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Comment by lvass | Hacker News Reader

>But Why Not Stick Around for the Paycheck?

A lot of people do this, they avoid getting political at all and just do their jobs as professors, often they do a great job and while they might want to express their opinions it's just no use when it could immediately be classified as wrong-think, not taken seriously at all except for reasoning on ostracization strategies. It's fine to stay, we're still far from definite proof of wokeness being required.

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Professors at public schools with tenure have an intellectual duty to themselves, their students, the school and the taxpayer to defy forces that try to silence them.

That's too reductionist. If they stay, they might still be doing a great job. If they leave, the expected replacement may not be up to par, and their defiance would in all likelihood be completely useless, which means leaving may be a net loss for society, not to mention an eventual, actually meaningful resistance would likely benefit from them being inside the universities.

This defiance looks sad unfortunately, no offense meant to the author here as I respect his attitude. He mentions blogging being in his plans for the future, but even here in HN this post already looks like it's shadow banned and the blogpost has one like. Not all defiance is made equal, this author has a huge uphill battle and I wish him the best.

Most lecturers just want to teach, they don't want to deal with politics so most just shut up and try to be invisible enough to do what they love.

Didn't I read something a while back about faculty members, prior to being hired, needing to write an essay about some woke cause? It being clear that the essay not expressing a woke enough opinion, there would be no job offer.

That reminds me The Kolmogorov option: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=3376

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