[kbenson]

Ultimately Texas A&M allowed Alonzo to keep her job after an internal investigation could not confirm any wrongdoing.

It's really not that hard to judge at all. They found no wrongdoing, and refust to even release what the purported problematic statements were. Their refusal to do so, and how that affects how you view the situation and whether it was warranted are exactly why it's problematic to behave like this in the first place and should be condemned.

Accusations should include some level of evidence. Public accusations should include some level of public evidence, otherwise what's the difference between slander or libel? If I called up your local police department and told them that harshreality is a pedophile, I wouldn't expect them to take any action other than to possibly quietly investigate if they thought it was credible, and if I supplied evidence, I'd expect them to verify that evidence before and public announcements or arrests, as I suspect you would and anyone would when accused of a heinous crime. To do otherwise is to allow the public to be swayed by innuendo rather than fact.

We should not condone behavior such as this.

[harshreality]

Every investigation of a professor, which fails to result in any official disciplinary action, should be equally condemned? How are universities supposed to investigate allegations then? Allegations are made all the time without administrations making the allegations public. They routinely take "protective" actions like limiting professors' non-critical duties during investigations. Do you condemn all those actions, too?

This is not a criminal investigation. Organizations, even public ones, have wide latitude in how they handle internal investigations as long as they're not making overt public accusations before verifying them.

I'm not saying these kinds of investigations are good. The investigation itself is a punishment. However, administrations have a lot of discretion in future actions, discretion which they can exercise against a professor, without recourse, even when there's no policy violation to cite and punish them for. It's impossible to avoid unofficial punishments, and a punishing investigation process is just another one of those.

I'm also not saying that suspension was a reasonable action to take during this investigation. It sounds extreme for any investigation of comments made by a professor. But I don't know what the allegation was and nobody else is saying what it was. The fact that nobody else is willing to remember on the record what the professor might have said doesn't mean she didn't say anything worth investigating.

[kbenson]

> Every investigation of a professor, which fails to result in any official disciplinary action, should be equally condemned?

Every publicly announced investigation or action that did not include information about the evidence that caused it to be announced that then failed to result in disciplinary action and then refuses to explain what evidence they acted on should be condemned.

> ... Do you condemn all those actions, too?

I think my above clarification of your misunderstanding of my position should address all those questions sufficiently as to my position on them.

Now, all that said, I think I might have conflated UTMB and A&M's actions slightly. I thought A&M announced their investigation and suspension publicly, while it's UTMB that was public in their condemnation of the visiting and speaking professor, and I thought A&M had been more public, when I'm not sure they were in further review.

I think UTMB's actions should be condemned unilaterally. They sent out an email stating they did not afgree with the professor and that they were formally censuring her with no evidence as to why, and still have refused to indicate why.

I think A&M's conduct was not great, but at least somewhat defensible. They took an announcement of formal censure with zero evidence, and then when they followed up and could not get not get UTMB to cooperate with more info suspended her pending additional investigation. They had evidence, in that UTMB's formal censure was itself "evidence" in their eyes, but not great evidence given there were no concrete details other than that. I suspect, as the article alludes, that the environment of petitioning for funding had something to do with their knee-jerk reaction.

That said, I see no reasonable justification for UTMB's actions, where they publicly and formally censured the professor with no evidence given then or since.