Yes, that bit on the board is sort of a smoking gun: someone is definitely keeping track of how well the department is satisfying the inexorable imperatives that dog this and every other field - including Abbott’s own. Indeed, his stated hostility to quotas produced a petition signed by colleagues and students at the University calling for various sanctions against him. So the attitudes he ran in to at MIT and that resulted in the cancellation of his talk there (on a subject unrelated to his views on affirmative action) are hardly unknown at Chicago. The difference is that the administration here is committed to protecting the academic freedom of all concerned - of Abbott to say what he likes, of students to protest his views.
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