It's a very painful and precipitous fall from grace for someone who had achieved the kind of stardom reserved for a handful of science personalities - images of Lewin swinging from a pendulum to demonstrate how its period is independent of its mass, or risking being struck in the face and badly hurt by having the pendulum approach his face within a hairsbreadth are now part of science folklore. As someone who has savored many of his lectures as well as his book, I am not the only one to feel pained, confused and stunned.
What I find bizarre is that MIT has chosen to take down all the lectures that made him famous. I simply don't understand this, especially since they have quoted reasons of "safety" in doing this - how could Lewin possibly entice or harass students simply through explaining the motion of a simple pendulum through an old, archived lecture? Apply whatever punishment you see fit to him but why deprive millions of students around the world of the joy of physics? As an institution that pioneered online courses through the Open Courseware modules, it is particularly damning to have MIT engage in this action.
Sadly, the purging of Lewin's lectures from the online universe cannot help but bear comparison to the book burning and blacklisting of speech and writing that was so endemic in the Dark and Middle ages. MIT's actions are akin to banning, say, Wagner's operas because he was anti-Semitic, or Peter Debye's equations because there are hints that he was silently permissive at the very least during the rise of the Nazis. Their actions remind me of the movie "The Ten Commandments" in which, after learning that his beloved son is actually the son of a Hebrew slave, the Pharaoh issues an edict to have Moses's name stricken from every monument and parchment in the land so that his very existence can be erased from history. It really shouldn't be so hard to separate men from their actions, and I cannot understand what motive MIT could have had in taking down the lectures. I am assuming that content in the Internet age is not as lost to the chasm of ignorance as content existing in a few select printed volumes four hundreds years ago, but the issue is really about the medium, not about the message.
Whatever their motive, the message MIT is sending to the world is not too complimentary - we will put the objectivity of knowledge on the same pedestal as the fallibility of human beings, and if we find evidence for one we will banish the other one too. It's a very troubling precedent in my opinion. I do hope that especially an institution as committed to the spread of knowledge as MIT reconsiders the decision.