Date: February 1, 2023
From: Kelly Podzemny
To: Brandt Schneider
CC: Ashley Hamm, Steven Berk, Mikel Coale, Susanna Cisneros

Good morning Dr. Schneider, I wanted to give you and Dr. Beck a heads up about an MD/PhD student who is getting some backlash on Twitter about an opinion piece he had published on the Newsweek website. These people believe it is misinformation. He's been outspoken on other topics in the past, and we were told it was free speech. Dr. Beck says he may talk to legal about this again.

MY NOTE: This was the first documented institutional response to the Newsweek article. They had already determined my prior speech was "free speech." Now they were going to legal "again."

===

Date: February 1, 2023
From: Simon Williams
To: Steven Berk, Lauren Cobbs

It is obviously protected speech but also quite concerning in the way he appears to speak for the medical community. We need to discuss an appropriate response.

MY NOTE: Williams called it "obviously protected speech" - then said they needed to discuss "an appropriate response" anyway. Per recollection, Williams also expressed concern that the article was being shared in "antivax" circles.

===

Date: February 1, 2023
From: Steven Berk
To: Kelly Podzemny
CC: Ashley Hamm, Mikel Coale, Susanna Cisneros, Vadivel Ganapathy

We had problems with him on Twitter before as you remember calling various diet doctors phonies but we got into the same free speech issues that with we did admonish him. I think we should discuss with legal.

MY NOTE: Berk admitted they had "the same free speech issues" before. Now he wanted to "discuss with legal" again.

===

Date: February 1, 2023
From: Michael Blanton
To: Lauren Cobbs, Simon Williams
Subject: Student Publication COVID-19

Forwarded complaint from Kip Hopper about Newsweek article.

===

Date: February 2, 2023, 10:22 AM (Schneider) / 10:27 AM (alternate timestamp)
From: Brandt Schneider
To: Kelly Podzemny
Subject: RE: Twitter: Kevin Bass

Kelly,

Thanks for the update. We are aware of the incident. I texted with Dr. Williams about it yesterday and will circle back with him again today to determine how best to proceed. I will also follow up with Dr. Berk.

Brandt

MY NOTE: The Graduate School Dean was coordinating with the medical school. They were figuring out "how best to proceed."

===

Date: February 2, 2023, 2:50 PM
From: Simon Williams
To: Didn't record

I am not surprised that there was backlash. I think it will be best to hear what legal says we should do.

===

Date: February 15, 2023, 12:42 PM
From: Steven Berk
To: Simon Williams

Wrt Kevin Bass what does it mean to recommend @ eugenics in 2023 might meet about him at 3pm

MY NOTE: The Dean was monitoring my specific tweets and proposing same-day meetings about them. I was talking about eugenics in the same way Dr. Williams had discussed it in lectures, and in the same way discussed in the medical ethics literature.

===

Date: April 20, 2023, 8:23 AM
From: Pamela Johnson
To: Terri Lloyd
Subject: URGENT - INFO NEEDED

Can you confirm the dates of his (Kevin Bass) enrollment in the GSBS (MS and MD degrees) and provide the approximate timeframes that he conducted his research in various faculty labs (under Drs. Grisham, Reynolds, Ganapathy or others) during this time. Do you have this information?

MY NOTE: Six days before Morales forwarded the complaints, someone was urgently gathering my enrollment history and lab assignments. They were building a dossier.

===

Date: April 26, 2023, 11:16 AM
From: Felix Morales
To: Lauren Cobbs, Simon Williams, Elisabeth Conser, David Trotter, Allison Perrin
Subject: Emails About a Student Starting the 3rd Year

Good morning everyone, I wanted to forward some emails that we have been receiving about a student that is returning back to the medical school curriculum from his PhD coursework. His name is Kevin Bass. We have received emails in our admissions inbox expressing concerns about his social media posts. I didn't know what to do with them, but I wanted to share them with you all. Let me know if you have any questions.

MY NOTE: The admissions office was receiving external complaints about my speech and forwarding them to five senior administrators.

===

Date: April 26, 2023, 11:29 AM
From: David Trotter
To: Felix Morales, Lauren Cobbs, Simon Williams, Elisabeth Conser, Allison Perrin
Subject: RE: Emails About a Student Starting the 3rd Year

Thanks for sending these. If you get any more please forward them on. I will help collect some more information and get back to you to discuss how to respond.

[Response to April 26, 2023 11:16 AM email from Felix Morales forwarding emails expressing concerns about my social media posts]

MY NOTE: Five senior administrators on this email. Trotter is asking for more materials and coordinating "how to respond."

===

Date: May 22, 2023, 1:29 PM (original) / 3:51 PM (forward)
From: [Redacted]
To: Ja'Net Sneed
Date: May 22, 2023, 1:29 PM
Subject: TTUHSC on MedTwitter

Hey Ja'Net, I just wanted to send an email on behalf of some of my classmates. I am sure the school admin is following the situation on social media. But in case it is not being followed, Kevin Bass and Class of 2025 has been making controversies in the realm of MedTwitter. At first it was not really a big deal but recently he has tweeted about how easy 3rd year med school is and made controversial statements that seem to go against the school's code of conduct. In fact some residents at residency programs have been responding to the tweets and questioning the quality of medical education TTUHSC is providing to students. Unfortunately he has a following of about 84,000 people and some of my tweets have caught the attention of residency programs' faculty members. He has been in news segments, podcasts, and interviews. With Step 1 going P/F and the attention shifting to Step 2 and school prestige some people are becoming concerned that this one person is essentially putting our school under the radar in a bad way. -Joe

PART B - FORWARD TO DEAN:
From: Lauren Cobbs
To: Steven Berk, Simon Williams
Date: May 22, 2023, 3:51 PM

Need to discuss...

===

Date: May 23, 2023, 8:58 AM
From: Steven Berk
To: Simon Williams, Lauren Cobbs, Islam

At our meeting can we discuss Kevin Bass and review our guidelines on professionalism also what clerkship he is on

MY NOTE: Cobbs forwarded this student complaint directly to Dean Berk. The next morning, Berk asked "what clerkship is he on."

===

Date: May 23, 2023, 12:22 PM
From: Acevedo
To: Lauren Cobbs
Priority: IMPORTANCE: HIGH
Subject: Honor Code

Here is the signed Honor Code for Kevin Bass

MY NOTE: 3.5 hours after Berk's meeting request, the Honor Code was pulled and marked "IMPORTANCE: HIGH."

===

Date: May 23, 2023 (after 12:22 PM)
From: Lauren Cobbs
To: Steven Berk, Pomasson
Priority: IMPORTANCE: HIGH
Subject: Signed Honor Code for K. Bass

Dr. Berk - PDF version of signed Honor Code for Kevin Bass

MY NOTE: The sequence on May 23, 2023:
- 8:58 AM: Berk asks "what clerkship is he on"
- Morning: Cobbs requests Honor Code from records
- 12:22 PM: Acevedo provides Honor Code (IMPORTANCE: HIGH)
- Afternoon: Cobbs forwards Honor Code to Berk
They were assembling a disciplinary file.

===

Date: May 27, 2023
Dean Steven Berk died 4 days after placing me on the meeting agenda and receiving my Honor Code file.

===

Date: May 31, 2023
Present: Dr. Megan Brown, Dr. Noelle Zavala, Kevin Bass

MY NOTE: 8 days after Berk asked "what clerkship is he on," professionalism concerns materialized at that exact clerkship.

===

I then faced the first flood of professionalism “complaints”.

I began reaching out to lawyers:

Date: July 24, 2023
From: Kevin Bass
To: Tim Weitz, JD

There are many discrepancies and facts that do not fit or make sense, and I don't understand what is happening. …

Due process has been systematically ignored and they refuse to specify the professionalism incident(s) in my letter. That's right, I'm being censured for a professionalism incident that hasn't been specified, not even to me. …

I believe that they may be trying to build a case for my eventual dismissal.

===

Then, from August 2 to August 7, I contacted at least 10 attorneys with the same language expressing confusion about the process and the refusal to specify charges.

Standard language included in all outreach:

“I believe that the administration may be trying to build a case for my eventual dismissal. There are many discrepancies and facts that do not fit or make sense, and I don't understand what is happening. … Due process has been ignored and they refuse to specify the professionalism incident(s) in my letter, or at any other point in the process.”

===

ERWIN'S COACHING NOTES: THE PRETEXT REVEALED

Then, after two extraordinarily stressful professionalism board meetings, and despite winning the appeal on "lack of specificity," I was still required to complete "professionalism coaching" with Dr. Cheryl Erwin, for reasons nobody would explain to me.

The coaching was assigned for clinical behavior during OB/GYN - "comments to nurses," "interactions with staff." It had nothing to do with my Newsweek article. Yet, strikingly, Erwin’s notes tell a different story.

She researched COVID vaccine sources to evaluate my opinions. She acted sympathetic to my face while writing this behind my back. And the final irony: my Newsweek article was pro-vaccine. I called for acknowledging mistakes in pandemic messaging and in the response, which led to reduced trust and reduced vaccine uptake. I did not express opposition to vaccines; I was pro-vaccine. She was building a case against a position I never held.

DATE: After August 8, 2023

ERWIN'S NOTES (excerpt):

I also spoke with Dr. Cobbs about this student and the issues presented. She agreed that there are concurrent legal issues embodied in the case including the right of Kevin to say anything that he wished to say (free speech). Even if the ideas he has shared with us seem contrary to generally accepted opinion regarding the science (my source is Cochrane’s review on the efficacy of COVID vaccines), it is not a dispute that he has a right to say whatever he wishes.

However, as a matter of professionalism he does not have a right to disrupt the learning environment, he does not have a right to refuse, without consequences, the feedback he is given and fail to adopt the virtues of medical professionalism which include attitudes of compassion, adaptability, and sensitivity to the needs of others. These obligations are expected by the LCME as professional activities which we have an obligation to ensure in order to maintain our accreditation as a medical school. My focus and the main conclusive issue here is to develop insight into why he is doing this when he admits that a lot of people have 'just quit talking to him.'

MY NOTE: The professionalism coach–assigned to address supposed clinical behavior issues–explicitly tied her assessment to COVID vaccine opinions (that I didn’t hold) and invoked LCME accreditation. Her own words reveal the pretext: if this were about pre-existing behavior, people wouldn't have "just quit talking to him." Something new caused this–and she told us what it was.

===

In another note, she went even further, comparing me to Trump and saying I had absorbed "conspiracy culture":

Erwin's second note (excerpt):

"I do not feel confident I can coach this student on the SPCC issues without addressing the issues raised by the student that lie beyond the formal referral. The social media issues came up. They cannot be ignored. They raise issues of constitutional free speech, due process, and reputational harm that imply the need for additional advice from the referring source and their counsel.

Because these issues are a part of our general culture at this moment in time it is appropriate to note K will have heard in recent days: Special Counsel Jack Smith points out in the Trump indictment, 'The defendant had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election and even to claim, falsely... he was also entitled to formally challenge the results of...'

KB has imbibed the cultural atmosphere of conspiracy theories. This is reflected in his combative attitude towards me and everyone who is trying to help him, as well as towards the CDC response to COVID as a conspiracy. In the present he seems to be taking his First Amendment rights to make an idiot of himself"

MY NOTE: My "professionalism coach" compared me to Trump, said I had absorbed "conspiracy culture," and wrote that I was using my First Amendment rights "to make an idiot of himself." She claimed that I thought that "COVID was a conspiracy" (whatever that means). This was the person assigned to help me.

===

But to my face? A completely different story:

SEPTEMBER 7, 2023 - After I apologized for being irritable while sick:

"Thank you Kevin. And thank you for making our meeting. You were lovely. See you next time."

OCTOBER 17, 2023 - Scheduling a meeting:
"Your call, either way I just want you to feel supported."

OCTOBER 19, 2023 - When I was in distress:
"Just breathe!! You're gonna be fine. I will continue to coach you through this."

OCTOBER 19, 2023 - Same day, later:
"Do you need to talk? I'm here"

OCTOBER 29, 2023 - When I shared personal trauma with her, in order to make the point that what I was going through was the worst thing I had ever experienced:

"Kevin, I am crying as I read this. For the pain you have been through. For the joy of your survival. For the dreams and goals you still hold. I can walk alongside you and I can be your friend. I can listen to you as you find your authentic self. But I would never want to change who you are and I couldn't even if I wanted to.

I am not sure there is continued value in a coaching relationship, but I will not abandon you. You have work to do my friend, and it is the work of healing.

Your friend, Dr. Erwin"

But it doesn't stop at the medical school.

In February 2023, Berk and Williams consulted the Office of General Counsel about my "obviously protected speech." Six months later, that same Office of General Counsel recommended "immediate updates" to the Board of Regents—citing "recent litigation trends" in harassment and speech policies.

The Board approved the changes on August 10-11, 2023. They added language requiring speech to "lose legal protection" before it can justify suspension. They removed a team that had been monitoring student "expressive activities."

Then in November 2023—two weeks after my suspension—the Board required that General Counsel "certify compliance with applicable laws" before any future policy changes.

They added a legal certification requirement after they suspended me.

The same lawyers who reviewed my case recommended the policy changes. The Board of Regents—appointed by Governor Greg Abbott—approved them.

This was institutional.

This is the tip of the iceberg.

I have sent more than a dozen Texas Public Information Act (TPIA) requests–basically, FOIA for Texas–for the documents that will reveal what really happened.

Texas Tech has responded by delaying their responses to the final deadlines; by double charging me for deposits; and by forcing me into a legal battle.

More than 70 pages of legal argument have been submitted by each side to the Texas Office of the Attorney General, more than 150 pages, a book’s worth for TPIA alone. Texas Tech seeks to withhold ALL documents.

What are they hiding?

Since October, I have also engaged in a lengthy dispute with Texas Tech–through FERPA–to gain access to all of my educational records, which I am entitled to according to federal law.

Texas Tech is required to provide me with these records within 45 days.

It has been 120 days, and I still have not had the opportunity to review the documents.

How long will it take? A year? To get documents I should have had in November?

They have provided me with a single set of sessions over the course of a week to review them. Thousands of pages. They have all of these documents in PDF format. They could send me these PDFs at any time.

Instead, they keep creating more friction, requiring me to visit each time. The atmosphere is tense. To avoid any misunderstanding, I spent $3,600 for a private investigator to accompany me just to review them. Because who knows what else Texas Tech will make up about me?

This is all intentional. And it violates federal law.

Therefore, I will continue to file complaints with the Department of Education.

And over the coming weeks, I will file still more complaints with still more agencies.

And once I started filing these requests, what happened? Out of the blue–debt collection for semesters at the medical school they did not allow me to attend.

There is no low to which this university will not stoop.

Thankfully, after posting about this, these attempts seem to have stopped. For now.

They destroyed my career. They destroyed my reputation. And they want me to shut up about it.

I won’t.

I have filed two lawsuits against Texas Tech and just some of the employees involved in these acts. One in state court. The other in federal.

And that brings me to the reason I am posting this.

They have filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit.

And they also delayed my next FERPA review session. Again.

Curious.

To when? They have delayed the session to the final two days in which my response to the motion to dismiss is due.

My guess: they’re hoping that I don’t have the time to consolidate the insights from the next review of documents.

But who is doing that? Ah, yes.

I am posting because one of the employees at the Texas Office of the Attorney General--run by Ken Paxton--is not just representing Texas Tech but now, it appears, helping Texas Tech to obstruct justice. By moving this review to just before the response is due.

By implication, this means that the Attorney General is now spending yet more taxpayer money to cover for a university that retaliated against the First Amendment.

Retaliation. Against the First Amendment. With your taxpayer money.

But not just the First Amendment. I am a scientist. I have a PhD. When I wrote about the pandemic, I did so in good faith. And my views are the same as those of NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, FDA CBER Director Vinay Prasad, and indeed, the official position of the Trump administration itself.

Texas Tech retaliated against a legitimate scientific viewpoint–the viewpoint which I believe is undeniably correct. All because it was unpopular and out of step with the politics of the university.

All I want is to move on. But that means acknowledging what happened.

I have recently received the first ruling from the Attorney General on one of my TPIA requests. 16 pages of redactions. Huge blocks of black. Citing attorney-client privilege.

This is completely unacceptable. And insane.

Let’s square that with what happened here.

Texas Tech used their Director of Ethics to subvert ethics.

They used professionalism hearings to behave unprofessionally.

And they used their legal team to break the law.

It’s Orwellian. Texas Tech inverted morality.

And now, they are trying to use attorney-client privilege as a shield–with Texas’s Attorney General to defend them.

I am writing here to appeal to you, reader, for one thing.

Pressure.

I’m asking for the documents. Nothing fancy. I’m only asking for the truth.

This is a pressure campaign for the truth. Is that so much to ask for?

Share this. Tag Ken Paxton. Tag Lori Rice-Spearman. Tag Greg Abbott.

Ask them why their taxpayer-funded government agency is trying to conceal the truth. Why they tried to destroy one of their students’ lives and won’t let him go.

I just want to move on. I don’t want back into medicine. Because of the ideologically captured bureaucrats, medicine no longer has moral standards. I want to create something of my own–something I can believe in as I once believed in medicine.

Let me go.

I finish with this passage from the Bible:

I hate, I despise your festivals,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.

Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them;
and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals

I will not look upon.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

Amos 5:21-24

Help me in my fight by donating here: https://www.givesendgo.com/kevinbasslegal

This is the first: academic mobbing.

Before I go back to Texas Tech, I want to show you the pattern in its clearest form, in someone else’s life and work.

Only then does my case start to really make sense.

The Waterloo crucible

Canadian sociologist Kenneth Westhues did not set out to study mobbing.

He was not a natural dissident.

For most of his career, he was a tenured, award-winning professor at the University of Waterloo and eventually served as department chair.

He believed in committees and ethics codes.

He trusted procedure.

Then the machine ate him.

In 1991, colleagues asked him to examine the case of Jack Edmonds, a world-class mathematician who had been abruptly pushed out of his job at Waterloo.

When Westhues read the file, it did not look like a normal tenure conflict.

As he later wrote, the record showed an “extraordinary degree of craziness, hostility, intransigence, and herd mentality,” an “intense ganging-up” by colleagues and administrators against a single professor.

Edmonds was eventually restored to his position, in part because Westhues was willing to say aloud that he saw a collective campaign, not a performance dispute.

Soon after, he defended an unpopular PhD student whose achievements, he believed, exceeded those of many faculty in the department.

He stood between that student and a determined department chair. That used up his last remaining institutional capital. The pattern that had engulfed Edmonds then turned on him.

“A collective movement of colleagues and administrators had begun to form against me, a campaign they would wage for the next five years. From an active, involved member of faculty, I would be transformed with amazing speed into a beleaguered pariah.”

Between 1993 and 1998, what he later called “the Westhues case” unfolded: secret departmental meetings, mass memos declaring him unfit to supervise graduate students, an “ethics committee” that found him guilty of misconduct and demanded a public apology, character attacks on the university website while his responses were refused, newspaper coverage, and a crisis that spread across Canadian universities.

He did what everyone is told to do. What I was told to do.

He trusted procedure. He filed grievances. He attended hearings. He wrote careful responses rebutting the allegations. He played by the rules.

The rules became the weapon.

The committee set up to hear his grievances collapsed twice in arguments over wording and jurisdiction and never got past technicalities.

The Ethics Committee’s report was so one-sided that he answered it with a document listing its own rule violations: “Twenty Flaws in UW Ethics Hearing Committee Report No. 94-3.”

He later realized something critical: the more “procedure” there was, the more power—not less—the mob had to turn private hostility into official stigma.

Special tribunals and codes did not restrain the mob; they gave it a stage under cover of official authority.

The same rules that were supposed to prevent abuse became a technique for hiding it.

In 1997, after several years of conflict and public controversy, Waterloo brought in an outsider: Peter Mercer, a law dean from another university, as independent adjudicator over the last ethics case, which involved a one-month suspension of Westhues.

Mercer read roughly a thousand pages, held a proper hearing, and did something rare: he overturned the internal tribunal, exonerated Westhues, cancelled the discipline, and granted him six months of paid research leave.

The university’s president resigned soon after.

Headlines announced that the professor had been cleared. Editorials said the case had been systematically mishandled for five years.

For Westhues, it was vindication, but more importantly, confirmation that his intuition had been right:

The problem was not a few bad apples.

The problem was the structure.

Within a year—and at his insistence—Waterloo abolished the Ethics Committee and its tribunal. Complaints of “ethical misconduct” were rerouted through normal academic channels: chairs, deans, external arbitrators, ordinary courts. No permanent inquisition. No kangaroo courts.

Five years later, when he wrote up the results, the predicted disaster had not occurred. Ordinary governance handled cases at least as well—probably better—than the special tribunal ever had. His verdict was not that the committee members were evil. It was that the structure “invites chutzpah and the authoritarian exercise of power.”

It dresses up factional conflict as neutral judgment. It becomes a secular inquisition aimed not at solving a problem, but at destroying a person’s credibility.

Drawing on sociologist Harold Garfinkel’s classic work on “degradation ceremonies,” Westhues argued that court-like workplace proceedings are almost a perfect instrument for transporting a disliked colleague into disrepute. Once a colleague is under “ethics” investigation, the conversation is no longer about disagreement. It is about criminality, deviance, and expulsion.

That ordeal became Westhues’s life’s work.

What “mobbing” is

In early 1994, Westhues reached for the phrase “mob action” to describe what was happening to him.

Then he discovered the work of Swedish psychologist Heinz Leymann, who had already spent years studying the same phenomenon under another name: workplace mobbing.

Leymann described mobbing as a pattern in which coworkers “gang up” on a target and subject them to sustained psychological harassment—typically at least once a week for months or years. He developed an instrument, the Leymann Inventory of Psychological Terror, listing 45 typical mobbing actions and specifying their length and frequency to identify mobbing events.

Later authors have elaborated the definition in similar terms: a systematic, hostile and unethical campaign aimed at expelling an employee from the workplace, using gossip, humiliation, isolation, and procedural maneuvers rather than open physical violence.

The key features are:

• It is collective. There is usually a core of instigators, but the campaign spreads to others, sometimes to “the whole department.”

• It is prolonged and patterned. This is not one bad argument; it is months or years of recurring behavior.

• It uses structure. Policies, tribunals, “ethics” processes, and outside consultants are weaponized to convert social hostility into official condemnation.

• The endpoint is elimination. The goal is to drive the target out—by resignation, firing, illness, or, in the worst cases, suicide.

A 2018 review by Tatar and colleagues found that in one sample of 64 mobbing cases, more than 90% of victims met diagnostic criteria for PTSD. Recent work has sharpened the picture.

Academic mobbing in higher education is now systemic. In 2006, Westhues wrote that “mobbing is today widely accepted as part of normal academic politics.” Things have not improved since then. A 2025 bibliometric analysis in Trauma, Violence, & Abuse reviewed 600 studies on workplace mobbing and concluded that mobbing is now a recognized subfield and that both top-down and horizontal mobbing have become “widespread”.

A number of other scholars agree with this assessment, with experts at the National Communication Association writing in 2015:

In our review of extant research, Joel Neuman and I found that 25–35 percent of faculty have been targets of workplace bullying, with 40–50 percent reporting they have witnessed someone else being bullied. The communications used include threats to professional standing (e.g., rumors, gossip, dismissing ideas), isolation/ exclusion (e.g., ignoring, interrupting, turning others against them), and obstructionism (e.g., failing to provide needed resources and information, interfering in work activities). Women faculty and faculty of color appear to be at greater risk for bullying. Bullying among faculty is most often peer-to-peer, yet frequently the bullies are of senior status. Of particular note is that in approximately one-third of cases, more than one actor is involved, what Ken Westhues calls “academic mobbing.”

A 2025 review of the mental health and economic burden of mobbing estimated that about one in five workers worldwide has been exposed to workplace mobbing, and that roughly 70% of victims never report it at all. The authors highlighted not just PTSD and depression, but long-term productivity losses and costs to health systems and employers.

In other words: what happened to Westhues was not a one-off Canadian tragedy.

It was an early, unusually well-documented instance of a systemic failure mode of modern institutions now being studied around the world, including in medicine and academia.

How mobbing unfolds

From hundreds of case files across North America and Europe, Westhues distilled a typical five-stage progression.

1. Avoidance and ostracism. The target is left off emails and committees. Invitations dry up. Colleagues turn away at the coffee machine.

2. Petty harassment. Small aggressions accumulate. Office space is moved. Access is made difficult. Requests vanish into a bureaucratic void.

3. A “critical incident.” Something happens—or is framed as having happened—that “shows what kind of person he really is.” That incident becomes the pretext: something has to be done.

4. Procedural aftermath. Suddenly there are hearings, appeals, mediations, investigations. Process itself becomes the main weapon of the mob.

5. Elimination. The target quits, is fired, forced into retirement, put on disability, dies from stress-related illness—or takes their own life.

He also offered a 16-item checklist of indicators.

Some of the most important are:

• By normal criteria, the target’s performance is at least average, usually above average. Colleagues quietly resent them for “showing them up.”

• Rumors and gossip circulate about the target: “Did you hear what she did last week?”

• A single incident, real or exaggerated, is taken as proof of deep character flaws.

• Emotion-laden, defamatory rhetoric appears in emails and memos.

• Formal expressions of collective hostility emerge: petitions, votes of censure, coordinated letters.

• It becomes dangerous to defend the target; people who speak up are warned or punished.

• Established procedures are bent or ignored; the mob “takes matters into its own hands.”

• Attempts to bring in independent review are met with outrage.

• Both sides start to fear violence, even when no credible threat exists.

When you see those elements, you are not looking at an ordinary workplace conflict. You are looking at a degradation ceremony aimed at destroying a person’s standing.

For the rest of this series, I will use two simple guides:

• a five-stage map of how mobbing unfolds; and

• a sixteen-point checklist of indicators that a case has crossed the line from ordinary conflict into mobbing.

The five stages are:

1. Avoidance and ostracism. The target is left out, avoided, and quietly pushed to the margins.

2. Petty harassment. Small aggressions and inconveniences accumulate, often under cover of “procedure.”

3. A critical incident. Something happens—or is framed as having happened—that allegedly reveals “what kind of person he really is,” and becomes the pretext that “something has to be done.”

4. Procedural aftermath. Hearings, investigations, committees, evaluations. Process itself becomes the main weapon.

5. Elimination. The target resigns, is forced out, put on disability, or otherwise removed, often with a lasting stain on their reputation.

Westhues’s sixteen indicators include:

1. Above-average performance. The target is at least average, often above average, in performance or standing.

2. Rumors and gossip. Stories circulate about the target’s supposed misdeeds.

3. Exclusion. The target is left out of meetings, committees, and informal networks.

4. A “critical incident.” One event is held up as proof of who the target “really” is.

5. Punitive consensus. A shared conviction emerges that the target must be punished or removed.

6. Strange timing. Sanctions arrive at unusual times or in unusual ways.

7. Defamatory rhetoric. Emotion-laden, hostile language appears in emails, memos, and talk.

8. Formal condemnation. Petitions, votes, coordinated letters, and disciplinary findings appear against the target.

9. Secrecy and solidarity. There is a strong emphasis on confidentiality and sticking together.

10. Dangerous to defend. Defending the target becomes risky; diversity of views collapses.

11. Venial sins into a mortal sin. Minor offenses are added up into one alleged “gross” offense.

12. Stigmatizing labels. The target is portrayed as deviant, unstable, or otherwise beyond the pale.

13. Bent procedures. Established rules are ignored, bent, or selectively enforced.

14. Resistance to outside review. Attempts to bring in independent oversight are blocked or resented.

15. Punished appeals. Appeals for outside help are treated as betrayal and escalate the campaign.

16. Mutual fear. Both sides come to fear violence, even when no credible threat exists.

In later parts, I will mark, as I go, where these stages and indicators appear in the record of my own case, and place each event on a simple chronological timeline.

Who gets mobbed

Here is where the literature becomes sobering.

Standing out

Westhues’s own synthesis is blunt:

To calculate the odds of your being mobbed, count the ways you show your workmates up: fame, publications, teaching scores, connections, eloquence, wit, writing skills, athletic ability, computer skills, salary, family money, age, class, pedigree, looks, house, clothes, spouse, children, sex appeal. Any one of these will do. And don’t forget: refusing to run with the herd, any herd, is reason enough for the herd to turn on you.

Any one difference can be enough. The problem is not poor performance. The problem is standing out.

Psychiatrist James Hillard, writing in Current Psychiatry in 2009, makes a similar point. He notes that targets are often marked by any visible difference from the workgroup—ethnicity, an “odd” personality, or high achievement.

He also flags whistleblowers and union organizers as especially vulnerable, and lists academia, government, and religious organizations as high-risk environments.

Reuven Kotleras, writing in Advanced Development in 2007, focuses on highly gifted adults. Their traits—moral intensity, perfectionism, aesthetic sensitivity, overwhelming perceptiveness, “overexcitabilities,” and a search for meaning—make them stand out and sometimes irritate colleagues. Ironically, Kotleras notes, those same traits can also impair their ability to interpret what is happening to them once a mobbing begins.

A synthesis drawing on Workplace Bullying Institute (WBI) data and other surveys finds that witnesses typically describe targets as compassionate, kind, cooperative, agreeable—and, crucially, often unable or unwilling to fight back.

They are, as many experts note, some of the organization’s most conscientious workers.

“Self-directed” employees

A 2024 Psychology Today piece by counselor and suicidologist Araya Baker describes what he calls self-directed employees—people who are internally motivated, creative, willing to challenge the status quo, and deeply purpose‑driven. Summarizing the research, he notes that self‑directedness correlates with purpose, resourcefulness, and self‑acceptance. These employees often become hypervisible because they challenge authoritarian, hierarchical, or paternalistic power structures.

They may be singled out as “troublemakers” or “rule-breakers,” making them prime scapegoats when envy or resentment builds. Baker argues that successful self‑directed employees can be just as vulnerable to bullying, rooted in malicious envy, as more traditional scapegoats. Once institutions label them, newer colleagues quickly learn to treat them as dangerous outliers.

High-risk professions and sectors

As mentioned, across studies, three sectors consistently show up as mobbing hot spots: academia, government, and religious organizations. These are the kinds of institutions that cloak themselves in moral language, have ambiguous goals and dense bureaucracies, and rely, in theory, on unusually conscientious, gifted, or self-directed people to function. You could hardly design a better environment for mobbing if you tried.

These are also the institutions that can least afford for mobbing to become widespread within them. Unfortunately, this may be exactly what has happened.

What mobbing does to institutions

In any safety-critical institution—hospitals, universities, labs, regulators—the basic promise is simple: people must be able to say when something is wrong without being destroyed for it. The point of these institutions is to protect patients, pursue truth, and uphold public obligations that are too important to leave to private conscience alone. The social contract of medicine depends on it.

That promise is fragile. It only takes a few visible counter-examples before people start to believe the opposite: that speaking up is dangerous, and that loyalty to medicine and public health means staying quiet.

Mobbing is what those counter-examples look like from the inside.

Most writing on mobbing focuses on the victim’s suffering. The toll is severe.

High rates of PTSD, depression, anxiety, and psychosomatic illness are reported among mobbing targets, particularly in clinical and academic settings. In severe cases—especially where mobbing is prolonged and unaddressed—suicide risk rises, confirming Westhues’s qualitative observations. Long-term disability and withdrawal from the labor force are common, particularly among highly gifted or highly specialized professionals who find it difficult to re-enter similar roles.

But the institutional costs are arguably even more steep.

If we only look at the suffering of individual targets, we miss what is most dangerous: what one mobbing episode does to the institution over time.

A single, visible mobbing episode—especially when used as retaliation for raising concerns—sets off a chain of effects:

one mobbing episode → retaliation signal → climate of fear and silence → moral injury → patient harm and institutional decay.

The rest of this section walks that chain.

One mobbing episode as informal retaliation

On paper, many institutions have zero-tolerance policies for retaliation. There is a whistleblower hotline, a code of conduct, an ethics office. The written system says: if you report misconduct, safety concerns, or legal violations, we will protect you.

In practice, when the person who raised concerns finds themselves at the center of a sustained campaign of shunning, rumor, trumped-up disciplinary procedures, and performative “investigations,” the message is unmistakable. The problem is no longer the misconduct or safety issue. The problem is the person who refused to look away.

This is where mobbing functions as a back-door retaliation system.

Instead of an official demotion or firing in direct response to a report—which would be obviously retaliatory and often illegal—the organization handles things socially. The target is isolated. Their reputation is quietly undermined. Petty rule violations are unearthed and magnified into “grounds” for formal action. Show trials and “fitness for duty” evaluations appear. On paper, no one has violated the whistleblower policy. In reality, the target is punished, and everyone can see it.

All of this sits on top of the individual-level damage described by the mobbing literature: severe psychological harm, suicidality in extreme cases, long-term disability, and withdrawal from the labor force—often among the clinicians and academics who were most invested in their work and least replaceable.

The episode is real and terrible for the person in the middle of it. But the institution-level story starts with what this episode signals to everybody else.

The retaliation signal and the climate of fear and silence

Amy Edmondson defines psychological safety as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking—things like asking questions, admitting mistakes, or challenging decisions. In one field study of 51 teams, higher psychological safety predicted more learning behaviors (asking for help, discussing errors) and better performance. A meta-analysis of 136 samples found that psychological safety is consistently associated with higher engagement, information sharing, creativity and performance, and lower burnout.

In healthcare, work on psychological safety sharpens this further: in clinical teams, it means staff feel able to report errors, raise concerns, and ask for help without fear of punishment. A non-punitive, supportive culture is one of its defining attributes. Studies of inclusive leadership—leaders who invite input and respond supportively—show that such leadership strengthens psychological safety among nurses, which in turn increases speaking up.

But if people see that speaking up leads to embarrassment, punishment, or career damage, they update their shared belief to “it isn’t safe to speak up here.” It does not take a decade of abuse to flip that belief. A single, visible instance of retaliation can be enough.

That is what a mobbing episode does.

Everyone who watches understands that the official story—“we are just addressing performance issues” or “we are concerned about collegiality”—is less important than the unofficial lesson: if you push too hard on safety, ethics, or misconduct, we can do this to you too.

People adapt. They go quiet. Pinder and Harlos call it quiescent silence when people stay quiet out of fear and self-protection, and acquiescent silence when they stay quiet because they believe nothing will change anyway. Across studies, fear of retaliation and lack of trust in management show up again and again as central reasons people do not report problems or unethical behavior.

When supervisors and leaders use aggression and social punishment to enforce that silence, the effects are predictable. Meta-analyses of workplace aggression show that aggression from supervisors—which often includes retaliatory behavior—has strong negative effects on job satisfaction and organizational commitment, and strong positive effects on psychological strain and turnover. Whistleblowing studies tell a similar story: employees who perceive retaliation after reporting wrongdoing show lower organizational commitment and higher intentions to quit; women and employees who have less power are especially likely to experience retaliation.

When this becomes normal—when “everyone knows” that speaking up is dangerous—the organization develops a climate of silence. Fear of retaliation is widespread. Problems go unreported. Learning stalls. Errors repeat. Silence driven by fear and low trust leads directly to lost opportunities for improvement and poorer performance. Negative, fear-based climates are associated with lower job satisfaction and higher turnover. In safety-critical settings specifically, organizational trust is one of the levers connecting safety climate to actual behavior: when staff trust the organization, they are more satisfied and less likely to leave; when they do not, the opposite holds.

Now add mobbing to that.

When mobbing is tolerated as the way “difficult” staff are dealt with, it sends a simple message internally: if you raise your hand about anything important, the group may come for you.

People stop surfacing bad data, inconvenient risks, or ethical problems—not because they do not see them, but because they have seen what happens to the last person who spoke.

New research underlines how quickly this eats into the workforce. Mobbing—especially attacks on professional status—turns out to be one of the strongest predictors of degraded quality of work life among early-career clinical nurses. This erodes engagement and drives attrition in exactly the cohort—young, trainable clinicians just starting their careers—you most need to keep.

By now, one mobbing episode has turned into something else: a generalized climate of fear and silence.

Moral injury: what this does inside people

There is another cost, less visible but just as corrosive: moral injury.

Litz and colleagues define moral injury as the lasting emotional, psychological, social, and spiritual distress that can follow perpetrating, failing to prevent, or witnessing acts that violate deeply held moral beliefs—or experiencing betrayal by trusted authorities.

In healthcare and other civilian roles, research on moral injury shows strong associations with burnout, depression, PTSD symptoms, and intentions to leave the profession. Causes include being forced to provide care workers believe is unsafe or inadequate, or feeling betrayed or abandoned by leadership. During and after COVID-19, several studies emphasized betrayal-based moral injury—feeling let down by institutional leaders—as both common and strongly correlated with distress.

Retaliation against staff who raise safety or ethical concerns is a textbook example of institutional betrayal. The target experiences betrayal by the very system that is supposed to rely on—and protect—their moral vigilance.

But it does not end there.

A recent systematic review of witnessing workplace bullying found that observers—not just targets—show increased stress, emotional exhaustion, and lower job satisfaction. Work on bystanders and moral courage shows a similar pattern: people who witness harm, believe it is wrong, and feel unable to intervene often experience guilt, shame, and lingering moral distress.

By the time the climate of fear and silence has set in, the damage is not only cognitive (“it isn’t safe to speak up”) but moral (“this place betrays people who try to do the right thing”). Mobbing therefore injures not only the person under attack, but also the colleagues who watch in horror and feel they can do nothing. Even those “untouched” by the formal conflict lose commitment.

At this stage in the chain, the institution has created a workforce that is afraid, ashamed, and increasingly detached. That has predictable consequences for the people they are supposed to serve. In healthcare, that’s patients.

From silence to harm: patient safety and institutional integrity

In medicine, the consequences are brutal and concrete. Communication failures among clinicians are a major cause of medical errors and adverse events. Studies of incident reports and root-cause analyses repeatedly identify speaking up about safety concerns as crucial for preventing harm and improving the safety culture.

At the same time, nurses and other clinicians often cite fear of retaliation, fear of being labelled “difficult,” and a belief that nothing will change as central reasons they do not report unsafe care or challenge more senior staff. An integrative review of employee silence in healthcare between 2016 and 2022 confirms that silence is common and is linked to poorer staff well-being and safety outcomes.

Systematic reviews of psychological safety in healthcare teams show that higher psychological safety is associated with greater error reporting and, in several studies, better objective patient-safety outcomes—fewer complications, fewer preventable adverse events, fewer reported errors that reach the patient.

Conversely, investigations of hospital systems with high rates of avoidable harm or avoidable deaths repeatedly describe a “culture of fear”: staff intimidated or bullied after raising concerns, whistleblowers pushed out, and widespread reluctance to speak up. These reports explicitly link fear of reprisals to unsafe care and failure to learn from errors.

When an institution retaliates against dissent—especially dissent tied to safety, ethics, or law—it is not just trimming an inconvenient branch. It is sawing through one of the main load-bearing beams of patient safety: the willingness of staff to speak up.

Reviews on the economics of mobbing underline the broader institutional damage. They highlight lost productivity from presenteeism and absenteeism, increased errors and poorer service (especially in health care), recruitment and training costs when experienced staff leave, and growing legal exposure as courts and regulators begin to recognize mobbing and “moral harassment” as actionable harms.

Put differently, mobbing does not just hurt individuals; it undermines competence and information flow and creates institutional dysfunction. It tells everyone exactly how the system responds when someone insists on accuracy, ethics, or patient safety.

By this point in the chain, the institution is not just morally compromised; it is less accurate, less safe, and less capable.

Long-term selection and hollowing-out

Outside healthcare, the same pattern appears. Surveys in large companies and public bodies routinely find that fear of retaliation is the main reason employees do not report discrimination, harassment, fraud, or other misconduct.

Major regulators—EEOC, OSHA, DOJ—now explicitly frame retaliation as a direct threat to compliance and safety because it chills reporting. Research on ethical leadership shows that when leaders are seen as self-serving or unethical, fear of retaliation stays high and employees keep problems to themselves, increasing risk for the organization..

Now add what the mobbing literature says about who tends to be targeted. The typical target is above-average in performance, unusually conscientious or gifted, self-directed enough to challenge bad policy, and morally sensitive enough to notice when the institution is lying to itself.

Over time, a system that drives such people out—or forces them into silence—selects for a different type: conformists over innovators, bureaucratic survivors over vocation-driven professionals, people who will not risk their standing to tell the truth.

That selection runs straight into the leadership pipeline. These are not the people institutions want in leadership, yet toxic feedback loops put them there. Over decades, the damage compounds and cascades through the institution. This is not a small risk; the curve for exceptional leaders has a razor-thin tail. These processes thin it even further and leave mediocre, sometimes unethical leadership in their place.

The result is institutions that look stable on paper but are hollowed out in reality. They become less able to correct error, respond to crises, provide competent services, or avoid repeating the same harms on the next generation.

At the start of the chain, it looks like “one difficult employee” being “managed.” By the end, it is what it really is: a system selecting against the people it most needs and quietly training everyone else to look away.

That is not just my problem.

It is your problem if you ever need a competent doctor, scientist, or teacher—or any well-functioning institution at all.

What Europe and the law are starting to do about mobbing

If this were just about hurt feelings, the law would not care. Increasingly, it does.

Across Europe, several jurisdictions now explicitly prohibit “moral harassment” or psychological mobbing in the workplace. French labor law, for example, bans repeated acts that deteriorate working conditions and harm dignity, health, or career prospects. Recent French appellate decisions have found employers liable for moral harassment and imposed significant damages. In the France Télécom case, the company (now Orange) and several executives were criminally convicted of collective moral harassment after a wave of employee suicides. The courts held that a deliberate restructuring strategy created an intolerable climate of “management by terror”.

Luxembourg has gone the route of a specific anti-mobbing statute. A 2023 law inserted a chapter on psychological harassment into the Labour Code, imposing obligations on employers to prevent and stop harassment. Spanish courts have treated mobbing (“acoso moral”) as an “occupational risk” that can trigger compensation regimes similar to those for industrial accidents.

In parallel, the field is institutionalizing intellectually. The Niagara Conference on Workplace Mobbing, first held in 2024 and continuing in 2025, explicitly aims to establish mobbing as a multidisciplinary scholarly field. The World Association for Research on Workplace Mobbing now publishes the Journal of Workplace Mobbing, whose inaugural issue collects papers from that conference.

In plain language:

• the phenomenon has a name;

• it has validated measurement tools and checklists;

• it has conferences and a peer-reviewed journal;

• and it is starting to reshape labor law, occupational-safety regulation, and case law.

Institutions that normalize mobbing as an informal governance mechanism are not just hurting people. They are placing themselves on the wrong side of a legal and scholarly consensus and inviting years of litigation, regulation, and discovery—not only with me, but with anyone else they decide to handle this way.

Why policies and procedures are not enough

If you stopped reading here, you might think the solution is obvious: more policies, better procedures, stricter enforcement. That is how modern institutions usually imagine reform.

The problem is that procedures can also be used to run the mob. A university can write an anti-mobbing policy with one hand and, with the other, convene a “professionalism” or “fitness” hearing that quietly excludes exonerating evidence, frames dissent as pathology, and delivers a foregone conclusion. On paper, every box is checked. In practice, the message to insiders is clear: if you create trouble, the machinery will come for you.

Europe’s new legal measures matter because they finally name the harm. But my case—and Westhues’s work on hundreds of cases before me—suggest that the deeper issue is not the absence of policies. It is the ease with which institutions weaponize their own procedures against the people who try to correct them, all behind the cloak of institutional legitimacy.

This series is, in part, an attempt to make that pattern visible. Later in this series, I will argue that academic mobbing is one of the blind spots of the proceduralist ideal: the belief that if the rules are written correctly, the institution will govern itself. In that world, even an anti-mobbing policy will serve the mob: it lends a veneer of legitimacy to what is, in substance, a status degradation ceremony.

In that world, even an anti-mobbing policy will serve the mob: it lends a veneer of legitimacy to what is, in substance, a status degradation ceremony.

What’s next

By now we have a working language for academic mobbing: the five-stage progression, the sixteen indicators, the risk profile of typical targets, the institutional chain from retaliation signal to moral injury to institutional hollowing-out, and the emerging legal recognition of “moral harassment.” By those standards, what happened to me at Texas Tech was not an idiosyncratic tragedy, but a textbook case of mobbing in a medical school.

From this point on, this series will have two living guides:

- the Westhues map above, where I will mark which stages and indicators have appeared; and
- a simple chronological timeline of my case, showing when each event occurred.

In the next part, I will begin filling in both. I will start where Part I and Part II left off: with the alleged “threat” that never made it into my dismissal hearing, was abandoned by the person who raised it, and yet somehow continued to circulate inside the institution. As that story unfolds, I will mark where it fits the stages and indicators described here, and I will place each step on the timeline.

In that episode, you can see the whole machine begin to move. A rumor becomes an allegation; an allegation becomes a pretext; a pretext becomes hearings, evaluations, and paperwork; and the record itself warps around it, as the facts are made to fit the story rather than the other way around. If you want to understand the mechanics of what happened to me—and what can happen to anyone who crosses a modern institution—that is the thread to follow. Part IV will pick it up.

This is Part II of The Record and the Wound, my attempt to make public what usually stays hidden when a medical school quietly destroys someone’s career. In Part I, I laid out the record: evidence that Texas Tech edited my dismissal hearing, and the public-records fight that followed. Here, I want to talk about something harder to document: what that did to me, why I refuse to disappear, and what I think the wound is for.

In Part I I said the next post would cover the “threat” I was accused of; that will now be Part IV after this piece and one on academic mobbing. I think will make that episode and what follows easier to understand.

I was dismissed from Texas Tech’s medical school after my criticism of the COVID-19 response went intensely viral on Twitter/X—seen by more than a hundred million times, regularly amplified by high-profile scientists and commentators, and followed by a sustained mobbing campaign, especially from other physicians, that washed back into my institution in the form of reputational panic and complaints. Only then did I discover that even the official record of my dismissal hearing appears to have been altered—a fight I began to document in Part I.

I need to say plainly why I keep returning to this story. And why I am escalating.

I didn’t set out to have a fight with a big institution, or to build some grand theory about how they work. For most of my life, I tried to play by the rules and move forward inside the system. I did not change. What changed was what happened to me.

If none of this had happened, I would still be in the clinic, doing the work and minding my own business. I am not a born crusader; social media was always just a hobby, and if I ever came across otherwise, it was only because that was the vehicle through which important ideas had to be carried. I wanted to make a difference, but I always thought that would come as a hobby as a physician. The only reason I’m writing any of this is that the system I trusted turned on me and left me with a choice: swallow it quietly and collude in it, or follow the logic of what had been done all the way out into the open.

Most people today talk about a “career” in medicine. “Career” is a word that exploded in usage in the 1950s to describe what we call a profession. It rose in response to massification and bureaucratization of the professions and the thinning out of their thick, moral character—what some scholars have called deprofessionalization.

I believe in something more than a career. I believe in medicine as a vocation. Vocation comes from the Latin word vocatio. It means to be called. I believe in medicine—and science—as a calling. For me, this is not a “career.” It never was.

I do not expect vindication. I cannot afford to pin everything on that. What if I do not get it? One thing I can do, though, is tell the truth. It is what I believe that I am called to science and medicine to do.

And I can do a little more than that, too. Something that has a small chance of making this about something more than me. I can contextualize my story. I can diagnose the system. Then I can try to make it better.

That’s medicine.

And so that’s what I will do. I will use my story to illustrate the larger patterns that are harming medicine and public health.

What happens to people like me

I was subjected to complete reputation destruction. It happened externally through social media mobs, internally through mobs that weaponized procedure, but also through internal–external channels, where social media mobs, mostly doctors, amplified the internal destruction. It continues unceasingly to the present day. There is no returning for me to science or medicine.

When an institution systematically destroys the reputation of one of its members, there are a few paths that people take.

Most disappear. Recently I was told a story about an extremely accomplished MD/PhD, a professor of medicine with elite credentials, who, after something similar happened to him, now works as a tennis instructor. He keeps quiet and avoids his former colleagues. His entire life’s work wiped out. And so now he teaches rich people tennis.

Others fight. It goes through the courts. It is interminable and exhausting. Then, just at the last minute, the institution offers a settlement to avoid discovery. Excited for things to finally be over—vindication!—the victim agrees. NDAs are signed. Money exchanges hands. Then, the victim seeks jobs. They interview at dozens of institutions. They are offered contracts. Then, ghosted. Over and over and over.

It’s the “whispers”, as some of us have come to call them. If someone who fights an institution goes on to be successful somewhere else, that makes the institution look bad. So that isn’t allowed to happen. Daggers are drawn in private. Apparent vindication is in fact an illusion. The victim is right back where they started, with settlement money, unable to pursue their life’s calling.

This is not victory.

Once an institution turns against you, and especially once they use underhanded means to do it, you’re done. They have dehumanized you. And if they have dehumanized you, then, well, I am reminded of the dark line from the Roman historian Tacitus (Agricola 42.3):

It is characteristic of human nature to hate those you have injured.

When we cause injury to others, we are even more predisposed not to help them or remedy the situation—not more. In fact, we are downright averse to it: “what does that say about me, that I would hurt an innocent person?” Thus, those in institutions instinctively shut down. They do not correct the situation. They rationalize their behavior.

It’s just the way things are.

The problem is not just psychological either. It’s structural. After such an abuse of power, if these institutions don’t do everything they can to obstruct every procedural remedy, they expose themselves not just to career and reputational damage, they also become exposed to cumbersome oversight and future litigation.

Even if they know internally that the victim is right, they will never admit to it. And they will do everything that they can to prevent that from coming to light. If the victim tries to move on, they will drag daggers in private at every opportunity, because success of a victim later threatens to provide credibility, invert the narrative about what happened, and make the institution look bad and bring about all of the above.

If the destruction isn’t complete, you’ll limp along. “It will never be the same,” one physician told me. That physician kept his practice. But the damage was done: “It will never be the same.”

But if the destruction is complete, what then? Daggers behind the scenes.

Look. For the things I wanted to achieve in medicine, I’m finished. “It will never be the same” is right.

The two honest options

At that point, there are only two honest options. You can disappear, call it a private tragedy, and build some second life on the ruins. Or you can refuse to disappear; you can decide that if your own career is already gone, the one thing you still control is whether what happened stays hidden.

I am choosing the second. After what I’ve seen, doing anything else would feel like colluding in a lie about what happened. Given how I’m wired, there is only one path: tell the truth. Expose everything. Bring it all out in the open. Never quit.

Then the daggers disappear.

So that is what I am going to do. And in the process, I will build something else. I don’t have a choice.

What I’m not doing this for

Given this, it is worth dispelling two misconceptions.

I am not doing this for attention. Although I can at times command large audiences, this is not my interest at present. The basic story of my dismissal has already reached far more people than I ever expected. That has not resolved the problem. So attention is not my aim—though I will use it when it serves that aim.

Nor am I driven mainly by anger or a desire for revenge. What happened to me is outrageous, but anger is a bad operating system. In cases like mine, those responsible are almost never held accountable. Whatever private consequences they may face, none of it enters the public ledger. Only allegations about me do. That’s the structure of these conflicts: the institution with power remains opaque, while the individual without it is scrutinized.

No amount of “naming names” will change that, and even in the best-case legal outcome, the compensation would be modest and the past would not be undone. Revenge, even if it were possible, would be self-indulgent and would miss the point: what happened to me is a symptom of a broader failure.

That is not the same thing as forgiveness. I do not forgive what was done. I am not going to pretend it was acceptable, or offer a cheap public absolution so that everyone can feel comfortable again. I will not anesthetize myself—or anyone else—to the reality of what happened.

Turning injury into moral formation

Today, moral injury is usually spoken of as trauma. “I’m traumatized.” “That traumatized me.” The dominant response is therapeutic: regulate your emotions, “let go,” “move on,” treat the injury as a private psychological wound to be managed.

I do not deny that people are wounded. I have been wounded. But I think something essential is missing in that framing.

When I refuse unilateral forgiveness and “just move on,” I am not clinging to my hurt for its own sake. I am saying that serious injustice ought to work on us—morally. The right question is not “How do I stop feeling this?” but “What does this require of me?”

What if we treated moral injury not mainly as trauma, but as material for moral formation? Not as something that just happens to us, but something that happens for us, if we are willing to learn from it. Not something to dissolve for our own comfort, but something to metabolize so that we are less likely to participate in similar harm ourselves.

The word holy comes from the Proto-Germanic hailagaz. It means that which is inviolate, whole, unbroken, preserved from defilement. From the same root we get wholeness, holistic, and health. Wholeness, in this sense, is not about avoiding harm. It is about refusing to let harm hollow out our moral core.

Maybe, instead of “letting go” in the therapeutic sense, we need to let the wound sit in us long enough to understand it. Process it. Search for solutions. Stay curious. Then act on it, and let that make us into something bigger and stronger.

If we rush to escape our pain, we create more of it in the long term by never really addressing the injury. We become morally, spiritually, and psychologically weak.

Refusing to anesthetize ourselves to injustice does not have to corrode us. It draws new moral boundaries, sharpens our sense of right and wrong, and gives us a clearer map of life. It can make us stronger. If we never do that work—internally or externally—we stay morally ambiguous. And sooner or later, we will do the same thing to someone else that was done to us. It happened to me.

So what is my motivation?

My motivation is to tell the truth about what happened, to identify the failure mode(s) that produced it, and to do what I can to make this less likely to happen to someone else. Along the way, I want to see how the dysfunction in this one place connects to dysfunction elsewhere in the country—and what people like us can actually do about it.

In the process, I will form myself. I don’t really have a choice about that. I’m ready to do the work I wanted to do, but the way my institution handled things makes that impossible. So I’m going to make the best of it and use it as the starting point for something else.

There is another way to describe all of this, which is the one I hinted at earlier: a vocation, a calling. I didn’t choose it in advance, but I choose it now.

Richard Feynman picked locks and played the bongos. Claude Shannon was a juggler. On a unicycle. Shakespeare was quite serious about real estate investment. Tycho Brahe? When he became bored of challenging the idea that the planets orbited the Earth, he had a pet moose that he would give beer to at a hideaway island castle. One night the moose missed a stair and died.

So yes, submitting public records requests is my hobby now. A strange hobby, perhaps, but lawful. Necessary.

As part of my hobby, today I submitted a complaint to the Texas Office of the Attorney General, Open Records Division. This was after submitting several records requests to Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center.

Request. No response. Notification. No response. Notification. No response. Notification. No response. Texas Attorney General complaint.

I tried.

The institution is Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center—the same one that dismissed me after my public writing on COVID‑19. During the pandemic, many there participated in the response; some won awards. Open debate was uncomfortable.

The pandemic response had catastrophic consequences for the country and the world. Some argue lockdowns caused substantial collateral mortality; others dispute the scale. This is an argument Jay Bhattacharya made when I spoke to him in 2023. Antivax beliefs have mainstreamed. Trust in public health and science has plummeted. Many people feel they do not know what to believe anymore.

But people won awards. The awards were aspirational, not meretricious. They are not meant to recognize healing, but to hide the wound. People notice. The wound is visible. And its effects can be seen no matter how much hiding is done.

When a student with a large platform questioned NIH and CDC positions and pointed to the fracture inside the medical community, the reaction followed a pattern.

I didn’t know what I’d stepped into. I don’t regret it.

Yes, I have been submitting public record requests to my former medical school. The one I attended on a full scholarship and earned a PhD from.

Curious. I keep returning to the same conclusion.

See, I do seem to recall on December 11th, 2023, that my dismissal hearing was video recorded. I do seem to recall being warned not to record it myself, according to official policy. The school could. Not me. That should have sent off alarm bells. It did not. After all, surely, these people were respectable. They are doctors. They would play fair.

I seem to recall something else. I seem to recall during that hearing, after testimony I believe contained falsehoods, one dean of the medical school, Dr. Bethany Nunez, said that another dean had told her something about me that, in her words, was not true.

By “seem to recall” I understate on purpose. Precision over volume.

If senior administrators circulated unverified allegations about a student, that is serious misconduct.

The world I believed in does not exist. In my 20s, I believed there might still be one refuge where I could go where something pure and true—healing—might exist. A sanctuary of good where I could work and live, where we worked against death and darkness. That’s why I applied to medical school. I entered medicine believing it was a refuge for truth. I worked like it was.

Medicine is not supposed to destroy those who tell the truth about it.

===

I visited campus to review my dismissal hearing recording on September 13th and 16th, 2024. Visiting campus was required to review the record. But why? Why couldn’t I just… receive the hearing recording? I would soon find out why.

My wife took off work to accompany me. We were worried that the school might fabricate more “evidence”. For a while, every time I visited campus, I wore a hot mic. But I wasn’t allowed to bring electronics. So I had to bring my wife.

Twice they had accused me of threatening to harm people. Once it was alleged that I had criminally trespassed. The police officers always expressed confusion. They knew me as the cheerful student who often lost his ID badge and had to be helped to open doors. None of that seemed to matter.

All that matters is fear. And there is a lot of it. They accuse you of doing terrible things so that they can justify doing terrible things to you. They leave a paper trail with these things. They then tell their friends, who join in.

When we met with the lawyer in charge of my recordings on campus, Joanna Harkey, we discussed access to the recording.

The technical person allowing me to view my hearing recording apologized that it was only audio. He did not give any explanation. I brushed this off.

But while listening, I discovered something: the audio suggests portions of the hearing recording are missing. If video exists, its absence prevents verification. Video with excised portions would show skipping frames.

The school delayed for more than a month before allowing me to view—well, listen—to the recordings. I couldn’t figure out why it took so long.

The lawyer responsible for providing the hearing record was Joanna Harkey.

And the man who oversaw my review of the recording was Vice President for Information Technology / Chief Information Officer Vince Fell.

I’m requesting chain‑of‑custody records, access logs, retention schedules, and file hashes for the hearing files.

If parts were deleted, I don’t know all of them. But one portion that appears missing corresponds to testimony in which a physician described her motive in terms of an alleged threat involving Rachel Forbes.

I will not speculate about future accusations.

Notably, the most serious allegation against me—a threat—never made it to the hearing. More interesting, the allegation was dropped by the person who made it. Yet it continued to circulate informally. No due process. The trace—wiped clean.

Now, to be clear: if any student records were altered or deleted, that conduct may violate Texas law and could, depending on the facts, amount to misdemeanor or felony offenses.

Gov’t Code § 552.351 (TPIA): Misdemeanor to willfully destroy, mutilate, remove without permission, or alter public information. Penalty: $25–$4,000 fine, 3–90 days jail, or both.

Gov’t Code § 552.203(2) (TPIA): Officer for public information must protect public information from alteration, loss, or unlawful removal.

Gov’t Code § 552.004(b) (TPIA / SB 944): If public info is on a personal device, the officer/employee must forward/transfer it to the agency or preserve it (original + backup) for the retention period.

Gov’t Code § 552.233(b) (TPIA / SB 944): Temporary custodians must surrender or return public information to the agency within 10 days of request.

Gov’t Code § 441.187: A state record may be destroyed only after the approved retention period expires or on approval of a records destruction request by the Director and Librarian (TSLAC), or if exempted by rule.

Penal Code § 37.10(a)(3): Tampering with a governmental record includes destroying, concealing, removing, or impairing its verity/availability (with an exception for legally authorized destruction/transfer).

Penal Code § 37.09(a)(1), (c): Evidence tampering—altering/destroying/concealing a record knowing an investigation/proceeding is pending; 3rd‑degree felony (higher in specified circumstances).

Penal Code § 39.02: Abuse of official capacity—misuse of government property/services, etc., with intent to benefit or to harm/defraud; grading tied to value. (“Misuse” is defined in § 39.01(2) as dealing with property contrary to law, agreement, oath, etc.).

FERPA, 34 C.F.R. § 99.10(e): A school may not destroy education records if there’s an outstanding request to inspect/review.

===

These details come from my own recollections and from the documents I’ve reviewed over the past year.

TTUHSC is required by law to release the video. TTUHSC has been provided a preservation notice and is required by law to preserve all records.

Sworn testimony regarding the deletion allegation is attached to this thread. Right‑to‑response emails to Joanna Harkey, Vince Fell, and Bethany Nunez are attached. The AG complaint is also attached.

As for lawsuits, let’s just say. It’s not out of the question. Lawsuits against me? That’s another battlefield. I will respond as needed.

Next week: the “threat”.

Wrap‑up notes:

There were no replies to the right‑to‑response emails.

A document hub will be posted and pinned on my website on Saturday. It will contain a chronological list of documents and incidents, all sworn testimony, etc.

I’m going to make this material easy to find. Google, DuckDuckGo, whatever crawls the fediverse: just breathing will surface the receipts.

The story will be further fleshed out by records requests and potentially discovery.

Obviously a lot of this is going in the book, though trimmed down. The book is about what is wrong with medicine, science, and technology and the reforms required to fix them. It will be a radical book with new ideas. More in a forthcoming book.

More actions will be taken over the coming days. Some will need to fly under the radar for a while.

If you know anything about what happened to me at Texas Tech, you can contact me at kevinnbass@proton.me or over DM, or alternatively, you can get in contact with my lawyer. You have the protection of many whistleblower laws. However, please consult an attorney. I will provide more information in the coming days.

If anything happened to you at Texas Tech, please share your story with me. Any story you have is confidential unless you specify otherwise.

Documents: