A professor at the University of Pittsburgh who sued the institution for racial discrimination and retaliation has refiled his suit after a federal judge dismissed his claims.
As we’ve previously reported, Moses Bility, an assistant professor of infectious diseases and microbiology in the university’s School of Public Health, sued the school earlier this year.
Among many claims of racial discrimination, Bility alleged the school’s response to a 2020 paper he published and later withdrew that proposed jade amulets may prevent COVID-19 was discriminatory. (In the process of our previous reporting on the article, Bility accused Retraction Watch of racism.)
According to Bility’s complaint, Pitt officials demanded an investigation of his research, which found he “did not violate any academic integrity standard.” However, at a departmental town hall meeting over Zoom, presenting the investigation’s findings, “students in Defendant Pitt’s School of Public Health called Dr. Bility derogatory names, such as stupid, retarded, unintelligent, etc.” Bility later received two emails “from anonymous individuals who Dr. Bility assumes came from the Defendant Pitt community” that included racial slurs.
Bility also alleges the school denied his application for tenure as retaliation for his complaints of discrimination.
Pitt and two administrators named in the suit, the former and current deans of the School of Public Health, filed a motion to dismiss the case in August. Last month, the judge assigned to the case granted that motion, but allowed Bility to update and refile his complaint. He did so earlier this month.
In her opinion, Judge Marilyn J. Horan wrote that Bility had not established that the majority of the claimed discriminatory acts were connected to his race.
Judge Horan wrote that Bility’s allegations the school denied his application for tenure as retaliation was “conclusory,” and “not enough to suggest that there is a causal relationship between his formal complaints about racial discrimination and the denial of his tenure.” She wrote:
The substantial passage of time between his formal discrimination complaints and the tenure decisions does not support or even suggest that any causal connection existed between the alleged protected activity and the tenure decision.
In response to our request for comment, Bility’s lawyer, Steven O’Hanlon of the firm O’Hanlon Schwartz, pointed us to the updated complaint Bility filed on November 8. The new complaint alleges Pitt informed him his employment will end in August 2024.
Pitt’s lawyer Jonathan Marcus, of the firm Marcus & Shapira (no connection to Retraction Watch co-founder Adam Marcus), declined to comment.
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All you need to understand about this case is in here: https://retractionwatch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Gmail-STOTEN-paper.pdf
OMG, I didn’t expect him to bring up racism so early in the process, when the original email from Retraction Watch had simply asked him to confirm his authorship! Wow…
How did he land a faculty position? This puzzles me. A lot.
The linked revised complaint gives interesting context.
In Bility’s complaint he doubles down on his novel ideas that COVID 19 “was predominantly mediated by serpentinization-driven magnetic catalysis of aberrant chiral biomolecules (including the SARS-CoV-2).”
He is aggrieved that his novel ideas published in STOTEN were treated less favorably than those of Alan Cooper and 30 others who documented a short-term reversal of the magnetic field 42,000 years ago and then went on to explain that that led to smart Sapians moving into caves to escape the cosmic rays where they learned to paint but the dumb Neandertals didn’t know better and died out (Cooper et al. 2021 ‘A global environmental crises 42,000 years ago’, Science) You can’t make this stuff up. Whereas Bility asked STOTEN to withdraw his article,
Cooper et al’s novel explanations of how it all went down remain available in Science (along with withering rebukes). Not clear what the court is supposed to do with all this.
This affair emphasizes why erasing retracted articles or in this case, articles withdrawn following online publication (what’s the difference?) is a bad practice except for narrow exceptions around privacy violations. The article is question can no longer be read.
It does sound like Bility has a legitimate grievance with what seems to have been a shallow university police investigation into harassing emails.
The affair also gives cautionary tale about reporting research integrity investigations or the like in a public zoom -type forum – have a moderator to suppress untoward comments.