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.”
What a sad situation. I googled around and went through some reddit threads and found my way to the final email. It was lengthy and one sided, and got off in the weeds towards the end, but the “ethics” complaints he felt it worthwhile to share were mostly centered around “lying, incompetence, hypocrisy, information hiding, etc.”
They boil down to, “They are taking my meeting space to give to a new professor and they waited until the last minute to tell me and fed me some BS about it,” and “the MechE department won’t be recommending my course for a certain requirement any more, and they didn’t tell me until long after they’d decided.” There were other grievances about the university not making lasting change after George Floyd, not taking his concerns about imminent environmental collapse (or the university’s role in preventing it) seriously, and a last-minute cancellation of a monorail proof of concept he wanted to do between two parking garages.
Honestly, it sounds like he was struggling and felt the weight of the world on his shoulders, and was no longer psychologically equipped to handle intense, but likely common, levels of office politics, academic fiefdoms, and baroque bureaucracy. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear his workplace saw the signs, and simply treated him as difficult but ensconced, an inconvenience to be avoided.
This confirms my suspicion that this was was the end result of a lot of office politics within the university. He apparently missed the “stop publicly criticizing us” memo, and everything after that was just the university forcing him out. It also confirms the common story that a HR is for the company whether is sexual harassment or ethics violations.
I’m still reading tea leaves of course, but while he may well have been completely right about literally everything, I sense that what changed was his tolerance for BS, combined how much the administration valued him.
Regardless, it’s still an absolute shame. Of course the personal tragedy for his family, and then professionally, either this poor guy was railroaded and mistreated, or else he missed a chance for a productive final act in his career.
Either BS tolerance or over optimism.
This sounds like typical higher education bullshit to me. Especially the part about being informed of decisions too late, with bullshit reasoning.
standard practice in corpos too tho
just parasites using institutions for personal circle jerks
Hierarchical systems favor sociopathy.
And don’t favor resilience in function.
They are still needed, so that non-sociopathic humans would never forget how this works. But just like with fire, it shouldn’t be allowed to spread. Or, as we are talking about sociopaths, cockroach infestation is a fitting analogy. One can breed cockroaches, for, I dunno, some food of the future, but never forget they are very pervasive pests.
Most likely he didn’t clearly see what was hitting him till the end, it’s a common thing with various scheming things. So he expressed what he saw on the façade, while it was some social pressure, possibly even intended for suicidal outcome.
I actually have such a story in my life, and it’s interesting that the person I remember saying most evil sh*t to me during that doesn’t seem logical ; I have a suspicion they were trying to evoke a response in me to some unseen pressure, thus actually help. Possibly even relaying words of my actual enemy in rather grotesque way.