I assume the analogy to Nazi book-burning in Prof. Hudlicky’s statement yesterday was meant to be excessively over-the-top and obnoxious and as insulting as possible to the people who he thinks wronged him. But I think it’s important to take a step back and think about context.

One of the reasons the original essay was so upsetting is that organic chemistry culture *has* improved over time, but the starting point was bleak enough that there’s still a very long way to go.

Ask yourself, as @CarolynBertozzi did in her awards talk a couple years ago, how it was that Cope did his foundational work at an all-women’s college but she was the first woman to win the award named in his honor

Compare the trajectories of Woodward and Julian, and consider the relative barrier heights each man faced to attain recognition

Browse #BlackandSTEM and #BlackintheIvory on here now, and look at the barriers so many brilliant people face today!

Think about a field dominated for 150 years by cis heterosexual white men, finally starting to turn the corner toward more inclusiveness. A paper appears in the field’s top journal arguing the main problem is insufficient “unconditional submission” to PI’s in that demographic

The paper argues that supporting women’s struggle diminishes the contributions of men, that striving for more diversity is a mistake that will diminish the quality of research

People angrily point out that we should keep moving the ball down the field, not suddenly give up and move back to the old days, when the hard work of unconditional submission to white men was glorified.

And the author, without a shred of sober self-reflection, says what he takes away from the whole experience is that we’re on the road to the Holocaust.

I’m just going to stop there—you get the point.