The professor said they proposed an alternative framework called “Merit, Fairness, and Equality (MFE),” in which applicants are “treated as individuals and evaluated through a rigorous and unbiased process based on their merit and qualifications alone.” After that, Abbot said his attackers have tried to isolate him and intimidate everyone else into silence.

A woke mob’s cancel culture attack on professor Dorian Abbot has backfired spectacularly. Princeton University has reportedly decided to host a remote lecture by Abbot, which thousands of students have already signed up for, that was canceled by MIT after the professor was targeted for supporting “merit-based evaluations.”

Abbot’s lecture was picked up by Princeton after MIT dropped the lecture in response to a woke mob, according to a report by the Daily Mail. Princeton has had to expand the Zoom quota for the lecture as thousands of students have registered for it.

“I am a professor who just had a prestigious public science lecture at MIT cancelled because of an outrage mob on Twitter. My crime? Arguing for academic evaluations based on academic merit,” professor Dorian Abbot wrote in Bari Weiss’ Substack newsletter last week.

Abbot, who is a geophysicist lecturer at the University of Chicago, was initially invited by MIT to give the prestigious John Carlson Lecture in recognition of his research on climate change.

The professor explained that in the past year, he has been targeted by a woke mob after deciding he could “no longer remain silent in good conscience” in the wake of “the street violence of the summer of 2020, some of which I witnessed personally in Chicago, and the justifications and dishonesty that accompanied it.”

“In the fall of 2020 I started advocating openly for academic freedom and merit-based evaluations,” Abbot said, adding that he argued for “the importance of treating each person as an individual worthy of dignity and respect.”

As a result, the professor said he was “immediately targeted for cancellation,” primarily by a group of graduate students in his department.

Abbot said the students wrote a letter claiming he had threatened the “safety and belonging of all underrepresented groups within the department,” and send it to his department chair.

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