My Hoover colleague and friend Alvin Rabushka writes:
An example of the authority of local control is Sara Cody, the health officer and public health director of Santa Clara County. She dictated Stanford’s response to COVID, a “shelter-in-place” lockdown. The evidence Atlas assembled and presented contradicted her instructions to Santa Clara County residents, firms, and institutions. For this reason and others, 85 percent of the members of the Stanford Faculty Senate in late November 2020 voted to condemn him, only the second instance in Stanford history. The intervention of the former provost, worried about academic freedom, persuaded the Senate against recommending that Stanford discipline Atlas. Only two of his Hoover Institution colleagues publicly defended him.
In private communication, Alvin informed me that I was not one of the two. I was surprised. I thought I had. I certainly did so with my doctor and with my friends. And I did write this, which was an implicit public defense of Scott Atlas, but it was not even an implicit defense of his academic freedom.
So, on the record, I do defend Scott Atlas’s academic freedom. This defense is independent of any advice he gave to President Trump. But from what I have read, his advice was generally quite good. It’s easy to defend the academic freedom of someone that you 90+ percent agree with, as is the case with Scott.
But even if I had totally disagreed with Scott’s advice, I think the Stanford Faculty Senate was totally out of line.
READER COMMENTS
David Seltzer
Dec 9 2021 at 6:28pm
John Cochrane’s Grumpy Economist, “Stanford Condemns Atlas,” November 22, 2020 openly and publicly defends Scott Atlas.
Alan Goldhammer
Dec 10 2021 at 8:21am
You are correct in the assessment about academic freedom being impinged upon. My view is that fools on one side should not pass judgement on a fool(s) on the other side. This is exactly what happened in this case. It is also a mistaken approach taken by the University against someone who was not speaking in his capacity as a University employee (he is not on the med school faculty and let his radiology license lapse several years ago).
Maybe David knows more about the relationship between the Hoover Institution and Stanford Univ. but to me it seems that the Univ should stay out of this. There are a number of Hoover affiliated fellows who have no ties to Stanford and the Faculty Senate has no role in what those people do or say.
steve
Dec 11 2021 at 11:03am
Academic freedom is important enough that i think I would have voted in his favor. The said, he does present a quandary. On the basis of a few Fox interviews he got made a presidential advisor. He had no special expertise, knowledge, clinical experience or any other experience pertinent to Covid, viral illnesses, public health or epidemiology. On the basis of what appears to be very minimal exposure to the literature on issues like masks he made pretty strong declarative statements. He advocated for the Barrington approach when we knew and still know that no one has successfully carried out the plan of protecting the elderly and the immunocompromised, except for vaccines.
I think the general public after watching too many episodes of ER think that every doctor is the same as every other but that is not the case, just like not every economist is qualified and able to handle any job related to the broad field of economics. That position should have been filled by someone with the qualifications to do so. If Atlas had any sense of integrity he would have turned down that job. He could’ve been a political advisor, and AFAICT politics has been his specialty for a while, but should not have been presenting himself to the public as an expert where he is not. I know some doctors like to play God but he should have resisted.
Steve
Zeke5123
Dec 11 2021 at 1:41pm
Yes as opposed to Fauci’s cast experience (which is basically his failure re AIDS).
atlas spent a lot of time analyzing cost/benefit for health. To say he had no expertise here is selling him short.
Todd K
Dec 11 2021 at 1:08pm
Scott Atlas was light years better than Tony Fauci and was trying to shift policy during pandemics to what it was in 2019 at both the CDC and the WHO: 1) try to calm the public 2) do not lockdown since ineffective and destructive to the economy and society 3) do not encourage the use of face masks since they are ineffective and can give a false sense of security.
Fauci had agreed with all three in January and February and then did the exact opposite in March.
Comments are closed.