Good point Andy. And FIRE and the NY Post were on this story in 2023, a couple years late, after publication of Pompeo's book. Here's an article approximately contemporaneous with Pompeo's speech in Georgia in December 2020. globalatlanta.com/pompe… It also mentions US govt opposition to TikTok and WeChat. Possibly good ideas, but not very free-speechy.
Below is a contemporaneous transcription of Pompeo's speech, which includes some words about MIT. He doesn't mention MIT's COVID restrictions, but that would make sense for a high official in the Trump administration giving a talk at another university (here, Georgia Tech). Parsing his words (below) carefully, I see that he doesn't directly express MIT's reason(s) for not hosting his speech but lets the listener/reader infer the reason.
Why do schools censor themselves? They often do it out of fear of offending China.
Indeed I must tell you that MIT wasn’t interested in having me to their campus to give this exact set of remarks. President Raphael Reif implied that my arguments might insult their ethnic Chinese students and professors. But of course nothing could further from the truth. These are the very people that this set of remarks is intended to protect, to protect their freedoms.
And I must say, the yielding to the objection of hurt feelings plays right into the Chinese Communist Party’s hands.