Is it an automated title edit triggered by many people clicking the "flag" link? Or does it show that a moderator reviewed the article and deemed it inappropriate for HN? Or something else?
What does [flagged] mean?
It means that users flagged a post as breaking the guidelines or otherwise not belonging on Hacker News.
Moderators sometimes also add [flagged] (though not usually on submissions), and sometimes turn flags off when they are unfair.
so I guess it could be either?
* breaking the guidelines:
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
"Most stories about politics" - perhaps this one? Although there are plenty of "political" stories that don't get flagged. This definitely won't get covered on TV.
That appears to be obviously appropriate for HN, and is not about "politics"; it's about institutions of higher education.
Mods, if you are reading: does it not look rather as if a contingent of HN readers are abusing the "flagged" link to flag content that they don't agree with (as opposed to flagging content that violated guidelines)? Presumably this contingent must be substantial if it has resulted in automated insertion of the string "[flagged]" in the title. Is this abuse of flagging a topic that has been addressed / written about?
(I don't mean in the "everything is political" sense. If everything is political, then nothing is. But I also don't mean just in the "Red v Blue" sense, either. I mean political in the sense of "our tribe's standing and prominence compared to your tribe". "Academic politics" is used in this sense.)
I agree with you: they are. But that's not what we're discussing; we're discussing the fact that rationality and free enquiry are under attack in our public universities, and we're discussing one of the consequences of those politically-motivated attacks (the resignation of an academic). Just because the attacks themselves are politically motivated does not make their consequences any less worthy of attention, or appropriate to HN. Indeed, that would be worthy of attention and appropriate content for HN whatever the underlying reasons (e.g. if it were financially powerful interests silencing inconvenient voices in academia, rather than a political movement).
To take it to an extreme to make the point absolutely clear: imagine that a crazy cult of rabbit-worshippers commit some murders in the course of a rabbit-worshipping ceremony. We would not dismiss the deaths as "just rabbit cult stuff"; a serious breach of human rights has occurred and questions need to be asked about whether the public are adequately protected from the rabbit worshippers: i.e. the normal considerations of everyday life still apply, regardless of how batty the original motivations may have been.