Update:
Lawrence Krauss, a world-renowned theoretical physicist who led Arizona State University’s Origins Project for nearly a decade, will not lead the initiative any longer, he announced on Twitter Thursday.
Krauss was accused of sexual misconduct in a February Buzzfeed News story and placed on paid leave by the university in March while it conducted an investigation. The story included allegations of inappropriate comments and behavior from multiple women. Krauss has strongly denied the allegations.
Rachel Leingang, “Renowned ASU professor Lawrence Krauss ousted from post after sex misconduct claims” at Arizona Republic, August 3, 2018
He was founder and director since 2009.
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From Peter Aldhous:
BuzzFeed News has learned that the incident with Hensley is one of many wide-ranging allegations of Krauss’s inappropriate behavior over the last decade — including groping women, ogling and making sexist jokes to undergrads, and telling an employee at Arizona State University, where he is a tenured professor, that he was going to buy her birth control so she didn’t inconvenience him with maternity leave. In response to complaints, two institutions — Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario — have quietly restricted him from their campuses. Our reporting is based on official university documents, emails, and interviews with more than 50 people.
Many of his accusers have requested anonymity, fearing professional or legal retaliation from Krauss, or online abuse from men in the movement who have smeared women for speaking out about other skeptics. A few allegations about Krauss made their way onto skeptic blogs, but were quickly taken down in fear of legal action. So for years, these stories have stayed inside whisper networks in skepticism and physics.
In lengthy emails to BuzzFeed News, Krauss denied all of the accusations against him, calling them “false and misleading defamatory allegations.” When asked why multiple women, over more than a decade, have separately accused him of misconduct, he said the answer was “obvious”: It’s because his provocative ideas have made him famous. More.
UD News (O’Leary for News) takes no position on Larry Krauss’s innocence or guilt; this is for information.
(Note: In 2009, I’d written about Krauss’s presentation at a Canadian science conference. He didn’t like what I said, though it was not even negative. )
See also: Larry Krauss on why it is silly to teach both sides of evolution (2017)
Larry Krauss, though a cosmologist, is mooted as a possible successor to zoologist Dawkins in the defence of Darwin. Thus he may not know that there is a lot of rethinking going on around evolution these days. But what’s Jerry Coyne’s excuse? A reader writes to point out that ambitious faculty who are not much interested in either scholarship or teaching tend to become administrators or controversialists. See below:
Larry Krauss goes after new US Education Secretary Betsy DeVos
Cosmologist Larry Krauss explains a universe from nothing to an astrophysicist
and
Celeb atheists Dawkins and Grayling don’t want to debate apologist Craig because … maybe a reason is now emerging … Larry Krauss! (2011)