Maybe he IS related to Mike

Neil DeGrasse Tyson accused of rape and sexual harassment by four women

I just found out from reading this article that Tyson and I were in grad school at the University of Texas together in the mid 80s. Our paths would not have crossed. I never spent any time on campus except in classes because I was living 200 miles from campus! Even if I had been living in Austin at the time, I might not have run into him. He was working toward a Ph.D, and I was in the business school taking an executive MBA program, so we had no common coursework and studied in completely different buildings. (Not to mention that I was only there on weekends, and he probably studied M-F.)

Even if two people take similar programs at UT, they might not meet unless they have common classes for some reason. UT is monstrous. It has 10,000 grad students and a total enrollment of about 50,000.

The Texas chapter of his life is one he does not like to discuss. (He got his master’s degree in astronomy, but was flunked out as a Ph.D candidate.) Heaven only knows why he chose to go to UT in the first place. He is a native New Yorker and had an undergraduate degree from Harvard, so he might have picked just about any prestigious grad school in the northeast. One wonders why he didn’t go to Columbia in the first place. At any rate, he eventually earned his Ph.D from Columbia in the field of astrophysics.

Anyway – digression over. Things look bad for him, but I hope he is innocent. Like just about everyone else, I really enjoy his TV appearances.

One thought on “Maybe he IS related to Mike

  1. From reading the article it seems like he has two issues:

    1. He probably drinks a bit too much in public settings and gets more loose than he should and in doing so gets too friendly with women who just want a picture. He doesn’t seem to be able to read the situation (or care to) and see that he’s crossing boundaries that they aren’t asking him to.

    2. He needs to stop trying to sleep with the help. Trying to bed your PA is tacky and unfair. That power dynamic does things like force her to show up for wine and cheese at your place when really all she wants to do at the end of the day is go home.

    The only career killer is the rape charge. I just don’t know if I believe that he was such a predator in the mid/early 80s that he was drugging and raping women but only one has come forward. As Cosby has shown us, if you’ve done it once, you’ve done it dozens of times.

    Buzfeed has done some solid investigative work here but it is pretty reckless for them to try to prove an old rape charge by pointing out that he once tried to awkwardly seduce a girl who was working for him. Lastly if he was into drugging women he probably would have spiked her wine yet as of now, her story ends with her leaving after an awkward handshake.

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