A point worth elaborating: "decisions about hiring and firing are rarely as simple as they appear to outside observers with an ax to grind, so there may well be more going on here—though the statement from Taylor seems to eliminate much of that ambiguity"
reason.com/2021/01/22/nis…
reason.com/2021/01/22/nis…
In my experience, outsiders (including journalists) describing personnel decisions of which I have tangible knowledge of almost always get it significantly wrong, due to the routine asymmetry of candor between parties who have a career-altering disagreement. That's important!
Even public-facing statements that seem to confirm the basic Narrative can be misleading, if the management involved is using a transgression as a convenient excuse to do something they had long wanted to do. The more a place is managed or PR'd badly, the more likely that is.
When management of public-intellectual-type institutions intimate that they fired someone over a single transgression, or even over the outrage that that transgression caused, whether or not that's the real reason, it contributes to a teensy tiny chilling of overall speech.
I wrote about this, though the formatting makes this near-unreadable now, when UC Irvine fired then un-fired law prof Erwin Chemerinsky in 2007. Was basically a management fail that gratuitously chilled the climate of speech. latimes.com/opinion/la-oew…
The personnel outcome in the Chemerinsky case is what I am rooting for here: After the obviously bungled/panicky decision, and the confusing/contradictory public statements thereof, dude got rehired, and we all promptly forgot about UC Irvine all over again. (I kid, I kid.)
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