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Friday, July 28, 2006
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READ ALL ABOUT IT Of course, this is the unofficial, insider, blog version (the comment thread is amazing). The major media version is in the Boston Globe, from the marvelous education reporter, Marcella Bombardieri. She's currently lobbing missiles at one of MIT's most powerful scientists, Susumu Tonegawa. He is the sort of target bombardiers dream about. For there sits he in his extravagantly funded lab, intellectually astute and emotionally infantile, typing intimidating emails to a first-rate junior woman appointment whose research and presence he finds threatening. Could he not have known that Bombardieri would find a way to get hold of his little notes warning this woman she'd better not accept the offer because it'd make him feel all icky inside? Your "recruitment process was bulldozed," he tells the woman. If you come to MIT, "unpleasant competition will be unavoidable." But there's a bright side! "Fortunately, you have great offers from two other prestigious institutions. As someone who is fond of you, and as a senior member of the neuroscience community I honestly recommend you to take one of these positions rather than plunge into the hot pan." The woman, who knows a member when she sees one, took a job elsewhere, but the story, which could not have been scripted better if it'd been assigned to Andrea Dworkin, has become public, leaving the senior member sizzling on the hot pan, and MIT, with its unimpressive record of hiring and retaining women scientists, constituting investigative committees and making official statements of distress, etc. It's one to watch. Will MIT have the integrity to punish a man who brings in so much research money? It'll be interesting to follow this one, alongside the Shleifer case at Harvard. |