MIT canceled prestigious public lecture over professor's DEI op-eds
MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences canceled the prestigious Carlson Lecture by University of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot in October 2021 after social-media objections to op-eds he co-authored criticizing certain DEI hiring practices. Princeton later hosted the talk.
In August 2021, the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences invited University of Chicago professor Dorian Abbot to deliver the John H. Carlson Lecture, an outreach talk on climate and exoplanets. After graduate students and others on social media objected to op-eds in Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal in which Abbot criticized identity-based hiring criteria, the department canceled the public lecture in October 2021. Princeton University's James Madison Program hosted the talk instead. The cancellation became a widely cited example in debates over academic freedom; MIT later overhauled its free-expression policies and in 2022 adopted a faculty free-expression statement.