I was downgraded at the University of Amsterdam for having the wrong position on the Palestine/Israel conflict

I was a Dorian abbot: that is to say, a presentation in which I was going to participate with two other professors, scheduled for this Friday at the University of Amsterdam, was canceled by the organizers because of my political opinions on the war between Israel and Hamas.

And, as in the case of Dorian at MIT, our scheduled discussion had nothing to do with Israel or Palestine. In other words, we were diverted not from what we were supposed to talk about, but from the opinions that Maarten Boudry and I had independently expressed elsewhere – opinions that were apparently offensive to the organization that canceled our discussion.

Our discussion was supposed to focus on an article I wrote with Luana Maroja for The skeptical researcher, “The Ideological Subversion of Biology,” which dealt with the distortion of six areas of evolutionary biology by well-meaning people whose ideology did not correspond to biological reality. This has Nothing to do with the war in the Middle East.

The organization that destroyed me and two other professors was Betabreak, a scientific discussion group at the University of Amsterdam. You can access their website by clicking on the banner below.

Everything was going well until we were informed yesterday on WhatsApp that the chat was cancelled. The organizers did not contact me directly, but sent the cancellation to one of my hosts, so I have redacted his name in the indented message below, which is otherwise exactly as my host l ‘has received. “Dr. Boudry” is Maarten Boudry, a Belgian philosopher with whom I collaborated on an article on religious beliefs several years ago.

Here is the official cancellation:

Hi NAME REMOVED,

I am sorry to inform you that unfortunately we will have to cancel Friday’s event. I’m sorry this was last minute, but in light of the information provided by Dr. Boudry, many committee members did not feel comfortable giving a platform to Dr. Coyne and Dr. Boudry given the their positions on the Palestine/Israel conflict. . Another fear is the impact this could have on us as a committee and that we could be ostracized by the UvA/AUC. We understand the irony of this given that this is the very issue Dr. Coyne wrote his article about. However, the group decided that we could not hold this event given the current political climate. Again, I’m really sorry that we spent so much time and effort organizing this for nothing, I’m also disappointed.

If you look at the Coyne/Maroja article (link above), you’ll see that it’s all about the science, so “the real problem” in our article is not the war in the Middle East, but the danger to distort science by infusing it with politics.

Some context: Betabreak had already voted to invite me and the other participants, but then backed out when they found out about Maarten and my “positions on the Palestine-Israel conflict.” (Presumably this is because we both sympathize with Israel.) At that point, they apparently decided that such a position was distasteful enough to ban us from discussing science in their forum. Betabreak also noted that she was worried about what they would look like if they held the event and whether they would get “blackballed” at their university.

Note that Betabreak is a “science discussion platform” and that is what we were going to do: discuss evolutionary biology and how it is misinterpreted by the public.

But enough is enough: one of the main purposes of this article is to solicit readers’ reactions to what happened. So I request readers to give their honest reaction to the above deplatforming. Please be aware that some comments may be picked up and quoted by the press in the Netherlands, so I ask you to be courteous and rational (no profanity!)

THANKS!

Oh, here is the poster published by Betabreak announcing the now canceled event.