The University of California: At War With Its Own Proud Speech Tradition
In his new FOIA Files writeup of the 1,400 pages of Freedom of Information documents Racket received from the University of California, Irvine, James Rushmore highlights an extraordinary Academic Advisory Board meeting, convened at the height of the pandemic in December, 2020.
In it, UC faculty members are so angry about academics defying Covid-19 consensus, they start to re-think academic freedom. They single out Hoover Institute fellow Scott Atlas at Stanford for questioning consensus on lockdowns, social distancing, masking, and other policies. Atlas was described as someone who d hit us very hard& in the area of public health, being on the wrong side of a clear right and wrong. One UC San Francisco medical professor raised a question pitting academic freedom vs. institutions passing on their obligation to deal with faculty who say and do things with significant chance to harm the public, asking, What is freedom of speech in this context? In other words, how much can freedom can we really tolerate?
Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, another of the Murthy plaintiffs, was the director of UC-Irvine s medical ethics program and a professor of psychiatry and human behavior who also worked in person with COVID patients every day at the UCI Medical Center. He was fired roughly a year after the meeting referenced in this FOIA document for opposing vaccine mandates, guilty of the identical crime Atlas is charged with in the docs: being a threat to the health and safety of the community. The Los Angeles Times used scare quotes to describe Kheriaty as someone who refused to get vaccinated, citing natural immunity, so the following comment about the UC docs is apt:
Even the excerpt you sent referencing Scott Atlas has academic freedom in scare quotes, opposing it to the need to protect people from the harms of wrongthink and the establishment s own infallible right-thinking on public health, Kheriaty says. These people live in an ideological bubble and can t see their way out of it, even for the sake of protecting free speech and academic freedom.
via www.racket.news
Matt Taibbi.