Actually, we need more Harvard professors who would call out overcharges at a restaurant

Second, Edelman doesn’t have tenure. I’ve seen untenured professors get bad publicity—both fairly and unfairly—and it can have the effect of harming their chances. Harvard Business School junior faculty have a very tough run, and most drop off before they get to the promised land of tenure. The system says that they should, therefore, play it safe. And that makes academia a less daring place.

In Edelman’s case, the passion that makes his research on unsavoryand hidden practices by online firms compellingbled into a dispute over takeout; as the articles exploded on Twitter and Facebook, he wrote Wednesday that he is genuinely sorry for how this turned out. But who among us hasn’t had some sort of heated customer service argument at some time? We should be concerned when the defense the business uses is to forward an email exchange to the press. It means that semipublic figures who are more vulnerable to bad press cannot even operate within the bounds of normal life. And it means, in this case, that we’re chastising an academic for qualities we should hope to see more of in academic life.

In Edelman’s exchange with Ran Duan of Sichuan Garden, you can see his maverick side at work. He knows this isn’t personally a big deal, but he also knows he’s complaining about the same thing he tries to hold big businesses accountable for. And if no one calls them out, the law is meaningless. Put simply, things that hurt lots of people a little bit are socially damaging, but it’s hard to initiate action against them. It is death by a thousand little cuts.