Email from Frank Keil and Dick Aslin
After a Yale Daily News article released on April 28th, Professor Scholl wrote an email to the entire Psychology Department at Yale. He doubled down on his accusations against me. Two days later, on April 30th, Frank Keil and Dick Aslin responded. Their reply is below.
In response to Brian’s 4/28 e-mail to the department, we make three points:
First, the FSRC committee was asked to investigate a complaint made by Sami against Brian and nothing else. It concluded that Brian’s behavior “(1) was substantially inconsistent with University standards; (2) was reckless or intentional; and (3) did Mr. Yousif serious harm.“
The committee was not asked to investigate any complaints against Sami and did not make any conclusions about Sami’s behavior. As part of a fact-finding process, the FSRC did hear complaints about Sami’s behavior from two members of Brian’s lab, but it also clarified “…it was not this panel’s mandate to assess the veracity of these concerns, only to determine whether Professor Scholl responded appropriately and in conformance with University standards. We conclude that he did not.”
Second, when the Psychology Department’s Director of Graduate Studies investigated the allegations by Brian against Sami, it found no grounds for action against Sami. No actual evidence has been presented that Sami engaged in inappropriate behavior in Brian’s lab or that he treated any colleagues differently because of their gender, which seems to be implied by Brian’s repeated mention of gender in his email. In fact, when these accusations were initially made back in 2019, Brian was forced to retract both his claim that this was an issue of "harassment" as well as his implication that this had anything to do with gender.
Third, Brian said, “the panel failed to find the vast majority of the complaint’s claims to be compelling, or to be supported by the evidence.” This is correct but misleading. The eight separate allegations considered by the committee were not determined by Sami, but rather were extracted by the committee from a letter in which Sami made a single, general complaint. That the committee did not support all eight claims does not change the fact that they supported the central claim.
We are not going to further engage in a public back and forth about this case. It is not appropriate. Fully informed about every detail of the case, we continue to support Sami.
For those who want a detailed understanding of what transpired, Sami has written, and we have cosigned, a more extensive description of the facts of the case here.
Sincerely,
Frank Keil and Dick Aslin
Weeks after this email was sent, on May 23rd, 2023, Dick Aslin wrote a blogpost addressing the situation in greater detail. Refer to it if you want additional information.