Early this year, B.C. (Before Covid), I was talking to a friend in his early thirties who had recently returned to university, studying science. He remarked that he had thought that all the talk of far-left orthodoxy on campus was an exaggeration. To his dismay, he found otherwise.
“I thought at least that STEM would be free of this bullshit, but it’s even taken hold there,” he moaned.
Physicist Lawrence Krauss is finally noticing the same trend.
In the 1980s[…]we in the science departments would scoff at the lack of objective intellectual standards in the humanities, epitomized by a movement that argued against the existence of objective truth itself, arguing that all such claims to knowledge were tainted by ideological biases due to race, sex or economic dominance.
It could never happen in the hard sciences, except perhaps under dictatorships[…]Or so we thought.
It’s important to note that Krauss is no right-wing firebrand. Krauss is as bien-pensant liberal as they come. From climate change to Dawkins-esque Christian-baiting, Krauss has said nothing for decades as the left came for everyone else.
Now, he’s belatedly realising, they’re coming for him.
Academic science leaders have adopted wholesale the language of dominance and oppression previously restricted to “cultural studies” journals to guide their disciplines, to censor dissenting views, to remove faculty from leadership positions if their research is claimed by opponents to support systemic oppression.
In June, the American Physical Society (APS), which represents 55,000 physicists world-wide, endorsed a “strike for black lives” to “shut down STEM” in academia. It closed its office—not to protest police violence or racism, but to “commit to eradicating systemic racism and discrimination, especially in academia, and science,” stating that “physics is not an exception” to the suffocating effects of racism in American life.
[…]no data were given to support this claim of systemic racism in science.
Krauss’s conventionalism is exemplified by his assertion that “racism in our society is real”, with as little evidence as the Scientific Wokeists he decries. But, as he concedes, he deigned not to notice the Long March through the institutions while it consumed the Humanities he regularly sneers at. Now that even Nature has fallen, Krauss is starting to wake up.
At Michigan State University, one group used the strike to organize and coordinate a protest campaign against the vice president for research, physicist Stephen Hsu, whose crimes included doing research on computational genomics to study how human genetics might be related to cognitive ability[…]Within a week, the university president forced Mr. Hsu to resign[…]
History should have warned Krauss that the sciences are no more immune to ideological witch-hunts than the Humanities – and just as ready to throw out facts that contradict their prejudices.
When scientific and academic leaders give official imprimatur to unverified claims, or issue blanket condemnations of peer-reviewed research or whole fields that may be unpopular, it has ripple effects throughout the field. It can shut down discussion and result in self-censorship[…]
Actual censorship is also occurring. A distinguished chemist in Canada argued in favor of merit-based science[…]For that he was censured by his university provost, his published review article on research and education in organic synthesis was removed from the journal website, and two editors involved in accepting it were suspended.
Krauss is the kind of porch atheist who bangs on incessantly about Galileo – yet it has taken him until now to notice the most disturbing trends in academia for centuries: the un-personing of academics and the Memory-Holing of published, peer-reviewed papers for no other reason than ideology. When Bruce Gillies’s The Case for Colonialism was forcibly removed under threat of violence, Krauss should have been shouting his indignation from the rooftops.
Still, better breaking his silence late than never.
As ideological encroachment corrupts scientific institutions, one might wonder why more scientists aren’t defending the hard sciences from this intrusion. The answer is that many academics are afraid, and for good reason. They are hesitant to disagree with scientific leadership groups, and they see what has happened to scientists who do. They see how researchers lose funding if they can’t justify how their research programs will explicitly combat claimed systemic racism or sexism, a requirement for scientific proposals now being applied by granting agencies.
Whenever science has been corrupted by falling prey to ideology, scientific progress suffers.
Now to see if Krauss applies his new-found skepticism and concern for the ideological corruption of science to his own favourite hobby-horse: climate alarmism.
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