Editor's Note (March 31). The April issue of The Scientist includes an Opinion entitled "A Matter of Conscience" in which Alexander McPherson laid out his objections to sexual harassment training at the University of California at Irvine.
In the meantime McPherson has participated in the training, for reasons given in the update below. The Opinion article follows the update.
My conflict with the University of California at Irvine ceased months ago to be over sexual harassment training. Instead it devolved into a controversy over how the university could use a grant, in my case an R01 from the National Institutes of Health, to compel faculty to comply with an arbitrary administrative edict. In greatly condensed form, this is what happened.
The university, having declared me no longer the principal investigator on my grant, contrived matters so that the grant was threatened by NIH with termination on March 25. I appealed ...
