Here is s summary of what happened
Here is President Zimmer’s response.
https://president.uchicago.edu/page/statement-faculty-free-expression-and-diversity
So proud that I study at a University where the administration is not intimidated
7 Likes
And where at least some faculty aren’t too intimidated to speak their minds. If they are wrong, let the evidence speak rather than some dumb petition.
2 Likes
Still, it was disappointing that 150 or so signed that dumb petition, which was full of the fashionable cant about “harm” and “safety” coupled with the obligatory list of “demands”, which included cancelling the wayward prof in a multitude of pettifogging lilliputian ways.
I read the posts of Professor Abbott. His argument in favor of meritocratic hiring of faculty and acceptance of grad students was cogent but refutable. It was tenable but not indisputable. He offered statistics, but those statistics may have been flawed. Perhaps he left other important considerations out of the statement of his position. These are all things that ought to have been addressed by his critics. But they preferred to send him to purgatory - or at least to Coventry - for the sin of stating a position that had previously been the policy of the University. Perhaps it is no longer the policy, but one policy at least remains: Nothing is holy at the University of Chicago except argument itself.
Luckily, there are still adults in the room, and, more importantly, adults who are willing to apply the true UChicago principles. There will be no excommunications of heretics on Zimmer’s watch. Nevertheless, I tremble when I think of the time coming when these 150 true believers - now mostly grad students and post docs - become responsible for policy at this university and many another.
4 Likes
Professor Abbott has now written a piece describing his experience.
https://quillette.com/author/dorian-abbott
This is interesting advice on how to survive when a mob comes for you. Abbott makes tactical suggestions (e.g. mobilizing your own supporters), but I especially liked his invocation of the perennial virtues of determination, courage, and love. The professor may have been re-reading some old HUM texts.
The appeal to the last of these virtues was at first blush, however, a bit surprising. Huh? You see yourself being viciously and unfairly attacked on all sides, and that is how you respond? Is this just a Christian-sounding piety? Possibly, but it also seemed to me to be very much in the argumentative spirit of a university, in which those one disagrees with are viewed as potential interlocutors, not simply enemies without any tincture of the truth. Even an isolated targeted individual ought not to write off his attackers as being simply dead wrong and malignant. Like Socrates he should want to talk to them, not damn them. As Abbott puts it, “If a mob starts attacking you, remind yourself that this mob is composed of human beings who are themselves worthy of dignity and respect…”
In a time of crisis all the virtues are needed, be they pagan or Christian. I would add to these ones the healing sense of laughter: the behavior of all of us has in it at all times a good share of the comic and preposterous. Whether attacker or attacked, no one is entirely composed of nobility.
Abbott is also fortunate, as he himself admits, in a more mundane way: “I am lucky to be at the University of Chicago, which has a long history of defending academic freedom, in large part thanks to President Zimmer… I also recommend getting a code such as the Chicago Principles adopted at your institution if possible, so administrators will have something concrete to point to in a crisis to justify not firing you.”
3 Likes
The link isn’t working. Unless the page was already removed 
Just google Quillette.com and scroll down six or seven articles or so.
Thanks!
Didn’t think MIT supported cancellation, good thing Princeton stepped up.
"Abbot was slated to deliver the tenth annual John Carlson Lecture at MIT this month regarding “[new results in climate science]” The school disinvited Abbot after outrage over a series of YouTube videos where he “argued for the importance of treating each person as an individual worthy of dignity and respect” following 2020’s summer of riots and protests, according to an opinion piece Abbot wrote earlier this month.
Romps then pushed for Abbot to speak at Berkeley and was denied, he said on Twitter.
“Last month, the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences @eapsMIT canceled a science lecture because of the invited scientist’s political views. That scientist does excellent work in areas of interest to BASC (he visited us at our invitation in 2014),” Romps tweeted.
“I was hoping we could agree that BASC does not consider an individual’s political or social opinions when selecting speakers for its events, except for cases in which the opinions give a reasonable expectation that members of our community would be treated with disrespect,” he continued.
Romps went on to explain that denying Abbot to speak about his research at Berkeley threatens the research and work of scientists overall.
“Excluding people because of their political and social views diminishes the pool of scientists with which members of BASC can interact and reduces the opportunities for learning and collaboration,” he wrote.
“More broadly, such exclusion signals that some opinions – even well-intentioned ones – are forbidden, thereby increasing self-censorship, degrading public discourse, and contributing to our nation’s political balkanization.”
From Princeton,
3 Likes
BTW, Romps resigned his chair at UCB over this.
1 Like