* The story of the Cal Tech Astrophysicist who has been suspended because he fell in love with one female graduate student and talked about it with another is worth looking into. I get the sense from the reading that both of the women in question are looking for an explanation for their less than stellar performance.
* Speaking of successful black woman, don’t you love looking through your college alumni magazines or browsing college or university web sites? Both tend to feature very few photos of young, white men. Those who are featured in photos are often shown participating in theater or music activities (not that there’s anything wrong with that) or they’re just one person among many, instead of the main focus of the photo. In contrast, there are always lots and lots of close-up photos of women of varying ethnicities shown engaged in “important” activities or photos of non-white men. Also, you will see pictures of older white men (I suppose as a representation of the past, not the future), often shown in conjunction with a non-white male or female student.
* “Because Christian [the professor] still has a place at Caltech, I feel that I don’t,” Kleiser [the grad student] told BuzzFeed.
Female thinking at its best. They literally cannot stand the sight of those that they despise – she can only be happy if she never has to lay eyes on his disgusting face again. Her personal happiness is much more important than the man’s career or the progress of science. The 125 acre campus of Caltech is not big enough for the two of them. It would be even better if he could be banished from the entire state of California or maybe sent to another planet.
If you read the story, Kleiser entered into a romantic relationship with Christian and used her relationship as an excuse for not doing her work as a grad student (whereupon he fired her) – she figured that if she was already working on her back then she didn’t need to do any actual work. What good is letting your professor shtupp you if you can’t at least get a break from your academic work out of it? But women (like other minorities) do not possess moral agency – they can never sin, only be sinned against by white men.
Tenured at 37 years old, Christian Ott was a rising astrophysics professor at the California Institute of Technology, BuzzFeed News reported.
In September, he was placed on unpaid leave for “unambiguous gender-based harassment” and restricted from stepping foot on campus until the suspension is up in July.
Caltech remains tight-lipped about the incident, noting only that a faculty member was suspended but not identifying Ott by name.
But the BuzzFeed investigation, published Tuesday, shone a light on the scandal and identified the two female graduate students who worked under Ott and brought the harassment complaint to Caltech’s Title IX office.
The allegations revolve around Ott’s romantic feelings toward Io Kleiser, one of the students, and his inappropriate conversations with the other, Sarah Gossan, over the course of nearly two years.
BuzzFeed reported that in 2012, the 22-year-old Kleiser was studying supernovae and conducting research under Ott. When she started struggling to balance her course load with her research responsibilities, Ott began to grow frustrated with Kleiser and told her he was unhappy with the effort she was putting into her research.
“It saddens me that research is coming last ?,” he wrote to her one night in 2013, according to BuzzFeed’s report.
Shortly after, he set up a meeting with her at a coffee shop — where he allegedly fired her, saying that he no longer wanted to work with her and to find another adviser.
Unbeknownst to Kleiser, Ott’s true motive for her dismissal had to do with his romantic feelings for the graduate student. He confided those feelings for Kleiser to another of his graduate students, the 23-year-old Gossan.
Gossan claims that Ott explained to her in a Skype chat that he was in love with Kleiser, according to BuzzFeed.
“The reason he had fired her was because he was concerned she was using her sexual influence over him to not do any work,” Gossan told BuzzFeed.
The site reported that over the course of two years, Gossan says Ott’s comments and behavior to her became progressively more hostile. He began to damage her confidence.
“He slowly but surely made me feel worthless,” she told the publication.
