What exactly happened here?
The world of turtle-based research is not well-known for its scandals, but there’s a first time for everything, one supposes. At an annual meeting of the Herpetologists’ League, a consortium of researchers who study amphibians and reptiles, professor Richard Vogt was targeted for an allegedly scandalous PowerPoint presentation he gave about turtles. The slideshow featured several photographs of researchers handling turtle specimens out in the wild. As one might expect of people working in beaches and coastal shallows, many of the researchers were in bathing suits. A number of the photographs depicted female researchers in bikinis.
That was it. And yet the backlash to the presentation was strong enough that the Herpetologists’ League ended up rescinding a distinguished award it had recently awarded Vogt. The league also committed to change its bylaws to “ensure inappropriate speakers will not be selected in future.” All of this over some anodyne workaday photographs of women in bathing suits. (Indeed, the photos, copies of which The College Fix obtained, were even less revealing when they were displayed—a colleague had surreptitiously censored the pictures prior to Vogt’s presentation, as if pictures of women in bikinis were pornographic material.)
Still more bizarre is a supplementary justification the league gave for rescinding the award: They claimed that Vogt had a history of sexually harassing female colleagues. Maybe this is true and maybe it’s not. But did the league know about it beforehand? If so, why did they give him the award? And if they didn’t know about it beforehand, and only found out about the allegations afterwards, did they rescind the award without any investigation into the claims of harassment?
The whole affair is bizarre and rather inexplicable. The Herpetologists’ League is free to give and rescind any award that it wishes. But if it wishes to retain a modicum of credibility, it should explain why it threw Richard Vogt under the bus under such weird circumstances. A slideshow featuring some female academics in bikinis hardly seems worthy of censorship and censure, and the league’s claim about his past behavior doesn’t really make a lot of sense. Answers should be forthcoming.
MORE: Professor’s award revoked after slideshow featuring photos of researchers in swimsuits
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