John Searle
I have permission from the writer to post this. It was forwarded to me by Tom Nagel. Let me add that I have spoken at length to other philosophers accused of this and that in the last twelve years: Peter Ludlow, Thomas Pogge, Jeff Ketland. My conclusion has been that none of these accusations has any merit (I say nothing of my case, on which I cannot comment for legal reasons). By my calculations that makes four cases of not guilty and zero of guilty. I wonder what the philosophy profession makes of that.
________________________________________
From: Jennifer Hudin [berkeleysocialontology@gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, September 26, 2025 6:38 PM
Subject: John Searle
Dear Professor…
I am Jennifer Hudin, John Searle’s secretary of 40 years. I am writing to tell you that John died last week on the 17th of September. The last two years of his life were hellish. HIs daughter–in-law, Andrea (Tom’s wife) took him to Tampa in 2024 and put him in a nursing home from which he never returned. She emptied his house in Berkeley and put it on the rental market. And no one was allowed to contact John, even to send him a birthday card on his birthday.
It is for us, those who cared about John, deeply sad.
I know you are aware of his final months at U.C. Berkeley when a female accused him (and me) of Title IX violations. This was extremely hard on John. The news no one knows is that after an extensive and intrusive investigation, these allegations were never found to be true. I was found 100% innocent of all allegations, and John’s emeritus status was removed because the Chancellor at the time, Carol Christ, found the not guilty verdict of the academic senate incorrect in her opinion. and reversed it herself. The two judges in the case both quit and wished me luck in restoring my life.
John never recovered.
There will be no memorial on campus honoring John’s 60+ years of dedication and work at U.C. Berkeley. The Dominican University of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley is trying to organize a memorial.
John was innocent and falsely accused. To the very end of his time on campus, he held his dignity intact. I know you and he were friends, and I thought you might like to know more details about his life and death. If you wish to know more, I am happy to oblige.
Best wishes,
Jennifer Hudin
Berkeley , CA
Very sorry to hear of the passing of Professor Searle. May his memory be a blessing.
And to read Jennifer Hudin’s account of their defamatory mistreatment.
What will the philosophy profession say? How will the obituaries read? I expect nothing but drivel and silence. Will they even manage to say he was an outstandingly good philosopher?
He was a solid if limited thinker and deserves some restitution after a painful and difficult end.
I agree about the restitution.
I took Searle’s Phil of Language class as an undergraduate in the early 80s. As a lecturer, there was no parallel; pacing back and forth, arguments and stories in equal portions, the kind of educational experience one dreams of as a young student.
As a teacher, I taught his material every semester (both on Mind, Language and the Social Construction of Reality) and my students, to a one, came away the better for it.
I’m also in the unique position in that many of my students transferred to Cal and were then students of Searle’s. So I was constantly updated as to what he was up to and how he was teaching. And although, as even I remembered personally, he was fond of impolitic remarks (and this was confirmed by many of my students to have persisted through the years), none, and this includes those females he selected as Assistants, ever accused him of anything more than language that, by historical standards, was, at most, maybe intemperate.
The way the university treated him was shameful. Of the many black marks (dare I say it) on my alma mater lately (the Stalinist renaming of buildings), this is probably the worst, in its effect. From the Free Speech Movement to the end, he defined the Berkeley experience in many ways.
To answer McGinn’s question: I tried submitting something like the above to Nous and it wasn’t accepted. There’s your answer
Your account of Searle is exactly what I would have predicted. Shameful, is the word, also applicable to the philosophy profession.
RIP Searle. History of philosophy books will remember him fondly for his ideas. Ms Christ’s legacy should be as attractive as her picture on her Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_T._Christ
You know the type: finger-wagging scold.
The mildest of corrections, though it’s entirely possible that Hudin knows best. According to this account at Daily Nous — https://dailynous.com/2019/06/21/searle-found-violated-sexual-harassment-policies/ — Chancellor Christ recommended stripping Searle’s emeritus status, but UC President Janet Napolitano ultimately authorized it.
So sorry to hear of John’s passing. He was a great philosopher, a great teacher, and a good friend of mine. He helped me get a job in computer science after taking his seminar at Berkeley in the summer of 96. He obliged me to become a speaker at Lancaster University in the UK in celebration of John’s teacher, JL Austin his work in philosophy of language and philosophy of mind will never be forgotten despite the disservice that Berkeley did to him in his last year of teaching that will be forgotten, but his philosophy won’t.
I quite agree. I hope Berkeley’s treatment of him is not forgotten.
I’m very sorry to learn about what happened to Professor Searle. I hope that he gets the memorial and recognition that he deserves.
On a separate note, may I suggest removing Jennifer’s email address? This would prevent spammers and other abusers from contacting her.
He won’t get that except from the morally decent few.
She has not expressed any discomfort about unwanted emails.
Searle was one of my favorite professors (over a decade ago) and encouraged me to go to grad school. He was a great lecturer (and scholar) who seemed to enjoy being politically incorrect during class. I was never able to pick up on anything more and was thus a bit surprised by the 2017 allegations.
Yet a letter written by Searle’s secretary of 4 decades—whom the alleged victim also accused of covering up Searle’s abuses—doesn’t seem like the most reliable piece of evidence to update one’s beliefs about Searle’s innocence/guilt. It’s also quite unsurprising that those accused of wrongdoing have tried to convey to you that they’re innocent. I’m not inferring that Searle/others are guilty, just that it’s a strange inference to make as opposed to remaining agnostic on the matter. So that is what one member of the philosophy profession makes of your “calculations.”
You must think I am very naive. Of course I didn’t just take their word for it. I had long conversations about what happened, asked probing questions, compared what they said with other information, etc., etc. The usual procedure when evaluating what someone says. It isn’t difficult to detect when someone is lying. I was also involved in a complex lawsuit myself and know the drill. People don’t generally lie when making factual claims that are easily falsified. But isn’t this obvious? Why did you assume otherwise?
I. Have been a fan of John Searle for over 40 years and still study his works. The whole incident and allegations were devastating but I never stopped reading his books and papers, and continue to watch his talks on YouTube.
I think he was one of the greatest thinkers of the past half century. Maybe the greatest.
He had a clever penetrating mind.
In 1981, while I was researching my ScD thesis and teaching at UNICAMP in Brazil, John was my office mate, on sabbatical from UCB. I was also his official translator for about 5 months. And we became good friends. He wrote a blurb on the cover of my book, Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes.
I got to know his entire family and we corresponded regularly, right up until his sexual harassment suit, when he stopped communicating (except to deny to me that he had ever harassed or assaulted anyone).
I cannot think of a book or article of his that didn’t help me in some way in thinking about the philosophy of language.
At a party in his honor in Brazil, July 1981, he was asked to say a few words. He stood up, in a large banquet hall with a couple of hundred Brazilians, and anounced “I can drink more beer than anyone in this room.” Brazilians took up the challenge. Flower vases were emptied and washed. Large vases. They were filled with beer. Searle finished his first and won.
I remember doing simultaneous translation of a talk by Donald Davidson at the conference. John asked Donald some questions that Donald couldn’t answer. Afterwards John asked me “Dan, do you think Don fudged his answers?” You have to be good to wipe the floor with Davidson (they did not seem to like each other much).
Huge loss for western philosophy, philosophy of the mind, philosophy of the social sciences, philosophy of language, philosophy of linguistics. He was one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, period, condescending remarks above notwithstanding.
In all the time I knew John, I never saw him even be flirtatious with female faculty or students. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t, of course. But it is part of the reason that I believed him when he told me he did not do these things.
I agree with this assessment.
Guardian obituary
John Searle obituary https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/05/john-searle-obituary?CMP=share_btn_url
The obituary is good except that it uses “found” in the penultimate paragraph instead of “claimed”. We mustn’t take universities’ statements at face value.
Good observation
There’s one in the Times as well, will check the wording.
The Times is behind a paywall,. But uses the verb allege,
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/obituaries/article/john-searle-obituary-philosopher-of-the-mind-who-was-sceptical-of-ai-qp2hsfdpx
There’s a. Way to see this on an archive.ph site but I don’t want to post it here
Just an anecdote I tell occasionally about alleged sexual harassment, a few years back I unfortunately had to spend some time in hospital. One of the nurses was very friendly and would say “hello darling” to me every morning for about 1 month. After approx a month I borrowed her phrase and greeted her in the same way – to which she replied “are you flirting with me”?
Presumably I was not of great value for accusations to be made, but in a different setting, where the m/ power balance is different, I can see how something like this could turn into a lawsuit
It certainly can and people will believe it. People will believe anything that suits their political (or other) prejudices–e.g., that Haitians are eating the dogs, or that famous philosophers are “sexual predators”.
I’m pretty sure that you first introduced me to Searle’s work back when we were working on that documentary series together, and I haven’t stopped reading/listening to/watching him since. He had a remarkable gift for making his thought comprehensible to lay people like me.
I remember. He was very clear, perhaps a bit too clear.
Too clear?
In education, there’s no such thing. Or at least there shouldn’t be.
Searle is of the mid-20th century Oxford school that believes that any philosophical problem can be solved by clear thinking; there are no mysteries. This leads him, in my opinion, to oversimplify and avoid difficulties. He is the opposite of Tom Nagel. This is what I meant by saying he is “too clear”. His view on the mind-body problem is a case in point.
Thank you for clarifying 😊
But yes, there is a relative “simplicity” to his approach to the mind body problem.
I’m attempting to write something related to this, which is in many ways a development of his arguments.
I’ve had discussions with him about how his views differ from mine, though in many ways they are similar.
You mentioned Searle’s approach of clarifying things as per the Oxford school of the 50s.
I saw his video debate with Sir John Eccles, and he made this point explicitly. Searle cites Ockham’s razor, and the approach of finding the simplest explanation.
He was one of the great oversimplifiers.
I enjoyed listening to Searle in my decades around Berkeley, especially his team teaching with Bert Dreyfus, a few years before Searle decided that philosophy of language is a sub-domain of philosophy of mind.
To my mind, he won the dispute with Derrida on textuality and reality.
His notion of speech acts deeply influenced philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who deeply influenced me. Habermas carried speech act theory far beyond Searle’s conception, yet always in appreciation of Searle’s contribution.
The Guardian seems to have done a fair obituary, but they’re unaware that Searle was found not guilty. This letter should be forwarded to the Guardian for correction of their article.
It was Austin and Grice who really invented speech act theory, though Searle developed it.
Newspapers are happy to report guilty verdicts on people, right or wrong, but reluctant to issue corrections when innocence is established. No one wants to hear when professor X is found not guilty after all.
Good points.
Interestingly, Grice’s notion of “ways” with words was preceded by Heidegger’s notion of “sway” in “Saying.”. Heidegger had, in his own idiom, a speech-act conception of language in _Being and Time_, and anticipated the Linguistic Turn prior to the Oxford School. Surprisingly, the first English-language review of _Being and Time_ was by Gilbert Ryle (1949). Austin’s _How to Do Things with Words_ is posthumous, and Grice’s pioneering work (c1967) was more-or-less simultaneous with Searle’s conception, which was in article form before the book.
Anyone who’s been wrongly accused of sexual “conversational implicature” wants to get beyond that, and the details stay confidential, rightly so. But it would be interesting to better understand how speech acts miscarry in a cumulative way into litigious effects. It’s an important kind of “theater” of projection and failures to repair miscommunication which is very relevant to better understanding how speech acts miscarry in extended relationships. The speech act is always nested in levels of interactional engagement which can fail to attend to confusions of horizon (associating here to Gadamer’s notion of a “fusion of horizons” in communicative interaction).
Indeed: it is only too easy to misconstrue the import of speech acts without knowing a lot of context.
“……I was found 100% innocent of all allegations, and John’s emeritus status was removed because the Chancellor at the time, Carol Christ, found the not guilty verdict of the academic senate incorrect in her opinion. and reversed it herself. The two judges in the case both quit and wished me luck in restoring my life”…. If the quotation is indeed accurate, in my book, to be fair, that means innocent. Period, next topic?
I agree: if you have never been found guilty of anything, you are to be treated as innocent.
I want to begin with 2 personal thoughts.
First, Professor Searle was a remarkable influence (though sadly we never met), and he very much shaped my early interest in cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and machine learning.
Second, as a grad student — what an odd coincidence — someone gave me Searle’s debates on VHS and asked me to convert them to digital files. I of course ended up watching them as they were being converted and loved every minute. It’s as close as I got to knowing him in person, and it was a really wonderful window into his personality, debate skills, and sense of humor.
Next, on to the allegations: Professor McGinn, please allow me to enumerate what I understand are the various details that support Searle’s innocence:
1. The Academic Senate reached a conclusion of “not guilty”
2. Prof. Searle strongly denied the charges (he was also clearly devastated by them)
3. Prof. Searle’s demeanor and behavior is confirmed by his lifelong professional assistant
4. The accusations were inconsistent with his character and reputation
5. There was a strong social movement at the time enabling (both true and) false accusations, typically against men
6. There was no direct evidence supporting the charges
Have I missed anything?
You summarize well. I have no direct knowledge of any of this and never got to speak to him about it. But I believe he was innocent based on a variety of factors–one of them being that he was just not that kind of person in my experience. Jennifer Hudin is very credible. What I am sure of is that he was subjected to the hysteria and fanaticism of certain people who should have known better and been better.
Thank you, sincerely, Professor McGinn. I appreciate your candor.
As you must surmise, I admit my belief status is “(as yet) unconvinced.” Nevertheless, I very much want to be convinced (of what my instincts tell me is true: the charges are false).
I envy you, that what you know is enough.
A footnote — I wonder if you are aware: when you ask Google in AI mode to summarize all the known facts pointing to innocence, they are in their entirety this post and the letter you shared.
You have succeeded in planting a very important flag in the history and memory of John Searle.
I do know a lot of detail from Jennifer and I know how these things work from my own case. People are innocent unless proven guilty. I am happy to have done something to remedy the situation.