BethAnn McLaughlin, a high-profile activist against harassment and abuse in academic science, is facing calls to resign from the organization she founded, MeTooSTEM. She herself has been a bully, recent MeTooSTEM volunteers say, and has not addressed criticisms that led to previous waves of resignations from the organization.
“While I have worked very closely with BethAnn over the last year or so, I can no longer support her leadership as she displays behavior patterns our organization has vowed to fight against,” Teresa Swanson, one of three members of MeTooSTEM’s leadership team, wrote in a message to The Chronicle.
Another volunteer said the issues were systemic. “The problem is when leadership/volunteers get fed up with her behavior, make a statement, and rightfully leave, 90% of people forget about it in like a week or month,” a former volunteer who goes by Jaedyn Ruli wrote to The Chronicle (Ruli is their middle name). “Then a new cohort of leadership/volunteers fill the empty spots and get treated terribly until they leave. And this cycle keeps continuing.”
Swanson, Ruli, and a second member of the MeTooSTEM leadership team, Angela Rasmussen, are all asking McLaughlin to step down. Reached briefly by phone on Thursday night, McLaughlin declined to comment. McLaughlin is the third member of MeTooSTEM’s leadership team.
And on Friday, both Swanson and Rasmussen tweeted that they were resigning from their leadership posts, citing inaction by the organization’s board. (The Chronicle called and emailed two board members on Thursday, but received no response.) The pair also apologized to former members of the group who had resigned and had criticized Rasmussen and Swanson for not taking seriously their concerns about McLaughlin.
MeTooSTEM is a nonprofit organization that hosts frequent video chats and seminars on college campuses, and directs survivors to legal help and other resources. McLaughlin, a neuroscientist, formed the group in 2018. That same year, she won the MIT Disobedience Award for her activism against harassment in science. In early 2019, scientists rallied to her cause just before she was denied tenure at Vanderbilt University — because, her allies said, of her outspokenness about gender discrimination.
By Ruli’s recollection, problems with McLaughlin’s current MeTooSTEM team began last month, when McLaughlin suggested during a video chat that people approach the police for help after they’ve experienced violence. Ruli pushed back, saying something along the lines of “Well, you’re a white woman. Of course they help you.”
“I just wanted to have them address my concern that always recommending the police might not be a good idea, especially for survivors of color,” said Ruli, who identifies as nonbinary and Chinese American. Ruli wanted McLaughlin to acknowledge that some black and Hispanic American communities have contentious relations with the police, and may not feel safe in reporting crimes. Instead, McLaughlin urged sympathy for police officers, Ruli said.
The exchange escalated. At some point, Ruli said, “All cops are Nazis,” by their own account. Afterward, Ruli and McLaughlin’s relationship continued to deteriorate. McLaughlin suggested Ruli’s concern about recommending the police was burdensome and taking the team away from more-urgent work, Ruli said. In addition, in an email that Ruli sent to The Chronicle, McLaughlin appeared to deride Ruli to Swanson and Rasmussen, based on Ruli’s mental-health conditions.
Swanson and Rasmussen, who said she supports Ruli “completely,” submitted their complaints to MeTooSTEM’s Board of Directors. Swanson said that besides McLaughlin’s aggressive behavior, in particular to people of color in MeTooSTEM, the organization needed better structure, which Ruli echoed. “MeTooSTEM the organization feels less like a nonprofit and more like a cheerleading squad for BethAnn,” they wrote. “There are no job roles or descriptions.”
The criticisms by Swanson, Rasmussen, and Ruli echo those lobbed against McLaughlin in a previous wave of volunteer resignations, which BuzzFeed reported in 2019. In resignation letters BuzzFeed posted, previous MeTooSTEM leaders complained of a lack of structure and roles, and hostility to suggestions from nonwhite leaders when similar suggestions from white leaders didn’t receive aggressive responses.
Ruli tweeted their own resignation from MeTooSTEM on Wednesday, citing mistreatment. The tweet drew support from other antiharassment online activists, including former volunteer leaders of MeTooSTEM.
One well-known advocate, Kathryn B.H. Clancy, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, suggested that there never was any need for a formal MeTooSTEM organization in the first place. “It’s a movement. It never needed a nonprofit or a savior,” she tweeted.
