Dear Gep-ed colleagues, I am writing to let you know about an open letter released yesterday calling on the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to adopt a strong, enforceable policy to address harassment, which I helped to lead together with other fellows of the AAAS Leshner Leadership Institute for Public Engagement with Science (I am part of a cohort of 15 climate scientists selected in 2016 for this public engagement fellowship). Our letter is open for anyone to sign on in support of at https://sites.google.com/view/timesupaaas <https://sites.google.com/view/timesupaaas> — you can find the full text there, as well as the list of the Leshner Fellow signatories and the additional 400+ people, including more than 40 elected Fellows of AAAS, who have added their names thus far.
As we detail in our letter, the group of Leshner fellows is calling on AAAS to stop honoring individuals who engage in behavior that harms, degrades, and discriminates, up to and including revoking previous honors, awards, and titles. This behavior includes sexual and gender harassment as well as other actions such as bullying and discrimination that hinder the ability to promote a diverse and inclusive scientific community. We further suggest in the letter some criteria that we think are necessary for an effective, transparent policy, and urge AAAS to apply such a policy to all fellows and honorees, including ourselves and future Leshner cohorts. AAAS is a major institution in S&T policy, including environmental policy, so their actions on this issue are critically important for our field of global environmental politics. (In particular, they sponsor the well-known and highly-regarded Science & Technology Policy Fellows program). Our actions in this area also send a strong signal to our students as well as our colleagues. I hope that some of you who are part of this list might consider signing on. If you have any questions or comments, please do get in touch. Best, Noelle --------------------------------------------------- Noelle Eckley Selin Associate Professor Institute for Data, Systems and Society and Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences Massachusetts Institute of Technology 77 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02139-4307 USA +1-617-324-2592 [email protected] http://mit.edu/selingroup **Fall 2018: Hans Fischer Senior Fellow, Technical University of Munich** -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "gep-ed" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
