An anonymous anthropology professor remained outspoken about fairness in academia even as she suffered for months with coronavirus.
“This person was a scientist who got Covid because they’d been forced to teach,” said Michael Eisen, a fly geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, who had interacted on Twitter with the professor for years. “It wasn’t the first person I knew who got Covid — but for a lot of people it was one of the first people they knew who got it.”
He said that he had continued to exchange messages with the person running the account through June and that this person frequently discussed a difficult recovery.
Then BethAnn McLaughlin, another Twitter connection, announced on July 31 that the anonymous professor had died from complications of the virus.
Just a few days later, both the account of the anonymous professor and of Ms. McLaughlin were suspended for Twitter policies that, among other things, bar the coordination of fake accounts.
The same day, Gerardo Gonzalez, a spokesman for Arizona State University, where the anonymous Twitter user was supposedly a professor, described the anonymous account as a “hoax.”
The account had posted inaccurate information about the school, he said. “We also have had no one, such as a family member or friend, report a death to anyone at the university,” he added.
Among scientists and academics, the shock of mourning was already laced with suspicion. Enough of them had unpleasant interactions with the combative account and were troubled by its inconsistencies and seeming about-turns.
“You have these internal alarms that are like, ‘Oh, I don’t trust you,’” said Julie Libarkin, the head of the Geocognition Research Laboratory at Michigan State University. “Kind of the same as when I worked with BethAnn.”