Nelson Muntz has the last laugh.

/ Historiann

HA-ha!:

Geoffrey Miller, a psychology professor, has been censured by the University of New Mexico, two months after he sent out a fat-shaming Twitter post that caused an angry Internet uproar.

It may have taken Miller less than a minute to write out this message and hit the “Tweet” button: “Dear obese Ph.D. applicants: if you didn’t have the willpower to stop eating carbs, you won’t have the willpower to do a dissertation #truth.” But the consequences of that tweet will last much longer.

According to a university memo released on Tuesday, Miller — who has tenure at the University of New Mexico and was a visiting professor at New York University this summer — will be required to:

  • Not serve on any committee involving the admission of graduate students to the psychology department for the duration of his time as a faculty member at the university.
  • Work with the faculty co-advisers of the psychology department’s diversity organization to develop a plan for sensitivity training on obesity (for himself to undergo, said a university spokeswoman). The plan must be approved by a co-adviser or by the chair of the department.
  • Be assigned a faculty mentor for three years with whom he will meet on a regular basis to discuss potential problems.
  • Have his work monitored by the chair of the department.
  • Apologize to the department and his colleagues for his behavior.

Miller did not immediately respond to an e-mail seeking comment.

Regular readers may recall that Historiann had her say on this earlier this summer.  (Why is this the summer of tweeting badly?  Seriously, folks:  step away from the “smart”phones!)  It seems appropriate that Miller was sentenced to university bureaucratic hell.  Can anyone imagine being “assigned a faculty mentor for three years with whom he will meet on a regular basis to discuss potential problems?”  Who else is the psychology department punishing that she’d have to take that service assignment?  Bleh.

At least he didn’t tweet any dick pix, so far as we know, but I guess that would fall under the “hav[ing] his work monitored by the chair of the department.”  (Poor department chair–is she being punished, too?)

10 thoughts on “Nelson Muntz has the last laugh.”

  1. Indeed! Can you imagine the hell for the people who have to meet with him to come up with the training, too?

    And he doesn’t have one onerous committee job! I hope he gets three others to take its place.

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  3. Firing was considered either impossible or too much for the crime. Then the limited imagination and limited creativity kicked in. The result: most of the bullets just wont take place.

    Some suggestions: For three years make him type every day 5000 times the following: I am a pig. I should be severely punished for being a dickhead. More text is left as an exercise for the unfortunate reader. By the way: it’s easy to count of sentences type and their correctness. This solution doesn’t punish anyone else.

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  6. Agree with koshembos that almost none of this will actually happen, or if it does, it will be in the most tokenistic way possible that takes the least time for all involved. And as for not serving on admissions committees – how is it punishment to lessen his workload? He should have been made to sit on (but never to chair) every admissions committee and report back to his mentor about how he is applying his newly-learned principles of equality and sensitivity to his work.

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  7. I don’t think this will necessarily mean less cmmee work for him. I think he will probably have earned the everlasting ire of his colleagues, who should not hesitate to give him the most loathsome of service assignments. (Even if they agreed with his orig. tweet, they should all hate him now for the notoriety and scrutiny he’s brought to all of them.)

    So he won’t chair grad studies or sit on the GSC? There’s loads of other scutwork to do.

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  8. Pingback: From Pine View Farm » Blog's archive » Twits on Twitter

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