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Absolutely, you step into the ring you should expect to get hit back. Stay the fuck out of politics if you're not a political figure.
Have you heard of this little thing called freedom of speech?
He's not being thrown in prison. As fond as I am of defending free speech, free speech is not the right to receive a check from the government to subsidize your tongue.
No, but it is the right to keep your non-political job whatever political opinions you espouse outside of that job. If Tao stopped midway through math lectures to rant to his students about his personal opinions, that'd be one thing. But if his political advocacy on his own time does not interfere with doing his job as an academic, then it is a violation of free speech to jeopardize his career on the basis of his political speech, no different from when left-wings cancel-mobs do it.
I'm not sure what you're referring to here. Open letters signed as part of UCLA faculty are "part of the job," and complaining about his funding is... job-adjacent, surely?
If he was being attacked and defunded for attending a protest off campus and explicitly not as a university representative, you'd have a stronger point.
No. His job is doing high-level math + teaching it. That is what he's paid for, and his career should only depend on how well and how conscientiously he does that. What he chooses to do with his reputation and credentials is up to him; as long as he is fulfilling those obligations, nothing about his non-math-related behavior should be able to dislodge him.
When you're using your credentials and writing as a representative of the university, you are representing the university. He didn't sign it as "Terry Tao, regular schmo" or "Terry Tao, Fields Medal Winner," he signed as "Terence Tao, UCLA professor along with 300ish other UCLA professors."
The university didn't complain because they supported the cause, but a professor doing that for something a university doesn't like will often get at least a slap on the wrist for misusing their connection to the university.
I grant you that this is probably factually true, but I think they shouldn't. I disagree that highlighting one's credentials within an institution entails that you are speaking in that institution's name. Sometimes you might be trying to give that impression - but there is a difference between "speaking as a representative UCLA, it is our institutional belief…" and "here is my personal opinion; and by the way, you should listen to me because I teach at UCLA", and the latter should not be verboten, or otherwise under the university's control in any way.
"I'm a UCLA professor" is a factually true statement for Tao to make about himself. It's an outrageous free-speech violation to try and stop him from stating that fact wherever and whenever he believes it to be relevant. The university shouldn't have the right to (hypothetically) prevent him from pointing out that he has those credentials to help his case. This holds even if 299 other UCLA professors speak up as a group of private individuals, all of whom happen to be able to truthfully point to their UCLA credentials as a reason why the public ought to trust their wisdom.
Frankly, UCLA as an institution should not be in the business of having official political beliefs. The idea that any number of UCLA professors signing a politically-motivated letter could be interpreted as "representing the university" should be absurd, because the notion that "UCLA" could make a statement about Trump should be laughable - should be immediately recognizable as a category error.
Correct, it should not. But it is.
https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/ucla-s-steps-to-support-black-life-on-campus
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