If their goal was good PR, I'd say they have failed quite dramatically. This kind of thing is surprising from MIT and I doubt it has a lot of support among the science/engineering types. It is common to see this behavior in social sciences nowadays, but less so in engineering.
Nobody who's in the demographic of people who could be attending university in the next ten years is going to see some professor getting knocked from a position as anything noteworthy; there's no viral potential in somebody not doing a speech. But the speech, if it goes well, could have and has historically had great potential to inspire people to going into the field of climate science. Making the best impression is paramount, and you can't do so if the person heading the explicitly public relations-based charge is in a position to alienate a sizeable portion of the perspective candidates.
Meritocracy is paramount to science and engineering, and having someone with such great potential to alienate placed in a public relations role is the exact opposite of meritocratic. Abbot is well-respected in his field, and it could be meritocratic to offer him a reward for his work, but it wouldn't be to put him in a critical social position with the baggage he brings along.
I disagree his ideas of merit-based entry would alienate a sizeable portion of perspective MIT students (the article also shows supporting polls). MIT, not merit-based, are you kidding?
Offering a social, outreach-based task to a man whose views are cause for alienation against prospective students not just prospective MIT students, but the field at large, which is substantially larger than the four-thousand undergrads MIT has, would indeed not be meritocratic.
I'm not going to debate what his views actually are, and I personally agree very heavily with merit-based admission. Like I've said elsewhere in the thread, it's likely I'm not far from the professor's views. However his views have been interpreted in a way significantly different from how you frame them by enough people that MIT saw it fit to not go forward with his speech. It's a PR and outreach game, not an inside baseball conference.
I'm very skeptical that the attitude can be isolated this way. There's a lot of people who genuinely do feel uncomfortable when authority figures don't share their political views, and that discomfort won't go away just because you're no longer in "outreach mode". If you shape your outreach efforts to target them, and you successfully convince them to apply to MIT (or enter the broader field), won't they expect their lecturers to be held to the same standard?
