[claytongulick]

All in all, it seems like this was a situation where the process worked.

- She said some stuff as a visiting speaker she probably shouldn't have in that context, or at least was taken wrong by some folks in the audience.

- Attendees complained

- She was formally censured by the hosting university that knew what the comments were

- Due to the censure, her employer investigated

- She was cleared, life went on

- Newspapers decided it was a great chance to twist events into an evil right-wing speech suppression story.

News at 11.

[bloaf]

This is not an accurate characterization.

- She made factual statements about policy impacts on overdose deaths.

- A politician's relative who was in attendance reported it to the political party backing those policies.

- The politicians successfully signaled to those at the university that criticizing their policies will be inconvenient at least, and a realistic threat to your career.

* Edit, for emphasis:

Your characterization would be like saying that it is fine that you're driving drunk since your car's auto-breaking feature is working and preventing you from hitting pedestrians.

[claytongulick]

We have absolutely no idea what comments she was censured for, they aren't saying. They certainly didn't claim she was censured for factual discussion about opioid crisis, as you've implied (and the reporter, without evidence, also implied).

UTMB is a prestigious institution. Issuing a statement of censure is a pretty big deal.

Occam's razor would suggest that it wasn't done arbitrarily.

Objectively looking at the known facts without a political bias, it seems to me that the most likely scenario is that she made some inappropriate comments, got censured, but no one wants to embarrass her further or risk liability by repeating hearsay.

People make mistakes.

We don't have any facts that would support the narrative that the government encouraged the censure or the investigation in any way.

I'm not sure why there's so much passion around insisting that particular narrative when there are limited known facts.

Of course I'd change my opinion if more information comes to light.

Would you?

[bloaf]

>and the reporter, without evidence, also implied

This is not an accurate characterization. The author reviewed the speaker's slides, interviewed students in the lecture, and consulted with her professional network; the reporter's investigation yielded no evidence of censure-worthy content or propensity for political rants.

> We don't have any facts that would support the narrative that the government encouraged the censure or the investigation in any way.

This is not an accurate characterization. The reporter has provided information from the university's spokespeople that Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham was the one who first contacted the university's governmental relations office as well as Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. Patrick then contacted the chair of the University of Texas System’s board.

The board responded to Patrick, within 2 hours of the end of the lecture, quote: "Joy Alonzo has been placed on administrative leave pending investigation re firing her. shud [sic] be finished by end of week."

> Of course I'd change my opinion if more information comes to light.

You're not even engaging with the facts as they stand.

Occam's razor would suggest this isn't done arbitrarily. The simplest explanation for the set of facts before us is that the one student complained to mommy, who complained to the school in conjunction with Patrick. The school immediately kowtowed to this political pressure and made motions to punish the person they complained about, without any diligence whatsoever. Now that everyone is complaining, they aren't releasing the details of their censure because there aren't any.

[kbenson]

> She was formally censured by the hosting university that knew what the comments were

She was formally censured by that institution with no evidence supplied, and that institution continues to refuse to provide any evidence of what she's censured for.

Without that evidence, why should we view this as anything other than a political hit job from the Governor? It's indistinguishable from that without evidence of what they're censuring for and with the evidence of student attendees that the statements they think might be the cause are fairly benign and based on facts and/or assessment by a per-eminent professional in that field without evidence to the contrary.

Is it the newspapers twisting it into a right wing suppression of speech story, or is it really just a right wing suppression of speech story that the newspapers are doing their job bringing to the public's attention?