A geneticist and journal editor named Michael Eisen was recently fired over a tweet about the Israel-Hamas war. Given some of the truly stupid and hateful things that have been spewing from the mouths of academics and college students lately, this seems pretty tame.

The Onion speaks with more courage, insight and moral clarity than the leaders of every academic institution put together. I wish there were a @TheOnion university. https://t.co/R8gufC9opJ

— Michael Eisen (@mbeisen) October 13, 2023

Personally I don’t think the Onion has been remotely funny in at least five years. The fake story and the comment strike me as both false and dumb. But is it a firing offense. Eisen, who is Jewish, tried to clarify the next day.

The Onion is not making light of the situation. And nor am I. These articles are using satire to make a deadly serious point about this horrific tragedy.

— Michael Eisen (@mbeisen) October 14, 2023

That didn’t mollify some of his critics who were understandably angry about the mass murder of Israelis Eisen seemed to have skipped over. But other academics argued that his comments weren’t hateful and were protected speech which shouldn’t be censored especially among academics.

That explanation did not mollify some scientists. “Empty words. For 7 days you haven’t tweeted a single time words of supports [sic] for Israeli researchers, some of which lost kids and friends. And now you dare to give us military advice from your privileged position of safety. What a moral bankruptcy,” responded Yaniv Erlich, a prominent Israeli American scientist who is now CEO of a company called Eleven Therapeutics.

Some Israeli researchers demanded that Eisen resign and that colleagues stop submitting papers to eLife as long as he remained in charge. Such calls quickly provoked social media debates about freedom of speech. A petition was launched urging HHMI not to remove or censure Eisen over his posts. “Our opinion is not based on the merits (or lack thereof) of Eisen’s views. Rather, we believe that censuring Eisen would create a chilling effect on freedom of expression in academia,” the petitioners wrote. The petition now has more than 1000 signatures, organizers say.

“The whole [academic] enterprise we’re engaged in rests on the ability to have open intellectual exchange about any topic and express our views honestly,” says Josh Dubnau, a neurobiologist at Stony Brook University and one of the letter’s authors. “Nothing he said was repugnant or hateful. There shouldn’t be consequences for minority views in academia.” Dubnau went on to ask whether eLife would define acceptable positions on other controversial issues, such as abortion or the war in Ukraine.Dubnau, who is Jewish, says many junior scientists have privately contacted him to thank him for speaking out, but are afraid their own careers would be harmed if they said anything publicly about the conflict in Gaza.

But within a few days Eisen’s employer sided with the critics. He was asked to resign and when he refused he was fired. The board of directors explained this wasn’t the first time he’d crossed a line online.

A few days later, Eisen said, eLife’s board of directors asked him to resign, which he declined to do. On Oct. 23, he was fired. His X post announcing the news has since gone far more viral than the initial offending post.

The next day, eLife’s board of directors released a statement justifying the decision. “Mike has been given clear feedback from the board that his approach to leadership, communication and social media has at key times been detrimental to the cohesion of the community we are trying to build and hence to eLife’s mission,” the statement said. “It is against this background that a further incidence of this behaviour has contributed to the board’s decision.”

Nature published an article going into his history of generating controversy.

Randy Schekman, a Nobel-prizewinning cell biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was eLife’s editor-in-chief before Eisen, suspects that the decision stems from ongoing problems between Eisen and the board, with the post on X being the last straw. “He’s extraordinarily controversial,” Schekman says. “He has a history of inflammatory and often profane statements on his Twitter account.”

“I have been involved in controversies,” Eisen told Nature — including a strange one nicknamed ‘Wormgate’, in which a crude tweet Eisen posted about worms devolved into a debate about oppression. The board “told me to stop tweeting about eLife from my personal account, which I stopped doing a long time ago”, Eisen says. “They didn’t like that I swore.”…

“I’m not afraid of pissing people off,” he adds. The board “clearly view this as me having done one too many somethings. Somehow, I’m a powder keg for them that they don’t like.”

I don’t think what he said in this instance was, by itself, worthy of firing. Again, I disagree with his statement and his sense of humor in a very dark moment for many people. But I think it would be better to just let people tell him he’s an asshat online than to punish him for an opinion which lots of people in academia hold.

There are other instances, where people are essentially cheering on mass murder, where I think firing is completely appropriate. But it’s a judgment call and in this case the only judgment that mattered was that of his employer. For whatever reason they had had enough.