A Radically Positive Re-Thinking of Male-Female Relations

On September 16th, Roy Baumeister gave a talk in the BASP Colloquium series. The talk was offensive and disrespectful. Many of the claims he presented have been used historically – and are being used today – to deny human rights, justify sexual assault, deny access to healthcare, justify discrimination, and politically disenfranchise women, transgender, nonbinary, and queer people. The repetition of these ideas as a proposed psychological theory with a weak empirical basis has no place within scientific discourse. 

As a faculty, we apologize to our GC Psychology community for promoting this talk and giving Professor Baumeister a platform to espouse these claims. We believe that healthy debate and a diversity of viewpoints are critical to both scholarship and science. But arguments that maintain that any one group is inherently inferior to others go against our basic scientific and professional values of mutual respect and recognition for the dignity and worth of all people.