Not just supernovae, but the explosion of his own and others’ careers, seems to attract Christian Ott, a Caltech astronomer. Ott has a fiery – and fire-y – personality.
Casey Handmer was a grad student in Ott’s group until June 2013, when he was fired partly because Ott didn’t want him to keep his bicycle locked up inside. “Either you accept my rules or you go look for another advisor,” Ott wrote him by email. “Your call!”
“As his student, did I have an obligation to manage his moods and pussyfoot my way around the extent to which a grown man is unable to control himself?” Handmer told BuzzFeed News. “I hadn’t come to Caltech to join some weird cult where you have to do whatever the leader says.”
Ott has now been suspended from Caltech, having been found guilty of sexual harassment. The details of not one but two cases against Ott have been shared in all their grotesqueness with BuzzFeed – indeed, the details were provided by the two harassed women, who are annoyed that Ott’s suspension will probably be temporary (he’s tenured). Here he is with one of the women:
Ott began messaging her late at night online, where they talked about their shared insecurities about work. Sometimes their chats were casual; he’d recommend that she read Charles Bukowski or listen to Leonard Cohen.
The recommendations transmit his subversive yet sensitive ways, which she should emulate… But eventually he fired her too, because he loved her too much. Not that the student understood his motivation; she just felt rejected by her mentor.
[She] didn’t find out about Ott’s feelings for her until June 4, when Caltech’s Title IX coordinator called her into her office and presented her with a stack of 86 poems Ott had posted about her on his Tumblr page.
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UPDATE: Since the Ott story has already inspired one of my readers to poetry (see comments), I thought I’d try my hand.
The Is/Ott Problem: Some Questions
Is Ott
The sort of lot
By whom we should we taught?
If not
Why ought
He have been so sought?
Once caught
Wouldn’t one have thought
He’d be sent to trot?
January 13th, 2016 at 12:41PM
Hearing Leonard Cohen, or reading Charles Bukowski,
The subtext always is: I really want to plow thee
Those days I ride my bike I have to park it in the back
And then enjoy some small talk while he’s leering at my rack.
January 13th, 2016 at 7:13PM
She was hot to Ott. (My first and last pun on a Web site run by an English prof.)