Comments

1
Love seeing stuff like this on top of the rape culture espoused by the student body. I suppose there's nothing that can be done since our laws were built by and for men.
2
@ #1. To me it sounds like he is on the way out the door, with career in ruin. That's not nothing. What were you hoping for: Drawn, Hanged and Quartered at noon in Red Square?
3
I feel bad for his current grad students.
4
Thank you for bumping this.
5
This guys a creep. He should have been fired a while ago. UW Why drag your feet and waste more public funds investigating this?
6
It's remarkable that he got tenure several years after the troubling behavior arose....
7
@5,6 this kind of behavior has been going on in academics for a long while. We've been trying to bring things out into the open and come up with solutions. One thing worth noting is that there is no shortage of talented scientists who aren't creeps so there is absolutely no need to keep creeps around.

9
I worked for Katze in 2000. I lasted three months before taking another job to get the heck out of his lab. The guy was an arrogant, misogynistic class A jerk. I never witnessed anything quite as extreme as what's described in the article, but he was belittling, demeaning, condescending, and regularly made his employees cry. Everyone in that lab seemed miserable. I'm not a vindictive person by nature, but it's really satisfying to me to see him getting his comeuppance.
10
He's not alone. There are some creeps among the SOM medicine research faculty, and plenty of administrative types willing to protect them.
11
@3: Ooh yeah, sucks for them.
12
I love showing stories like this to fanboys & fangirls of Neil Degrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, and Christopher Hitchens. They love shouting "SCIENCE!" as if it is some moral good. "Yay! Scientists! Good guys!"
13
Er.

That headline makes it sound like somebody simply hired a sex worker. Which we don't have any problem with, right?

But that's not what happened at all. So fix the headline, Stranger editor-person.
14
I've known Dr. Katze professionally for years. He is not really misogynistic and certainly not racist. He's just an asshole with serious rage issues.

@12
You know what? Fuck you. Science is done by scientists. We are human you know, which means we have all the same faults and virtues everyone else has. But you paint us all with your pissy little hate brush because one scientist is an asshole. Your vomitus above says a whole lot more about you than about us scientists.
15
@12 So.....Bill Nye is a rapist? I guess everyone in your profession is a saint. Unless you are an actual saint because many of them were pedophiles.
16
@9) "I'm not a vindictive person by nature, but..." is kind of like starting a sentence with "I am not really a racist, but..."

Not accusing you of anything, it's just that the qualifier turns your point on its head.
17
@16 Unnecessary comment that adds nothing to the discussion, and no parallels whatsoever with the "I am not really a racist..." comment. The point was obviously that his actions were extreme enough to elicit feelings of vindictiveness in someone not usually prone to them.
18
Speaking as someone who is suing a Canadian university for covering up sexual assault - the real, important story here is that a public university not only a) initiated investigations (yes, after knowing damn well what he was up to for years and years); b) produced reports that were not secret to a few key administrators; and c) they actually provided those reports to the public, most likely through a FOIA request. And they aren't redacted so much as to be useless.

Transparency is important, and the wide cultural acceptance of transparency as a fundamental value is probably the only reason this asshole will lose his job. Because once UW realized that enough outsiders knew about it, they accepted his end as inevitable and began the administrative steps to make it happen.

The academy in both nations is extremely tolerant - nay, encouraging - of serial sexual predators. The main difference can be summed up as such: Canadian universities use public money to shroud, hide, and bully complainants with threats to sue for libel/slander. (This is crazy easy in Canada because they don't actually have free speech.) American universities use public money to pay off complainants. At least in the second scenario, the victims get something and the public has the opportunity to know what's happening.
19
This story is immensely troubling to me. Seven years ago, I was also the victim of a sociopath who is now a lab director at UW Bothell. I've considered coming forward, but this article only reinforces my sense of futility and distrust of the administration. I'm glad these two students are finally getting justice. Parents, protect your kids. UW won't.
20
The UW SOM, UW Medical Center and research labs are full psychopaths who are power hungry, wealth hungry, fame hungry and beyond vindictive. UW is the most dysfunctional place I've ever worked. The pervasive sexual harassment and rigid misogynistic hierarchy is an open joke to anyone in administration. So is the fact that they'll protect abusers at all costs, until there is enough public stink about it.

I always felt very sorry for the young female Med students, knowing the snake pit they were paying money to will treat them so poorly.

Please wait...

Comments are closed.

Commenting on this item is available only to members of the site. You can sign in here or create an account here.


Add a comment
Preview

By posting this comment, you are agreeing to our Terms of Use.