Popular tech educator died in his office within hours of claiming retaliation for filing NCSU ethics reports.

The article has full details, excerpts below

The week before Thanksgiving, Marshall Brain sent a final email to his colleagues at North Carolina State University. “I have just been through one of the most demoralizing, depressing, humiliating, unjust processes possible with the university,” wrote the founder of HowStuffWorks.com and director of NC State’s Engineering Entrepreneurs Program. Hours later, campus police found that Brain had died by suicide.

Marshall David Brain II established HowStuffWorks.com in 1998 as a personal project to explain technical topics to general audiences. The website grew into a major success that Discovery Communications acquired for $250 million in 2007. He later expanded his educational reach through books like The Engineering Book and television shows on National Geographic Channel […]

Brain was also well-known in futurist and transhumanist circles. In 2003, his “Robotic Nation” essay, published freely on the web, predicted that widespread automation and robotics would cause a massive labor crisis by 2050, warning that up to half of American jobs could be eliminated, leading to unprecedented unemployment and social upheaval. […]

At 4:29 am—just two and a half hours before he was discovered dead in his office, Brain sent a final email, obtained by Ars Technica, to over 30 recipients inside and outside the university. In the detailed letter, Brain disputed an announcement made by his boss, Stephen Markham, executive director of NC State’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship program. Markham had told staff Brain would retire effective December 31, 2025. Brain wrote that he had instead been terminated on October 29 and was forced into retirement as a face-saving option.

The termination followed Brain’s filing of ethics complaints through the university’s EthicsPoint system about an employee at the university’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The complaints stemmed from an August dispute over repurposing the Engineering Entrepreneurs Program meeting space.

“What got us to this point? The short answer is that I witnessed wrongdoing on campus, and I tried to report it,” Brain wrote in his email. “What came back was a sickening nuclear bomb of retaliation the likes of which could not be believed,” Brain wrote in the email. He stated that the accused person “excommunicated me from my department for reporting my concerns to her.”

In his email, Brain wrote that the school’s head of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering later informed him the department would stop recommending students for Brain’s Engineering Entrepreneurs Program. According to Brain’s account, this led to disciplinary action against Brain for “unacceptable behavior.”

“My career has been destroyed by multiple administrators at NCSU who united together and completely ignored the EthicsPoint System and its promises to employees,” Brain wrote. “I did what the University told me to do, and then these administrators ruined my life for it.”

[…] Dror Baron, an NCSU professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, wrote on X, “A professor I know died following various investigations. I know the people mentioned here, and call for a transparent and independent investigation.”

So far, that investigation has not been forthcoming. University spokesperson Mick Kulikowski declined to comment to The Technician about Brain’s death or the allegations. To date, the university has not issued a public statement about Brain’s death.

Barry and Kashani expressed disappointment in the university’s lack of public response. “It’s been six days now,” Kashani said at the time to the school newspaper. “There hasn’t been any acknowledgment of mistakes that were made, systems that failed, no resignations, not even a call to celebrate Marshall’s achievements.”

  • slaacaa@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1591·
    23 days ago

    Ok, so this might be controversial, but in these situations I definitely think the people that drove him to this situation should be investigated (and if needed, held accountable) by the police.

    We put this enormous personal responsibility on everybody, that they should be able to manage anything that life throws at them, and give a free pass to bullies to hurt and destroy others, instead of realizing some people have more fragile souls and less resilience. We don’t need to turn our lives upside down to protect them, but at least we could make sure you can’t go around hurting them without repercussions.

    If we want to treat mental health as seriously as physical health, then why is this accepted? A seemingly big hearted person, driven to suicide by the organizational politics of a few more savvy individuals. How is this any different, then the strong taking something from the weak, or pushing them off a cliff?

    • RubberDuck@lemmy.worldEnglish
      321·
      22 days ago

      Anyone that finds your take controversial, I would consider insane.

      More specifically… the school on paper also agrees with you. They rolled out a whole system to make sure these things go well for employees. There has just never been actually implemented and now we see the result.

      So the systems setup for this need to be more than lip service for the brochure or “thoughts and prayers”. And yes this requires an investigation as this could definitely rise to negligent homicide or something.

      • futatorius@lemm.eeEnglish
        12·
        22 days ago

        There are ethics and whistleblowing policies and procedures in any large organization. Retaliation is still sickeningly common. I’ve seen others in my organization report bullying and ethics violations and still get driven out. Organizations are shit at policing themselves.

    • Phoenixz@lemmy.caEnglish
      192·
      22 days ago

      Nah, the university will just say they’ll investigate something something, do nothing really, and a year or two from now, when most have forgotten, proclaim nobody did anything wrong, and that will be it.

      • VerticaGG@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        1·
        21 days ago

        Tl;dr at end

        Barbarism We are (indeed) no more evovled or “civilized” than australiopithicus or cro-magnons, nor the marauding vikings.

        Tribalism Im sick of the cop-out using this word too.

        So yeah, signal boost to Andrewism (a channel name which is roughly about rejecting isms/be your own ism; this one helps articulate where I’m coming from about why tribalism gets a bad rep.)

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0_w87J9Dj0

        We in the modern age operate under the dangerous misconception regarding our heritage. If one should ask the average citizen whether or not they believe humans are more evolved than our ancient ancestors they will more often than not express the belief that we are indeed far, far superior.

        Surely we are more sophisticated and more capable of reason than the hunter gatherers of 13,000 BC. More civilized than the marauding Vikings of 1,000 years ago. We imagine these peoples as ignorant, primitive, barbaric. “wE aRe nOt tHoSe pEoPlEs.”

        In fact Homo sapiens–modern humans–share an inherited gene pool with the earliest hominids like australopithecus who lived 2.5 million years ago. We possess no significant physiological differences than Cro-Magnon or the Neanderthals. Nor does evidence suggest our tendencies toward the barbaric have lessened over time.

        On the contrary, present day humans are capable of the same self destructive behavior, the same crimes against humanity, the same violent power struggles as our ancestors. We appear to be doomed by our DNA to repeat the same destructive behaviors our forebears have repeated for millennia. If any thing our problem solving skills have actually diminished with the advent of technology and our ubiquitous modern conveniences.

        And yet, despite our predisposition toward fear-driven hostility, toward what we anachronistically term ‘primitive’ behavior another instinct is just as firmly encoded in our makeup. We are capable–as our ancestors were–of incredible, breathtaking acts of kindness.

        Every hour of every day a man risks his life at a moment’s notice to save another. Forget for a moment the belligerent, benevolent billionaires who grant the unfortunate a crumb of cost-free cake.

        I speak of pure acts of selflessness. The mother who rushes into the street to save a child from a speeding vehicle. The person who runs into a burning building to reach a family trapped on an upper story. The man who can barely swim who dives into a lake to rescue a drowning stranger.

        Such actions, such moments, such unconscious selfless decisions define what it is to be human. Daniel Ash

        Tl;dr: The root cause analysis into the violence, inequity and needless sufferung results in the recognition of Class War: That ruling elites in this modern NeoColonial Imperialist Era have shaped Fear Propaganda Campaigns to divide the working class (modern day: anyone not a C-level Executive Officer) into atomization. A wonderful example is the Prohibition in the USA exacerbating and profit / acquisition of political capital by dividing the not-so-white americans from the white-white americans. Preceeded by anti-chinese propaganda by proxy of conflation with opiate usage and anti-black (dock workers of 1910’s), and followed by the cannabis prohibition.

        All of these have economic roots, as do things we call “natural” such as the nuclear (imperial) family, and the conflation and dyaditic flattening of gender such that working class Men alone were afforded a wage, to then take a wife to subjugate and make up the economic difference with unpaid domestic labor; an arrangement which is far from universal or pre-ordained.

        Root causes are not easily tl:dr’d