> At this point, faced with career-threatening reprisals from their own departmental colleagues and the diversity committee at Penn State, as well as displeasure from the NSF, Sergei and his colleague who had done computer simulations for us withdrew their names from the research.
That strikes me as pretty damn "unsafe".
> Steinberger replied later that day. Half his board, he explained unhappily, had told him that unless he pulled the article, they would all resign and “harass the journal” he had founded 25 years earlier “until it died.” Faced with the loss of his own scientific legacy, he had capitulated.
It's sad that these lunatics have the power to do these things, but that's why people appease them.
Indeed, the only reason this sort of crap happens is because organisations and companies don't have the guts to tell the moral police to sod off. If they did, and their tactics stopped working, many of these issues would go away.
Because humans are coalition forming apes, with a brain built to survive in that environment not to perceive truth.