After The Verge reported last October that Texas Tech University’s biological sciences department was allegedly a hostile environment for female students, the Texas Tech administration launched an official investigation. Although the investigation was completed last spring, the university only publicly released the findings last month. To the dismay of many biology students and faculty, officials essentially exonerated the department of charges of sexism and sexual harassment.

The findings, which many see as whitewashed, dashed many hopes that the biology department at Texas Tech might be turning a corner in its long history of alleged sexist attitudes. The investigation was launched after the department chair, Ronald Chesser, had been caught on video making sexist remarks at a October 2015 retirement party. The party was for Robert Baker, a famed mammalogist whom some students called a “dirty old man” for his alleged decades-long habit of sexually harassing both graduate and undergraduate students. Another faculty member, Lou Densmore, had allegedly hosted sex-themed Christmas parties at his home, which some students felt pressured to attend. But while Chesser was formally suspended from his post for several months during the investigation, last April the department’s several dozen faculty voted two-to-one to reinstate him.

To make matters worse, during a hastily organized meeting with students last May, John Zak, a biologist and associate dean who acted as interim chair after Chesser’s suspension, seemed unaware of the university’s formal procedures for reporting sexual harassment. To the students’ amazement, he reportedly said that they should take complaints either to Chesser, to Densmore (who is currently the graduate advisor), or to Zak himself.

“Many of the graduate students are upset and worried that everything is going to be swept under the rug,” says Marina Fisher-Phelps, a graduate student who just received her PhD from the department this summer and has now left Texas Tech. “We are very angry about this. The biggest problem is that students are afraid to speak up because of repercussions within the department and in our future careers.” A number of current and former biology students told The Verge that they did not cooperate with the investigation, which was carried out by Texas Tech’s Office of General Counsel and its Office of Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO), because they feared retaliation.

The students “are all terrified of the consequences,” one of them said.

A dark, disgusting joke: Megalabia

Last October, The Verge reported on an alleged pattern of sexism and sexual harassment in Texas Tech University’s biological sciences department. The report included details of sexist remarks that were made at a retirement party for the well-known mammalogist Robert Baker in October 2015 (see main text.) Those remarks, captured on video, were the main instigator for an investigation the university subsequently carried out.

But at the time, this publication was unaware of a highly sexist parody scientific paper that was also distributed at the retirement event. The paper was published under the supposed auspices of the “Illusional Papers,” a comic reference to the “Occasional Papers” published by Texas Tech’s Natural Science Research Laboratory (NSRL), to which several biology faculty also belong. The title, “Evolutionary Origin, Natural History, Biogeography, and Phylogenetic Relationships of a New Species of MEGALABIA,” was a crude but elaborate joke about female genitalia, and its text and illustrations riffed on that theme. The paper described new sightings of “Megalabia” — depicted in a drawing as a naked human female with long curly hair and wings—and described the anatomical structure of its supposed genitalia in detail.

The first author of the paper is listed as Robert Baker, with current biology department chair Ronald Chesser as second author, followed by several former biology students as coauthors. The paper was reportedly made available on a table near the entrance to the auditorium, and Robert Bradley — a senior Texas Tech mammalogist and associate chair of the department, who emceed the event — drew the participants’ attention to it and urged them to take copies, according to sources who attended the retirement party.

Bradley did not respond to repeated requests to explain the origins and purpose of the Megalabia paper, and why it was distributed to an audience that included both adults and young children; nor have other university officials responded to repeated questions about it. However, a comment from a pseudonymous editor of the paper, appended to the end of it, notes that it is “a long-lost article that documents the Baker years at their finest.”

As it turns out, the Megalabia paper does help chronicle the long history of sexism among some department students and faculty. According to one of the “coauthors,” Craig Hood, a former Baker graduate student now at Loyola University in New Orleans, the paper was originally prepared in 1982 in what he and others thought at the time was a joke. “I did play a big role in creating it,” Hood admits. But, he adds, “that was a wrong thing to do, and also inappropriate.” Hood also contends that neither Baker nor Chesser were involved in creating the paper, although it clearly had remained in the institutional memory of the biology department for more than three decades. “I heard that some kind of copy of it was going to be there, but I wasn’t part of making that happen,” says Hood, who did not attend the retirement party himself. According to a source familiar with events, the original paper was reproduced at the NSRL and given a new date of October 17th, 2015, the day of the retirement party.

University officials have not responded to numerous requests for comment on the Megalabia paper, nor to questions about whether they were aware of it during their investigation. Chesser, for his part, disavows all responsibility for it. “I was appalled to see my name added to the document,” he says. Perhaps a new, independent investigation could determine exactly who was responsible for its preparation, and why this grossly sexist exhibit was thought fit to hand out to members of Texas Tech’s biology department and their families.

The university’s exoneration of its biology department comes even as new evidence has emerged about ingrained sexist attitudes among some of its faculty, including the distribution of a parody scientific paper at Baker’s retirement party heralding discoveries of a primate dubbed “Megalabia,” a crude reference to female genitalia (see sidebar.)

The Verge’s own investigation into charges of sexism at Texas Tech took place last year. Our inquiry began with allegations that Miguel Pinto, a researcher formerly at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) in Washington, DC, had sexually assaulted a NMNH student. Pinto had done some of his graduate work in Baker’s lab, and had been disciplined in 2008 for sexual misconduct with an undergraduate while there. Zak, who was department chair at that time, let Pinto off with a verbal warning, and took no other action. (The NMNH later banned Pinto from working in its labs, shortly after The Verge’s report appeared. )

As a result of The Verge’s report, which included video excerpts of sexist remarks made at Baker’s retirement party, Texas Tech launched an investigation into three related issues: the allegations of sexism and sexual harassment against Baker; the overall claims of gender bias in the biology department; and the content of the video of Baker’s retirement party.

The university’s investigation almost completely exonerated both Baker and the department. A summary of the findings, posted on the biological sciences department website and attributed to Texas Tech’s president, Lawrence Schovanec, explained why. “The inquiry did not reveal any formal or informal allegations of a sexual nature against Dr. Baker,” the report concludes, “nor did anyone come forward with anecdotal information of inappropriate sexual conduct by Dr. Baker…” As for whether or not there was “an atmosphere of gender bias in the Biology Department,” the inquiry found in the negative other than “a very few remote isolated statements that were addressed at the time they were made..” The report did not elaborate on those episodes, nor did it make any mention of Densmore and his alleged parties.

The investigators did conclude that the remarks at the retirement party — by Chesser and a former Baker graduate student  — were “inappropriate and offensive.” However, the investigators said, they “do not reflect an atmosphere of sexual bias in the Biology Department, nor do they reflect a pattern of inappropriate sexual bias, conduct, or attitudes by either Dr. Baker or the speakers on the video.”

Although students and faculty have known about these conclusions for months, Texas Tech officials only released the findings publicly on August 14th, after being made aware that The Verge planned to follow up on the first story. The university may have absolved the biology department and its faculty of wrongdoing, but as a result, new sources have emerged to testify to the department’s sexist history, as well as to the cavalier attitude with which they say the university has treated student concerns. Moreover, the grossly sexist “Megalabia” parody paper distributed at the retirement party was apparently ignored by the university investigation.

Though Texas Tech says its biology department doesn’t harbor sexist attitudes, plenty of current and former members of the department disagree. On October 29, for example, less than a week after the article’s publication, mammalogist Adam Ferguson, a former graduate student in the department who is now collection manager for mammals at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, posted his own thoughts on his public Facebook page:

“There is not a mammalogist out there that does not know Baker treats female scientists differently than male scientists, despite what he and Chesser say in the article. Everyone at [Texas Tech] sure knew it, including male and female faculty and students, but, we all chose to ignore it or laugh it off.” Ferguson added that he “saw firsthand and spoke with several students about instances of inappropriate behavior, behavior that goes beyond back rubs and awkward hugs, but I chose to do nothing.”

Fisher-Phelps, the outgoing graduate student, describes her own experiences with Baker. “He liked to unnecessarily touch female graduate students, including myself,” she says. “I also saw him do this with female undergraduates. He also liked to talk about women in a sexual way. I was in a meeting with him and he started talking about this female scientist he knew. How gorgeous she was and how if she wore this red dress to a meeting with him, he knew that ‘it was on.’”

Another former graduate student, who asked not to be identified, recalls being at a scientific meeting with Baker and walking by him at one point. “He said, ‘Hello, big tits,’” she says. “He thought that was okay.” On other occasions, she says, Baker, who is married, would ask “When are you going to run away with me?”

This same former student describes the “hugs” that Baker was notorious for giving to both graduate and undergraduate females. “His motive was to press his body firmly against a female student, lingeringly, so he could feel her body more thoroughly. We all knew why he did it. It made women uncomfortable, but what are you going to do? Baker wielded much power in the circle of mammalogy and in the biological sciences department. You did not cross him.”

Baker, in an interview last year, denied all of the allegations concerning him, including charges that he hugged students in an inappropriate way. The Verge reached him again by telephone at his home in Lubbock, 10 days after the university posted the findings of the investigation on the biological sciences website. Baker said that no one at Texas Tech had yet told him that the investigators had exonerated him of wrongdoing. Asked to respond to the new round of allegations, Baker would not confirm nor deny that he had commented on the size of women’s breasts or deliberately pressed women’s bodies to his own. “I don’t know what to say,” he answered. Baker said that he was unaware that he had made women uncomfortable and “never tried to do that.” He insisted that he had “treated all the women equally” and “always tried to look out for them” and help them advance in their careers.

Beyond Baker, there’s also Densmore’s sex-themed Christmas parties, which both students and faculty attended. These allegedly involved exchanges of sex toys and other kinds of erotica. One former student describes the first time she attended. “I had the idea that it would be gifts that were maybe off-color or mildly sexual in a funny way, but it was really, really raunchy,” she says. Another former student says, “At first I felt privileged to be invited, but after a while it became very uncomfortable for me and other women I knew.“ She and others explained that the parties reinforced the sexist culture in the biological sciences department, which also included habitual posting of photos from Hustler, Playboy and other magazines by graduate students in biology halls and labs.

Although three individuals have now told The Verge that they attended the parties, Densmore denies that they took place. “I have had no ‘sex-themed’ parties at my home, nor have I attended any,” he says.

Meanwhile, on November 23rd a group of 16 Texas Tech biology faculty members sent an open letter to this reporter, expressing their unhappiness with the sexist remarks on the video. “The lighthearted portrayal of sexual harassment in this video is appalling and antithetical to our beliefs about how faculty should treat students or any other members of our community,” the faculty wrote. “The fact that the offensive statements were intended as jokes does not reduce their offensiveness.”

In an email accompanying the letter, Sean Rice, an evolutionary biologist who organized its preparation, suggested that more of the department’s 41 faculty members would have signed it but that “some members of the faculty, especially those without tenure, might reasonably feel uneasy about signing a statement of this sort.” (Only one of the biology department’s 11 women signed the letter.)

For its original story, many current and former students and faculty talked to The Verge about the long history of sexism in the biology department. But as the university’s inquiry got under way, it became clear that the investigators would have difficulty getting witnesses to talk to them. Early in the process, Texas Tech’s vice chancellor and general counsel, John Huffaker, contacted me, asking me to encourage my confidential sources to talk to his team. Although I agreed to post this request on my personal blog, I also pointed out that I could not in good conscience directly suggest to sources who feared retaliation that they put themselves in danger. Huffaker’s request is noted in the university’s public statement, along with an ambiguous comment suggesting that no one volunteered to be interviewed.

The email trail of the investigation’s progress raises serious questions about just how hard the investigators really tried to talk to potential witnesses. Although the university’s public statement claims that investigators sent “multiple requests” to “Biology Department faculty, staff, and graduate students to be interviewed as part of the inquiry,” students and faculty told The Verge that the requests were minimal and only came very late in the investigation. Thus on January 27th, Victor Mellinger, Texas Tech’s deputy general counsel, sent an email addressed to biology faculty and staff describing the investigation and asking anyone “who may have relevant information, or who may know someone having such information,” to either contact him or Charlotte Bingham of the university’s EEO Office no later than February 3rd. An identical email from Mellinger did not go out to the department’s graduate students until January 31st,  with the same February 3rd deadline.

The grad students, who are the most important targets and witnesses of alleged sexual harassment, say they were given only three days to come forward. Moreover, students say, this January 31st email from Mellinger was the first time they were told that they could provide information confidentially. Although Mellinger’s email stated that a February 3rd deadline had been set “in order for us to complete the inquiry as quickly as possible,” it did not explain why the investigators were suddenly in such a hurry.  

Nor is there any evidence that the investigators tried to contact former members of the department, including Baker’s students, even though the allegations included episodes that went back many years. Since the investigation was made public on August 14th, The Verge has spoken to several former graduate students, all easily reached at their current institutions. None had heard from investigators. “I was not contacted during the investigation,” said one former Baker student. “I didn’t even know there was one. I don’t recall anyone I know mentioning it either.”

But Huffaker insisted in an email to The Verge that the investigation “was done in an appropriate manner.” Huffaker contested the statement of the students that they were not made “aware of the possibility of talking to” the investigators before January 31st,  insisting that they were “invited to provide information in the fall of 2016, and several comments were received in the fall.” Huffaker declined, however, to make emails or other documentation available that would back up this claim, despite being informed that The Verge was already in possession of a number of emails provided by both students and faculty. Huffaker also declined to answer questions about why former students in the department were not contacted, and questions about the Megalabia paper and whether the investigators had known about it. He did, however, say that his office was still interested in hearing from faculty, staff or students who had “concerns” about the biological sciences department.

By early April, the investigation was formally completed, and the administration presented the results to biology faculty in a meeting on April 6th. According to faculty present at the meeting, the results were similar to those reported in the public statement last week, with one addition: while the faculty were told that there was no evidence of serious misbehavior by Baker, the investigators did report that he was sometimes “too familiar” with female students and hugged them too often.

Several scientists present at the meeting pointed out the investigation wasn’t persuasive, says one faculty member who asked not to be identified. That’s because vulnerable students had not been given clear-cut promises of confidentiality or protection from retaliation — a concern the students themselves have expressed. Even when reassurances were offered, some students say, they were not believed. University officials were evasive when asked if and when the conclusions would be published, raising further doubts that the administration really wanted to get at the truth, say sources in the department.

Days later, the faculty was asked to hold a secret vote on whether Chesser should be reinstated. The results, announced to the faculty on April 12th, were 23-to-13 in favor of reinstatement, and Chesser resumed his duties as chair the following day. This came as a keen disappointment to those who felt that, as one faculty member put it, the video was “disqualifying.” (It also came as a surprise to many students, who found out when they received an email from the department hailing the “Good news!”) But he and some others speculate that many faculty did not want to have to search for a new chair, especially since Chesser had only recently been appointed to the post. In fact, faculty and student sources in the department told The Verge, Chesser’s suspension was actually a sham, as he reportedly continued to sign documents and work from the department chair’s office during most of the time that Zak was supposedly acting as interim chair.

Another faculty member, who asked not to be identified, says that some senior members of the department actively discouraged colleagues from speaking out about the video. “While many felt that the content of the video constituted a damaging statement about our department, others thought it was no big deal and would quickly blow over,” this researcher says.

Brent Lindquist, the dean of Texas Tech’s College of Arts and Sciences, who bore ultimate responsibility for signing off on Chesser’s reinstatement, told The Verge that “the offensive statements in the video do not reflect an atmosphere of sexual bias” in the biology department. Lindquist adds that he “discussed the inappropriateness of certain content in the video with Dr. Chesser to ensure this does not happen again” and that Chesser has since undergone training about discrimination and sexual harassment.

While the faculty were told about the investigation’s conclusions, students in the department were not. A month later, Zak, in response to questions from students, finally called a meeting for May 8th. He gave students a weekend’s notice and scheduled the meeting at the end of the day on a Monday, a time considered inconvenient by many. Nevertheless about 40 students attended. By all accounts it was not a happy occasion. “Dr. Zak made statements that downplayed the seriousness of sexual harassment and even said that sometimes in life we will encounter people with certain behavioral traits, and that we just need to learn to deal with them,” says Fisher-Phelps. She also described Zak’s apparent ignorance of the university’s sexual harassment reporting procedures, and his advice to take complaints to Chesser, Densmore, or himself. (Zak declined to be interviewed for this article, referring queries to the university’s communications manager.)

This account is backed up in detail by a second graduate student who attended the meeting, who asked not to be identified. This student adds that “most people displayed great dismay when they said there were no findings against Baker, that’s such obvious in-your-face bullshit.”

This same source also confirms that Zak did not tell the students about formal procedures in place at the university, such as Title IX of the US education code and the Texas Tech EEO office, that would bypass department faculty. And in an exchange that the students found particularly galling, Zak explained that sexual harassment training would now be required of everyone in the department, and that graduate students might be denied teaching or research assistantships if they failed to take it. But Fisher-Phelps says that when Zak was asked what the penalties would be for faculty who failed to undergo the training, “he laughed and said, well, maybe teach more classes? And laughed again. I and many other students were very upset at this seeming disregard for our concerns.”

Zak’s apparent lack of knowledge about the university’s obligations under Title IX to provide a safe space for students, faculty and employees to report harassment seems very surprising. “It is certainly concerning to hear that someone in a position of authority, leadership, or responsibility at a university would not be well versed in the way a school handles any issue involving sex discrimination, including sexual harassment,” says Anne Hedgepeth, the interim vice president of public policy and government relations for the American Association of University Women (AAUW.)

Hedgepeth adds that for a university leader to make light of sexual harassment is equally worrying. “The idea that sexual harassment or sex discrimination is not a big deal reflects really deep mores in our society, a very persistent environment that we see women scholars have to navigate.”

Sage Carson, project manager of the advocacy network Know Your IX, agrees. “The Department of Education says that employees should be trained about Title IX procedures,” Carson says. “We see an increase in the reporting of incidents when the policy and guidelines are clearly laid out.”

Last fall, while waiting to learn of his fate as department chair, Chesser wrote several letters to his fellow faculty members, apologizing for his comments in the video. Chesser reminded them of his own long and illustrious scientific career, and defended Baker as a major researcher who — as he put it in one letter — never treated his students “with anything but complete respect…” Chesser insisted that he did not intend his presentation in the video to be anything other than a “roast” of his colleague and not a representation of Baker’s own views.

Chesser repeated these sentiments in an email he sent to The Verge on August 14th. “I have been deeply sorry that my comments offended or embarrassed anyone other than Dr. Baker,” he wrote, adding that he “can guarantee it will not happen again.”

But the question remains: If Ronald Chesser’s sexist remarks at the retirement party did not reflect his own views, and if they did not reflect Robert Baker’s views, then whose views did they represent? If Chesser and the university are to be believed, sexism occurred without any sexists in sight. But that doesn’t jibe with the evidence accumulated over the last year, which suggests that  sexism was rife in the Texas Tech biology department, especially among some of its most senior faculty. “Some women did survive the experience, and went on to do great things,” says one former graduate student who spent many years there. “But to a large extent, it was an old boys’ club.”

That might now be changing, as the university recruits younger faculty who are more committed to creating a welcoming environment for all students. The majority of the 16 scientists who signed the open letter criticizing the sexist remarks at Baker’s retirement party are from the biology department’s younger ranks. Unfortunately, however, the senior professors — including Chesser, Densmore, Bradley, Zak, and until recently, Baker (who still exerts considerable power in the field of mammalogy) — are still in charge.

Thus, it seems the university’s investigation was naïve and incompetent at best, and a clumsy attempt at a cover-up at worst. In light of a new round of allegations about sexism in its biology department, perhaps the university will finally sponsor a serious investigation — for example, involving an independent, outside contractor as some other institutions have done — that will really get at the truth. Only then will students and faculty be able to have confidence that Texas Tech is a safe place for men and women alike.

Brian Richmond, a paleoanthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History who has been investigated three times for the same accusation of sexual misconduct, has resigned his post effective December 31st, according to the museum.

For the remainder of Richmond’s time at the museum, he will continue to work offsite, as he has been required to do for the last year, according to a statement from Anne Canty, a spokeswoman for AMNH. He will receive a year of salary as his severance, in keeping with the AMNH policy for tenured curators. The museum has not yet begun the search for his replacement. Richmond did not immediately respond to emails requesting comment.

As of February of this year, Richmond was the principal investigator or co-principal investigator on grants from the National Science Foundation that totaled more than $1 million.

Richmond was the subject of a blockbuster investigation in Science magazine in February, which discussed several accusations against the paleoanthropologist. One of his employees publicly accused him of having sexually assaulted her during the final evening of a meeting on human origins in Florence, Italy. (Richmond claims in the Science article that the sexual contact was consensual.) An initial investigation resulted in him being removed as her supervisor. She later went public with her claims, which spawned a second investigation. This second investigation uncovered three undergraduates who say they’d been groped by Richmond at a research site in Kenya, but the investigation concluded in June 2015 and no action was taken.

A third investigation was opened in the wake of reporting from Science. “The investigation ended with Brian’s resignation,” said Canty, the AMNH spokeswoman, in an interview.

“I have an overwhelming sense of sadness, and some hope,” wrote Bernard Wood, who mentored Richmond for 12 years at George Washington University, in an emailed statement to The Verge. After the accusations surfaced, Wood spoke to a number of current and former GWU students about Richmond’s behavior. He was instrumental in removing Richmond from a post at Koobi Fora Field School in Kenya, which is co-run by GWU and the National Museums of Kenya, last year. Wood wrote of being saddened by the “individual’s alleged behavior” and how it affected young women, particularly one who decided to leave the academy.

Incidents like these are all too common in the sciences; numerous sexual harassment scandals have recently surfaced. Geoff Marcy, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, resigned his position after he was found to have kissed and groped his female students. Jason Lieb, a molecular biologist at the University of Chicago, was said to have made unwanted sexual advances to graduate students; he also resigned. Caltech astronomer Christian Ott was suspended for harassment, a first in the university’s history. Miguel Pinto, a bat researcher, was banned from the Smithsonian after admitting to groping a co-worker in a report by The Verge; Texas Tech is now investigating an alleged decades-long culture of sexual harassment in its biology department, also following a report by The Verge.

However, Wood wrote, he is hopeful that “this episode, which is just one of too many examples of male entitlement, will mark a watershed in all our efforts to make the scientific workplace welcoming to all.”

In June 2011, Angie, a research student at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, was attending a popular Friday evening happy hour at the museum. During the event, she says, another scientist lured her into a hallway on a pretext and then suddenly groped her buttocks. That scientist was Miguel Pinto, a visiting researcher at NMNH and a PhD student at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York. He admits that he did it. But the Smithsonian Institution, which runs NMNH, did little to protect Angie (not her real name) from further encounters with Pinto.

Pinto, widely regarded as a talented mammalogist, had a prior record of misconduct. In 2008, while a biology masters student at Texas Tech University, he was admonished for inappropriate behavior with an undergraduate. His advisor was Robert Baker, a legendary bat researcher. Baker was also, as one current student in the department opines, a legendary “dirty old man.” Before Baker’s retirement last year, that student says, she witnessed him making physical contact with female students, including giving them hugs and backrubs. “He would come into the room and ask for hugs, but just the girls.” The details uncovered by The Verge have now forced the chair of TTU’s biology department, behavioral ecologist Ronald Chesser, to step down pending an investigation of extremely sexist remarks he made at Baker’s retirement party last year, which were caught on video. The inquiry is also examining an alleged decades-long culture of sexism in the department.

To some, what happened to Angie might seem like a minor “boys will be boys” episode. But for Angie, it was a traumatic violation. It left her a nervous wreck, terrified of running into Pinto again at the museum, and looking over her shoulder at every turn. Yet many NMNH personnel insisted on referring to actions that could constitute a sexual assault as a “misunderstanding,” taking Pinto’s word for it that he would never do it again. The Verge’s reporting suggests that many administrators and researchers at the museum may have been blinded by Pinto’s supposed scientific brilliance and chose to minimize what he had done. Over the next several years, Angie was shuffled from office to office in Kafka-esque fashion, leaving her feeling hopeless and despondent. For Angie, the NMNH, which had been such a wonderful place to do research, now felt like a hostile work environment.

Over the past year, numerous sexual harassment scandals have surfaced in the sciences. Geoff Marcy, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, was found guilty of kissing and groping his female students. (Marcy resigned his position when the story broke in BuzzFeed.) Jason Lieb, a molecular biologist at the University of Chicago, was said to have made unwanted sexual advances to graduate students; he also resigned. Caltech astronomer Christian Ott was suspended for harassment, a first in the university’s history. A paleoanthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History, Brian Richmond, was repeatedly investigated for sexual misconduct. Angie’s story is an example of how systemic sexism in the sciences leaves many administrators ill-prepared to deal with victims of sexual misconduct.

All of the administrators involved at the NMNH we contacted have declined to comment, citing confidentiality rules, even though both Angie and Pinto have told their stories publicly. (Angie is using a pseudonym to protect her privacy, to avoid retaliation, and so she will be known for her research and not her status as a sexual assault victim.)

A map of New York state flood zones in the

On the evening of June 3rd, 2011, Angie recalls, she’d gone to the student and staff happy hour. Pinto, whom she didn’t know well, was there, too. They struck up a conversation. After some minutes Pinto asked to borrow her cell phone, saying he wanted to call a friend. They stepped out into the hallway. No one else was around. Angie went to use a nearby restroom. When she returned, she saw that Pinto was accessing the internet on her phone.

She angrily demanded her phone back, she says, whereupon he suddenly grabbed her buttocks. Shocked, she grabbed the phone and ran back into the happy hour. “It was absolutely terrifying to have a near stranger’s hands on my body,” Angie says. “He had lured me into an isolated space. I was overtaken by fear since I had no idea what was going to happen next. When I ran away I didn’t know if he was going to follow me.”

Pinto, in email comments to The Verge, admits the basic facts, including Angie’s assertion that he used the cell phone as a ruse to lure her outside. Pinto claims that he and Angie were “chatting and laughing” and that he received “verbal and physical clues” that she was flirting with him. Once in the hallway, he says, “I got nervous on how to respond to her flirting signals and I grab her behinds.” (English is not Pinto’s native language.) When she rejected his advances, Pinto says, he realized that “I did a bad reading of the situation.” He left the museum “very confused.”

Angie flatly dismisses Pinto’s suggestion that she was flirting with him. “Chatting and laughing is what social events are for,” she says. If he really thought she was flirting, she adds, “why did he feel the need to be dishonest? He could have asked for my phone number [and] asked me to go on a date with him.”

Some female researchers who know Pinto describe him as socially awkward, and, as two of them told The Verge, they felt he was a little “creepy.” A former student at Texas Tech, who knew Pinto there, remarks that “he had a reputation as a man you didn’t want to be cornered by at a party.”

The day after the happy hour, Angie contacted her adviser. (His name is also being withheld to help protect her identity.) The adviser wrote a memo to the museum’s equal employment opportunity (EEO) specialist, Shadella Davis, reporting the allegations. Later he went to her office to discuss the situation. Angie and her adviser thought that these actions constituted an official report on the matter. They would only learn later, they both say, that this was not the case.

On June 7th, Pinto sat down with his own adviser, NMNH mammalogist Kris Helgen, for a counseling session. In a memorandum of the meeting, which both signed the next day, Helgen wrote that Pinto had acknowledged that the episode with Angie had taken place, and “that it resulted from a misunderstanding and misjudgment on his part.” Helgen added that “Miguel gave me his assurance that such an event would never happen again.”

In a written statement to The Verge, Helgen says that he had known Pinto since 2004, when he was still an undergraduate student in Ecuador. “I was not aware of any previous complaints about his behavior.” Helgen says that Pinto did not tell him about the 2008 allegations at Texas Tech, although he cannot now recall whether he asked about prior episodes. (Anne Canty, vice president for communications at the AMNH, told The Verge that the AMNH did not learn of any allegations concerning Pinto while he was a PhD student there, nor did his doctoral supervisors, mammalogists Susan Perkins and Nancy Simmons.)

The encounter with Pinto left Angie badly shaken. Yet her real troubles were just beginning. After a few years mostly away from the museum, while she pursued her formal education, Angie made plans for an extended stay back at the NMNH. But just before a short visit in 2014, she learned, to her horror, that Pinto had been awarded two prestigious postdoctoral fellowships at the NMNH. The fellowships would overlap with the time she was planning to be there.

Angie pleaded with administrators to keep Pinto away from her. They included Mary Sangrey, a coordinator of the NMNH’s visiting students program, and later Tracey Cones, a human resources officer at the museum. “I was freaking out. I ran into Mary Sangrey’s office crying,” she recalls. But Angie says that she immediately started getting the runaround.

Sangrey told her to talk to Shadella Davis, the EEO adviser. After some difficulty she managed to get her on the telephone. Angie says that Davis berated her for not having filed a formal report, but promised to figure out a plan to keep Pinto away from her. This was the first time Angie heard her report wasn’t formal. And when they talked again a few days later, Davis had changed her tune. “She said that because I had never filed a report, she had no obligation to help me.” (Davis, Sangrey, and Cones all declined to comment for this story.)

It turned out that Angie, unknowingly, had not followed the official procedure for filing a complaint. That required her to go in person to a specific office at SI within 45 days of the encounter with Pinto. Both Angie and her adviser say that they were not aware of this rule, and that no one — including Davis in 2011 — ever told them about it.

It turned out that Angie, unknowingly, had not followed the official procedure

At the Smithsonian Institution, which follows federal guidelines for reporting sexual misconduct, “it’s the person who is harassed who has to jump through all the hoops, and the hoops are not always specified,” says Conrad Labandeira, a paleobiologist at the NMNH who emerged as an advocate for Angie during her struggles to be heard by administrators. “Interacting with the administrators was maddening,” Angie says. And the absence of an official complaint would play heavily in what followed.

Over the following months Angie attended several meetings with Sangrey, Cones, and other administrators. One of them included Eric Woodard, head of the Smithsonian’s office of fellowships and internships and a former aide to Hillary Clinton. Angie says that Woodard was dismissive of her concerns, telling her that it could have been worse and repeating Pinto’s assertion that it was all a misunderstanding. Woodard, Angie recalls, pointed to his association with Clinton as evidence that he was pro-woman. Angie says that this meeting “was a disaster. They ganged up on me.” (Woodard declined to comment for this story.)

Angie’s hopes were raised when Sangrey suggested that she go to see Chandra Heilman, the Smithsonian’s ombudsman, to discuss her case. “I expected that Heilman would at least have treated me with respect, if not sympathy,” Angie says. But that meeting went just as badly. “She repeatedly told me what a great scientist Miguel Pinto is,” Angie recalls, something that she had also heard from Sangrey and others. Heilman said that people usually approached her because they had an ongoing problem with misconduct, but that she had “only one incident,” Angie says. And when Heilman mentioned that alcohol had been served at the 2011 happy hour, Angie asked her if that meant Pinto should not be held responsible for his actions. “She refused to tell me why she had brought up the subject of alcohol.” (Heilman declined to comment.)

Up to this point, Angie referred to what had happened to her as “sexual harassment.” But when she realized that no one seemed to be taking her seriously, she decided to look up the legal definition of what Pinto had done. According to U.S. Justice Department guidelines, and to Washington, DC law, making unwanted sexual contact is considered a sexual assault. (In Washington, DC, this is actually called “sexual abuse.”)

Angie says that her treatment by SI and NMNH administrators took a heavy toll. “For over a year, I felt that they were trying to run me out of academia because my right to a safe workplace was a thorn in their sides,” she says. “I cannot overstate how demoralizing this was. Oftentimes I could barely function because I was so despondent. I was left with the impression that because so many people consider me to be worthless, I had no future. My years of hard work as a researcher would amount to nothing.”

But it seemed the administrators eventually realized they had to do something. In a lengthy email dated August 13th, 2014, Sangrey laid out a series of restrictions that could be put on Pinto’s movements in the museum, including specifying certain exits and entrances that he would use. But she also cautioned Angie to “avoid the areas where you would most likely find Miguel.” Sangrey told Angie to “give us a heads up” if she wanted to attend an event where Pinto might be present. And on January 5th, 2015, after Angie told Sangrey that she would be in the museum for most of the following March, Sangrey emailed her that security would be alerted, “so you’re covered.”

But on March 8th, shortly before Angie arrived, Helgen sent an email to Sangrey, Cones, Davis, and others, stressing again that the 2011 episode involved “poor judgement and a mortifying misunderstanding” on Pinto’s part and that he did “not expect that Miguel will again behave unprofessionally.” Helgen added that while he had advised Pinto to avoid contact with Angie, “my understanding from conversations I have had with Tracey Cones is that we cannot restrict what events these two people can and cannot attend at the Smithsonian.”

The following Friday, March 13th, Angie attended another happy hour. She was talking with a friend when suddenly he looked over her shoulder. “Miguel is right behind you,” he said.

Above: The Texas Tech biology building

When Miguel Pinto arrived on the Texas Tech campus from his native Ecuador in the mid–2000s, he was already making a name for himself as a talented mammalogist. At TTU, he began working with Robert Baker, a legendary bat researcher. His star rose quickly.

But Pinto may have been learning about more than just mammalogy. In 2008, Pinto told The Verge, “I was accused of sexual harassment” of an undergraduate student. “I gave her back massages, and grab [sic] her breast until she said stop.” Pinto relates that he met that same day with Baker as well as the biology department chair, who at that time was John Zak, an expert in soil microbes. (Zak is now associate dean for research in TTU’s college of arts and sciences.) “I was verbally warned,” Pinto relates, “and I stay away from the student. I am positive that this incident at TTU was my worst mistake in my life.”

Baker’s own reputation may have given Pinto the impression that his conduct was excusable. According to several sources, Baker was well known for both verbal and physical harassment of female students, often in the guise of supposedly friendly banter and affection. A former student in the department says that she was “warned about [Baker] by other students almost as soon as I started the program.” Baker’s reputation apparently spread far beyond TTU. “My PhD adviser warned me about him back in 1993, before I went to my first scientific conference,” says a senior female mammalogist who works at another institution.

Baker was not alone in creating a sexually inappropriate atmosphere in the biology department, current and former members say. During the 2000s, Lou Densmore, a crocodile expert and also a former department chair, held annual Christmas parties with sexually charged themes, according to two former department members who attended the parties. One of them said that the parties included an exchange of sex toys. “It was really, really raunchy,” this witness says, adding that they felt that “the actions of Densmore and other professors contributed to an atmosphere of sexual harassment” and the feeling that the biology department was “a hostile place for a woman to be.”

In another departmental tradition, two sources told The Verge, some faculty would go out to ogle undergraduate women when the weather turned warm and everyone was wearing fewer clothes. Further, the sources said these faculty members would then return to the department and joke about it openly. According to the sources, Densmore was one of the participants.

Densmore did not respond to requests for comment on these allegations, and Zak did not respond to a request to discuss the 2008 events concerning Pinto.

However, Robert Baker, reached by telephone at his home in Lubbock, Texas said that he did not recall the sexual harassment accusations against Pinto. Baker denied engaging in any inappropriate behavior with students, including giving backrubs. Baker says that it was “not uncommon for people to walk up to me and give me a hug, both males and females. I tried to treat everybody equally and give everybody the same opportunities.” (Another current biology faculty member told The Verge that Baker’s failure to remember the incident concerning Pinto could be due to his age and poor health.)

Several former female students of Baker’s, who asked not to be identified, said that he was an excellent mentor. These students said that Baker never acted inappropriately with them.

While the evidence of Baker’s inappropriate behavior may seem ambiguous, remarks made at his retirement party at the Texas Tech museum clarify both his own apparent attitudes and those of at least some members of the biology faculty. At the party, extremely sexist remarks and images were presented. The Verge has obtained a video of the event.

The first speaker was John Bickham, a graduate student of Baker’s during the 1970s who is now a scientist with the Columbus, Ohio-based Battelle Memorial Institute. Bickham told a series of jokes that he attributed to Baker. In one, involving a play on words, young women athletes are clearly being referred to as “cunts.” Another was about a competition to make up a poem with the word Timbuktu. The winning entry, according to Bickham — who illustrated it with a Powerpoint of couples having sex in a tent — was: “Tim and I a’hunting went/Spied three lovelies in a tent/In the morning wet with dew/I buck’d one and Tim buck’d two.”

The last speaker, before Baker himself, was Ron Chesser, the department chair, who had collaborated with Baker on the health effects of the Chernobyl nuclear accident on animals. Chesser’s Powerpoint presentation was entitled “Things Robert Baker NEVER said.” Sprinkled among sometimes amusing anecdotes were blatantly sexist sayings and images.

One slide featured a photo of a young woman in a crop top, with her abdomen exposed down to low-riding jeans. According to Chesser, Baker never said, “Sure, those are nice, but what is her GPA?” In another, Chesser showed a photo of what appears to be a young female researcher; in this case Baker never said, “She is too young for me.” And in what might be the pièce de résistance, Chesser pointed out that Baker never said, “I wrote the TTU sexual harassment policy.” Chesser added that Baker had written a draft of the policy, “but he misunderstood what was being requested. Robert thought it was a how-to guide.”

“Chesser perfectly sums up Baker,” says one student in the department. Bickham, through a spokesperson at Battelle, declined to be interviewed, and Chesser did not respond to requests for comment. However, on October 6th, shortly after The Verge approached TTU’s communications chief Chris Cook for the university’s reaction to the video, Chesser was forced to step down as department chair, pending an investigation. The interim chair is now John Zak.

In a written statement, Cook said: “A potential issue in the Department of Biological Sciences was recently brought to the attention of university leadership and an inquiry process has been initiated. During this period, the department will operate under an interim chair. There will be no further comment until the inquiry is complete.”

A former student in the department attempted to explain how these sexist behaviors and attitudes were able to persist for so long. “I never really stood up for myself because I just wanted to make it through and not rock the boat and endanger my career,” she says. “I feel real guilt that I didn’t do enough to defend myself and my sex. It’s a shitty and cowardly mindset but a strategy for survival. I am older and braver now.”

In this kind of sexist environment, an instinct for self-preservation is understandable. “The culture and climate of a lab or department must be incredibly toxic that a person thought it was an acceptable idea to take the time and effort to make a Powerpoint of sexist joke highlights,” says Katie Hinde, an anthropologist at Arizona State University who has researched sexual harassment in the sciences, having seen the video. Miguel Pinto spent several years in that “incredibly toxic” environment.

Above: An elephant in the NMNH rotunda

Pinto says that he did not know Angie was there when he walked into the happy hour on March 13th, 2015. “Kris always told me to avoid her,” he says. “I never realize she was in the same room. I never intended to harass or intimidate her, and I will never do.” (Pinto initially answered, on the record, a number of questions posed by The Verge. But later, after he was asked about Robert Baker, he requested that his name and affiliation be removed from this story and he stopped communicating.)

A photo of Pinto, taken by one of Angie’s friends and which The Verge has obtained, shows him standing a few feet behind her, but with his back turned. Angie is convinced that he knew she was there, or that he should have, given all the warnings he had to stay away from her. There is no firm evidence, and there were no interactions between the two. Later that evening, Angie wrote a blistering email to Sangrey and Cones describing what had happened. She demanded a serious plan to insure that she would not encounter Pinto again during her time at the museum.

Cones responded on March 14th that she was “sorry” Angie was “having these experiences” and asked what Angie wanted management to do. (Cones did not respond to Angie’s suggestions until months later.) Sangrey, the same day, wrote a lengthy email expressing surprise that Angie had attended the happy hour. She also claimed — falsely, given her earlier acknowledgement of Angie’s plans to be there during the month of March — that she had not been notified of Angie’s arrival date at the museum until the day of the happy hour.

On March 15th, Helgen pulled Pinto into his office for another conference. In a new memo, Helgen reported Pinto’s statements that he did not know Angie was there. Pinto was given another reminder to adhere to “professional behavior,” and he was again given a copy of the SI’s harassment guidelines.

By this time, Angie says, “I felt there was no hope, either for me personally to be able to work in the museum without having to worry about running into him, or for attitudes and policies to change at the Smithsonian. I experienced periods of despondency that seemed as if they would never end.”

For Angie, things had to get worse before they got better. The following June, when NMNH administrators realized that she would soon be returning, there was another flurry of emails. Brian Huber — then the chair of the paleobiology department, where the happy hours were held — wrote to Angie on June 8th, assuring her that “Miguel will be told he cannot set foot in Paleo again and that this issue will not just go away.”

But by June 19th, Huber had apparently changed his mind. In an email addressed to Angie’s adviser and copied to Sangrey, Cones, and Helgen, he wrote: “Your statement assumes that Miguel Pinto is a sexual predator, but we don’t really know what happened. The fact that [Angie] did not file a report with the security office or police and did not claim that a ‘sexual assault’ occurred until long after their encounter is problematic.” Huber added that “we need to be careful that we do not go too far and violate Miguel Pinto’s rights while at the same time [helping Angie] feel that she should not feel threatened when she is here.” (Huber declined to comment for this story.)

Helgen, in an email to the group the same day, expressed similar concerns. Helgen referred twice to the 2011 episode as a “misunderstanding” and expressed his “very high opinion of Miguel, both in terms of academic background and conduct…”

“The fact that [Angie] did not file a report with the security office or police and did not claim that a ‘sexual assault’ occurred until long after their encounter is problematic.”

Helgen insists that he followed the “institutional guidelines and legal advice” given by museum administrators. Helgen, who stresses that he is speaking only for himself and not the Smithsonian, adds that when, late in 2015, administrators finally decided to toughen their stance concerning Pinto’s movements in the museum, he did not put up any resistance. He “agreed to advise Pinto to fully avoid certain areas of the museums and events” where he might run into Angie. This shift in policy, sources say, is largely attributable to Maureen Kearney, the NMNH’s new associate director for science, whom Angie contacted about her situation after Kearney took over the job in August 2015.

(As for Helgen, he later had his own firsthand experience with the Smithsonian’s procedures: this year he narrowly escaped being fired for allegations that he engaged in research misconduct during an expedition he led in Kenya, after an investigation by The Verge showed that an inquiry into those allegations was deeply flawed.)

But Conrad Labandeira thinks that Helgen may have gone “above and beyond” what he was told by Sangrey and Cones. “Kris was enabled by the intransigence of Mary and Tracey that they were unable to make any allowance or accommodation for [her].”

Labandeira, along with Angie, is also critical of the decision to allow Pinto back into the museum for the postdoctoral fellowships. Helgen insists that there was no choice: “I was advised by NMNH management that this was a confidential matter… that should not have been considered in fellowship reviews.” But Labandeira counters that this was the wrong call. Competition for the fellowships is very stiff, and the candidates’ academic records are closely scrutinized, he says. “We should also be asking about their standing in the community. Other kinds of issues, misconduct, plagiarism, and so forth have to be put on the table. To not do that is a dereliction of a research scientist’s duty.” Labandeira says he doubts Pinto would have received his fellowship if sexual harassment had been considered.

Katie Hinde, the ASU researcher who studies sexual harassment, agrees with this basic principle, though she declined to comment on this specific case. “Science is not just the data and papers, it is also the people and the process,” Hinde says. “Sexual harassment or other sexual misconduct within the research community… constitutes scientific misconduct as well.”

Advocates for sexual misconduct victims say that a key problem is that institutions may be more interested in protecting their reputations than helping victims get justice. That concern can result in an excessive reliance on secrecy and confidentiality, even when the identity of both the accused and accusers are publicly known. This may explain why administrators at the NMNH and Smithsonian declined to comment on the Pinto case, referring to the confidentiality guidelines.

“There’s no escaping what it looks like,” says Janet Stemwedel, chair of philosophy at San Jose State University in California. “That [institutions are] maintaining confidentiality to avoid exposing details of a process that hasn’t been effective, that hasn’t been fair, and that would bring more negative attention if the details were known.” Stemwedel adds that the institutions may think they have good reason to do this, such as avoiding litigation. “But building trust without transparency is hard.”

Even at US universities, which — unlike the Smithsonian — are governed by the somewhat more victim-friendly Title IX of the education code, misconduct victims face “a structure that focuses on compliance rather than doing the right thing,” says Kathryn Clancy, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois and sexual harassment researcher.

Misconduct victims face “a structure that focuses on compliance rather than doing the right thing.”

Sources at the NMNH say that the Pinto case has been a wake-up call for some administrators, including Maureen Kearney. She and other museum officials are reportedly looking for new ways to make sure that the NMNH can go beyond the bureaucratic procedures that have often made the SI’s procedures ineffective and victim unfriendly. But officials refuse to discuss publicly what they might be doing to update their sexual harassment guidelines, saying only that they are constantly reviewing them for improvements.

Meanwhile, The Verge’s investigation has uncovered no evidence that Pinto engaged in sexual misconduct since 2011. Pinto says that he has learned his lesson. “Constantly I question my behavior during the 2008 and 2011 episodes,” he says. “I am extremely grateful for having good friends and colleagues, that gave me a hard time for these actions and also gave me advice to avoid situations that may lead to sexual harassment.” Pinto, who now leads a research group at the National Polytechnic School in Quito, says that his team “includes seven women in different stages of their careers. I am trying to learn from my mistakes.”

How will we know that Pinto and other perpetrators really have reformed? “I don’t think we can be confident that a harasser won’t do it again,” Stemwedel told The Verge. But she thinks the main focus should be on the institutions rather than the individuals. “The environment makes it possible, and dealing with harassers as isolated bad apples does little to change that environment.”

Meanwhile, Angie is trying to get on with her life. She has just started an exciting new graduate program far from the museum. “When I am away from the museum I am often able to keep my previous experiences out of my thoughts,” she says. “But the anger has never gone away because the administrative mishandling of my situation just goes on and on.” All too often, Angie says, she suffers from the headaches and knotted up stomach that have afflicted her for the past five years. And Smithsonian administrators, she adds, are still free “to destroy women’s careers and break their spirits. As long as this is the case, it will be impossible for me to move past this.”

Just a few weeks ago, Angie received a copy of the conclusions of a recent investigation by SI’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) into her complaints that her case had been mishandled.

“The OIG has determined that there were no violations of Smithsonian policies with respect to this matter,” it reads. “We recommend this matter to be closed at this time.”

Correction: The original version of this story mis-identified one of Pinto’s co-advisors. She is Nancy Simmons, not Nancy Sullivan. We regret the error.

Kris Helgen, the star mammalogist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) accused of research misconduct during an expedition in Kenya last year, will keep his job, despite a recommendation from his supervisor that he be fired. But he has been suspended for two weeks without pay — a serious black mark in federal government service — and museum officials have stripped him of his responsibilities as head of its mammal division for a full year.

Helgen says he is “glad” that NMNH director Kirk Johnson decided that the recommendation to terminate him “was not warranted.” (This is his first public statement on the affair since it began in November.) His legal team, however, will now appeal the suspension to officials within the Smithsonian who are “outside of the limited circle of internal museum administrators who have handled the case over the last year,” he says. Today’s ruling was the result of what Helgen calls “a badly managed and damaging investigation” which came after the Smithsonian’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) had already cleared him of the major charges last December.

Johnson’s decision comes despite considerable evidence, reported by The Verge last month, that the investigation into three charges against Helgen was flawed and incomplete. Helgen stood accused of three things: First, that he had copied and pasted the signature of the NMNH’s associate director for science onto a specimen export form without her permission. Second, that he had tried to export specimens of the African wild dog without proper permits from Kenyan authorities. And finally, he was accused of instructing his staff to hide specimens from an employee of the Kenya Wildlife Service. Johnson upheld the first accusation, and part of the second. The third charge was dismissed for lack of evidence.

This decision is the result of a second investigation, following the OIG inquiry that had cleared him. Yet The Verge’s inquiry found that the chief investigator, ornithologist Gary Graves, chair of the museum’s vertebrate zoology department, failed to interview key witnesses to the events in question: the researcher to whom the wild dog samples actually belonged, and a Kenyan colleague who was helping to deal with the necessary permits. Johnson seemingly ignored protests from Helgen and his legal team that these witnesses were key to understanding what had happened.

“There are no grounds for this duration of suspension, or for limiting my duties.”“There are no grounds for this decision of suspension, or for limiting my duties,” Helgen says. Indeed, Helgen says, he and his legal team “presented evidence to the Smithsonian that Dr. Johnson was not an impartial party in this case, but he did not recuse himself from making this decision.” That evidence, which Helgen and his legal team may make public at a later time, was not taken into account, he says.

“It seems that the NMNH administration never actually needed to fire Kris Helgen,” says one museum scientist who asked not to be identified. “Instead, by prolonging the witch-hunt, they ruined his reputation.”

Museum officials declined to comment on the decision, on the grounds that it is a confidential personnel matter. But some NMNH researchers speculated that Johnson, stuck with a botched investigation conducted by one of its senior scientists, had to save face for the institution by disciplining Helgen, even though the evidence for wrongdoing was flimsy.

Helgen will go back to work on September 16th, after his two-week suspension is up. But when he returns, Gary Graves will no longer be his supervisor. Museum officials have decided that Graves, who was scheduled to step down as chair on September 30th, will be relieved of those duties immediately. He will be replaced by NMNH researcher Jon Coddington, effective today. Unlike Graves, Coddington is highly popular in the museum. Museum officials are keeping silent about the reasons for the early changeover, but many NMNH scientists welcome it. “This is a good move,” says one department member (who spoke on the condition of anonymity), because the charges against Helgen sparked controversy and dissent between his supporters and his detractors. “We need someone with experience to guide us through what is going to be a tough period.”