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The Geoff Marcy situation

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Ed Lazowska <lazowska@cs.washington.edu>
Date: Thu, Oct 15, 2015 at 1:45 PM
Subject: [cs-ugrads] The Geoff Marcy situation
To: Researchers <researchers@cs.washington.edu>, Staff <cs-staff@cs.washington.edu>, “cs-ugrads@cs.washington.edu” <cs-ugrads@cs.washington.edu>

Many of you will have been following press reports of the Geoff Marcy situation at UC Berkeley.

There’s an article in the New York Times that includes links to excellent letters issued earlier this week by the graduate student community and the postdoc community in Berkeley’s Astronomy Department:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/15/science/geoffrey-marcy-to-resign-from-berkeley-astronomy-department.html

These letters emphasize that there pretty clearly has been a pattern of tolerance and coverup of this sort of behavior at the level of the department, the school/college, and the university, going back a long way. That is, people were not unaware – however nothing was said, and nothing much was done.

Hopefully that’s not how things work at UW – and not how they will work anywhere in the future.

If anyone at UW were to ever make you feel uncomfortable, please report it immediately.
October 16, 2015