Steven Pinker Will Be Just Fine
Hundreds of academics in the linguistics community signed an open letter earlier this month attacking Steven Pinker, one of their field’s most prominent scholars, for six tweets and a passage from one of his best-selling books. Whatever their intentions, they were never going to succeed in intimidating the famous, tenured Harvard professor. But they did send a message to less powerful scholars that certain opinions, publicly stated, could result in professional sanction.