Geoff Marcy, Exoplanet Leader in Sexual Harassment Case, Resigns

Geoff Marcy, Exoplanet Leader in Sexual Harassment Case, Resigns - 

Geoff Marcy at Lick Observatory.
NASA

Geoffrey Marcy, a top figure in extrasolar-planet discovery since the field began and one of America's most public astronomers, sexually pressured and harassed students and researchers who were training under him for at least a decade, an investigation by the University of California at Berkeley concluded last June. 

The university kept the report, and its warning to Marcy to cease or face dismissal, secret.

Last Friday (October 9th) a science reporter for BuzzFeed News broke the story. Within a day it was in the New York Times, Washington Post, Forbes, The Atlantic, and other media, and discussion was blazing on numerous scientific and academic websites. (For instance, for instance.)

"While I do not agree with each complaint that was made, it is clear that my behavior was unwelcomed by some women,” Marcy wrote in a public statement. “I take full responsibility and hold myself completely accountable for my actions and the impact they had. For that and to the women affected, I sincerely apologize. It is difficult to express how painful it is for me to realize that I was a source of distress for any of my women colleagues, however unintentional." He denied that a reported incident took place that would constitute sexual assault, a felony.

The Berkeley Astronomy Department's faculty, its graduate students, and its post-docs have each issued statements calling on Marcy to withdraw from the faculty or otherwise cease contact with students, in a way that would not leave his research team and its current work in ruins.

Marcy has been mentioned as a Nobel Prize candidate for his career at the forefront of exoplanet discovery and for developing extreme-precision Doppler spectrometers that made much of it possible. In July Marcy co-starred in the public announcement that Russian philanthropist Yuri Milner was committing $100 million to develop Breakthrough Listen, the next generation of SETI search projects — a substantial part of it through a contract with Berkeley. Marcy was the principal investigator for Breakthrough Listen, until he resigned from that position on October 12th. 

Many in and out of the astronomy community are accusing Berkeley of hiding the investigation's findings to protect a valuable asset at the expense of his subordinates' safety and ability to advance in their field. Wrote the graduate students, "The University’s failure to impose meaningful consequences on Geoff Marcy — offering instead vague threats of future sanctions should the behavior continue — suggests that Berkeley’s administration values prestige and grant money over the well-­being of the young scientists it is charged with training."

Not that the issue was a well-kept secret. Jessica Kirkpatrick, a former Berkeley astrophysics grad student who told investigators of Marcy pressuring a woman at the 2010 American Astronomical Society meeting, told Buzzfeed, "He’s had a long history of behaving inappropriately, especially with undergraduates. Women discouraged other women from working with him as a research advisor. It was just something that was talked about pretty frankly among the women in the department."

John Asher Johnson, a grad student and then collaborator with Marcy for 13 years, now a professor at Harvard, wrote in a blog post that he had long witnessed the harassment but felt unable to report it without hurting his career. The current sudden crisis "should be surprising to very few researchers in the exoplanets community, particularly those of my generation or younger," he wrote. "Geoff's inappropriate actions toward and around women in astronomy is one of the biggest 'open secrets' at any exoplanets or AAS meeting. 'Underground' networks of women pass information about Geoff to junior scientists in an attempt to keep them safe. Sometimes it works. Other times it hasn't, and cognizant members of the community receive additional emails, phone calls and Facebook messages from new victims."

Marcy has stepped down from the organizing committee of next month's Extreme Solar Systems III conference in Hawaii and has agreed not to attend it.

Updates

October 14:

• The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on a history of women's complaints: How Astronomers Sought to Intervene With Geoff Marcy — and What’s at Stake for Women in the Field. Excerpts:

Women in astronomy worked quietly for a decade to persuade Geoffrey W. Marcy, the acclaimed Berkeley astronomer whose alleged sexual harassment of students has roiled the discipline, to change his behavior before four former students finally filed complaints against him last year....

Ruth Murray-Clay, an assistant professor of physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara who earned a Ph.D. in astrophysics at Berkeley in 2008, says it was in 2004 that she first decided to approach Mr. Marcy about what she saw as his inappropriate behavior with young women.... "Someone suggested putting in a joke about Geoff chasing undergraduates, and the room got really quiet and uncomfortable," says Ms. Murray-Clay. "I knew that if this was something that couldn’t even be joked about, I needed to go have a conversation with him....

"He said he was going to change," recalls Ms. Murray-Clay. "He said this was not going to happen again."

And then, she says, it did. Over and over again.

Ms. Murray-Clay went back to talk to Mr. Marcy several times about his behavior before she left Berkeley, in 2008, she says, and so did other students. She also complained to the astronomy-department chairman, in 2005, and to Berkeley’s Title IX office, in 2006. But, she says, nothing happened.

...Joan T. Schmelz, who just completed her second term as chair of the American Astronomical Society’s Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy, characterizes Berkeley’s treatment of Mr. Marcy as a "slap on the wrist."

As she talked to more and more women, Schmelz realized that Mr. Marcy had a "play book."... "I heard this so many times," she says, "that I realized it was standard practice for him.... The reason he’s been able to get away with it is that people don’t trust the system to protect them."

- See more at: http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/geoff-marcy-exoplanet-leader-in-growing-sexual-harassment-crisis/?et_mid=791709&rid=250958391#sthash.nYSVVZsq.dpuf