I want to remind you of dates again. In May 2017, Brian Dear circulated his blog, which fellow experts immediately characterized as a personal attack and harassment against me. In May 2017, I filed my second complaint of sexual harassment with MSU OIE against an associate dean in Lyman Briggs College.

The next month, June 2017, Elizabeth Simmons, then dean of Lyman Briggs College, filed a Research Misconduct Allegation against me based on Brian Dear and C.K. Gunsalus’s harassment tactics.

Let us pause for a moment. In the exquisitely competitive academic job market, Elizabeth Simmons and Michigan State recruited me for a much-desired tenure track position because of my expertise as a historian of gender, science, and technology. My degrees, the prestigious fellowships I had won, articles and essays I had published, my book contract with Harvard University Press — all of those were indicators that I was a vibrant and valued thinker in my field. But then I became a vibrant and valued thinker who filed two complaints of sexual harassment against Simmons’s associate dean.

Simmons did not communicate with me in any way about my conference talk or Brian Dear’s blog, or C.K. Gunsalus’s complaint, before she made this allegation. She did not “discuss them with the researcher [me] for further context and clarification before acting,” which was the recommended best practice for university administrators. This was not coincidental ignorance, but complicit ignorance. This was a bad-faith research misconduct allegation, just as Dear’s blog post and Gunsalus’s complaints were bad-faith harassment tactics.

I can contrast Simmons’s actions with those of Sherman Garnett, the dean of MSU’s James Madison College, where I am jointly appointed. Despite my joint appointment, and my teaching and research responsibilities to Madison College, Simmons did not consult Garnett about Dear’s blog, Gunsalus’s verbal complaints, or making the allegation. Rather, Garnett learned of the misconduct allegation — from me — after Simmons had filed it. In response, Garnett wrote a letter to MSU’s Provost, General Counsel, and the Research Integrity Officer protesting the allegation and emphasizing how problematic MSU’s pursuit of such an allegation was for any scholar working in the humanities or social sciences. (I have not seen this letter, but Garnett read it to me during a long telephone call on August 3, 2017.)

Rather than protecting me, my scholarship, and academic freedom, Elizabeth Simmons and MSU legitimized Dear’s attack against me by using his unvetted personal blog as grounds for a research misconduct allegation — after that same blog had been repeatedly and publicly censured by fellow academics. Simmons capitalized on the opportunity in what seems like a textbook case of retaliation for my sexual harassment complaints.

The misconduct allegation hung over my head for four long months. What could be worse for an assistant professor in her first tenure-track appointment than to be accused of and investigated for a lack of integrity in her scholarship — all based on the blog of a man who didn’t like her expert interpretation? The harms begun by Dear, perpetuated by Gunsalus, and sustained by Simmons operated on multiple levels. The allegation itself, regardless of outcome, carried high potential energy to damage my academic reputation. The allegation robbed me of time in its requirements for responses, documents, evidence — months that should have been used for generative research and writing. The allegation laid the groundwork for the university to censure me, perhaps even terminate my employment.

The Inquiry Process itself was a Kafkaesque nightmare. As one example (among many), the Research Integrity Officer, Jim Pivarnik, refused to share with the Inquiry Panel the letters that four tenured historians wrote on my behalf, yet he quickly passed along to the Inquiry Panel an email from Gunsalus complaining about me — an email itself full of errors and misrepresentations about my work.

In late September 2017, the Inquiry Panel unanimously and strongly cleared my name: “There is no evidence whatsoever that Dr. Rankin’s work in any way commits Misconduct…Rankin drew conclusions from her research with which Dear takes strong issue. That does not make them the product of Misconduct.”

Even now, I’m aware that coming out publicly about this will lead some people to question my scholarship. After her many years as a physicist and administrator, Simmons surely knew that a research misconduct allegation was so serious and toxic that any junior scholar would be stunned or shamed into self-protective silence. Which would make it all the more effective as retaliation.