No, I don't think harassment in any form is acceptable.

I do think the case of Hsu is worth using as an example here: an intra-university conflict; a group of grad students is petitioning for a professor that they believe is actively harmful to the institution to step down as director of research. Now, I don't think it really matters what you or I think about any of this--whether or not we agree with the students or the prof is immaterial. This is an issue for the university, the students at the university, the professor, and any professional relations the professor has within his field of academia.

If I'm a student at the school, and I'm pro-grad student faction, I'd probably be rightly annoyed and mighty curious at a pseudonymous blogger so fervently involving himself. Why the pseudonym? Why the support? It would behoove me to look into this person, seeing as, from my perspective, he is signal boosting an erroneous cause via his immensely popular website.

If I'm a professor at the school, and I'm pro-prof faction, I'd probably be rightly bewildered and mighty curious at a pseudonymous blogger so fervently involving himself. Why the pseudonym? Why the support? It would behoove me to look into this person, seeing as, from my perspective, he is signal boosting, albeit for a good cause, via his immensely popular website, with no apparent reason to do so, seeing as how he doesn't seem to be a geneticist or faculty. It would definitely give me pause, to say the least.

I can think of things even in my personal life or business where, if an outsider were involving himself trying to "signal boost" a resolution (even if in my favor), I think I'd very rightly want to know the motivations and identity of said person.

The above examples don't illustrate that he should be identified, rather, that he's presenting people with a compelling reason to want him identified. I don't think he should be ID'd, but if a campus paper wrote an OP-ed about it, I'd have a hard time faulting them.

I don't think anyone should harass anyone else, which I think is somewhat what Scott has been doing (perhaps for a righteous cause) with this affair (as, by nature, signal boosting pro-prof draws some fire upon the grad student faction in question), so his response here rings a little bit hollow to me. But, to be crystal clear, even if I think Scott is using his platform to ever so slightly browbeat institutions via his followers (in the most mild sense & with the best of intentions), I still think the NYT is very much clearly in the wrong.

I feel you're using a lot of noncentral meanings of terms here - "harassing" a "group" by drawing attention to something they're doing, publically, to another person, which severely impacts that person's life in a comparison with revealing somebody's identity in order to enable harassment of their private life.

I note that it's "the same" side in both situations that you're comparing, who thinks imposing personal consequences for civil, public speech is a legitimate substitute for debate. What Scott is doing is very dissimilar from what that group of students was doing, but what they were doing is very similar to what the NYT is trying to do.