Abbot controversy spills over from MIT to Princeton and now to Berkeley - Part 3

We noted in our last post that the Abbot-MIT-Princeton-Berkeley controversy has made its way from predominantly conservative news media to mainstream popular sources.* It has now moved also into the general academic discussion area with publication in Inside Higher Ed:

A Berkeley Resignation Over Canceled MIT Talk

By Colleen Flaherty - October 21, 2021

 David Romps, professor of earth and planetary science at the University of California, Berkeley, says he’s resigning as director of the Berkeley Atmospheric Sciences Center over an internal disagreement about extending an invitation to a fellow climate scientist. Romps made his announcement in a lengthy Twitter thread, and while he didn’t mention the fellow scientist by name, it is clearly a reference to Dorian Abbot, an associate professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago whose planned public lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was recently canceled over concerns about Abbot’s commentary on academic diversity initiatives, including his comparison of the diversity “regime” to Nazism.

Abbot will give his climate science address today instead at Princeton University, which offered to host him when MIT canceled. Romps said he also wanted to reach out to Abbot, to ask him to deliver his MIT talk at Berkeley, and that he was disappointed by the reactions of his immediate colleagues (Romps did not share details about who disagreed, or why). Romps said, “I was hoping we could agree that BASC does not consider an individual’s political or social opinions when selecting speakers for its events, except for cases in which the opinions give a reasonable expectation that members of our community would be treated with disrespect,” but that it’s “unclear when or if we might reach agreement on this point.”

Berkeley said in a statement, “Prof. Romps’s resignation is unfortunate, but it is his decision to make.” Abbot will visit MIT to address fellow scientists, not the general public, in May.

Source: https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2021/10/21/berkeley-resignation-over-canceled-mit-talk.

With (now) general awareness, this would be a good time for the UC and campus-level Academic Senate institutions to take a good look at free speech issues and not leave it in the hands of university administrators. It appears that when controversy developed at MIT, the academic in charge went to the MIT central administration for guidance. Something similar appears to have happened at a somewhat-related controversy at UCLA. The advice received from that quarter seems in the end to have been unhelpful at best. There is no need, when an academic speaker is invited to give a lecture for elaborate statements as to why the speaker's views don't represent the university on this or that issue. No speaker, whether an invited guest or a faculty member, represents anyone's view other than that of the speaker. The administration can simply point to whatever policy makes that clear if anyone asks. Elaborate statements by university presidents, chancellors, or other officials simply lead to situations such as what has now developed in the Abbot-MIT-Princeton-Berkeley case.

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*http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2021/10/abbot-controversy-spills-over-from-mit_21.html; http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2021/10/abbot-controversy-spills-over-from-mit.html.