In Front of Our Nose: Institutional Cowardice
Don't try to hand out academic editorials at an academic convention!
The NYT: Police Remove Diabetes Experts From Conference for Distributing Critique of Trump Administration.
Several diabetes experts were escorted out of an influential medical conference by the police on Friday after they handed out copies of an editorial criticizing the Trump administration’s attacks on scientific research.
The incident took place Friday morning at a meeting of the American Diabetes Association in New Orleans, shortly before Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, was scheduled to speak. An organizer announced just before Dr. Bhattacharya’s session that he would no longer be speaking; a senior adviser at the N.I.H. took his place.
The researchers were handing out copies of the editorial, recently published in the association’s flagship journal, which detailed the effects of N.I.H. cuts and other Trump administration actions on diabetes research and outcomes, when security staff asked them to step outside and tried to take away the papers, said Aaron Kelly, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Minnesota who was among the researchers escorted out. A video taken by MedPage Today, which first reported the news, shows a tense confrontation, including a man in uniform putting his hands on an expert.
The researchers re-entered the convention center from another entrance, but were confronted again by security staff and police officers.
My interpretation is that the ADA’s leadership didn’t want to upset the Trump administration or hurt Bhattacharya’s feelings (or something). But, of course, if having a bunch of older academics hand out copies of an editorial from an academic journal is threatening to you, well, you might be a thin-skinned authoritarian.
Based on what has been reported, I can see absolutely no justification for calling in the police. This is a legitimate example of censorship.
In the latest example of the Streisand Effect, here’s the editorial, published in the flagship journal in the field, Diabetes Care, Misguided Brushes of a Pen Continue to Dismantle and Destroy Biomedical Research in the United States: We Can No Longer Afford Complacency and Fear. We Must All Act Now! The authors were Steven E. Kahn, Cheryl A.M. Anderson, John B. Buse, and Elizabeth Selvin.
Kahn is the editor-in-chief of the journal, which makes it rather unlikely he is some crank, shall we say (indeed, his bio hardly screams “radical disruptor!).
I can see nothing, by the way, in the ADA’s code of conduct that would prohibit the distribution of an article from the discipline’s flagship journal. Indeed, the notion that trying to do that act would get one banned from the conference is utterly absurd on its face. People have tried to distribute flyers and other information at events I have attended over the decades. If I don’t want it, I have two killer moves. The first is that I take it and then throw it away or leave it on a chair in the conference room. Or, if I am feeling really salty, I politely decline taking the object in the first place.
Seriously, this is absurd on any number of levels.
Worse than the absurdity of it all, this is an academic organization calling the police on its own members to silence and punish them for daring to speak out, in the quietest and most academic of ways (here, please read this thing I wrote!), because it fears the administration.
This is the America Trump and MAGA want.
Some video:
Perhaps a suitable companion piece by Paul Campos at LGM.
So . . . the organizers of American Diabetes Association conference prohibited distribution of an editorial published in their own journal, under the byline of the editor of said journal (et. al.), and then escorted said editor (et. al.) out of the conference under force of arms? That is beyond bizarre.