[danso]

Based on what little I’ve read about his situation, and general academic conventions, I don’t think MIT should’ve cut the author’s speaking invitation.

But him getting dragged on Twitter? Yeah, that’s going to happen when you write an op-Ed in Newsweek that oafishly compares DEI efforts to the Nazi purge of Jewish students and scholars:

https://www.newsweek.com/diversity-problem-campus-opinion-16...

> Ninety years ago Germany had the best universities in the world. Then an ideological regime obsessed with race came to power and drove many of the best scholars out, gutting the faculties and leading to sustained decay that German universities never fully recovered from.

[Quarrelsome]

do you really think this guy invoking Godwin's law is heinous enough to cancel this guys speech about extra solar planets?

At best, its a petty retort isn't it?

[danso]

From my comment:

> I don’t think MIT should’ve cut the author’s speaking invitation.

"Oh but you said 'But' and we should ignore anything said after 'But...'". Sure, but if you could afford the slightest bit of nuance, you'd recognize that "don't cancel an academic lecture" and "making a bad-faith dumb Nazi comparison deserves to be dragged on twitter" are 2 different things? And asserting the former with the latter necessarily implies that academic decisions should not be made on the basis of social media outrage.

Abbot arguing that contemporary DEI campaigns are comparable to Nazism is distasteful on its face, but it's also reflects a shallow level of thinking and knowledge. Can he seriously not think of any other comparison from the last 90 years?

But again, the shallowness of his thinking in this area doesn't pertain to his speaking invitation.

[Quarrelsome]

I don't see how you separate the two. The dog piling on twitter is obviously a factor in the speaking invitation being cut.