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.”
I didn’t know Marshall, however I worked for one of the engineering departments at NCSU, and I will state it was the most toxic, hostile work environment I’ve ever been part of. Direct colleagues were mostly great despite being underpaid and overworked.
The professors there have a culture where they feel and act like they are celebrities. I knew of three instances where professors had affairs with their students, divorced their spouses, married said students, and repeated the process over again a few years later. All “distinguished” professors too. Even though I was a sysadmin, one assigned me to transcribe a recording of some lecture he was giving while clearly in a bathtub having something sexual done to him just as a power trip. I reported it, nothing was done, and I received a poor performance evaluation that year despite very good ones years prior. Absolute horrible place to work.
The reason why these systems are put into place is to empower people who had wrongdoing done to them. If they fail to work, those people should use alternative methods to force consequences on them. That lecture recording should have been leaked. It could have been accidentally left somewhere and gotten out.
I was in my early 20’s at the time during the Great Recession. Honestly was afraid there were no options for me if I left that job.
Based on the current response to this incident, it doesn’t seem like a lot would have happened
Yeah it’s survivorship bias. We remember the high-profile cases when things like this blow up, but the odds for that are pretty slim.
text book academia… not just engineering.
profs using classes as stable of free pussy. admins did not do shit.
My grandfather was one of these self-absorbed narcissistic professors who had multiple affairs with students over the years as well. I think academia is just one of those domains that attracts this type of person.
The situation creates opportunities. Just like pedos gravitate to where the kids are.
That last line is absolutely disgusting but true.
I mean, willpower probably kinda leaves the chat when you are put above many young women enthusiastically looking up to you, especially considering how authority affects women, and especially since they are listening to what you have to say.
But! Profs probably should know something about Ulysses and the mast. Or about things you can do, but shouldn’t.
Yeah similar to cathlic clergy… Just no will power and the house won’t enforce the rules.
The society boomers made for us 🤡
I think you’ll find that this kind of thing had been going on for thousands of years before the Boomer generation came around.
can’t hold the dead accountable but we can cut social security from these sex pests ;)
also limp dick excuse to justify their behavior… catholic church has always raped children… why are you crying now 🤡
pathetic.
You’re the one who brought up the Boomers, not me. And I don’t believe the behaviour of the Catholic Church is justified or should be permitted in a modern society—their priests committed secular crimes and should be doing time in prison for it like the rest of the non-clergy. The Vatican’s shielding them is reprehensible and the people in their hierarchy who did so should be charged with aiding-and-abetting. My point was that you can’t blame their centuries-old misbehaviour on a group of people that haven’t even been around for a single century.
(And you say you can’t hold the dead accountable—the Catholics have actually done that before, too. Look up the Cadaver Synod some day when you’re really bored.)
Catholic Church cover is useless without Catholic churches communities enabling it.
Boomers pretend this shit never happened so now I view all Catholic as the trash that they are.
They don’t care, so fuck them.
Wow.
Yes, that seems like a place I would avoid.
If any of these people are still there, I’m sure the N&O would be interested.