Should Steve Kirsch Be Allowed To Speak on Campus about His Eccentric Views on Covid Vaccines?

by Eric Rasmusen

The MFSA Free Speech Hotline has had its first tip. It's not inside information, just an anonymous note letting us know about something related to free speech at MIT. Good. Do send us tips like that; we may not know about such things otherwise. Not every tip has to be about how a professor gave a student an F for disagreeing with him in class.

The first tip said:

Steve Kirsch (stevekirsch.substack.com), after whom an EECS auditorium is named, has been talking about suing MIT for something published in Technology Review. He says that MIT will not let him speak or debate there (presumably re the mRNA vaccines), as an alternative, and that he needs a professor to sponsor him.

Steve Kirsch is an inventor of the optimal mouse, a Silicon Valley millionaire, and an MIT alum (Class of '80). Twenty-four years ago, in 1998, he gave $2.5 million for the Kirsch Auditorium, Room 32-123 in the EECS building.

Kirsch is very interested in covid and has funded research on it. His views, however, are unorthodox. Some of his views are mildly unorthodox.

He pushes fluvoxamine, an anti-depression drug which despite doing very well in covid treatment studies has been strangely neglected. Some are views most scientists think are wrong. He likes ivermectin, where the consensus is that it doesn't help with covid unless the patient has tapeworms too, in which case it might help a lot. (I myself went to Rural King and bought a jug of sheep drench since it's cheap and harmless and maybe I do have worms. I keep it in a cabinet with my custom filter N95 mask, my oxygen meter, my super-duper mouthwash, and my stethoscope). And some of his views do sound crazy. He said on a video that an there were an estimated 400K spontaneous abortions related to the vaccine. “We can’t determine causality but we certainly have correlation. The only thing that could cause something that huge would be something like the vaccine - there isn’t any other rational explanation.” Doesn't pass the smell test for me, though maybe I'd change my mind if I looked at the study.

Steve wanted to talk about covid on the MIT campus. To do that, you need a faculty sponsor. He couldn't find one, so he wasn't allowed to use MIT rooms, including the one he donated.

Here's how he put it in his February 26, 2022 newsletter:

"They couldn’t find a member of the MIT faculty who was willing to sponsor me to give a talk that would examine the possibility that MIT made a serious mistake that jeopardizes the lives of students, staff, and faculty."

It should also be noted that Technology Review did a hit piece on Steve Kirsch in October 2021 (here's his rebuttal), so the Administration is not a big fan.

So, what should we think? First of all, the question makes for a good debate on the topic of what should be debated. We had a discussion like that on the MFSA email chat, about who should speak on campus, with pleasantly vigorous disagreement among those participating. Here's my view. (Write a comment at the end if you want to disagree.)

First, Steve donated a classroom, but that doesn't mean he gets to do what he wants with it. In fact, if that were the case, it wouldn't be tax deductible any more, because he would be the effective owner, not MIT.

This comes up sometimes because donors of endowed chairs for professors want to decide who gets the chair and what they can say. (I have some personal experience there– I was the Dan R. and Catherine M. Dalton Professor at Indiana University's Kelley School for some years until the chair's funding oddly evaporated.) As a matter of discretion, though, I think the Administration should have sponsored his talk, because he's a devoted alum who wants to come speak on a scientific topic. He should have been sponsored out of love, not out of obligation or greed for more contributions. Of course, if he's crazy, it might be nobody would come to hear him speak and he'd be embarrassed, but that's his business.

But suppose the Administration doesn't want to sponsor him, out of fear that that might make people think they endorse his views even if they repeat till they're red in the face that they don't endorse them and in fact totally disagree with him. That's OK. The next question is whether he should be able to speak in an MIT room without Administration sponsorship. The current rule is that he needs a faculty sponsor (or, I would guess, a student or alumni group sponsor, which he perhaps didn't try). That's a good rule. We don't want just anybody being able to use MIT facilities. And it's a very low bar to just have to get one professor to sponsor your talk.

What surprises me is that he couldn't get that one professor to sponsor him, out of the hundreds at MIT. I recently retired as an economics professor at Indiana University, and I'd have been willing to sponsor someone like him, even if I disagreed with his views. If someone like him had wanted to speak on the virtues of lockdowns, for example, something abhorrent to an economist, I'd have sponsored him anyway, though I might have asked to turn it into a little bit of debate.

So why wouldn't any professor sponsor him? Maybe he didn't ask very many. In fact, it sounds like he asked the Administration to find one for him. Big mistake. They probably just whispered "Anybody want to sponsor Kirsch?" into a closet and then emailed him back saying they couldn't find anyone. If he emails me, I can ask some MIT econ or poli sci professors I know if they'd sponsor him, or use contacts to the math dept. (I'm serious). A more worrisome thought is that MIT faculty are scared to sponsor a dissident like Kirsch. I hope that's not the case. It would be a sad day for MIT if faculty were reluctant to offend the Political Establishment or the MIT Administration.