‘Cancel prof’ gets huge new audience

Thousands of people have registered to attend a geophysicist’s remote lecture hosted by Princeton University — after the Massachusetts Institute of Technology canceled the talk because, the scholar says, the school caved to a woke Twitter mob.

“I’m delighted to report that we’ve expanded the Zoom quota for Dr. Dorian Abbot’s Princeton lecture — the one shockingly and shamefully canceled by MIT — and literally thousands of people have registered,” said Princeton professor Robert George.

Princeton is hosting Abbot’s talk on climate and the potential for life on other planets via Zoom on Oct. 21 — the same day it was scheduled at MIT.

MIT canceled the talk after students and recent alumni demanded Abbot be uninvited because he’d recently argued academic admissions and evaluations should be based on merit, not diversity issues.

Abbot said he’s a victim of cancel culture.

“A small group of ideologues mounted a Twitter campaign to cancel a distinguished science lecture,” he wrote, because they disagreed with some of his political positions. Abbot called the campaign’s success in eight days “shocking” and “damaging” to a free society.

An MIT spokesperson told The Post last week that Abbot was offered an alternative forum, talking to students and faculty, not the wider public event.

“We felt that with the current distractions we would not be in a position to hold an effective outreach event,” said Professor Robert van der Hilst.

Abbot said he was punished for arguments he’d made about college admissions unrelated to his science lecture.

He and Stanford University professor Ivan Marinovic had argued in a Newsweek op-ed published in August that current college diversity efforts — known as Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion — violate equal treatment.

Instead, they proposed a framework called Merit, Fairness, and Equality where “university applicants are treated as individuals and evaluated through a rigorous and unbiased process based on their merit and qualifications alone.”