Matthew M. Wielicki, professor of geosciences at the University of Alabama, has announced in a Twitter thread that he has decided to leave the university, and some of his reasons are becoming depressingly frequent in the sciences:
Why I am leaving the University of Alabama:
Some internet sleuths have discovered that I will be leaving my faculty position in the Department of Geological Sciences after this semester so I thought I should tell you why. As with most large decisions, the reasons are mainly personal. COVID made me realize that we were really far from our families in CA and the travel on our elderly parents was taking a toll. The result was that our children were not seeing their grandparents very often. As a Polish immigrant I know what it’s like to live far from family and I started to resent myself for choosing my career over my family’s time together.
Furthermore, over the last decade or so, but especially the last few years, the obsession with universities and grant-funding institutions on immutable characteristics of faculty and students and the push for equity in science above all else has dramatically changed the profession of an academic professor.
The rise of illiberalism in the name of DEI is the antithesis of the principles that universities were founded on. These are no longer places that embrace the freedom of exchanging ideas and will punish those that go against the narrative. Although I had worked from an early age to earn a Ph.D. and become a professor, like my father, I feel the profession is no longer worthy of my efforts.
Contributing to this is the earth science communities silence on the false “climate emergency” narrative. Members of the community routinely discuss the mental health effects of climate catastrophism but dare not speak out lest they lose their positions and research funds. (Emphasis added.)
Alabama ought to be one of the states where the legislature could put a stop to this ideological assault quite easily.
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