position of trust. And this, in turn, leads us back to Vanderbilt’s decision to deny McLaughlin tenure. In 2015, McLaughlin’s tenure application was paused “while a three-member Faculty Investigation Committee conducted a disciplinary probe of her for allegedly posting anonymous, derogatory tweets about colleagues.” When the investigation was completed and the tenure review process resumed, the dean called attention to “allegations of violations of the Faculty Standards of Conduct” by McLaughlin, and she was denied tenure on a split decision. Many in the academic community supported McLaughlin’s claim that she was the victim of retaliation after she testified against a former colleague who was accused in 2014 of sexual harassment. However, that colleague, neuroscientist Aurelio Galli, was ultimately found innocent of wrongdoing, which raises the question of whether McLaughlin’s testimony against him was credible.

Having been busted for inventing an indigenous queer professor, and then having killed her invention with COVID-19, McLaughlin seems well on her way to the kind of personal meltdown that overtook Deb Frisch.

(Hat-tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)




 

Category: Education

Comments

2 Responses to “‘After Being Denied Tenure …’”

  1. Fake Leftists | 357 Magnum
    August 7th, 2020 @ 3:51 pm

    […] tip to The Other McCain, who […]

  2. News of the Week (August 9th, 2020) | The Political Hat
    August 9th, 2020 @ 11:56 am

    […] “After Being Denied Tenure …” How many readers recall Deborah Frisch, the former psychology professor who eventually went to prison for harassing Jeff Goldstein? Frisch was the original inspiration for my oft-repeated observation that Crazy People Are Dangerous. We haven’t had occasion to mention Frisch since she was arrested in December for violating terms of her parole, and we may hope she’s now in a padded isolation cell with no Internet access, so there won’t be any new updates on her case for a while. […]