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Comment by tensor | Hacker News Reader

That's not quite what I imagine when I hear the term "gutting a team." Gutting a team is when then very significantly reduce its size and priority. Simply switching leadership of a project isn't gutting a team, it's normal university politics and infighting.

If they are forcing funding by Facebook/Meta, then that does seem like a conflict of interest, but is a quite a different headline.

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The sidelining is to show damages to her reputation etc. Page 50 or so starts the description alleging how the administration and the dean gutted her department by blocking, reallocating funds, stopping hiring, and refusing to extend contracts when funds are available.

From what I gathered, they didn't simply switch leadership, they removed it entirely, along with the person doing the most work, replacing them with nothing, which effectively shut down the project.

Is there someone continuing it that I missed?

According to the complaint, "the project" was FB Archive, which Dr. Donovan came up with the idea for and was the only person in the room with the actual source material. The Public Interest Tech Lab was the organization actually tasked with building out FB Archive, which they did, and it shipped: https://fbarchive.org

I think Dr. Donovan's complaint is not that it didn't happen, so much as she was not allowed to play a larger role in it despite having the desire, the people, the funding, and the right--as the person who came up with the idea and the person who provided the material, without which there would be no project. (And then worse, history rewritten to exclude her contributions)

Who exactly did the university get to replace the lead researcher they dismissed*?

Who remains at the university doing the research halted by the dismissal* of the lead researcher?

* – whether overtly or via constructive dismissal

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