You can disagree with what he says, but I think he makes a fair point. From the first article,
> ‘Academia doesn’t need more polite bureaucrats. Academia needs smart people who are weird enough to be real and tell the truth, about the little things as much as the big things.’
> In a blog, Dr Murphy, who brands himself a ‘highly skilled’ intellectual, said: ‘What I am doing is simple. I am just thinking and saying whatever I feel like.’
> He added: ‘I want to enjoy the right to make mistakes, to be rude, to occasionally overshoot and occasionally undershoot, perhaps even wildly.’
> He also said: ‘If my bosses think that any of this is inconsistent with my employment, then I will just infer that their employment is inconsistent with a real intellectual life.
Yes, there is a difference between honest, intelligent thought and absurdist nonsense that offends people, but the line separating the two can be incredibly narrow, or sometimes nonexistant.
There is, and has always been room in society for those who say things that irritate or inflame other people, even at the cost of society belittling or dismissing them (or in modern times, cancelling them).