Dorian Abbot, here at the University of Chicago, had been invited by MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences to give their distinguished "Carlson Lecture."   Professor Abbot, as some readers may recall, encountered a mob here at Chicago awhile back when he expressed skepticism about "diversity" initiatives here.  The Chicago Administration, correctly, rebuffed the disgraceful calls to sanction him for expressing his lawful views.  More recently, he co-authored an essay on this subject in Newsweek, which then sparked another Twitter mob calling for the cancellation of his lecture.  (This mob was particularly enraged by the ill-considered Nazi analogy in the essay, which the mob also misinterpreted.)   Alas, the Chair of the Department succumbed to the mob pressure. 

Professor Abbot's very gracious tweet about the cancellation is here.  I am inclined to agree with former Harvard Medical School Dean Jeffrey Flier that the MIT Department must reinstate Professsor Abbot as the lecturer and apologize for their shoddy treatment of him, one wholly inconsistent with academic freedom and the core values of the academy.  (MIT has violated the academic freedom rights of all the faculty in their Department who wanted to hear from Profesor Abbott.)  One can think Professor Abbot's views on diversity in the academy are brilliant or nuts, insightful or obtuse:  all of that is irrelevant to his competence to deliver a lecture in his scholarly field.  To literally "cancel" him for his extramural views is anathema to everything I had thought universities were about before the current mass insanity set in.

(I do wonder what those who like to pretend "cancel culture" isn't real, and are quick to point out right-wing attacks on academic freedom [as I have always done, from the illegal firing of Steven Salaita at Illinois to, just last week, Yale], will have to say about this.)