Matt Taibbi:

On November 20, 2022, 85% of Stanford University’s Faculty Senate voted to condemn Dr. Scott Atlas, a former chief of radiology at the Stanford University Medical Center who was serving on President Trump’s White House Coronavirus Task Force. The Stanford faculty pilloried Atlas for questioning the efficacy of state-enforced lockdowns, face masks, and social distancing protocols, even arguing that his claims were “anathema to our community, our values and our belief that we should use knowledge for good.” A few weeks after the Faculty Senate rendered its verdict, the Academic Advisory Board of the University of California’s National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement held a meeting in which its members questioned whether Atlas’ COVID-19 pronouncements were protected by academic freedom.

A series of FOIA productions shed some light on what was discussed during that meeting. Dana Nelkin, a philosophy professor at UC San Diego, seemed to draw a distinction between academic freedom and cases in which faculty members promote ideas with the potential to harm the general public, especially in the context of a pandemic. This line of thinking was seconded by Suneil Koliwad, a medical professor at UC San Francisco, who argued that Atlas had “hit us very hard as scientists in the area of public health, from basic to clinical to epidemiological.”