Collaborating with woke college regimes will not save STEM

By Mitt Castor

As much as I admire Professor Dorian Abbot for standing up to the woke mobs that tried to cancel him, I must take exception to his well-intentioned advice that working in support of illiberal college administrations to stave off federal defunding is the best way to save STEM.

Why? For the same reason that Marshall Petain’s “Vichy” strategy did not serve France well after its leadership collapsed. The key to combatting existential threats is not accommodation and collaboration but sacrifice and courage.

In his Wall Street journal op-ed, Dr. Abbot argues that despite agreeing that “Harvard had it coming” when the Trump administration cut off both its science research grants and its access to foreign STEM students, the heavy-handed cure is worse than the disease. This is short-term thinking–the kind that emboldens hostage takers. Truth be told, STEM has long been held hostage by college administrations that grew fat off “indirect” ransom payments. It’s time to put an end to this.

The analysis starts by examining the factors that brought about the current confrontation between higher education and an implacable administration in Washington, dedicated to reforming a system whose moral foundations have collapsed.

Why didn’t STEM professors rise up against the woke takeover of our universities before they turned into cesspits of leftist, anti-American activism? What stopped scientists and engineers from wading into the faculty committees and governance bodies that became dominated by leftist humanities professors? What made STEM professors accede to the DEI mandates and identitarian quotas that riddled their professions with incompetent posers, undermining their specialties and squandering public trust? Why were they so late to the free speech movement? And why didn’t these professors stand up en masse to defend cancelled colleagues after the ideological purges began?

Most of all, how did so many brilliant intellectuals fail to see the inevitable outcome of their acquiescence?

Were they ignorant of the impact the long march through the institutions was having on their campus cultures? Could they not see the looming destruction of Enlightenment values that made their existence possible, and their replacement with the poisonous fruits of critical theory? What were they thinking as they watched their campuses descend into the fever swamps of gender madness, race grifting, antisemitism, and pro-Hamas riots?

Did the conceit that their scientific research was far too important for them to waste time on faculty politics glue them to their lab benches? Secure in their tenured sinecures, did complacency and indifference keep them on the sidelines? Or was it plain old cowardice, a fear that if they spoke out, the mob might come after them next?

It was all of these things, which is why a price must now be paid to set things right.

A major reset is coming to Big Science as practiced by the technologic elites ensconced in our R1 Universities. President Eisenhower’s warning about the dangers of unbridled confidence in Experts™ and politicized government funding was ignored. Hence, these maladies have come to pass.

A correction is long overdue. The “Vannevar Bush Binge” is over.

Public trust in our institutions has crumbled, in no small part due to the wokeification of science perpetrated by the aforementioned posers that DEI infiltrated into the academy. As a result, the public appetite for pouring torrents of money into sinkholes like Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia has dried up.

Only the French Resistance and the Free French Forces salvaged France’s honor in the aftermath of Petain’s Crime. If the STEM professoriate doesn’t break ranks with the bloated illiberal administrations that have been leeching off them, they deserve to go down with the ship.

The wiser strategy is not to beg for a return to the status quo ante Trumpum, but to make common cause with the new administration in Washington, working together to stamp out wokeness.

Will this require sacrifice? Yes. Will it be disruptive? Of course. Might this require decamping from the Ivies for less “prestigious” universities whose intellectual and moral foundations have not crumbled beyond repair? Indeed, it will. The alternative is going out of business.

The “mean orange man” is not out to destroy science and innovation any more than he is out to destroy world trade. Whether or not you like his bull-in-a-china-shop approach to overturning the status quo, he is looking to make deals. So, go make your best deal!

Do not blow your chance to work with the new heads of the NIH, the NSF, and the DoD. Give a wide birth to lawsuits that claim scientists have a fundamental right to taxpayers’ money. Stop acting like hostages and start behaving like leaders.

Getting out in front of needed reforms, rather than reacting from behind, is the only way to restore STEM to its productive and right-sized place in the future of higher education. Act now to reserve your place at the table in a system that will inevitably be much smaller than it is today, driven by both demographics and fiscal sanity. And if you don’t have the stomach for the fight to save STEM, cash in your chips and retire.