Shame on MIT for Bowing to a Twitter Mob
MIT canceled geophysicist Dorian Abbot’s lecture on life on other planets after people on Twitter criticized his advocacy of merit-based college admissions.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology canceled geophysicist Dorian Abbot’s lecture about climate and the likelihood of life on other planets after people on Twitter criticized his advocacy of merit-based college admissions.1 The school confessed that its decision was intended “to avoid controversy.” As Abbot explains (using the third person), “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.”
In August 2021, Abbot coauthored a short op-ed advocating that universities admit students based on merit, not “diversity” considerations, and that applicants should be treated as individuals, not members of a group. The op-ed clearly and rationally presents its case and is worth reading in its entirety, but here is a representative snippet:
DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] violates the ethical and legal principle of equal treatment. It entails treating people as members of a group rather than as individuals, repeating the mistake that made possible the atrocities of the 20th century. It requires being willing to tell an applicant “I will ignore your merits and qualifications and deny you admission because you belong to the wrong group, and I have defined a more important social objective that justifies doing so.” It treats persons as merely means to an end, giving primacy to a statistic over the individuality of a human being.2
Instead of such injustice, Abbot and his coauthor, Ivan Marinovic, advocated that “university applicants be treated as individuals and evaluated through a rigorous and unbiased process based on their merit and qualifications alone.”
What makes MIT’s decision particularly irrational, however, is that Abbot wasn’t invited to speak about university admissions. He was invited to speak about his research, which MIT students could have benefited from. If students object to Abbot’s op-ed, the appropriate response is to write a rebuttal, or to send a letter to the editor of Newsweek (which published the op-ed). Instead, students took to Twitter to vent their discontent, and the administration capitulated, thereby depriving students—at a university focused on science and technology—the opportunity of hearing a respected scientist discuss his important findings.
Sadly, canceling talks—and thus opportunities for students to learn—on spurious grounds has become common, especially in higher education. Part of the university administration’s job is to determine who speaks on campus. But to deplatform speakers based on unrelated political views is spineless and contrary to the mission of a university: to seek and share knowledge. Universities ought to stand up to the nonsense of Twitter mobs, not bow to it. Let this be a lesson on intellectual integrity to universities across the county.