MIT Cancels Geophysicist Dorian Abbot's Lecture After Criticism from Students, Professors

The cancellation of geophysicist Dorian Abbot’s lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has caught itself in the middle of a controversy with many calling it an erosion of democratic and liberal values. Abbot, who is a geophysicist lecturer at the University of Chicago, was invited to the John Carlson Lecture in recognition of his research on climate change.

The lecture takes place in the Boston area and is conducted to communicate new results in climate science to the general public, however, the invitation of Abbot irked some students and professors at MIT who started an online campaign asking the university to retract the invite, reported The Atlantic. MIT eventually agreed to the demand and withdrew the lecturer’s invite.

In the middle of all this controversy over Abbot’s invite was an opinion piece that the geophysicist wrote in August this year. In his piece in Newsweek, Abbot advocated for a Merit, Fairness and Equality (MFE) framework where candidates are selected only on their ‘merit’ and ‘qualification’ after a rigorous scanning process.

Criticising the affirmative actions, he drew a parallel to the Germany of the 1930s and said that 90 years ago, an ideological regime obsessed with race came to power and drove some of the best scholars out of the country. Abbot added that the example of Germany was important for realising that viewing group membership as more important than merit will have consequences. Many MIT students and professors came together against his lecture on the campus and shared expressed their displeasure in tweets.

https://twitter.com/NMGasparini/status/1444688917001801730?s=20

While Abbot’s controversial opinion had drawn flak, many see his lecture cancellation as an erosion of liberal values on the campus, especially when his lecture was on a completely different topic that he is an expert at.

https://twitter.com/ECONLIZ_E/status/1446438818379452450?s=20

After the cancellation of his lecture at MIT, Abbot was invited to deliver the lecture at a small academic centre at Princeton on the same day. Later, MIT also invited him to give a scientific presentation to a much smaller audience of graduate students and EAPS professor

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