Is Woke Science the Only Science Allowed in Academia?

My recent talk at the Stanford Classical Liberalism Initiative seminar.

I recently gave a seminar at the Stanford Classical Liberalism Initiative, organized by Ivan Marinovic, with the title of this post. I had originally intended the seminar content to be available for just the seminar participants. However, there have been numerous requests for access to the examples I presented. Dorian Abbot kindly reproduced the slides for his Heterodox STEM Substack Site, and they will be posted on Dec 18th, and Ivan also asked if he could post the recorded video to the Classical Liberalism Youtube page, and I have agreed.

Following the request from Ivan to outline the troubling incursion of various aspects of what can be called, for lack of a better term, “woke ideology” into science, and if possible with references to physics, I worked fairly hard to amass a host of examples. Many of these have appeared in the context of previous posts on Critical Mass. It was a difficult process, and in order to ensure the length of the talk did not exceed one hour I had to excise many slides and examples I had prepared. As I stated in the seminar, one can safely assume that for each example I presented, there are a host of other equally egregious other examples.

I organized the examples under 4 major themes: Sociology, Scientific Infrastructure, Academic Freedom, and ‘Woke Science: The Scientific Enterprise’. The intent was to first show how the sociology of the science has been evolving, often from the top down, to incorporate claims that, for example, science is a racist enterprise that can result in dramatic policy proposals that that may not be justified by empirical evidence. Next, I wanted to demonstrate the more troubling fact that these viewpoints and policies are being implemented by the scientific leadership of major societies, and government institutions, where virtue signaling has often been carried out at the expense of rational investigation. More troubling still has been the attack on academic freedom, where faculty are sometimes removed from positions or even fired due to performing research that is not politically correct, or asking inconvenient questions. Finally, motivated in part by a question posed to me in an email by Jerry Coyne, I addressed the most troubling aspect of all: How the scientific enterprise itself, including scientific content, is being distorted or attacked by ideologues, how various fields of science are evolving away from free and open inquiry, and how, in some cases, absolutely ridiculous claims make their way into various fields with impunity.

My hope is that by making the examples in this talk public, it may help to raise awareness of some of the issues that the academic and scientific and academic communities need to address with transparency and thoughtfulness, and hopefully to encourage rational discourse.

Here is the video record:

And here, for those who want view to the slides directly, is that record, as reproduced on the Heterodox Site: