Over the past two weeks, scientists nationwide have rallied behind a Vanderbilt University professor and prominent anti-harassment activist who is fighting to reverse her tenure denial.
BethAnn McLaughlin, an assistant professor of neurology and pharmacology at Vanderbilt’s medical center, has become widely known over the past nine months as the architect of #MeTooSTEM, which began as a website and social-media community where people could tell their stories of experiencing harassment in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields. It’s now a nonprofit organization.
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Over the past two weeks, scientists nationwide have rallied behind a Vanderbilt University professor and prominent anti-harassment activist who is fighting to reverse her tenure denial.
BethAnn McLaughlin, an assistant professor of neurology and pharmacology at Vanderbilt’s medical center, has become widely known over the past nine months as the architect of #MeTooSTEM, which began as a website and social-media community where people could tell their stories of experiencing harassment in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields. It’s now a nonprofit organization.
But as McLaughlin was battling misconduct in science, she was embroiled in a battle on her own campus. Her tenure case at Vanderbilt has stretched on for more than four years. For 17 months, the process was frozen as her social-media activity was investigated. That review, she said, had its roots in retaliation. A colleague had filed a false complaint against her, she said, after she served as a witness in an investigation into his alleged misconduct.
At first, McLaughlin’s tenure was approved by her department and the executive faculty committee — but when the medical center’s dean asked the committee to reconsider, it reversed itself and denied her tenure bid.
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On Thursday, she said, her National Institutes of Health grant expired. A Vanderbilt spokesman said she is still employed by the medical center: “Although it has been reported publicly that Dr. McLaughlin’s employment ends on February 28, we are not aware of any deadlines tied to that date.”
However, because her grant funding is about to run out, the 51-year-old McLaughlin said she only counts on receiving a paycheck through the end of March.
McLaughlin’s allies say they see her experience as yet another example of how women’s careers can be derailed when they speak up about misconduct. Vanderbilt students staged a sit-in at the office of Nicholas S. Zeppos, the university’s chancellor, on Wednesday, demanding that he save her job.
The wave of support for McLaughlin shows just how many scientists are fed up with sexual harassment in their fields, said Sharona E. Gordon, a professor of physiology and biophysics at the University of Washington.
Gordon used Twitter to organize a “week of action” to support the professor that began last Friday. She hasn’t met McLaughlin, but she is a fellow activist and founded her own organization to fight sexual harassment in STEM disciplines.
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Gordon was also inspired by the Vanderbilt scientist’s activism against the infamous chili pepper on the website RateMyProfessors. (The site dropped the pepper, which signified an instructor’s physical attractiveness, after McLaughlin’s complaint about it on Twitter went viral last summer.)
McLaughlin’s tenure case, Gordon said, “has the potential to send such a chilling message to victims of sexual assault everywhere that they need to be quiet, and to faculty at universities everywhere that they better not make any waves when they see it.”
Tweets, Guns, and Tenure
At the moment, McLaughlin said she’s working long days, trying to keep up her lab activity, responding to the women who continue to reach out to her about their harassment experiences, and raising money for the MeTooSTEM nonprofit. Within the next few days, she and her legal team plan to meet with lawyers for the university about her tenure case.
Exactly how McLaughlin ended up in this situation is complicated, and involves anonymous Twitter accounts, university investigations, and multiple claims of threatening language.
The story started almost five years ago, when McLaughlin attended a dinner in July of 2014 at the house of Aurelio Galli, a former Vanderbilt physiology professor. McLaughlin later became a witness in a Vanderbilt investigation into Galli’s conduct at that dinner.
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At the time, Galli was fighting a lawsuit filed by a former graduate student who alleged that he had harassed and retaliated against her. During the dinner, Galli threatened to “destroy” his former graduate student, showed off his gun, and made other troubling comments, according to McLaughlin and a friend of hers who was also at the dinner, Science magazine reported. (The lawsuit was dismissed in late 2014.)
But a few months later, as the university’s investigation into Galli’s conduct continued, McLaughlin found herself under investigation. Why? Because Galli had presented Vanderbilt administrators with pages and pages of inflammatory tweets from anonymous Twitter accounts. He had proof, he told The Chronicle, that many of the tweets were written by McLaughlin. One referred to wanting to “stab” a colleague.
Galli told a faculty disciplinary committee that he had become “obsessed” with Twitter and what the anonymous accounts were saying about him, according to a written account of his interview.
While all of this was going on, McLaughlin had submitted her tenure portfolio, in the fall of 2014. (She came to Vanderbilt in 2002 and was promoted to a tenure-track position in 2005.)
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The investigation of Galli concluded that he hadn’t violated university policy. But his complaint against McLaughlin then prompted the university to freeze her tenure process and begin a disciplinary investigation, according to Science. McLaughlin told The Chronicle that the anonymous Twitter account that wrote the “stab” tweet had multiple users. She said she had written one tweet that was critical of Galli but doesn’t remember writing the one about stabbing.
An outside law firm hired by Vanderbilt said in its report about McLaughlin’s social-media activity that she probably had written that tweet, Science reported. But a faculty disciplinary committee voted not to discipline her, and her tenure process restarted. In the summer of 2017, the medical center’s executive-faculty committee approved her tenure.
But after the medical center’s dean asked the committee to reconsider and gave them the law firm’s report about McLaughlin’s social-media activity, the committee reversed its decision. McLaughlin filed a grievance in November of 2017, which has yet to be resolved. Now her grant money is almost out, and her job is up in the air.
“My department voted me up, the executive committee voted me up,” McLaughlin said. “Then the dean says, Let’s circle back, and by the way here are these lawyers I hired, and here’s their report. Then it was, Never mind, let’s vote her down.”
McLaughlin believes it’s clear what happened: Galli retaliated against her because he was angry that she testified to his alleged misconduct, and even though his claims about her behavior were false, Vanderbilt administrators took his side.
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Galli, who’s now at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, has filed a defamation lawsuit against McLaughlin. He denies any misconduct at the 2014 dinner. “I’ve never been found guilty of anything,” he said. He admits to taking over the anonymous Twitter account that wrote the “stab” tweet — the one he accused McLaughlin of using — after it had been deactivated.
He said he left Vanderbilt in 2017 largely because he didn’t want to work in the same building as McLaughlin. “I wanted to do science again instead of worrying about these tweets that people were writing about me,” he said.
Vanderbilt officials wouldn’t elaborate on McLaughlin’s case, citing the confidential nature of the tenure process. A spokesman provided a written statement from last week: “Recent news reports and subsequent social media conversations and posts related to an ongoing tenure review have created a grossly inaccurate picture of the culture and values of Vanderbilt University.”
Jef McAllister, who’s part of McLaughlin’s legal team, told The Chronicle in an email: “It is ironic, but unfortunately not surprising, that someone with a national reputation for promoting women in STEM at universities finds herself ground down in an opaque and irregular tenure review. It has been a long and demoralizing process of the sort that pushes many women out of academia.”
Changing Minds Online
McLaughlin’s allies see her case as important because the outcome stands to shape the career of a leading voice against sexual harassment in the sciences.
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Her online activism started to gain steam last year, around the time that the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine released a searing report describing the prevalence of sexual misconduct in those disciplines and estimating that half of women experience some form of harassment.
In May, she circulated a petition calling on Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, to deny grants and other financial support to scientists who have committed sexual misconduct. It’s one of several petitions McLaughlin has initiated in recent months. She also demanded that the National Academy of Sciences revoke the membership of scientists who have been disciplined for sexual misconduct or retaliation.
Later, she helped persuade the American Association for the Advancement of Science to enact a policy for revoking honors given to scientists who commit “serious breaches of professional ethics.”
Collins invited McLaughlin to speak to his new anti-harassment working group in February, where she urged the NIH not to support scientists with a history of misconduct. Collins wrote a tweet on Thursday expressing his support for McLaughlin’s activism, though he didn’t specifically mention her tenure case.
A special thank you to @McLNeuro, whose leadership with the #MeTooSTEM movement has given a voice to victims of harassment. Her activism has been valuable in shaping #NIH’s discussion on how to strengthen our efforts.
On Twitter, Gordon, the Washington professor, persuaded a prominent scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Edward Boyden, to delay a scheduled appearance at Vanderbilt until, as Boyden put it, McLaughlin’s “situation has been addressed.”
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I was on the Media Lab Disobedience Award jury that picked BethAnn as a winner for her work fighting sexual harassment in STEM. To continue to show solidarity and support, I have notified my hosts that I will delay my visit until this very concerning situation has been addressed.
Going forward, Gordon said, she and other scientists will continue to take a specific action every week to support McLaughlin and her work. They plan to start next week, she said, by asking tenured faculty members to reach out to a trainee who seems to need mentoring, “in the spirit of what BethAnn is doing.”
McLaughlin has a postdoc and half a dozen undergraduates in her lab. The postdoc, Amy M. Palubinsky, has worked with McLaughlin since she started as a graduate student at Vanderbilt in 2010. “I’ve seen it take its toll on her,” Palubinsky said of the professor’s tenure fight.
McLaughlin has worked hard to keep her case and her scientific work separate, Palubinsky said. The lab has been productive, she said: They just published two research papers and recently submitted another one.
But as Palubinsky contemplates her future in the field, she’s alarmed at what she describes as a broken system for women who come forward about harassment, especially students and scientists without tenure. She wonders: “What if I see something? Do I want to report it? Do I want to be a witness?”
McLaughlin said there are many more uncomfortable conversations that academe still needs to have about sexual harassment, and she wants to continue to lead them. She hasn’t applied for other jobs, because she wants to stay at Vanderbilt.
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“I feel like there are so many eyes on this,” she said. “I hope to not disappoint anyone.”
Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.