https://www.chronicle.com/article/robert-putnam-and-the-ethi...
https://www.city-journal.org/html/bowling-our-own-10265.html
His work doesn't appear to have been desk-drawered or self-censored.
Reinvigorating your old work for publication, once you have a commercially viable avenue to promote it, is pretty average capitalism.
Plenty of work that is politically awkward is published under a strict pseudonym. This wasn't - and the author's position is that it was their choice not to publish.
> Academics aren’t supposed to withhold negative data until they can suggest antidotes to their findings.
That seems incredibly naive. If an academic finds a way to create a potent poison, it would be unethical to disseminate that knowledge without an antidote. Why would this be different?
It is highly unlikely a researcher in "finding X" is an expert in "solving X" or otherwise has the capacity to do so.
The "head in the sand" approach here doesn't "ease community tensions" it does precisely the opposite: prolong them for fear open investigation "goes against the consensus".
Well, that metaphor doesn't apply here. The research shows that something we're already doing is potentially harmful. A more accurate metaphor would be discovering milk is actually poisonous as currently processed, and withholding the research for fear of disrupting the dairy industry (which the researcher happens to be a member of).
Your mistake is in presupposing the goodness of the thing the research is revealing to be potentially harmful. Hiding science that disagrees with your preconceived ideas is a dangerous path to take. You strengthen your position by whittling away the pieces that disagree with reality and updating your approach, not by denying reality and insisting you were right all along.