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The treatment of Carole Hooven was ‘an act of intellectual vandalism,’ scholars say
Three prominent scholars are urging Harvard University to re-hire evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven, describing the “intimidation and cancellation” over her defense of biological sex as “an act of intellectual vandalism.”
Restoring Hooven to her former position would “do more than right a wrong. It would send a signal of profound importance to the entire academic world,” University of Chicago Professor Dorian Abbot and Princeton University Professors Robert George and John Londregan wrote in a yet-to-be-sent letter to Harvard President Alan Garber.
“We write to you at a time of great challenge to academic freedom, with threats both to the freedom of the faculty and to the independence of universities themselves …” the letter states.
Welcoming Hooven back would be a step toward repairing the damage caused by cancel culture, they wrote:
A decade or more of cancel culture has discouraged dissent from prevailing orthodoxies and undermined the robust exchange of ideas needed for universities to fulfill their research and teaching missions. One school of thought holds that the remedy for this ailment is for government to extend its long arm and mailed fist to cut funds and dictate the curriculum. Another point of view holds that the correct response to intellectual vandalism is to repair the damage, restore the victims, and deprive the vandals of their ill-gotten gains.
The latter approach, we believe, is much to be preferred.
The three authors welcomed like-minded scholars to sign onto the letter by Friday, according to a post on the Heterodox Academy’s STEM substack. After gathering signatures, they plan to send the letter to Garber.
Hooven taught at Harvard for more than two decades before drawing backlash in 2021 for stating that sex is binary, The College Fix reported previously. She also criticized the diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives driving the university’s actions at the time.
The hostility directed toward her, including accusations that she was “harming” students, in combination with a lack of support from campus leadership later prompted her to resign.
“… while I was not ‘forced’ to resign, Harvard’s culture of intolerance—particularly toward my scientific views on the nature of sex—led me to feel that my only choice was to leave,” she wrote at the American Enterprise Institute in 2024.
In 2023, Hooven was part of a panel of scholars that was canceled by the American Anthropological Association and the Canadian Anthropology Society, The Fix reported. Organizers said the panel topic “Let’s Talk about Sex Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology” would cause too much “harm.”
MORE: Anthropology groups cancel all-female panel defending biological sex as ‘necessary category’
