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Comment by bfkwlfkjf

2 months ago

> It also claims that Jennifer Hudin, the director of the John Searle Center for Social Ontology, where the complainant had been employed as an assistant to Searle, has stated that Searle "has had sexual relationships with his students and others in the past in exchange for academic, monetary or other benefits".

Wiki

But she also claims he "was innocent and falsely accused": https://www.colinmcginn.net/john-searle/

  • This is a curious case of one accused academic writing to a second accused academic about the status of a third accused academic, being published widely by the second of the three accused academics in a post explicitly concerned with allegations of (sexual) misconduct against academics in general.

    I'm very certain that issues of justice are complicated, and that allegations of misconduct are not always correct and that allegations in and of themselves must not be immediately treated as substantiated; yet surely, if it is justice we are interested in, we must be careful to ensure our fact-seeking methods do not not unduly rely on testimonies of those accused to the detriment of all other lines of inquiry.

    I understand in McGinn's case that actual documents of the harassment are available, and I think that if some academics believe they need to push back against allegations of sexual harrassment they consider wrongful, a person with documented harassment is profoundly inappropriate to be spearheading that.