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Comment by civilized | Hacker News Reader

The letter you link is quite clear: MIT doesn't want to hold a scientist up as a role model if progressive activists dislike him.

This wouldn't have happened at University of Chicago.

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Your comment is a partial answer to a question I have: are there any universities with any prestige who still, today, uphold the principles of free expression and academic freedom? I thought MIT might still have some institutional self-respect, and am saddened to find out that it does not. Who’s left (in addition to U. of Chicago)?

Here are some schools that endorse the Chicago Statement on Freedom of Expression: https://www.thefire.org/chicago-statement-university-and-fac...

Not all of these schools have a perfect history of supporting free expression, but this is a big positive indicator.

This fits MIT's historical pattern of buckling under external pressure, like what happened to Aaron Swartz or Star Simpson. Different this time because of the cancel mob aspect, but not too surprising.

Please don't break the site guidelines by going on about downvotes. Besides doing no good and making boring reading, it ends up being uncollected garbage when the original comment gets corrective upvotes, as yours has.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Understood. Deleted the offending text.

It sounds to me like they didn’t want the climate lecture to be hijacked by people angry about something unrelated to climate.

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