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.”
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?
Anyone that finds your take controversial, I would consider insane.
More specifically… the school on paper also agrees with you. They rolled out a whole system to make sure these things go well for employees. There has just never been actually implemented and now we see the result.
So the systems setup for this need to be more than lip service for the brochure or “thoughts and prayers”. And yes this requires an investigation as this could definitely rise to negligent homicide or something.
There are ethics and whistleblowing policies and procedures in any large organization. Retaliation is still sickeningly common. I’ve seen others in my organization report bullying and ethics violations and still get driven out. Organizations are shit at policing themselves.
Because we don’t have a society that functions in the way you believe it should. People are entangled with barbarism, tribalism and whataboutism to really set their head straight to really get to the bottom of these things. Plus we’re in a society where dishonesty and short-term memory seems to reign supreme.
Nah, the university will just say they’ll investigate something something, do nothing really, and a year or two from now, when most have forgotten, proclaim nobody did anything wrong, and that will be it.