Fresh Wave of Attacks

        According to Dr Trivers:

On October 8 (2013) Rutgers unilaterally dismissed Dr Amy Jacobson from teaching her signature course on Human Aggression, scheduled for the spring of 2014, a course it had begged her to teach 4 months earlier. Two days later they assigned the course to me, who had never taught such a course before.

Why?  I know a thimble full as much on human aggression as does Dr Jacobson while she receives a spoon full of my salary. I would be forced to divert my mind from what I was intending to concentrate on—solely in order to try to master something that she already knew. If I refused, my salary and job could be seized—for insubordination!

I explained that I knew very little about the details of the subject—the physiology of aggression, endocrinology (hormones), neurophysiology, genetics, early predisposing factors, all major subjects. I might as well have been talking to a deaf man—an economist backed up by a cultural anthropologist—decides what areas of biology I master, am capable of mastering, should have mastered, and will now master? “Ganz quatsch” as we Germans would say—complete nonsense.

Week after week after week—never mind the counter-argument—Rutgers stuck to its narrative, I would teach Human Aggression—or else. The Executive Dean said that human aggression was “related” to my area of expertise, but since everything is related to everything else in this universe, this was not saying much.  I master genetics and genetics is closely related to biochemistry. Does that mean anybody wants to hear me teaching biochemistry? 

Finally fueled by deceit and self-deception and in full flight from reality, a Rutgers attorney says that “The Department of Anthropology assigned the Human Aggression course to Prof. Trivers precisely because of his expertise in this area (emphasis added)” or was this a slip of her tongue? Did she mean to say that I was assigned the course precisely because of my ignorance of this area (thereby inflicting a greater cost)?

When I showed up ready to teach the course but openly criticized them, I was yanked. As is classic with bureaucrats, negative facts about them that are revealed to outsiders are seen as an attack on them, and since from the inside, an act of treason. It is this fierce response that causes us to have laws to protect against retaliation.

Why the latest attack? It is difficult to say but I believe it may have something to do with this same aversion to having negative truth publicly revealed. On April 7, 2013, I posted “A Case of Fraud at Rutgers” which revealed that Rutgers had repeatedly sided with a Professor who was supporting fraud while defaming me as a fraudster. It also wrongly used its rules against violence in what I believe to be a most biased and discriminatory manner so as to force me from campus for 5 months. Since Rutgers refused to release their federally mandated report that showed that everything I had published about the fraud was true (and nothing by my colleague) I released the report myself, as I was allowed to do, and Nature finally retracted—a full 8 years later—a paper published in 2005. For this public disclosure on my part, Rutgers may have chosen to bite back. 

In the latest case, in response to the press and television coverage, the University refuses to comment and releases nothing because this is a “personnel matter” so whom are they protecting, the personnel or themselves? I believe their own record is hardly reassuring. When I was barred from campus in April 2012, my students were told by the undergraduate director that: “Professor Trivers has taken an unexpected leave. In the interests of his privacy, I am afraid that I cannot tell you more than that.” But I did not take a leave of absence, I was barred from campus. To “protect” me, they then say to my students that nothing more can be told them than the lie they have just been told.

As grounds for summarily suspending me, Rutgers claims that I should not have spoken about a “personnel matter” in front of my class. I did not conceptualize it that way. I spoke about what I knew about the subject of human aggression and what I did not, what the University claimed I knew and what was in fact true, how, as a matter of logic, they argued to support their claims and how I had tried to make up for their mistake. I did not mention that I had been threatened with loss of salary if I did not show up, nor that this assignment appeared to be part of a long running vendetta against me, for unknown reasons. 

The University made this a “personnel issue”—and then turned around and said that I have violated their prohibition against discussing “personnel” issues, which prohibition they have created for themselves and does not, in fact, apply to me. Once again the University is free to lie about me—for example, that I am uniquely qualified to teach this course—but I am not allowed to speak the truth on the same subject. We can lie and you must support our lies or else we can fire you for insubordination.

“Incredible”, were it not for the fact that deceit and self-deception are expected to be especially powerful when they are aroused in support of injustice.

One final point.  In order for Rutgers immediately to suspend me requires that it “reasonably believes that the faculty member poses an immediate and serious threat”. Threat to whom and threat to what? Could it be a physical threat? No evidence is given nor available. Threat to self-serving misinformation by the University? Threat to its reputation as a decent and principled institution? And why should exposing university mendacity be grounds for immediate revocation of teaching duties?