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.
If any of these people are still there, I’m sure the N&O would be interested.
sad story. it’s emblematic of a mentality that is all too common in “ivory tower” positions
whether you work for a university or a news agency or a government organizations, etc. everyone ends up self censoring because they realize that rocking the boat is bad for your personal interests. after working so hard to get into this little elite club, you don’t want to jeopardize your position. your identity and sense of self worth is tied up with it
the few that end up trying get quickly chewed up and spit out by the whole.
it’s essentially group think and self censorship. too bad this guy killed himself instead of trying to move forward in his life with another avenue.
I can’t imagine how frustrated he was, but it just shows you how bad depression can get. He had hundreds of millions of dollars and could do basically anything he wanted. Start his own program, buy a little island, anything. And he was so upset and depressed he killed himself.
Yeah, he could have taken the “retirement,” and started a non-profit doing whatever his area of interest is in, while fighting a lawsuit against NCSU around his allegations.
He had so much potential, but I think you nailed it perfectly here:
our identity and sense of self worth is tied up with it
He was likely at a point where he couldn’t see what was right in front of him because he was so tied up with his position. And that’s often how people in distress work, they literally cannot conceive of anything outside of their problem and they get so wrapped up in it until they either end it or get help.
I’m really supportive into psychedelic research because I hear it can help you see other possibilities, if even for a small moment, and that glimmer of hope can help people get out of their crippling situation. I hope NCSU pays for this, and I hope we can make more progress on mental health research so we can prevent similar things in the future.
Ok, so this might be controversial, but in these situations I definitely think the people that drove him to this situation should be investigated (and if needed, held accountable) by the police.
We put this enormous personal responsibility on everybody, that they should be able to manage anything that life throws at them, and give a free pass to bullies to hurt and destroy others, instead of realizing some people have more fragile souls and less resilience. We don’t need to turn our lives upside down to protect them, but at least we could make sure you can’t go around hurting them without repercussions.
If we want to treat mental health as seriously as physical health, then why is this accepted? A seemingly big hearted person, driven to suicide by the organizational politics of a few more savvy individuals. How is this any different, then the strong taking something from the weak, or pushing them off a cliff?
deleted by creator
Tl;dr at end
Barbarism We are (indeed) no more evovled or “civilized” than australiopithicus or cro-magnons, nor the marauding vikings.
Tribalism Im sick of the cop-out using this word too.
So yeah, signal boost to Andrewism (a channel name which is roughly about rejecting isms/be your own ism; this one helps articulate where I’m coming from about why tribalism gets a bad rep.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0_w87J9Dj0
We in the modern age operate under the dangerous misconception regarding our heritage. If one should ask the average citizen whether or not they believe humans are more evolved than our ancient ancestors they will more often than not express the belief that we are indeed far, far superior.
Surely we are more sophisticated and more capable of reason than the hunter gatherers of 13,000 BC. More civilized than the marauding Vikings of 1,000 years ago. We imagine these peoples as ignorant, primitive, barbaric. “wE aRe nOt tHoSe pEoPlEs.”
In fact Homo sapiens–modern humans–share an inherited gene pool with the earliest hominids like australopithecus who lived 2.5 million years ago. We possess no significant physiological differences than Cro-Magnon or the Neanderthals. Nor does evidence suggest our tendencies toward the barbaric have lessened over time.
On the contrary, present day humans are capable of the same self destructive behavior, the same crimes against humanity, the same violent power struggles as our ancestors. We appear to be doomed by our DNA to repeat the same destructive behaviors our forebears have repeated for millennia. If any thing our problem solving skills have actually diminished with the advent of technology and our ubiquitous modern conveniences.
And yet, despite our predisposition toward fear-driven hostility, toward what we anachronistically term ‘primitive’ behavior another instinct is just as firmly encoded in our makeup. We are capable–as our ancestors were–of incredible, breathtaking acts of kindness.
Every hour of every day a man risks his life at a moment’s notice to save another. Forget for a moment the belligerent, benevolent billionaires who grant the unfortunate a crumb of cost-free cake.
I speak of pure acts of selflessness. The mother who rushes into the street to save a child from a speeding vehicle. The person who runs into a burning building to reach a family trapped on an upper story. The man who can barely swim who dives into a lake to rescue a drowning stranger.
Such actions, such moments, such unconscious selfless decisions define what it is to be human. Daniel Ash
Tl;dr: The root cause analysis into the violence, inequity and needless sufferung results in the recognition of Class War: That ruling elites in this modern NeoColonial Imperialist Era have shaped Fear Propaganda Campaigns to divide the working class (modern day: anyone not a C-level Executive Officer) into atomization. A wonderful example is the Prohibition in the USA exacerbating and profit / acquisition of political capital by dividing the not-so-white americans from the white-white americans. Preceeded by anti-chinese propaganda by proxy of conflation with opiate usage and anti-black (dock workers of 1910’s), and followed by the cannabis prohibition.
All of these have economic roots, as do things we call “natural” such as the nuclear (imperial) family, and the conflation and dyaditic flattening of gender such that working class Men alone were afforded a wage, to then take a wife to subjugate and make up the economic difference with unpaid domestic labor; an arrangement which is far from universal or pre-ordained.
Root causes are not easily tl:dr’d
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.
Dr. Steve Markham Executive Director, NC State Innovation and Entrepreneurship
919.515.5592
“Hello, I’m calling to ask about the status of an independent investigation into the circumstances surrounding Marshall Brain’s death and the allegations he raised prior to it. Can you confirm if such an investigation has been initiated and, if not, explain why?”
Stephen Markham
Dude went to BYU for undergrad and graduate degrees. That might not tell you everything you need to know, but it should, speaking as someone who worked at a Mormon-dominated college in Utah.
Wow, so sad. He engineered such a huge contribution to humanity thru HowStuffWorks, allowing regular folks to understand more deeply the complex world around us. Truly a superhero of epic proportions. Rest in Power, Marshall Brain!
RIP, Marshall. Your novella, Manna (full text), was so impactful for me, as a 20-something at the time you first released it on your website.
Time for an [independent] investigation into the departments
“We’ve investigated ourselves and found no evidence of wrongdoing.”
“Furthermore and completely unrelated, the employee who called for the investigation has retired, effective immediately”
It all solved itself, they can go on with their little silly lives and nothing changes.
This was actually an important point in the article, I should have included it in the post
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.
There’s an edit button
Oh no :(
I learned so much from him over the years. Used to visit HowStuffWorks almost religiously.
what the fuck
Science communicators that make complex things accessible for the general public are a critical component to building and maintaining public support for scientific institutions. If we want science to serve public interests rather than corporate ones, we need to establish public funding for it, which requires a public understanding of what they are doing and why it’s valuable.
A blog I very much like and keep recommending talks about both the importance of this and the differing viewpoints within academic culture (specifically about history, but many of the concepts apply to sciences in general). It also has cat pictures.
This isn’t the first time I’ve heard about toxic culture in universities (Section “The Advisor”). Again, the entry is about graduate programs in the humanities, but it’s not just a humanities-specific issue.
I personally didn’t know about HowStuffWorks (I was under the misconception that it was just a YouTube format, which I generally don’t watch a whole lot), but checking it out now, I definitely missed out, and I think it fits the criteria of the field-to-public communication.
To drive such a valuable contributor to such despair they no longer want to live at all is a disservice to the public, a threat to what good their institution can do (which, for all its toxicity, probably also provided valuable research) and most of all a crime against that person. I hope they’re held accountable, but I also hope that public scrutiny can bring about improvements in academic culture so that his death might still do some good in the end.
My first supervisor fucked up my life in ways I’m never going to recover from. I wasn’t even the first, just the worst case. I was able to get away from them eventually, but it should have happened much, much earlier. There needs to be more accountability. RIP.
It sucks when you’re led to believe you can trust people whom you definitely should not trust. Universities, like all other organizations with people in them, are full of broken people who don’t know how to respect those with whom they disagree. My former supervisor (and underlings) cost me a lot more than thousands of dollars of therapy. But I know I have to forgive them, or else I’ll just perpetuate the cycle in creative ways I can’t imagine.
I am continuing out of spite. None of their other students did, but I managed to expose them with hard evidence. :) I now have a mortgage of debt and physical problems, but I am still here. Almost done.
repurposing the Engineering Entrepreneurs Program meeting space.
It is 2024, everyone has zoom. It is a room that engineers can meet in and some dumb admin wanted to turn it into a commuter’s lounge or a decoration storage space. Just let the man keep his little meeting space! It is hard enough getting engineers to meet in person these days, no need to make it harder.
I consider reporting systems to be a trap. It’s a way to get rid of whistleblowers who are not part of the groupthink. There needs to a harsh spotlight on the failings of such systems. Too bad that those who can and should do so typically don’t want to. Lawmakers are beholden to the ka-ching and the public only cares for a short period of time, if at all. The only way these institutions are affected is by cutting their funding.
Not knowing anything about his death before reading the article, the headline made it sound like some odd coincidence. “Sudden death” makes it sound like something that just happened unexpectedly. Not sure why they didn’t just say “…before suicide.”
