Mark Roger Lepper (born December 5, 1944) is an American psychologist. He was the Psychology Department Chair at Stanford University who allowed J. Michael Bailey to engage in the vulgar misuse of gender diverse children on Stanford’s campus.
Stanford biologist Joan Roughgarden had contacted Lepper when she learned of Bailey’s upcoming lecture. From her 2003 report on the event:
I learned in March that the psychology department at Stanford had invited Bailey to give a regularly scheduled departmental seminar. I alerted the chair of psychology to the considerable risk attending such a speaker, because Bailey’s findings were of dubious quality, and likely to hurt and offend people. He said that the seminar series could accommodate a marginal speaker every now and then, and invited me to attend. My caution went unnoticed however, and Bailey was introduced as “controversial,” someone whose work has “important implications for law, medicine and social policy” and as a “successful teacher whose courses feature transsexuals stripping after class.”
What ensued was the most humiliating lecture I’ve ever personally attended.
Source: Letter to the National Academy of Sciences (2003)
Resources
Stanford University Bulletin (stanford.edu)
- Psychology 2003-04 (PDF)