[tallandblonde]

(I swear I did a thorough search, and couldn't find anyone else that posted anything similar. Please don't ban me Tuth!)

http://tech.mit.edu/V134/N60/walterlewin...s#comments

Quote:

MIT is cutting ties with retired professor Walter Lewin after determining that the physicist, whose lectures had made him a beloved teacher and minor Internet star, had sexually harassed at least one student online.

The woman was taking one of Lewin’s classes on edX, the online learning platform started by Harvard and MIT.

MIT said Monday that it had launched an investigation immediately after she filed a complaint in October.

MIT officials reviewed “detailed materials” provided by the complainant, who also presented “information about interactions between Lewin and other women online learners,” according to Monday’s announcement. The investigation also included interviews with the complainant and Lewin.

MIT has revoked his title as professor emeritus, Provost Martin A. Schmidt PhD ’88 said.

MIT is also removing Lewin’s lecture videos and other course materials from edX and MIT OpenCourseWare indefinitely, “in the interest of preventing any further inappropriate behavior.”

Schmidt said that MIT’s actions were “part of a process of a complete separation from Walter,” though he also said those actions were “probably the extent of it” given that Lewin had retired.

“Given Dr. Lewin’s long career on our campus and contributions as an educator, taking this step is painful,” Schmidt wrote to MIT’s faculty.

“However, based on my careful review of the findings of the investigation and my conversations with the Physics Department leadership, School Deans, and other faculty leaders, I believe that harassment occurred, that our response is appropriate, and that explaining this matter publicly is necessary.”

Schmidt declined to comment on whether MIT would also investigate Lewin’s past at MIT.

Lewin joined MIT in 1966 and became a full professor in 1974. In the decades that followed he collected award after award for his undergraduate teaching.

Through OpenCourseWare and YouTube, Lewin’s lectures and physics demonstrations have reached millions.

“Professor Lewin delivers his lectures with the panache of Julia Child bringing French cooking to amateurs and the zany theatricality of YouTube’s greatest hits,” The New York Times wrote in 2007. “With his wiry grayish-brown hair, his tortoiseshell glasses and his intensity, Professor Lewin is the iconic brilliant scientist … he is at once larger than life and totally accessible.”

Lewin went on to star in viral videos of him drawing dotted lines on blackboards and swinging on steel balls suspended from the ceiling.

And then in 2013, Lewin helped launch online versions of his classes on edX. Among those who enrolled: the woman who would lodge the sexual harassment complaint this past October.

By Monday evening, at least some of Lewin’s classes had been taken down from edX, MIT OpenCourseWare, and MIT OpenCourseWare’s Youtube channel.

MIT is keeping some of Lewin’s lecture videos available on ocw2.mit.edu until the end of the semester. “We realize that some of you may have been using some materials from the OCW versions of the course as you prepare for your exams,” physics department administrators wrote in an email to students in an introductory physics class.

“Students place tremendous trust in their teachers,” MIT President L. Rafael Reif said in a statement. “Deserving that trust is among our most fundamental obligations. We must take the greatest care that everyone who comes to us for knowledge and instruction, whether in classrooms or online, can count on MIT as a safe and respectful place to learn.”

An email requesting comment, sent to an MIT address that Lewin has previously used in communications with The Tech, could not be delivered Monday.

My thoughts on the matter can be summed up by this comment, although I'm not an MIT student:

Quote:

How is this the appropriate response? Does it serve as appropriate aid to those harmed and as appropriate punishment or rehabilitation for Dr. Lewin? Does it prevent any further harassment in a way that couldn't be done by means other than removing the courses and videos? None of the videos or lectures themselves objectify, discriminate against or harass anyone. This solution seems to only remove an incredibly good and generous source of education for millions of people, while also punishing Lewin by removing his legacy from MIT education. This does not seem to appropriately allocate the consequences and harms many more in the process.

Really a shame that in the age of rape/sexual harassment hysteria that it has come to things like this. Just a bunch of ass covering and overreacting by the University.

[Roosh]

What exactly was the harassment? For all we know, he could have just given her a compliment.

[ElBorrachoInfamoso]

Whatever Lewin did had nothing to do with those OCW lectures.

Anyone who knows physics and watched any of Lewin's lectures knows that the man is a first rate educator. MILLIONS of people will be robbed of the opportunity to learn physics from Lewin's OCW lectures because MIT is overreacting. I hope someone outside of MIT has those lectures archived.

[Dusty]

He probably owns an "offensive" shirt too.

[Kabal]

et tu, MIT?

[tallandblonde]

(12-09-2014 07:43 PM)Roosh Wrote:  

What exactly was the harassment? For all we know, he could have just given her a compliment.

Sadly, in this day and age, looking at a women can even be considered rape.

[StrikeBack]

(12-09-2014 07:43 PM)Roosh Wrote:  

What exactly was the harassment? For all we know, he could have just given her a compliment.

Well, I hope it was "Tits or GTFO"

[polymath]

I know a few folks who went to MIT. Without exception, all are stunned by this. Lewin was a dedicated educator whose videos were his legacy and a gift to the students of the world, and his genius in this regard stands out in a university where many, many otherwise brilliant professors lack communication skills.

[Jevioso]

Just saw videos of the guy on inertia, and the guys a genius.

I hope people raise a fund for him, or start a kick-starter campaign or something and someone backs up his lectures online for people to purchase or something. He probably doesn't need the money, but given the state of our educational system, people like this should be elevated. My God, he said stuff online to girls that they didn't like, and he ended up being perv, who gives a damn, Jack Nicholson does it all the time and he does it in person.

[WanderingSoul]

(12-09-2014 07:43 PM)Roosh Wrote:  

What exactly was the harassment? For all we know, he could have just given her a compliment.

"Love your new avatar btw."

[Shrodax]

(12-09-2014 07:43 PM)Roosh Wrote:  

What exactly was the harassment? For all we know, he could have just given her a compliment.

He probably told an offbeat joke to his class, one that 99% of his students would find funny. But it only takes that one humorless SJW cunt in the class to ruin everything, especially if she isn't doing well in physics because math is haaaaaaaaard.

Watch this video at the 0:37 mark as an example to what I mean:

[Sherman]

To hell with political correctness. Long live Benny Hill.

[ashraf]

guy must have had tons of nerdpusy there over 40 years starting when he was much younger and better looking

[Failing]

Science is less important than a woman's feels. It's over. Attach a trigger warning to the front end of his videos and leave them for the people with strong enough stomachs for science.

[Sherman]

They might have a point. I just watched one of his videos where he demonstrated various cylindrical objects rolling down an inclined plane. I could see where this could emotionally disturb a sensitive young feminist still suffering from the legacy of millions of years of oppression.

[Hades]

As far as I can tell, they haven't pulled any of his lectures from this website ->
http://videolectures.net/walter_h_g_lewin/

I hope to find a direct download of this, have never heard of the guy but if they're this highly rated they're a must for any autodidact.

[MMX2010]

(12-11-2014 05:13 PM)Hades Wrote:  

As far as I can tell, they haven't pulled any of his lectures from this website ->
http://videolectures.net/walter_h_g_lewin/

I hope to find a direct download of this, have never heard of the guy but if they're this highly rated they're a must for any autodidact.

I've only watched the first two of his 1999 lectures "8.01 - Classical Mechanics".

I took AP Physics in High School about 20 years ago, and only took up to Physics 2 in college. I remember most of the basics, because I've tutored high school physics a couple of times.

His lectures are excellent, and I think even a beginner to physics would get a lot out of them, provided their arithmetic and algebra skills were good.

[Roadrunner]

My high school AP physics teacher didn't teach. You taught yourself at home with Walter Lewin and did problems in class. Lewin is brilliant and MIT is making a huge mistake. Idiots.

[HawkWrites]

One more good man brought down by political correctness. I don't see any end in sight and it's a damn shame since the majority of people with the word "Professor" in their title are generally terrible. This guy had some fire in him and could have taught his students quite a bit.

[placer]

Here's another article on the purging of Lewin:

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2091

Quote:

Yesterday I heard the sad news that Prof. Walter Lewin, age 78—perhaps the most celebrated physics teacher in MIT’s history—has been stripped of his emeritus status and barred from campus, and all of his physics lectures removed from OpenCourseWare, because an internal investigation found that he had been sexually harassing students online. I don’t know anything about what happened beyond the terse public announcements, but those who do know tell me that the charges were extremely serious, and that “this wasn’t a borderline case.”

This reminds me of the purges in Orwell's 1984 (modeled after Stalin's purges), where people who lost favor with The Party (Big Brother) are made in to unpersons. All record of their existence was destroyed and everyone is then forced to act like the person never existed:

Orwell Wrote:

The only real clue lay in the words 'refs unpersons', which indicated that Withers was already dead. You could not invariably assume this to be the case when people were arrested. Sometimes they were released and allowed to remain at liberty for as much as a year or two years before being executed. Very occasionally some person whom you had believed dead long since would make a ghostly reappearance at some public trial where he would implicate hundreds of others by his testimony before vanishing, this time for ever. Withers, however, was already an UNPERSON. He did not exist: he had never existed.

[...]

Syme had vanished. A morning came, and he was missing from work: a few thoughtless people commented on his absence. On the next day nobody mentioned him. On the third day Winston went into the vestibule of the Records Department to look at the notice-board. One of the notices carried a printed list of the members of the Chess Committee, of whom Syme had been one. It looked almost exactly as it had looked before--nothing had been crossed out--but it was one name shorter. It was enough. Syme had ceased to exist: he had never existed.

Edit One of the more insightful comments (I added emphasis for speed readers):

Quote:

Amy #144: Sorry for the delay in answering you; I had to attend to my grandfather’s funeral.

You write about tech conferences in which the men engage in “old-fashioned ass-grabbery.” You add: “some of the gropiest, most misogynistic guys I’ve met have been of the shy and nerdy persuasion … In fact I think a shy/nerdy-normed world would be a significantly worse world for women.”

If that’s been your experience, then I understand how it could reasonably have led you to your views. Of course, other women may have had different experiences.

You also say that men in STEM fields—unlike those in the humanities and social sciences—don’t even have the “requisite vocabulary” to discuss sex discrimination, since they haven’t read enough feminist literature. Here I can only speak for myself: I’ve read at least a dozen feminist books, of which my favorite was Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse (I like howls of anguish much more than bureaucratic boilerplate, so in some sense, the more radical the feminist, the better I can relate). I check Feministing, and even radfem blogs like “I Blame the Patriarchy.” And yes, I’ve read many studies and task force reports about gender bias, and about the “privilege” and “entitlement” of the nerdy males that’s keeping women away from science.

Alas, as much as I try to understand other people’s perspectives, the first reference to my “male privilege”—my privilege!—is approximately where I get off the train, because it’s so alien to my actual lived experience.

But I suspect the thought that being a nerdy male might not make me “privileged”—that it might even have put me into one of society’s least privileged classes—is completely alien to your way of seeing things. To have any hope of bridging the gargantuan chasm between us, I’m going to have to reveal something about my life, and it’s going to be embarrassing.

(sigh) Here’s the thing: I spent my formative years—basically, from the age of 12 until my mid-20s—feeling not “entitled,” not “privileged,” but terrified. I was terrified that one of my female classmates would somehow find out that I sexually desired her, and that the instant she did, I would be scorned, laughed at, called a creep and a weirdo, maybe even expelled from school or sent to prison. You can call that my personal psychological problem if you want, but it was strongly reinforced by everything I picked up from my environment: to take one example, the sexual-assault prevention workshops we had to attend regularly as undergrads, with their endless lists of all the forms of human interaction that “might be” sexual harassment or assault, and their refusal, ever, to specify anything that definitely wouldn’t be sexual harassment or assault. I left each of those workshops with enough fresh paranoia and self-hatred to last me through another year.

My recurring fantasy, through this period, was to have been born a woman, or a gay man, or best of all, completely asexual, so that I could simply devote my life to math, like my hero Paul Erdös did. Anything, really, other than the curse of having been born a heterosexual male, which for me, meant being consumed by desires that one couldn’t act on or even admit without running the risk of becoming an objectifier or a stalker or a harasser or some other creature of the darkness.

Of course, I was smart enough to realize that maybe this was silly, maybe I was overanalyzing things. So I scoured the feminist literature for any statement to the effect that my fears were as silly as I hoped they were. But I didn’t find any. On the contrary: I found reams of text about how even the most ordinary male/female interactions are filled with “microaggressions,” and how even the most “enlightened” males—especially the most “enlightened” males, in fact—are filled with hidden entitlement and privilege and a propensity to sexual violence that could burst forth at any moment.

Because of my fears—my fears of being “outed” as a nerdy heterosexual male, and therefore as a potential creep or sex criminal—I had constant suicidal thoughts. As Bertrand Russell wrote of his own adolescence: “I was put off from suicide only by the desire to learn more mathematics.”

At one point, I actually begged a psychiatrist to prescribe drugs that would chemically castrate me (I had researched which ones), because a life of mathematical asceticism was the only future that I could imagine for myself. The psychiatrist refused to prescribe them, but he also couldn’t suggest any alternative: my case genuinely stumped him. As well it might—for in some sense, there was nothing “wrong” with me. In a different social context—for example, that of my great-grandparents in the shtetl—I would have gotten married at an early age and been completely fine. (And after a decade of being coy about it, I suppose I’ve finally revealed the meaning of this blog’s title.)

All this time, I faced constant reminders that the males who didn’t spend months reading and reflecting about feminism and their own shortcomings—even the ones who went to the opposite extreme, who engaged in what you called “good old-fashioned ass-grabbery”—actually had success that way. The same girls who I was terrified would pepper-spray me and call the police if I looked in their direction, often responded to the crudest advances of the most Neanderthal of men by accepting those advances. Yet it was I, the nerd, and not the Neanderthals, who needed to check his privilege and examine his hidden entitlement!

So what happened to break me out of this death-spiral? Did I have an epiphany, where I realized that despite all appearances, it was I, the terrified nerd, who was wallowing in unearned male privilege, while those Neaderthal ass-grabbers were actually, on some deeper level, the compassionate feminists—and therefore, that both of us deserved everything we got?

No, there was no such revelation. All that happened was that I got older, and after years of hard work, I achieved some success in science, and that success boosted my self-confidence (at least now I had something worth living for), and the newfound confidence, besides making me more attractive, also made me able to (for example) ask a woman out, despite not being totally certain that my doing so would pass muster with a committee of radfems chaired by Andrea Dworkin—a prospect that was previously unthinkable to me. This, to my mind, “defiance” of feminism is the main reason why I was able to enjoy a few years of a normal, active dating life, which then led to meeting the woman who I married.

Now, the whole time I was struggling with this, I was also fighting a second battle: to maintain the liberal, enlightened, feminist ideals that I had held since childhood, against a powerful current pulling me away from them. I reminded myself, every day, that no, there’s no conspiracy to make the world a hell for shy male nerds. There are only individual women and men trying to play the cards they’re dealt, and the confluence of their interests sometimes leads to crappy outcomes. No woman “owes” male nerds anything; no woman deserves blame if she prefers the Neanderthals; everyone’s free choice demands respect.

That I managed to climb out of the pit with my feminist beliefs mostly intact, you might call a triumph of abstract reason over experience.

But I hope you now understand why I might feel “only” 97% on board with the program of feminism. I hope you understand why, despite my ironclad commitment to women’s reproductive choice and affirmative action and women’s rights in the developing world and getting girls excited about science, and despite my horror at rape and sexual assault and my compassion for the victims of those heinous crimes, I might react icily to the claim—for which I’ve seen not a shred of statistical evidence—that women are being kept out of science by the privileged, entitled culture of shy male nerds, which is worse than the culture of male doctors or male filmmakers or the males of any other profession. I believe you guys call this sort of thing “blaming the victim.” From my perspective, it serves only to shift blame from the Neanderthals and ass-grabbers onto some of society’s least privileged males, the ones who were themselves victims of bullying and derision, and who acquired enough toxic shame that way for appealing to their shame to be an effective way to manipulate their behavior. As I see it, whenever these nerdy males pull themselves out of the ditch the world has tossed them into, while still maintaining enlightened liberal beliefs, including in the inviolable rights of every woman and man, they don’t deserve blame for whatever feminist shortcomings they might still have. They deserve medals at the White House.

And no, I’m not even suggesting to equate the ~15 years of crippling, life-destroying anxiety I went through with the trauma of a sexual assault victim. The two are incomparable; they’re horrible in different ways. But let me draw your attention to one difference: the number of academics who study problems like the one I had is approximately zero. There are no task forces devoted to it, no campus rallies in support of the sufferers, no therapists or activists to tell you that you’re not alone or it isn’t your fault. There are only therapists and activists to deliver the opposite message: that you are alone and it is your privileged, entitled, male fault.

And with that, I guess I’ve laid my life bare to (along with all my other readers) a total stranger on the Internet who hasn’t even given her full name. That’s how much I care about refuting the implied charge of being a misogynistic pig; that’s how deeply it cuts.

You could respond to this, I guess, by treating me as just another agent of the Patriarchy trying at length to “mansplain away” his privilege. If you do that, then I’ll consider this discussion closed, as neither of us will have anything more to learn from the other. But you seem like an interesting, reasonable person, so I hold out some hope for a human response.

Edit #2 This is the best reply to the above comment:

Quote:

Scott, you had the difficult task of figuring these things out for yourself, as no university is going to teach you.

There is a school of thought that most of what society tells you about male-female relations is wrong. It says that men and women are so different that a man cannot understand women by trying to put his mind in her place. He has to study the human nature of those difference, and learn from masters who have figured it out. And he has to take the “red pill” to symbolically unlearn what he has been taught.

The info is available in books, blogs, and seminars. Some of it is labeled for pick-up artists, and it comes with all sorts of politically incorrect comments. It has its own peculiar jargon and mantras. While some of it may seem manipulative or exploitive, most of it is not, and consists of lessons in flirting skills.

One of the lessons is to identify “indicators of interest”. These are signals from women that many men are completely oblivious to. Men are apt to think, “why doesn’t she just tell me if she likes me”. She might, but most women don’t.

The pick-up artists have no interest in stalking or harassing women with unwanted advances. They believe in approaching the women who show interest.

Another lesson is to have flirtatious conversations or text messages that show interest without seeming creepy. For the shy nerdy male, this is a tricky one. Without some practice or coaching, you will almost always fail.

While much of the material is oriented towards the quick seduction, a lot of it also by people who are firm believers in old-fashioned relationships and marriage, and they insist that many of the techniques are essential to maintaining the spark in a long-term marriage. Wives are happier too, when the husbands understand them better.

You will not learn this stuff thru reputable channels. I would recommend that a shy nerdy 18-year-old boy hire some sort of dating coach, unless he has a dad or brother to teach him. It is one of those things like public speaking that come naturally to some people while terrifying most people, but they can learn with proper training.

[TheWastelander]

I just read Amy's response to that post. She claimed she was raped, which immediately, involuntarily caused me to shout out "LIAR!"

Good job, feminists.

[placer]

(12-30-2014 03:28 AM)TheWastelander Wrote:  

I just read Amy's response to that post.

Amy is a single mother, which means, not only did she ride the cock carousel, she rode the cock carousel and now is attacking betas for being "creepy". Indeed, she states that "I think a shy/nerdy-normed world would be a significantly worse world for women". Red Pill truth: Women are repelled by beta men.

Reading Amy's thoughts is concentrated Red Pill knowledge.

Another bit of Red Pill: What Amy is not saying is that if, say, the father of her child "harassed" her the exact same way those "shy" and "nerdy" guys "harass" her, she would find it sexy, not creepy.

When an bangable single mother told me the father of her child "was not a good person", I laughed out loud. I didn't say it, but it was clear and unspoken between us that she didn't think poorly of him when she was opening her legs and letting him plant his seed inside her.

[placer]

Update: Details on what happened

Let me save everyone a click (emphasis added by me):

Quote:

'We All Felt Trapped'
January 23, 2015
By Carl Straumsheim

Walter H.G. Lewin’s debut as a massive open online course instructor was announced with some fanfare: “Afraid of physics?” a press release asked in January 2013. “Do you hate it? Walter Lewin will make you love physics whether you like it or not.”

That made his MOOCs a good fit for Faïza Harbi, 32, a private English tutor living in Montpellier, France. Harbi spoke openly to Inside Higher Ed but asked that her maiden name be used. She said she decided to take a physics course after struggling with the subject in high school. She was not familiar with the rock star professor, whose more than four decades at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, innovative and hugely popular video lectures and hundreds of scholarly articles had earned him international acclaim.

To connect with other learners in the MOOC, Harbi searched Facebook for groups dedicated to the course but found none, so she created one herself. On Nov. 24, 2013, someone with the profile name Walter Lewin requested to join the group. Believing it to be a parody account, Harbi approved the request and asked for proof. Within minutes, she received an email with a screenshot of her Progress page -- a tool only individual learners and their edX instructor can access (MIT's MOOCs are offered through edX).

Harbi said she was surprised -- not just by the fact that she was communicating with the real Walter Lewin, but also that she was doing well in the course. She takes medications for anxiety and depression, which she told Lewin makes it difficult for her to concentrate. Lewin, Harbi said, told her he would help her regain some self-confidence.

It would take almost a year before Harbi, with the help of MIT’s investigators, said she came to understand that Lewin’s interest in her was not motivated by empathy, and that their first conversations included inappropriate language. Shortly after contacting her, Harbi said, Lewin quickly moved their friendship into uncomfortable territory, and she was pushed to participate in online sexual role-playing and send naked pictures and videos of herself. After about 10 months, Harbi said, she resumed self-mutilating after seven years of not doing so.

The harassment, however, “started day one,” Harbi said. Eventually, she said she discovered she was one of many women, which MIT confirmed.

Harbi last October sent MIT a packet of more than 100 chat logs, emails, pictures, recordings and screenshots to document the harassment against her and other women. She gave Inside Higher Ed permission to view the contents on condition that they not be published and that names of the other women not be disclosed. The various pieces of evidence include nudity and sexually explicit language.

After reviewing the packet, MIT last month announced that an investigation had determined that Lewin, 78, had “engaged in online sexual harassment in violation of MIT policies.” The institution cut ties with Lewin, removing his online courses and lectures from MIT OpenCourseWare and its MOOC platform, MITx, and stripping him of his emeritus title.

Harbi was not named in the announcement -- her identity was disguised as a “learner in one of [Lewin’s] MITx courses” who last October provided “information about interactions between Lewin and other women online learners” -- nor did MIT provide any further details about the case. To confirm her identity, Harbi provided a copy of the letter addressed to her from MIT announcing the results of the investigation. She is now coming forward because she is concerned the case will be forgotten.

“If I as a victim stay anonymous, I will send a negative message to the other victims,” Harbi said in an interview with Inside Higher Ed. “If I hide, how can I ask other victims to come forward?”

'Unprecedented' Legal Area

The Lewin case lacks precedent in higher education, experts on sexual harassment said. As MOOCs exploded onto the higher education scene as recently as 2012, “The Year of the MOOC,” the case took place in largely unexplored legal territory.

MOOCs can enroll hundreds of thousands of people, and -- like any massive online arena -- they offer some sense of anonymity, which can enable harassment among learners on the message boards. Moreover, MOOCs such as Lewin’s have been marketed as access to the most brilliant minds in academe -- superstar professors whose decades of experience and prominence in their fields made them known quantities, not potential predators.

“I would call it an unprecedented area,” said Erin Buzuvis, director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Studies at Western New England University. “There isn’t even a lot of precedent for online harassment in general.”

Sexual harassment of students in face-to-face courses is not unheard-of, however, said Billie Wright Dziech, a professor of English at the University of Cincinnati who explored the issue in the book The Lecherous Professor: Sexual Harassment on Campus, which she co-wrote.

“Many of the cases that I’ve dealt with or known about have been cases where the professor is very popular, very brilliant, very well-received by the academic profession, and that’s one of the reasons why they’re able to get away with a lot of what they do,” said Dziech, who specializes in research on sexual abuse and harassment. MOOCs, she added, could amplify that problem. “It seems to me that there are really serious legal hurdles for institutions that are using this technology.”

Whether MIT could be held liable for not protecting Harbi and the other women is still an unanswered question. MOOC providers differ on whether learners who are not enrolled at institutions eligible for federal financial aid are covered by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which some researchers have warned about. But when it comes to discrimination, legal experts said, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 should apply to anyone who registers for a MOOC.

“Title IX talks in terms of ‘no person’ shall experience discrimination -- not ‘no student,’ ” Buzuvis said. “That broad language creates the possibility for anyone who’s a victim of discrimination [to] potentially have a claim under Title IX.”

Buzuvis, who runs the Title IX Blog, said that, based on the severity of the Lewin case, a lawsuit against MIT could come down to if the institution knew about the harassment and didn’t act to protect learners.

Joel Robbins, a lawyer involved in a 2008 case where a student at Paradise Valley Community College overdosed on cocaine in a faculty member's home, interpreted the law similarly.

“It’s really going to depend on [Lewin] having shown his unsuitability for that job in the past,” Robbins said. “To put someone in a candy store and know they have a propensity for victimizing women ..., I think that’s where the crux of any issue is.”

An MIT spokeswoman said the university handled the case as though Harbi were enrolled at the institution.

“As President [L. Rafael] Reif said, we believe we must take the greatest care that everyone who comes to us for knowledge and instruction, whether in classrooms or online, can count on MIT as a safe and respectful place to learn,” Provost Martin A. Schmidt said in an email. “Our actions did not depend on legal conclusions. They were guided by MIT policies with respect to teacher-learner interactions.”

As MIT pointed out, Lewin, 78, taught his last course on campus in spring 2008 and retired the next year. He has not taught online since his fall 2013 MOOC on classical mechanisms, during which he contacted Harbi.

Inside Higher Ed was unable to contact Lewin or identify a lawyer for him. Many of his social media accounts have been closed, as has his email through the institution. Multiple emails -- one outlining the issues raised in this article -- that were sent to a personal account were not returned. Some web directories list a Walter Lewin in Cambridge, Mass., and Inside Higher Ed called and left several voicemails that were not returned. A Federal Express letter, which the company confirmed was delivered and signed for by someone with the last name Lewin, was sent to the address but received no response. Attempts to reach Lewin through publishers also proved unsuccessful.

The institution’s decision to remove Lewin’s courses from OpenCourseWare, a repository for free course content, was met with frustration from students not familiar with details of the case. MIT professors and administrators elaborated on the decision last week in independent campus newspaper The Tech, saying that not removing the courses “presented a [real] danger to people who would see them and contact [former] Professor Lewin, expecting a student-teacher relationship and getting something that was inappropriate.”

MIT has not been able to remove all trace of Lewin from the internet. The video lectures are still available through other sites that aggregate free course content.

Asked if he believed Lewin is still in communication with the women, Schmidt said “We do not know, but we have closed the communication channels through MIT.” He did not say if the case had been referred to law enforcement, as “disclosing more information regarding our actions would not be appropriate at this time.”

Balancing Privacy, Safety

After talking to a psychiatrist in September 2014 about what she described as a “breakdown,” Harbi decided to collect evidence of Lewin’s behavior to take to MIT. Within five days of searching, Harbi said, she found 10 other women whom Lewin had befriended and contacted on Facebook with inappropriate, sometimes identical messages. Lewin then blocked her from seeing his Facebook friends, she said.

Generally speaking, Harbi said, the women live in countries where speaking out about sexual harassment is taboo -- countries “where the culture is that it is better to actually not speak at all, because you’ll be a disgrace to your family.” Lewin confessed his love for several of them, chat logs show, but often denied those feelings to women who asked about the others.

Schmidt did not say how many women Lewin harassed, nor if any harassment took place while he taught on campus.

“In investigating the complaint and making that announcement, we attempted to balance our commitment to the privacy of the people involved with our commitment to ensuring safe learning environments,” he wrote. He later added that “MIT’s actions with respect to Dr. Lewin and the decision to describe some of those actions publicly were taken in the interest of preventing any further inappropriate behavior.”

What may be most difficult to understand, Harbi said, is why anyone would respond to Lewin’s requests. Harbi, who is originally from Algiers, Algeria, is open about having been sexually assaulted in the past, and said she struggles with abandonment issues. The more she tried to distance herself from Lewin, she said, the more he attempted to contact her through email and social media. Ultimately, Harbi said, she felt forced to “obey.”

“We all felt trapped,” Harbi said.

Dziech said Harbi’s history as a victim of sexual assault was relevant.

“That stays with you all of your life,” Dziech, who this quarter teaches a seminar on child and adolescent abuse, said. “You never get beyond it no matter how much therapy. It’s terrifying, and it raises another problem for all institutions: They can never know the background of the student -- in what way the student is vulnerable.”

MIT last spring surveyed its students about sexual assault, an initiative that drew praise from victims’ rights groups. More than one-third of the student body responded; 17 percent of female students and 5 percent of male students said they had experienced sexual assault. The numbers grew to 35 percent and 14 percent, respectively, when the students were asked about sexual harassment.

The survey was not motivated by the Lewin case, Schmidt said. “The survey was undertaken to understand the extent and effects of sexual misconduct in our community,” he wrote. “The chancellor had already conducted the survey and was already preparing to make the results public when the complaint about Dr. Lewin was received in October.”

Despite the growing calls to address sexual abuse in higher education, Dziech said, the issue of professor-student harassment remains largely unexplored.

“We have never in the academic profession -- never, never -- in a collective way looked at the threat posed by professors,” Dziech said. “We have never been willing to confront whatever is happening on campus.”

[Mekorig]

So, if i understand well, the broad that began this is really crazy, and " came to understand that Lewin’s interest in her was not motivated by empathy, and that their first conversations included inappropriate language" with the help of the MIT investigators?

I smell something fishy going on inside the MIT.

[MMX2010]

I'd smell something fishy, too, if it weren't for the ten-plus women who also came forward. I side with MIT on this one, (for now).