Tim Hunt, British scientist and 2001 winner of the Nobel Prize in physiology, was threatened with termination if he didn't resign from his position at the University College London (UCL) after he made a joke about working with female scientists.
At a conference in South Korea earlier in June, the 72-year-old biochemist made the following comment that made his career come to a screeching halt:
Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab. You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them, they cry.
Hunt is not shy to admit that he has a bit of a reputation as a "male chauvinist" and that he prefers single-sex labs, and that was enough for feminism to step in and take him down swiftly. And not only Hunt, but his wife, an immunologist, has also been on the receiving end of her husband's faux pas with UCL saying her relation with the school has been "badly tarnished." She considers her husbands remarks as "an unbelievably stupid thing to say."
And so Hunt went on the apology circuit telling The Guardian, "I stood up and went mad. I was very nervous and a bit confused but, yes, I made those remarks – which were inexcusable – but I made them in a totally jocular, ironic way."
However, there are those who are coming to Hunt's defense, not for what he said, but for how the university handled the situation. British broadcaster and fellow scientist Brian Cox said UCL's threat highlights an even bigger issue of social media dictating decisions, especially for a long-time employee and contributor to the scientific field at the university and the world.
"To have a Nobel prize winner – and by all accounts a great scientist and a good person – being hounded out of a position at UCL after all those years of good work and science, I think that’s wrong and disproportionate," Cox said.
Even Richard Dawkins gave a strong defense of Hunt: "Along with many others, I didn’t like Sir Tim Hunt’s joke, but ‘disproportionate’ would be a huge underestimate of the baying witch-hunt that it unleashed among our academic thought police: nothing less than a feeding frenzy of mob-rule self-righteousness.”
American Thinker's Selwyn Duke was keen enough to point out other instances where people said offensive things but kept their jobs, effectively exposing feminism's hypocrisy. Like the black Boston University professor who called white males a "problem population" yet continues her teaching duties. Or another professor who still teaches in Nova Scotia even though she believes males shouldn't be the first to speak in class. Even Vice President Joe Biden still has a job, though he called Barack Obama a mainstream African-American, who is articulate, bright, clean, and nice looking. The language police were taking a nap that day, apparently.
Duke then offers a great conclusion in his piece about Hunt:
Is this not reminiscent of Marxist nations, which would often replace qualified doctors and researchers with goose-stepping incompetents?
The sad part of this submission to evil is that leftists are abject cowards and pack animals; stand up to them en masse, and they’ll scatter like the capons and clucking hens they are. Instead, legitimate freedom is being lost. Of course, there certainly are those in the hierarchy above Hunt who subscribe to the politically correct nonsense. But there no doubt are others who realize his joke was no big deal yet are making a calculation: “If I don’t fire the man, the guns could be turned on me and I’ll be next on the chopping block.” It could remind one of Ben Franklin’s words, “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
And we are hanging separately, as sane people are picked off one by one and an iron muzzle descends across the West. It has already touched you, no doubt, as everyone is watching what he says. And barring a revolution, it’s only a matter of time before the effecting of oppression moves from the social to the governmental sphere, as we transition from the gag to the gulag.
Photo: Csaba Segesvari/AFP/Getty Images
