I just wrote to the Dean of the School of Public Health at Harvard

[bluedye33139]

Yascha Mounk and his allies have decided to attack a doctoral student because the doctoral student uses Twitter.

Mounk instructed the dean to "cut" the doctoral student in order to placate an imaginary public.

Link to tweet

Mounk and his allies routinely attack people for their speech and attempt to get them fired from jobs, barred from universities, deplatformed, and removed from public debate. Mounk and Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan also claim that they are doing this in order to protect free speech, and because they are opposed to cancel culture.

I wrote a nice four paragraph email to the Dean and reminded her to protect academic freedom and freedom of speech from the marauding Twitter horde led by Mounk and Weiss. Of course, I used more academic language in my missive.

[frazzled]

1. Wait, I don't quite get it

On the basis of this one announcement of an intriguingly titled talk, without presence of the content of the talk (by a statistical mathematician whom I’m sure most of us would not understand anyway ... and I should know, being the parent of a son with a PhD in pure mathematics from an equally rigorous university, whom I’ve never understood either), this guy is writing the dean to have the student cancelled?

This has to stop. People need to stay in their lanes.

[bluedye33139]

2. After their whole campaign against cancel culture, it's even weirder

That's the part that actually makes me angry. They pretend that they are defending free speech and they literally speak of themselves as the last line of defense for Western civilization, and then they attack a graduate student? Because he was quoted in an article? Holy crap.

I spent many years in many cohorts on many universities, and I really don't like to think of someone with deep pockets attacking graduate students.

[frazzled]

3. Yeah, we have had to contend with this

We had a friend who was forced to resign from a very prominent position recently (I won’t give name or other clues) because of one misinterpreted statement in a Zoom meeting in an otherwise stellar lifelong career of supporting BIPOC efforts. Twitter ruckus ensued, and he had to step down.

I’m still infuriated at this mob injustice.