The Director of the University of Berkeley Atmospheric Sciences Center (BASC), Professor David Romps, has announced he will be resigning his position, which he has held for the last five years, shortly.
Romps said that he made the decision after he became concerned that BASC had become politicised, and that he could no longer say that BASC “does not consider an individual’s political or social opinions when selecting speakers for its events.”
The controversy began when MIT cancelled a lecture by Dorian Abbot, after taking issue with an article Abbot wrote in which he argued that race-based “diversity, equity and inclusion” programmes of the types popular on university campuses violated “the ethical and legal principle of equal treatment.”
Abbot, an associate professor in geophysics at the University of Chicago, had been due to give a talk titled “Climate and the Potential for Life on Other Planets.”
MIT is understood to have taken particular issue with a point Abbot made regarding the impact that “an ideological regime obsessed with race” had upon German universities when it drove out “many of the best scholars” in the 1930s. Abbot said that example should be a “warning” of “the consequences of viewing group membership as more important than merit.”
Romps asked the faculty of BASC to invite Abbot to speak at Berkeley, and to give the speech which he had been originally invited to give at MIT. Romps says that he put forward the idea in order to “reaffirm that BASC is a purely scientific organization, not a political one.”
However, Romps proposal was not confirmed by the faculty, and Romps noted that, in the ensuring discussion, “it became unclear to me whether we could invite [Abbot] ever again, let alone now.” Romps said that the discussion demonstrated to him that it was “unclear when or if” the faculty might reach agreement on the idea that BASC would not exclude speakers based purely on their “political or social opinions.”
Romps felt that excluding scientists from speaking at BASC, based purely on those views, “signals that some opinions –- even well-intentioned ones — are forbidden, thereby increasing self-censorship, degrading public discourse, and contributing to our nation’s political balkanization.”
According to Romps he continues to hold BASC and its faculty, his “friends and colleagues”, in “the highest regard,” and he said that it had been “a great honor to serve as BASC’s director these past five years.” However, he also said he had never agreed to “lead an organisation that is political or even ambiguously so.”
Romps says he will leave his position at the end of the year, or when an appropriate replacement has been found, “whichever is sooner.”
Princeton University has now invited Abbot to give the cancelled speech. Registration to view the speech online is free, and can be accessed HERE.