MIT Cancels Guest Lecture by Scientist Who Questioned Diversity Hiring

The Maclaurin Building is shown on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Feb. 22, 2006 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Institute admitted its first students in 1865 and continues with the mission to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has caved to the demands of progressive activists to cancel a guest lecture because of the speaker’s opinions on diversity hiring.

Dorian Abbot, a geophysicist at the University of Chicago (UC), had been invited by MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences to give its prestigious Carlson Lecture on Oct. 21. He was to talk about the climate on exoplanets, or planets that orbit stars other than the sun of our solar system.