Lawrence Krauss. Letter to the Wall Street Journal
In the 1980s, when I was a young professor of physics and astronomy at Yale University, deconstructivism was in vogue in the English department. We in the scientific departments chuckled at the lack of objective intellectual standards in the humanities, the best example of which was the movement that denies the existence of objective truth. Its supporters argued that claims to knowledge have always been tainted by ideological prejudices such as racial, gender, or economic.
This was impossible in the exact sciences, unless it was about a dictatorial society, as in the case of the Nazi condemnation of "Jewish" science or the Stalinist campaign against genetics, led by Trofim Lysenko. Then, to suppress the opposition to the state political doctrine, geneticists were fired by the thousands.
So we thought then. But in recent years, and especially after the police assassination of George Floyd in Minneapolis, a host of academics have adopted the vocabulary of domination and oppression from "cultural studies" journals. This is done in order to guide the development of their disciplines, censor dissent, and remove from the leading positions teachers whose research, according to their opponents, supports systemic oppression.
In June, the American Physical Society (APS), representing 55,000 physicists around the world, approved a "strike for black lives" to "shut down STEM" (faculties: Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics - V.Ya.) ". The APS closed its office not to protest police violence or racism, but to “commit to eradicating systemic racism and discrimination, especially in academia,” stating that “physics is also involved” in the suffocating consequences of racism in American life.
Although racism does exist in our society, no evidence has been provided to support the claim of systemic racism in science. As I have said elsewhere, we have every reason to believe that this statement is a fabrication.
APS is not alone. The country's laboratories and the science departments of our universities have joined the same one-day strike.
The preeminent scientific journal Nature, which daily includes in its mailing list the most important - in the opinion of its editors - scientific materials, has published an article "Ten simple rules for creating an anti-racist laboratory."
At Michigan State University (MSU), the strike was used to organize a protest campaign against the vice president of research, physicist Stephen Xu. His crimes included conducting research in computational genomics to study how human genetics might be linked to cognitive ability. According to the protesters, it smelled like eugenics. He was also accused of supporting psychological research on police firearms statistics, which explicitly denied claims of racism. Within a week, the president of the university forced Mr. Xu to resign.
In Princeton on July 4, more than 100 faculty members, including more than 40 from science and engineering faculties, wrote an open letter to the president, proposing to “end the institutionalized hierarchy that perpetuates inequality and damages.” The letter included a proposal to create a special commission that would “monitor, investigate and discipline incidents of racism, with“ racism ”defined by a different faculty committee, and required each faculty, including the faculties of mathematics, physics, astronomy and other sciences, to establish awards for a dissertation that would somehow be "actively anti-racist or expanding our understanding of the properties of race in our society."
It has a ripple effect when our science leaders and university bosses give formal endorsements to unverified claims, or come up with overarching condemnations of peer-reviewed research or entire areas of science that might not be popular with others. This can end discussions and lead to self-censorship.
Soon after mr. Xu resigned, and the authors of the psychology study asked the National Academy of Sciences to withdraw their paper - not because of flaws in statistical analysis, but out of concern that it would be misused by journalists who believe it contradicts popular belief. that the police are only racists. Later, the authors changed the motivation for their request to make it more comfortable for them to state that "there are no political considerations, pressure from the crowd, threats or rejection of the political views of those who approve of their work and cite it." As a cosmologist, I can say that if we started to withdraw all articles on cosmology that, in our opinion, were misrepresented by journalists, then there is hardly anything left of our work.
Actual censorship also takes place. A distinguished chemist from Canada has spoken out in support of meritocratic science and against recruitment practices aimed at equal results and leading to "discrimination against the most worthy candidates." For this, he was convicted by the university's vice-chancellor, his already published review article on research and education in organic synthesis was removed from the journal's website, and two editors who were involved in preparing it for publication were removed from work.
A planned seminar on the statistical analysis of gender imbalance in physics, which an Italian scientist from the CERN International Laboratory where the Large Hadron Collider was about to teach, was canceled, and his position in the laboratory was eliminated because he suggested that an explicit inequality should not be a consequence of sexism. A group of linguistic students initiated a petition to strip psychologist Stephen Pinker of his position as a member of the Society of the Linguistic Society of America for the crime of tweeting an article from the New York Times that they disapproved of.
Since ideology has a detrimental effect on the work of scientific institutions, the question is pertinent: why do more scientists not protect the exact sciences from this invasion? The answer is that many scientists are afraid, and for good reason. They do not dare to contradict the leading groups in science and they see what happens to those who decide. They see researchers lose funding unless they can explain how their research programs will eradicate systemic racism or sexism - a demand for research funding now being made by grant-makers.
Scientific progress suffers whenever science falls prey to ideology. This was the case in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, it was so in the United States in the 19th century, when racist views dominated biology. This was also the case during the McCarthy era, when eminent scientists such as Robert Oppenheimer were ostracized for their political views. To contain this slide, scientific leaders, scientific societies and university leaders must publicly defend not only freedom of speech in science, but also science itself, independent of political doctrines and not associated with the demands of political factions.
Mr. Krauss is a theoretical physicist, president of the Origins Project Foundation and author of The Physics of Climate Change.