In the late 1980s, Searle, along with other landlords, petitioned Berkeley’s rental board to raise the limits on how much he could charge tenants under the city’s 1980 rent-stabilization ordinance. The rental board refused to consider Searle’s petition and Searle filed suit, charging a violation of due process. In 1990, in what came to be known as the “Searle Decision”, the California Supreme Court upheld Searle’s argument in part and Berkeley changed its rent-control policy, leading to large rent-increases between 1991 and 1994. Searle was reported to see the issue as one of fundamental rights, being quoted as saying “The treatment of landlords in Berkeley is comparable to the treatment of blacks in the South… our rights have been massively violated and we are here to correct that injustice.”
. . .
In March 2017, Searle became the subject of sexual assault allegations. The Los Angeles Times reported: “A new lawsuit alleges that university officials failed to properly respond to complaints that John Searle … sexually assaulted his … research associate last July and cut her pay when she rejected his advances.” The case brought to light several earlier complaints against Searle, on which Berkeley allegedly had failed to act.
The lawsuit, filed in a California court on March 21, 2017, alleged sexual harassment, retaliation, wrongful termination and assault and battery and sought damages both from Searle and from the Regents of the University of California as his employers. It also claims that Jennifer Hudin, the director of the John Searle Center for Social Ontology, where the complainant had been employed as an assistant to Searle, has stated that Searle “has had sexual relationships with his students and others in the past in exchange for academic, monetary or other benefits”. After news of the lawsuit became public, several previous allegations of sexual harassment and assault by Searle were also revealed.
Also he was a philosopher, I guess.
I took several undergrad classes with him in the early 2000s. He would say casually racist things during lectures, and was also a notorious slum lord in Berkeley. His penchant for only taking attractive young women as research assistants was also common knowledge among students (though I wasn’t aware of the SA stuff at the time). He was just sort of icky, and I definitely wasn’t shocked when all this stuff came out. Good riddance, and shame on UC for taking so long to do something about him.
According to my limited experience, every philosophy department seems to have at least one genuine saint and then there’s one guy down the hall who seemed to have picked the discipline so as to investigate how to intellectually justify sleeping with his students.
At least you got to take classes with Hubert Dreyfus, too? (And I hope he doesn’t have skeletons; everyone I know who met him thinks highly of him.)
Yeah, Dreyfus was a delightful little guy. I only had one class with him, but I liked him. It was unfortunate, because I was (and to a lesser extent still am) much more philosophically sympathetic to Searle than to Dreyfus, but Searle was such an obvious piece of shit. The department there was fairly dysfunctional at the time. I ended up going to grad school on the other side of the county and was very pleasantly surprised to find that it wasn’t universal. Most of the faculty at the place I did my PhD were very cool, and there wasn’t anyone (at least that I was aware of) who had the same reputation. All my friends who were women graduate students were happy there (or as happy as anyone can be as a woman in a philosophy grad program), and there was none of the “don’t ask don’t tell” vibe that Berkeley seemed to have.
had to write a paper arguing against one of this guy’s weakass theories and I’ve hated him ever since. pretty validating to find out he was a huge piece of shit
