Astronomy Look-alikes, No. 97
I found an appropriate look-alike for University of California at Berkeley astronomer and serial sexual harasser Geoff Marcy:
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In the Dark 
October 10, 2015 at 11:11 pm
I think your comparison is unfair to excrement, Marcy is far worse.
October 11, 2015 at 12:17 am
What will happen to his current graduate students? I feel sorry for them myself.
October 11, 2015 at 10:10 am
Well, unbelievably, he hasn’t been sacked. Yet.
October 16, 2015 at 1:33 am
Now that he’s resigned: I still feel awful about his graduate students. He had at least two.
October 12, 2015 at 10:16 am
Sadly this is not how it works. People who complain tend to suffer damage themselves, both personally and professionally. It takes courage to come forward. Sympathy doesn’t compensate for the scars.
October 12, 2015 at 11:28 am
Staff move around. It’s no big deal for students. Supervisors like to think they are indispensable but they aren’t.
October 12, 2015 at 9:44 am
I know more about this than you can possibly imagine.
October 12, 2015 at 10:12 am
There is a great story in a great book, the postwar classicist Gilbert Highet’s “Art of Teaching”. He tells of a female student who asked her prof (a colleague of his) to up her marks. He refused. She offered to sleep with him. He still refused. She threatened to jump then and there out of his (3rd storey) office window. He opened it for her. She didn’t jump.
October 12, 2015 at 10:36 pm
“Honey, just become a woman astronomer in my class and we’ll get to Uranus together”…
October 14, 2015 at 12:44 am
The response of Berkeley students, postdocs and faculty:
http://www.bradford-delong.com/2015/10/ucb-astronomy-graduate-students-on-geoff-marcy.html
http://www.bradford-delong.com/2015/10/32-berkeley-astronomy-post-docs-on-gibor-basri-and-geoffrey-marcy.html
http://www.bradford-delong.com/2015/10/uc-berkeley-astonomy-department-faculty.html
As Christina Richey says “This problem is not just isolated to one incident or one person in our field” (http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.be/2015/10/cswa-chairs-message-to-greater.html)
And buzz feed continues to report: http://www.buzzfeed.com/azeenghorayshi/berkeley-astronomy-dept-calls-for-professor-to-leave-in-wake
October 14, 2015 at 3:02 pm
This particular case does not seem complicated at all. If this had happened at a school the response would have been automatic and obvious. Most companies would do the same. The only thing hard to understand is the response from Berkeley which makes itself part of the problem.
October 14, 2015 at 7:33 pm
It sounds like a fairly typical case, to be honest. There is little dispute about the facts. There are the usual indications that the perpetrator is being protected. That may be because of a perceived status (nobel prize potential?) but it commonly happens wherever there is little risk of outside action.
I have little reason to be sympathetic. A family member has been on the receiving end of this kind of behaviour. He lost his job, but she lost her life. It was a strong contributing factor in her death. Why do men, in position of power, think that human rights do not apply to women?
October 14, 2015 at 7:35 pm
The more I read the worse the case gets and any sympathy I had for Marcy vanished a long time ago.
October 15, 2015 at 9:31 am
He should take some advice from Shakespeare:
“Stand not upon the order of your going. But go at once.”
October 17, 2015 at 10:19 pm
Or Cromwell dismissing the Rump Parliament.
October 18, 2015 at 2:00 pm
Cromwell’s speech on that occasion, for the record:
October 18, 2015 at 5:21 pm
I was going to post it, Peter, but then I found these words of caution at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rump_Parliament#Oliver_Cromwell
after learning that Parliament was attempting to stay in session despite an agreement to dissolve… Cromwell’s patience ran out. On 20 April he attended a sitting of Parliament and… stood up and harangued the members of the Rump. This speech does not survive but has often been paraphrased, for instance in the Book of Days: You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately … Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go! He then declared you are no Parliament and called in a troop of soldiers…
October 18, 2015 at 5:41 pm
Interesting!
I remember being taught the speech (in pretty much the form I posted it above) when I was at school. Obviously my history teacher should have checked his sources!
October 16, 2015 at 6:46 pm
I remind commenters that I do not accept anonymous comments from people who give fake email address.
October 17, 2015 at 10:17 pm
“I’ve never met Marcy personally nor, as far as I know, any of his victims, thus can’t say anything about this.”
Reading this thread, I think you’re not doing a particularly good job of saying nothing about it!