MIT ABANDONS ITS MISSION
I am a professor who just had a
prestigious public science lecture at MIT cancelled because of an outrage mob
on Twitter. My crime? Arguing for academic evaluations based on academic merit.
This is the story of how a cancellation is carried out, why it should worry all
of us, and what we can do to stop this dangerous trend.
I have been a professor in the Department of
the Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago for the past 10 years. I
work on topics ranging from climate change to the possibility of life on
extrasolar planets using mathematics, physics, and computer simulation.
I have never considered myself a political
person. For example, a few days before an election I go to I Side With.com and
answer the policy questions, then I assign my vote using a weighted draw based
on my overlap with the candidates. It’s an efficient algorithm that works
perfectly for a nerd like me.
But I started to get alarmed about five years
ago as I noticed an increasing number of issues and viewpoints become
impossible to discuss on campus. I mostly just wanted to do my science and not
have anyone yell at me, and I thought that if I kept my mouth shut the problem
would eventually go away. I knew that speaking out would likely bring serious
reputational and professional consequences. And for a number of years I just
didn’t think it was worth it.
But the street violence of the summer of 2020,
some of which I witnessed personally in Chicago, and the justifications and
dishonesty that accompanied it, convinced me that I could no longer remain
silent in good conscience.
In the fall of 2020 I started advocating
openly for academic freedom and merit-based evaluations. I recorded some
short YouTube videos in
which I argued for the importance of treating each person as an individual
worthy of dignity and respect. In an academic context, that means giving
everyone a fair and equal opportunity when they apply for a position as well as
allowing them to express their opinions openly, even if you disagree with
them.
As a result, I was immediately targeted
for cancellation, primarily
by a group of graduate students in my department. Whistleblowers later revealed that the
attack was partially planned and coordinated on the Ford Foundation Fellowship
Program listserv by a graduate student in my department. (Please do not attack
this person or any of the people who attacked me.)
That group of graduate students organized
a letter of denunciation.
It claimed that I threatened the “safety and belonging of all underrepresented
groups within the department,” and it was presented to my department chair. The
letter demanded that my teaching and research be restricted in a way that would
cripple my ability to function as a scientist. A strong statement in
support of faculty free expression by University of Chicago President Robert
Zimmer put an end to that, and that is where things stood until the summer of
2021.
On August 12, a colleague and I wrote an op-ed in Newsweek in
which we argued that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) as it currently is
implemented on campus “violates the ethical and legal principle of equal
treatment” and “treats persons as merely means to an end, giving primacy to a
statistic over the individuality of a human being.” We proposed instead “an
alternative framework called Merit, Fairness, and Equality (MFE) whereby
university applicants are treated as individuals and evaluated through a
rigorous and unbiased process based on their merit and qualifications alone.”
We noted that this would mean an end to legacy and athletic admission
advantages, which significantly favor white applicants.
Shortly thereafter, my detractors developed a
new strategy to try to isolate me and intimidate everyone else into silence:
They argued on Twitter that I should not be invited to
give science seminars at other universities and coordinated replacement speakers.
This is an effective and increasingly common way to ratchet up the cost of
dissenting because disseminating new work to colleagues is an important part of
the scientific endeavor.
Sure enough, this strategy was employed when I
was chosen to give the Carlson Lecture at MIT —
a major honor in my field. It is an annual public talk given to a large
audience and my topic was “climate and the potential for life on other
planets.” On September 22, a new Twitter mob, composed of a group of MIT students,
postdocs, and recent alumni, demanded that I be uninvited.
It worked. And quickly.
On September 30 the department chair at MIT
called to tell me that they would be cancelling the Carlson lecture this year
in order to avoid controversy.
It’s worth stating what happened again: a
small group of ideologues mounted a Twitter campaign to cancel a distinguished
science lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology because they
disagreed with some of the political positions the speaker had taken. And they
were successful within eight days.
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