One likes to think that science is immune from DEI considerations. One understands that Humanities and Social Science faculties in America’s university systems have been corrupted by ideology, but one had held out some hope for science.
Alas, if one is to believe John Tierney, via his most recent article in City Journal, the sciences have been overrun and defeated. This is bad news indeed.
Progressives on campus have quietly undermined scientific research for decades, but in the past year the corruption has become blatant. A series of scandals has exposed widespread bias, incompetence, plagiarism, and censorship. The publicity has prompted some modest changes, but the prospects for science are unclear: nonideological practitioners are outnumbered on campus today, and their ranks are thinning.
In the past science faculties based their work on experimentation, and on debate and discussion. Reality had the last word. Reality decided the value of any hypothesis. Well, such is no longer the case.
Tierney explains:
Scientific institutions have traditionally flourished by recruiting the most proficient researchers and promoting vigorous competition as they freely debate and test their theories. Those traditions remain sacrosanct among older professors, particularly older men with moderate or conservative political views, but not among the younger progressives and women who increasingly dominate academia. These younger professors, administrators, and journal editors are more likely to champion the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) regime: they value ethnic and gender diversity over originality and productivity, and they are far more eager to silence and punish scientists daring to challenge progressive orthodoxy.
And also,
Even the hard sciences have been politicized by demands to meet diversity quotas and to “decolonize” physics and mathematics by introducing “indigenous perspectives.”
Tierney suggests that the problem lies with the arrival of many distaff members, that is, with women. Strangely, women tend to reject the scientific method:
Female academics tend to be more politically progressive and more concerned with ensuring equal outcomes for groups than with rewarding individual achievement. They’re also more reluctant than their male colleagues to pursue controversial research—and more willing to suppress research and debate that they deem “harmful.”
Of course, plenty of women strongly support meritocracy and academic freedom, but studies have shown that on average, female professors put less emphasis than males do on “advancing knowledge” or “academic freedom” and more on “emotional well-being,” “social justice,” and “creating a better society.” In a national survey of academics two years ago, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) found that women were twice as likely as men to favor some restriction on “hate speech” and to support sanctions against faculty members who make controversial statements. The survey also found significantly less support for free speech among professors of both sexes who were under 35 or who leaned left politically.
Emotional well-being as the goal of scientific research. That means that we must ignore or stifle any research that makes us feel uncomfortable. This is a world defined by therapy, and by values that have stereotypically been associated with women.
But then, not all women are on board with this new culture. Consider, Tierney says, the case of Penn Law Professor Amy Wax:
“The feminization of the academy has been a total disaster,” Wax said in a recent podcast with Richard Hanania. “The values of the nursery and the kindergarten have now been elevated to the paramount considerations, and the old traditional and traditionally masculine values of truth-seeking, of argumentation, of reason, evidence, and objectivity have been downgraded.”
It is a bit of a stretch to call it science, but the field of psychology has recently become a female ghetto. This has had consequences:
When psychologists Cory Clark and Bo Winegard surveyed colleagues at 100 universities, they found that only 43 percent of the female psychology professors believed that scholars should prioritize truth over social equity when the two conflict, and that only 37 percent believed that scholars should be completely free to pursue research questions without fear of institutional punishment.
Of course, professional organizations are hard at work suppressing ideas that do not conform to the prevailing ideology:
The preference for dogma over science has become the official policy of one of the largest professional organizations, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP). Since 2022, it has evaluated papers submitted for presentation at its annual convention by asking each researcher to explain how the work “advances the diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-racism goals of SPSP.” Some prominent social psychologists, including Jonathan Haidt, have resigned from the group in protest.
Obviously, psychologists have been advising young men to avoid the field.
As today’s younger professors gain seniority and hire colleagues who share their politics and fit their preferred identity groups, fewer talented scientists will remain to tackle the difficult questions—and more scientists will be determined to stop anyone from trying.
As for how we can go about reversing the trend, Tierney is far from being optimistic. Dare we say that other nations will probably take the lead in scientific research.
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