In the news last night was this little tidbit: George C. Deutsch, the NASA PR guy at the center of the controversy I posted about a few days ago, has resigned. But not, it seems, because of pressure from his boss for his completely inappropriate behavior. No, young George apparently is resigning because of the discovery that his claim to have graduated from Texas A & M was false.
And this discovery was made by a (very anti-Bush) blogger!
More information here, here, here, and here.
This story is interesting on several levels. There’s the angle that (yet again!) the blogosphere beat out the lamestream media at on-the-ground journalism. There’s the removal of a voice of insanity (from a scientist’s or a rationalist’s perspective) from a position of influence at NASA. And finally there’s the troublesome indication that Deutsch was pressured to resign not because of his efforts to get NASA to present science’s results as a “theory” on equal standing with other theories such as “intelligent design", but instead because of a lie on his job application.
Fraud on job applications is almost unbelievably common; I know this on a personal level from decades of hiring experience. And I do not excuse it in the slightest; I think dismissal for job application fraud is not only appropriate, but should be mandatory policy at any employer. But…inappropriate behavior such as that Mr. Deutsch has displayed should also lead to either dismissal or effective correction. And in the case of something so public as Mr. Deutsch’s transgressions, that corrective action should also be made public, even if just for the reason of reassuring the public that the behavior would not be repeated by the PR flack that replaces Mr. Deutsch.
For now, I feel no such assurance. I can but hope that underlying Mr. Deutsch’s resignation is a realization by NASA that his behavior was inappropriate, and for some reason the NASA brass think their realization should be a secret. Doesn’t sound all that likely, does it?
