FIRE— an organization devoted to championing free speech on university campuses— has broken the story of Mike Joyner, a Mayo Clinic Professor suspended for comments he made to the news media. They even published his disciplinary letter.
It appears Mike Joyner is in part being punished for comments he made about fairness when trans-athletes compete in women’s sports. Allow me to outline the details of this action, and build my case that Mayo clinic is in complete and egregious violation of Academic Freedom.
As a bit of background. Mike Joyner is an anesthesiologist and expert in sports physiology. Pre-pandemic we were allies. We agreed that the genome has been massively overhyped and Francis Collins specialized in that hype. We exchanged hundreds of emails on genomic oncology, and I have published extensively on it.
During the pandemic, we drifted apart because I was opposed to giving convalescent plasma outside of randomized studies, and Mike gave a ton of it, outside randomized studies. As readers know, my philosophy is RCT or STFU— especially for experimental agents that may have negative side effects. But here are the rules of academics. It Mike’s job to say what he thinks, and my job to say why he is wrong.
Now let’s turn to what happened.