[2][3] Abbot was invited to give the 2020 John Carlson Lecture, a public science outreach, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The lecture was rescheduled to October 2021, before being cancelled in September 2021 after complaints on Twitter about a Newsweek editorial co-written by Abbot and Stanford professor Ivan Marinovic.
They recalled how the racial ideology of Nazi Germany "drove many of the best scholars out" of the universities, and called this "a warning of the consequences of viewing group membership as more important than merit".
[8][9] Abbot ultimately delivered his lecture on planetary science to a large audience hosted by the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University on the same day as the cancelled event.
[10] The barrage of negative press and public outrage resulting from Abbot's cancellation led MIT to hold two forums at which faculty were polled on two free speech questions.