A clarion call, and one hopes that those who are against all this now feel emboldened to speak up. I confess guilt to having been one who largely (not completely) sat idle as this tidal wave overcame universities, preferring to remain focused on my research and teaching. I tried to fight it around the edges, but not head-on. The real difficulty is that the sacrifice required to stand against this is not just one's own--it can extend to one's family. Being canceled can and has included being fired from one's job, or driven to quitting, or even to suicide. Had that happened to me during certain years (which turned out, looking back, to be the very years that DEI and its derivatives exploded), it would have affected not just me but my invalid husband. But this essay also fails to recognize another consequence of its recommendations in the very last sentence. The younger faculty are so steeped in this culture that they can't even imagine how things were "before". I suspect if we graphed "degree of discomfort with DEI and its derivatives" against "age of faculty" it would not start at zero but would still be an upward-trending line with increasing age. If those who can retire do, the fight will be lost. Of course, quitting is also an option, but see my comments about family.
Thank you for your thoughtful and honest comments. I, too, capitulated in the early days, thinking I was helping women and people of color overcome previous discrimination. I favored them in faculty hiring. I now realize I was wrong in several ways, and that I should have protested our violating the Civil Rights Act.
Few people admit their mistakes, hats off to you sir for doing so. It's not too late for you to strive to make things right. Friction is a force, just quietly resist woke "initiatives" that will likely increase in frequency in response to the Trump administration. Ask questions, e.g. "If women are strong and resilient and can do anything men can do 'just as well if not better' (Joe Biden quote), why do they need special programs to persuade them into STEM when they have freedom of choice - and exercise it?"
That is an interesting question. I'm a scientist, and we have several female scientists on this forum. I've never understood why some women select themselves out of STEM even if they're interested. But I've run into the same attitude among women when I tell them I'm a pilot. "Oh, I could *never* do that." Well, why not? I honestly don't get it.
Woke answer: Obviously they need a government program to tell them why they _could_ do that!
At one Zoom meeting someone asked a similar question, and a panty panderer (male feminist) piped up, "Because of all the harassment!" Enthusiastic nodding by those with their cameras on. I wrote "Isn't this mansplaining women's experiences?" in the chat - no response, but I hope it showed some undecided people that one can gently expose woke hypocrisy.
Follow the money - those with a vested interest in these programs will never say their work is done.
Sorry Judy I'm all over the place, but two interesting stats from physics: Highest fraction of women getting Bachelor's degrees in Physics: Iran
Lowest fraction: Germany.
It seems that in countries where women are more liberated and get government support (paid time off, childcare), they tend to choose more traditional roles - playing with their kids vs. debugging code until 3am. And there is nothing wrong with that!
I have benefited from female mentorship along my professional pathway in STEM. Many of my colleagues have as well.
Are as many women willing to go into STEM as men? Maybe not. But that does not mean we should still not try to encourage the women with interest and talent from pursuing it.
There is one huge barrier for women; children and families. Maybe we just need to make this barrier less daunting. I am willing to try this experiment, given the resources.
Only if you encourage boys with the same fervor. Don't leave it to the radfems, who want actively to _discourage_ men and boys from even showing up at college.
And perhaps some societal changes are in order - so that children and families can be more part of men's lives. Start with paid maternity AND paternity leave! And presumptive joint custody in divorces. I have an opposite-side-of the coin question from Judy's - if raising children is such a difficult job, why all the maternal gate-keeping?
Yes. Thank you. Dedication to science and family is human and more than good enough. Scientific progress advanced all realms of human endeavor, and needs no apology.
Brother you are right as rain. Been a professor for 20 years at top level research institutions. Wear gloves and a lab coat all day, don't sit idle in an office while others work and toil to solve problems. I've been preaching the exact same message to my colleagues for 5 -10 years or more. My diversity statements were in regards viewpoint diversity and I was mocked. They have no idea what is coming for them. The ignorance of arrogance. We should show zero mercy and demand absolute accountability for their mission creep and move to activism. Bravo to you for voicing truth and providing clarity of action. Your message is a perfect solution and exactly what is required to recreate the pursuit of truth, a 21st Century Renaissance in STEM.
No one cared when it was whites being discriminated against. Only when the brown golems started seeing jews as white and protested Israel was a spotlight put on the problem. And until this root is dealt with, that communists fleeing from Germany and Russia flooded our universities not a single damn problem will ever be dealt with.
If people want to have a respectable middle ground between "antisemites" and regular people fine, but the longer people avoid the harsh realities of the jewish problem they leave only those antisemites as the voices on the topic, to the point the masses are shouting "nigga heil Hitler" in desperation to be set free from this nightmare we have been enslaved to.
Jewish people are going to have to have a come to Jesus moment or they are going to have to be removed from all European lands for their betrayal after we foolishly helped them against 95% Christian Germany that was resisting the same communists who had just killed 60 million Christians. We tried to help these people for so long and they betray us, capture our institutions and brainwash our children.
"We know that there is one enemy, ever-busy obscuring our terms; ever muddling and muddying terminologies, ever trotting out minor issues to obscure the main and the basic, ever prattling of short range causation for the sake of, or with the result of, obscuring the vital truth."
- Ezra Pound
"As a Jewish convert to Orthodox Christianity with a fairly wide set of historical books under my belt, it troubles me to see some hierarchs and channels following the world's narrative about "anti-Semitism" and all the things that have been done to "combat anti-Semitism." I'll tell you directly, as a 100% pure blooded Ashkenazi man, how to fix "anti-Semitism:" Anti-Semitism will end when faithless Jews leave other groups of people alone and stop trying to transform their nations and cultures in ways that invariably harm the populations in question. It is really not that complicated.”
"Why didn’t STEM professors rise up against the woke takeover of our universities before they turned into cesspits of leftist, anti-American activism?"
Easy one. For the same reason most of academia didn't rise up: FEAR.
"Most of all, how did so many brilliant intellectuals fail to see the inevitable outcome of their acquiescence?"
Another softball. They didn't fail to see. They failed to act, because of fear.
Castor is entirely correct: anything short of pulling up DEI, ... root and branch will fail.
Various writers have been warning about the New Left/Critical Social Justice takeover of academia since the days of the Sokal Affair (way back in 1996), which played out the same way these things always play out: arch-frauds like Derrida and his coterie just played their usual rhetorical shell games (Sokal is not sophisticated enough to understand us!), lesser frauds wheeled out the bigotry accusations (of course white men feel threatened!), while the rest of our liberal class kept their heads down and hid till it all blew over.
The truth is that there are very few liberals who can ever stand up to Leftists, Leftists always create and control liberal-Left morality and style themselves as Official Defenders of the Oppressed, which makes opposing them socially and professionally risky, to say the least—and this is even more extreme for profs and admins, who have invested their whole lives in their careers and are not inclined to risk them to get down in the mud and battle ideological extremists, who live to fight and smear.
Both the CSJ takeover of academia and the Trumpist response are directly the result of the cowardly impotence of our liberal class, who abetted the former which made the latter inevitable. Expecting any of the conformist careerist well-meaning liberals of academia to fight for neutral principles and for the integrity of scholarship is as naive as expecting Charlie Brown to finally kick that football. It's never happened and never will.
"Both the CSJ takeover of academia and the Trumpist response"
False equivalence.
"Expecting any of the conformist careerist well-meaning liberals of academia to fight for neutral principles and for the integrity of scholarship is as naive as..."
So much wrong there. Hugely cynical. Concedes defeat...
Hey, I realize this topic is highly subjective and I'm happy to be proved wrong, I'm just simply describing what I've witnessed the past 30ish years.
I am "hugely cynical" maybe bc I approach this from the Humanities/Lit side, which was the first beachhead conquest of CSJ. I was a Lit major in the 80s and will never forget when I was handed my first "Marxist lens" and was informed that the purpose of culture and scholarship was the "rectifying of historical injustice", which seemed odd to me considering I was paying to study/read/write books not take part in someone else's imaginary revolution. And then I got an MA degree in the 90s while reading everyone from Camille Paglia, Robert Hughes and Chris Hitchens et al., all of whom clearly warned that American scholarship was being hollowed out by New Left ideology where denouncing the West and fetishizing its supposed victims became the main (almost sole) topic of modern culture.
And, as I said before, I never saw a single college prez, dean, admin or any mainstream liberal notice or stand up against any of this, they simply slept and cashed checks while the Trojan Horse was wheeled inside our gates. So while I am cynical about the Trumpists, it is early in their reign and I will give them the benefit of the doubt; but as for our liberal class, the people who are well-compensated to preserve our liberal traditions and pass down our cultural patrimony, they have blatantly obviously failed and no possible salutary reform will come from them.
And why suddenly are there so many power-players trying to take everything to extremes depending on people's fear to subjugate them? Both sides are playing this game and it does not reflect the America we grew up with.
It's not 2021 anymore. DOGE has canceled over a billion dollars in NSF grants using keyword blocklists that pull in random papers. No government scientist can speak of climate change or global warming in any government publication. Speaking up about the ablation of Gaza gets people deported. Regardless of the left weirdness at universities a few years ago, the right is being even more ferocious and censoring. Trump has sold us all out to his latest buddies in the middle east anyhow, to this and that petrostate. That's why we can't even speak of the greatest dangers to humanity in our lifetimes.
I'm part of this group because I genuinely thought that woke turned into a witchhunt and was personally affected. It's called heterodox STEM. Republicans are now in control and could try to reform institutions without destroying them altogether. DOGE attacks on universities and science agencies are like if liberals decided since the military is conservative-leaning, they should gut the entire DOD in an attempt to replace it with a bunch of pre-groomed hippies, who obviously aren't going to do THAT job as well as the conservative-leaning military types. Get real.
Let's say your post is true. I wonder why things got to that point? Why, even after reading the writer's essay I still have no idea. It's a complete mystery!
The America we grew up with is under MASSIVE assault. It will disappear if we do not defend it. And you seem to be content to be an ostrich. Great. Carry on.
Great article Mitt - I assume you are the author, though confusingly the Substack header risks confusing you and Dorian Abbot (mentioned in the article. I know) for the author's name. Very good article you wrote and that should be clearer.
Also, in the spirit of the article, I would like to note for jew focused Jim (in this comment section), that he doesn't get to vomit over this nice conversation like a woke commissar in a faculty meeting. Someone should speak up, so, here, Jim: there is plenty of blame to share for our lost world and you don't need to dump it all of it on one small minority. Do some mirror work, dude.
I have noticed that over the last couple of years or so, there seems to always be one or two lunatics of various stripes on Heterodox STEM who come out of the woodwork to cause trouble by posting ridiculous nonsense.
I think back to my engagement with one "adjunct scientist" who probably by now has been eliminated from his tenuous untenured position. He always had numerous obnoxious, semi-literate and semi-woke things to say on every topic. Like rising in high dudgeon to defend the law students at Stanford University threatening to rape and kill a Federal judge and his family. And he was pretty aggressive about claiming that was appropriate behavior. Of course, we have seen far worse on campuses since then.
We also crossed swords on the issue of Jewish participation in STEM. He wrote such offensive comments that I called him out. And then he threatened, behind the scenes, to sue all and sundry if all the comments were not removed. So, they were ALL removed, And then he whined endlessly that the comments had been expunged. Oh brother...
"Why didn't STEM profs rise up" is pretty interesting. The thing a number of people in STEM never got was actually the fact that people in the humanities were not stupid--there's some pretty interesting evidence here depending on what you consider evidence--and that the humanities were always traditionally "civics education" and were professionally linked to div schools and law schools. Put more bluntly: The humanities were a primary pipeline to power and were the first place most politicized. Humanities profs in the '50s, '60s and '70s had a dicey relationship with federal funding and campus activists, and generally there was extraordinary bloodshed for *decades* in the humanities.
STEM professors share a problem with expert technocrats in that they have no preparation for or preoccupation with power, and yet expect to wield authority. Importantly, they also allowed the entire administration to fall to activists, and every step of the way they vainly thought it was because the humanities were *dumber* than STEM, rather than getting that the humanities were actually more important. Once the education departments (who admittedly always have been idiots) and the feeders to the law schools (classics/history/philosophy/lit) were either compromised or liquidated, the whole thing was over, and people in STEM never got that. Lit fell first and is now converted into the primary bastion of evil on campus, history has been a long and hideous fight but has finally pretty much fallen, classics was liquidated, philosophy's fate is half way between classics and history. At this point, everyone who wields the mechanism of power is either on the enemy team or is up to their nose in shit, and that's true in university bureaucracy, government bureaucracy, and in many cases courts.
STEM watched all this happen either as naïve children of the Enlightenment who ultimately share some blame for it, or arrogantly dismissed this as an irrelevancy associated with lower academics with non-scientific standards, or they paid no attention at all, and now they reap the whirlwind.
Agreed. The scientific community is not only an enabler of woke...it has a significant membership that is PART OF and SUPPORTS wokeness. By its silence and direct complicity, the scientific community as a collective is as culpable as the German functionaries who could have acted against the darkness but placed their won careers ahead of their moral obligations. The moral response in correction means they must lose those careers as a warning to others. It is time to replace the entire staff of academia.
As for the "Where were you when...?" question, I think that the campus radicals were surprised how easy it was to take over STEM. There was a brief pause at the gates of objective rationality, before they realized that nerdy male scientists would bend over backwards to avoid being called sexist, and defaulted to chivalrous behavior around angry women and minorities in order to placate them. "I'm one of the GOOD ones, they won't come after me..." instead they were and are regarded the same as Stalin's "useful idiots". Male feminists are a classic example - respected by no-one, distrusted by everyone!
Fortunately it doesn't take much to throw a wrench into their works. A few questions here and there, use their language against them (e.g. you don't "feel safe" sharing your viewpoints in front of them), and quiet friction. For example, I have seen enforced "Native land acknowledgments" stopped in their tracks in some California colleges just by asking how much Mexico is to blame! Woke meltdown ensued and the proposal died quietly.
I recognize this within myself. I am a HUGE coward, basically. It is why I do not do scientific fieldwork, even though I have had many opportunities (a couple of trips to Siberia offered, over 10 to Antarctica, a couple of trips to Greenland, a chance to go to the Galapagos and Easter Island, and so on).
I recoil from conflict.
I am really a "milquetoast" type of scientist.
However, with this comes a LOT of risks. By avoiding risks and confrontation, one does not always have smooth sailing. In fact, it invites trouble.
I like to believe I have learned from this. And I like to believe I will be different, moving forward.
For a couple of years, I participated in a monthly zoom call with my former colleagues from MIT. Mostly there were discussions about teaching methods and examination schedules and families.
Then, one of our more "politically active members", a strikingly attractive female physicist "Dr. A." from a fancy private school, took me to task over distributing some mildly controversial writings of Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute. Dr. Mac Donald was bemoaning some of the corruption from the early stages of woke ideology that were running rampant in the Humanities.
Dr. A., who is Jewish, was very annoyed at this. And I warned everyone that it looked like wokeness was going to have an impact on STEM. I was convinced of this. Dr. A. was furious. Dr. A. was among those who completely bought into the woke narrative, and thought it was wonderful to devote ones time to social justice issues like replacing all women in STEM with men pretending to be women, and similar things.
The zoom calls stopped. I am not sure if I was disinvited because I was too disruptive, or what exactly.
However, I was interested that a year or so later, the "woke dragon" suddenly turned and attacked Jews in academia. Many Jews who previously had been on board with wokeness since it seemed fashionable and "kind" and "fair" were shocked that they were suddenly the target of this monstrosity.
These highly political fashions are capricious. They are irrational. One group that is favored can in the next breath be vilified.
I saw this decades ago with a close friend who is a gay rights law professor. He was discouraged from ever considering a profession in law after a stellar preparation because he was male, and supposedly the powers that be had decided that males were forbidden from pursuing a career in law or legal academia in our native country. So he fled to another country where he has become quite famous as a law professor. But then things changed, and as a famous gay rights professor, he was now sought out by every institution everywhere. But it was too late. He already was happy and comfortable elsewhere. No one could entice him to move.
Now, the 'TQ+' part of 'LGBTQ+' is at war with 'LGB'. My law professor friend is on the side of 'LGB'. And once again, LGB is under assault by TQ+ as well as confused outsiders. In this march towards some supposed "Utopian" vision of "social justice" and fairness, things change in a flash, just like they did in the French and Russian revolutions.
Look at Jordan Peterson, who was a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, and was driven from that position and even entangled in a mess with the College of Psychologists of Ontario over public statements. One of the judges ruling decided that Peterson's free speech rights had been violated, but that pushing woke ideas was far too important so the College of Psychologists judgement was allowed to stand. Now, just a year or two later, the Scottish Supreme Court has opined that only biological women, born as women, are women, in law. Of course, in Canada this ruling carries some precedent. We will just have to see how this all plays out. But it is beyond Kafkaesque at this point. It is ridiculous in the extreme.
This culture war is a battle for the very existence of Western Civilization itself, including STEM. We would do well to pay attention to it.
Amen! There was resistance in the 1990s at my university, in the form of a Faculty Newsletter that pointed out some of the deconstructionist nonsense. But it seemed just too silly to be taken seriously. We also noticed the growth of bureacracy, with a weekly "VP Count" that continuously increased. The causes were many, but two are (a) the increasing number of "Title" regulations that required bureaucrats and lawyers to deal with them, and (b) the natural growth tendencies of any bureaucracy. The bureaucrats were happy with all the new regs, which required more bureaucrats. The faculty didn't really understand what was happening, so, no resistance -- especially given the insane competition for research funds.
Thank you. It is tragic that Heterodox Academy and FIRE, in the name of academic freedom, are endorsing the fabrication and teaching of disinformation, and the free expression of DEI and antisemitic lies on university campuses. It is time to change our missions. Let's reinstate the professional institution of learning where scholarly discourse, the pursuit and teaching of evidence-based truth, takes precedence over unrestrained free expression. Heterodox and FIRE can do it, but why don't we?
Long ago, well before wokeism, I decided that academic STEM (and its counterparts in corporate America and government and the nonprofit world) were in serious trouble. I was crushed and disheartened that my beloved profession had obviously fallen from its previous position.
I saw all kinds of issues with incompetence and lack of productivity, somewhat similar to what Peter Thiel and Jordan Peterson and Kary Mullis had noticed. So, recalling advice from my father, an engineer who was a serial entrepreneur, I decided to explore a different approach. I would take what I had learned from decades in STEM R&D, and form a new type of R&D organization that had "antibodies" of various sorts against the ills that I had observed in conventional R&D settings.
I knew Jim Simons. I worked at the same think tank as Simons. I know the techniques Simons used, and many of the people he hired. I also knew several others who were similar to Simons in STEM, who had done similar things. So, I wondered, could I do something similar?
I have contemplated writing essays on this topic for Heterodox STEM. I still might do it. Right now I am busy with preparations for this startup.
Obviously, this approach is fraught with risk of various sorts. I really relished being at "prestigious" institutions like MIT and Princeton and Bell Labs. Starting out in a new direction is uncertain and a gamble. But the current systems we have enjoyed since WWII are rotten in numerous ways. Can they be saved? I am not sure, but if they can be saved, it will only be through tremendous amounts of pain and disruption. They have to be forced into it, by being forced to compete with new entities that are more efficient and faster and offer more attractive environments.
The public is disgusted with STEM at the moment. The blindness and arrogance certain elements of STEM showed towards the public really annoy the average person.
I can point to Anthony Fauci who declared himself to be synonymous with "the science" while he was clearly lying under oath. He even admitted this. He said he was lying "for our own good" or some such nonsense. I might also mention Holden Thorpe, the senior editor at Science Magazine who has a long checkered history of termination for scientific fraud and similar problems. Thorpe has been frantic to politicize science and take the "wrong side" of every issue publicly and loudly.
I know many are in precarious positions, and not able to do what I and my colleagues intend to do. But change is coming, whether we like it or not. And it will be painful for everyone, both those well-prepared, and not.
STEM is broken. It was broken before woke ideology arrived. Wokeness just made things worse. So, everyone should put on their thinking caps, and start figuring out what to do. We are all pretty smart (not to brag or anything), and we ought to use our creativity and other resources to save our profession. Do not wait for someone else to do it. We are the ones we are waiting for.
Thank you for reminding us of so many key diagnostics of the downfall of STEM, and also of two of the prominent spokespersons who betrayed the essence of open, respectful scientific discourse. And, yes, Jim Simons, was a extraordinarily wonderful person, along with his family.
A clarion call, and one hopes that those who are against all this now feel emboldened to speak up. I confess guilt to having been one who largely (not completely) sat idle as this tidal wave overcame universities, preferring to remain focused on my research and teaching. I tried to fight it around the edges, but not head-on. The real difficulty is that the sacrifice required to stand against this is not just one's own--it can extend to one's family. Being canceled can and has included being fired from one's job, or driven to quitting, or even to suicide. Had that happened to me during certain years (which turned out, looking back, to be the very years that DEI and its derivatives exploded), it would have affected not just me but my invalid husband. But this essay also fails to recognize another consequence of its recommendations in the very last sentence. The younger faculty are so steeped in this culture that they can't even imagine how things were "before". I suspect if we graphed "degree of discomfort with DEI and its derivatives" against "age of faculty" it would not start at zero but would still be an upward-trending line with increasing age. If those who can retire do, the fight will be lost. Of course, quitting is also an option, but see my comments about family.
Thank you for your thoughtful and honest comments. I, too, capitulated in the early days, thinking I was helping women and people of color overcome previous discrimination. I favored them in faculty hiring. I now realize I was wrong in several ways, and that I should have protested our violating the Civil Rights Act.
Few people admit their mistakes, hats off to you sir for doing so. It's not too late for you to strive to make things right. Friction is a force, just quietly resist woke "initiatives" that will likely increase in frequency in response to the Trump administration. Ask questions, e.g. "If women are strong and resilient and can do anything men can do 'just as well if not better' (Joe Biden quote), why do they need special programs to persuade them into STEM when they have freedom of choice - and exercise it?"
That is an interesting question. I'm a scientist, and we have several female scientists on this forum. I've never understood why some women select themselves out of STEM even if they're interested. But I've run into the same attitude among women when I tell them I'm a pilot. "Oh, I could *never* do that." Well, why not? I honestly don't get it.
Possible answer: because they have more options?
Woke answer: Obviously they need a government program to tell them why they _could_ do that!
At one Zoom meeting someone asked a similar question, and a panty panderer (male feminist) piped up, "Because of all the harassment!" Enthusiastic nodding by those with their cameras on. I wrote "Isn't this mansplaining women's experiences?" in the chat - no response, but I hope it showed some undecided people that one can gently expose woke hypocrisy.
Follow the money - those with a vested interest in these programs will never say their work is done.
Sorry Judy I'm all over the place, but two interesting stats from physics: Highest fraction of women getting Bachelor's degrees in Physics: Iran
Lowest fraction: Germany.
It seems that in countries where women are more liberated and get government support (paid time off, childcare), they tend to choose more traditional roles - playing with their kids vs. debugging code until 3am. And there is nothing wrong with that!
I have benefited from female mentorship along my professional pathway in STEM. Many of my colleagues have as well.
Are as many women willing to go into STEM as men? Maybe not. But that does not mean we should still not try to encourage the women with interest and talent from pursuing it.
There is one huge barrier for women; children and families. Maybe we just need to make this barrier less daunting. I am willing to try this experiment, given the resources.
Only if you encourage boys with the same fervor. Don't leave it to the radfems, who want actively to _discourage_ men and boys from even showing up at college.
And perhaps some societal changes are in order - so that children and families can be more part of men's lives. Start with paid maternity AND paternity leave! And presumptive joint custody in divorces. I have an opposite-side-of the coin question from Judy's - if raising children is such a difficult job, why all the maternal gate-keeping?
Yes. Thank you. Dedication to science and family is human and more than good enough. Scientific progress advanced all realms of human endeavor, and needs no apology.
Woke is entirely antithetical to all STEM principles
Woke needs to die so that the useful STEM can thrive
100%
Brother you are right as rain. Been a professor for 20 years at top level research institutions. Wear gloves and a lab coat all day, don't sit idle in an office while others work and toil to solve problems. I've been preaching the exact same message to my colleagues for 5 -10 years or more. My diversity statements were in regards viewpoint diversity and I was mocked. They have no idea what is coming for them. The ignorance of arrogance. We should show zero mercy and demand absolute accountability for their mission creep and move to activism. Bravo to you for voicing truth and providing clarity of action. Your message is a perfect solution and exactly what is required to recreate the pursuit of truth, a 21st Century Renaissance in STEM.
No one cared when it was whites being discriminated against. Only when the brown golems started seeing jews as white and protested Israel was a spotlight put on the problem. And until this root is dealt with, that communists fleeing from Germany and Russia flooded our universities not a single damn problem will ever be dealt with.
Chuck Woolery explains: https://files.catbox.moe/wsbkv0.jpg
If people want to have a respectable middle ground between "antisemites" and regular people fine, but the longer people avoid the harsh realities of the jewish problem they leave only those antisemites as the voices on the topic, to the point the masses are shouting "nigga heil Hitler" in desperation to be set free from this nightmare we have been enslaved to.
Jewish people are going to have to have a come to Jesus moment or they are going to have to be removed from all European lands for their betrayal after we foolishly helped them against 95% Christian Germany that was resisting the same communists who had just killed 60 million Christians. We tried to help these people for so long and they betray us, capture our institutions and brainwash our children.
Solzhenitsyn confirms in 200 years together: https://files.catbox.moe/khk98o.jpg and warns the West those same people are going to flood the US/Europe with mass immigration to destroy them, https://files.catbox.moe/pti3tl.jpg
"We know that there is one enemy, ever-busy obscuring our terms; ever muddling and muddying terminologies, ever trotting out minor issues to obscure the main and the basic, ever prattling of short range causation for the sake of, or with the result of, obscuring the vital truth."
- Ezra Pound
"As a Jewish convert to Orthodox Christianity with a fairly wide set of historical books under my belt, it troubles me to see some hierarchs and channels following the world's narrative about "anti-Semitism" and all the things that have been done to "combat anti-Semitism." I'll tell you directly, as a 100% pure blooded Ashkenazi man, how to fix "anti-Semitism:" Anti-Semitism will end when faithless Jews leave other groups of people alone and stop trying to transform their nations and cultures in ways that invariably harm the populations in question. It is really not that complicated.”
– Brother Augustine (Michael Witcoff)
"Why didn’t STEM professors rise up against the woke takeover of our universities before they turned into cesspits of leftist, anti-American activism?"
Easy one. For the same reason most of academia didn't rise up: FEAR.
"Most of all, how did so many brilliant intellectuals fail to see the inevitable outcome of their acquiescence?"
Another softball. They didn't fail to see. They failed to act, because of fear.
Castor is entirely correct: anything short of pulling up DEI, ... root and branch will fail.
Various writers have been warning about the New Left/Critical Social Justice takeover of academia since the days of the Sokal Affair (way back in 1996), which played out the same way these things always play out: arch-frauds like Derrida and his coterie just played their usual rhetorical shell games (Sokal is not sophisticated enough to understand us!), lesser frauds wheeled out the bigotry accusations (of course white men feel threatened!), while the rest of our liberal class kept their heads down and hid till it all blew over.
The truth is that there are very few liberals who can ever stand up to Leftists, Leftists always create and control liberal-Left morality and style themselves as Official Defenders of the Oppressed, which makes opposing them socially and professionally risky, to say the least—and this is even more extreme for profs and admins, who have invested their whole lives in their careers and are not inclined to risk them to get down in the mud and battle ideological extremists, who live to fight and smear.
Both the CSJ takeover of academia and the Trumpist response are directly the result of the cowardly impotence of our liberal class, who abetted the former which made the latter inevitable. Expecting any of the conformist careerist well-meaning liberals of academia to fight for neutral principles and for the integrity of scholarship is as naive as expecting Charlie Brown to finally kick that football. It's never happened and never will.
"Both the CSJ takeover of academia and the Trumpist response"
False equivalence.
"Expecting any of the conformist careerist well-meaning liberals of academia to fight for neutral principles and for the integrity of scholarship is as naive as..."
So much wrong there. Hugely cynical. Concedes defeat...
Hey, I realize this topic is highly subjective and I'm happy to be proved wrong, I'm just simply describing what I've witnessed the past 30ish years.
I am "hugely cynical" maybe bc I approach this from the Humanities/Lit side, which was the first beachhead conquest of CSJ. I was a Lit major in the 80s and will never forget when I was handed my first "Marxist lens" and was informed that the purpose of culture and scholarship was the "rectifying of historical injustice", which seemed odd to me considering I was paying to study/read/write books not take part in someone else's imaginary revolution. And then I got an MA degree in the 90s while reading everyone from Camille Paglia, Robert Hughes and Chris Hitchens et al., all of whom clearly warned that American scholarship was being hollowed out by New Left ideology where denouncing the West and fetishizing its supposed victims became the main (almost sole) topic of modern culture.
And, as I said before, I never saw a single college prez, dean, admin or any mainstream liberal notice or stand up against any of this, they simply slept and cashed checks while the Trojan Horse was wheeled inside our gates. So while I am cynical about the Trumpists, it is early in their reign and I will give them the benefit of the doubt; but as for our liberal class, the people who are well-compensated to preserve our liberal traditions and pass down our cultural patrimony, they have blatantly obviously failed and no possible salutary reform will come from them.
At least Trump and his staff are trying to right the ship - excising DEI, ...
Big kudos from me.
And why suddenly are there so many power-players trying to take everything to extremes depending on people's fear to subjugate them? Both sides are playing this game and it does not reflect the America we grew up with.
Not so fast. Both-sides-ism really doesn't work here. Almost all cancelings, censorings, ... are the work of the woke left.
It's not 2021 anymore. DOGE has canceled over a billion dollars in NSF grants using keyword blocklists that pull in random papers. No government scientist can speak of climate change or global warming in any government publication. Speaking up about the ablation of Gaza gets people deported. Regardless of the left weirdness at universities a few years ago, the right is being even more ferocious and censoring. Trump has sold us all out to his latest buddies in the middle east anyhow, to this and that petrostate. That's why we can't even speak of the greatest dangers to humanity in our lifetimes.
" Regardless of the left weirdness at universities a few years ago, the right is being even more ferocious and censoring."
Not regardless.
The latter phrase is a lie.
Convenient to be anonymous, isn't it?
I'm part of this group because I genuinely thought that woke turned into a witchhunt and was personally affected. It's called heterodox STEM. Republicans are now in control and could try to reform institutions without destroying them altogether. DOGE attacks on universities and science agencies are like if liberals decided since the military is conservative-leaning, they should gut the entire DOD in an attempt to replace it with a bunch of pre-groomed hippies, who obviously aren't going to do THAT job as well as the conservative-leaning military types. Get real.
Your wild hype is surreal.
"the right is being even more ferocious and censoring."
Total falsehood.
Let's say your post is true. I wonder why things got to that point? Why, even after reading the writer's essay I still have no idea. It's a complete mystery!
Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.
The America we grew up with is under MASSIVE assault. It will disappear if we do not defend it. And you seem to be content to be an ostrich. Great. Carry on.
Great article Mitt - I assume you are the author, though confusingly the Substack header risks confusing you and Dorian Abbot (mentioned in the article. I know) for the author's name. Very good article you wrote and that should be clearer.
Also, in the spirit of the article, I would like to note for jew focused Jim (in this comment section), that he doesn't get to vomit over this nice conversation like a woke commissar in a faculty meeting. Someone should speak up, so, here, Jim: there is plenty of blame to share for our lost world and you don't need to dump it all of it on one small minority. Do some mirror work, dude.
I have noticed that over the last couple of years or so, there seems to always be one or two lunatics of various stripes on Heterodox STEM who come out of the woodwork to cause trouble by posting ridiculous nonsense.
I think back to my engagement with one "adjunct scientist" who probably by now has been eliminated from his tenuous untenured position. He always had numerous obnoxious, semi-literate and semi-woke things to say on every topic. Like rising in high dudgeon to defend the law students at Stanford University threatening to rape and kill a Federal judge and his family. And he was pretty aggressive about claiming that was appropriate behavior. Of course, we have seen far worse on campuses since then.
We also crossed swords on the issue of Jewish participation in STEM. He wrote such offensive comments that I called him out. And then he threatened, behind the scenes, to sue all and sundry if all the comments were not removed. So, they were ALL removed, And then he whined endlessly that the comments had been expunged. Oh brother...
"Why didn't STEM profs rise up" is pretty interesting. The thing a number of people in STEM never got was actually the fact that people in the humanities were not stupid--there's some pretty interesting evidence here depending on what you consider evidence--and that the humanities were always traditionally "civics education" and were professionally linked to div schools and law schools. Put more bluntly: The humanities were a primary pipeline to power and were the first place most politicized. Humanities profs in the '50s, '60s and '70s had a dicey relationship with federal funding and campus activists, and generally there was extraordinary bloodshed for *decades* in the humanities.
STEM professors share a problem with expert technocrats in that they have no preparation for or preoccupation with power, and yet expect to wield authority. Importantly, they also allowed the entire administration to fall to activists, and every step of the way they vainly thought it was because the humanities were *dumber* than STEM, rather than getting that the humanities were actually more important. Once the education departments (who admittedly always have been idiots) and the feeders to the law schools (classics/history/philosophy/lit) were either compromised or liquidated, the whole thing was over, and people in STEM never got that. Lit fell first and is now converted into the primary bastion of evil on campus, history has been a long and hideous fight but has finally pretty much fallen, classics was liquidated, philosophy's fate is half way between classics and history. At this point, everyone who wields the mechanism of power is either on the enemy team or is up to their nose in shit, and that's true in university bureaucracy, government bureaucracy, and in many cases courts.
STEM watched all this happen either as naïve children of the Enlightenment who ultimately share some blame for it, or arrogantly dismissed this as an irrelevancy associated with lower academics with non-scientific standards, or they paid no attention at all, and now they reap the whirlwind.
You tell ‘em, Mitt!
Perfectly said!!!!
Agreed. The scientific community is not only an enabler of woke...it has a significant membership that is PART OF and SUPPORTS wokeness. By its silence and direct complicity, the scientific community as a collective is as culpable as the German functionaries who could have acted against the darkness but placed their won careers ahead of their moral obligations. The moral response in correction means they must lose those careers as a warning to others. It is time to replace the entire staff of academia.
As for the "Where were you when...?" question, I think that the campus radicals were surprised how easy it was to take over STEM. There was a brief pause at the gates of objective rationality, before they realized that nerdy male scientists would bend over backwards to avoid being called sexist, and defaulted to chivalrous behavior around angry women and minorities in order to placate them. "I'm one of the GOOD ones, they won't come after me..." instead they were and are regarded the same as Stalin's "useful idiots". Male feminists are a classic example - respected by no-one, distrusted by everyone!
Fortunately it doesn't take much to throw a wrench into their works. A few questions here and there, use their language against them (e.g. you don't "feel safe" sharing your viewpoints in front of them), and quiet friction. For example, I have seen enforced "Native land acknowledgments" stopped in their tracks in some California colleges just by asking how much Mexico is to blame! Woke meltdown ensued and the proposal died quietly.
STEM = No balls.
I recognize this within myself. I am a HUGE coward, basically. It is why I do not do scientific fieldwork, even though I have had many opportunities (a couple of trips to Siberia offered, over 10 to Antarctica, a couple of trips to Greenland, a chance to go to the Galapagos and Easter Island, and so on).
I recoil from conflict.
I am really a "milquetoast" type of scientist.
However, with this comes a LOT of risks. By avoiding risks and confrontation, one does not always have smooth sailing. In fact, it invites trouble.
I like to believe I have learned from this. And I like to believe I will be different, moving forward.
Let me also contribute another anecdote.
For a couple of years, I participated in a monthly zoom call with my former colleagues from MIT. Mostly there were discussions about teaching methods and examination schedules and families.
Then, one of our more "politically active members", a strikingly attractive female physicist "Dr. A." from a fancy private school, took me to task over distributing some mildly controversial writings of Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute. Dr. Mac Donald was bemoaning some of the corruption from the early stages of woke ideology that were running rampant in the Humanities.
Dr. A., who is Jewish, was very annoyed at this. And I warned everyone that it looked like wokeness was going to have an impact on STEM. I was convinced of this. Dr. A. was furious. Dr. A. was among those who completely bought into the woke narrative, and thought it was wonderful to devote ones time to social justice issues like replacing all women in STEM with men pretending to be women, and similar things.
The zoom calls stopped. I am not sure if I was disinvited because I was too disruptive, or what exactly.
However, I was interested that a year or so later, the "woke dragon" suddenly turned and attacked Jews in academia. Many Jews who previously had been on board with wokeness since it seemed fashionable and "kind" and "fair" were shocked that they were suddenly the target of this monstrosity.
These highly political fashions are capricious. They are irrational. One group that is favored can in the next breath be vilified.
I saw this decades ago with a close friend who is a gay rights law professor. He was discouraged from ever considering a profession in law after a stellar preparation because he was male, and supposedly the powers that be had decided that males were forbidden from pursuing a career in law or legal academia in our native country. So he fled to another country where he has become quite famous as a law professor. But then things changed, and as a famous gay rights professor, he was now sought out by every institution everywhere. But it was too late. He already was happy and comfortable elsewhere. No one could entice him to move.
Now, the 'TQ+' part of 'LGBTQ+' is at war with 'LGB'. My law professor friend is on the side of 'LGB'. And once again, LGB is under assault by TQ+ as well as confused outsiders. In this march towards some supposed "Utopian" vision of "social justice" and fairness, things change in a flash, just like they did in the French and Russian revolutions.
Look at Jordan Peterson, who was a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, and was driven from that position and even entangled in a mess with the College of Psychologists of Ontario over public statements. One of the judges ruling decided that Peterson's free speech rights had been violated, but that pushing woke ideas was far too important so the College of Psychologists judgement was allowed to stand. Now, just a year or two later, the Scottish Supreme Court has opined that only biological women, born as women, are women, in law. Of course, in Canada this ruling carries some precedent. We will just have to see how this all plays out. But it is beyond Kafkaesque at this point. It is ridiculous in the extreme.
This culture war is a battle for the very existence of Western Civilization itself, including STEM. We would do well to pay attention to it.
Amen! There was resistance in the 1990s at my university, in the form of a Faculty Newsletter that pointed out some of the deconstructionist nonsense. But it seemed just too silly to be taken seriously. We also noticed the growth of bureacracy, with a weekly "VP Count" that continuously increased. The causes were many, but two are (a) the increasing number of "Title" regulations that required bureaucrats and lawyers to deal with them, and (b) the natural growth tendencies of any bureaucracy. The bureaucrats were happy with all the new regs, which required more bureaucrats. The faculty didn't really understand what was happening, so, no resistance -- especially given the insane competition for research funds.
Thank you. It is tragic that Heterodox Academy and FIRE, in the name of academic freedom, are endorsing the fabrication and teaching of disinformation, and the free expression of DEI and antisemitic lies on university campuses. It is time to change our missions. Let's reinstate the professional institution of learning where scholarly discourse, the pursuit and teaching of evidence-based truth, takes precedence over unrestrained free expression. Heterodox and FIRE can do it, but why don't we?
Brilliantly insightful and bang
on target.
This is a clarion call to action.
Long ago, well before wokeism, I decided that academic STEM (and its counterparts in corporate America and government and the nonprofit world) were in serious trouble. I was crushed and disheartened that my beloved profession had obviously fallen from its previous position.
I saw all kinds of issues with incompetence and lack of productivity, somewhat similar to what Peter Thiel and Jordan Peterson and Kary Mullis had noticed. So, recalling advice from my father, an engineer who was a serial entrepreneur, I decided to explore a different approach. I would take what I had learned from decades in STEM R&D, and form a new type of R&D organization that had "antibodies" of various sorts against the ills that I had observed in conventional R&D settings.
I knew Jim Simons. I worked at the same think tank as Simons. I know the techniques Simons used, and many of the people he hired. I also knew several others who were similar to Simons in STEM, who had done similar things. So, I wondered, could I do something similar?
I have contemplated writing essays on this topic for Heterodox STEM. I still might do it. Right now I am busy with preparations for this startup.
Obviously, this approach is fraught with risk of various sorts. I really relished being at "prestigious" institutions like MIT and Princeton and Bell Labs. Starting out in a new direction is uncertain and a gamble. But the current systems we have enjoyed since WWII are rotten in numerous ways. Can they be saved? I am not sure, but if they can be saved, it will only be through tremendous amounts of pain and disruption. They have to be forced into it, by being forced to compete with new entities that are more efficient and faster and offer more attractive environments.
The public is disgusted with STEM at the moment. The blindness and arrogance certain elements of STEM showed towards the public really annoy the average person.
I can point to Anthony Fauci who declared himself to be synonymous with "the science" while he was clearly lying under oath. He even admitted this. He said he was lying "for our own good" or some such nonsense. I might also mention Holden Thorpe, the senior editor at Science Magazine who has a long checkered history of termination for scientific fraud and similar problems. Thorpe has been frantic to politicize science and take the "wrong side" of every issue publicly and loudly.
I know many are in precarious positions, and not able to do what I and my colleagues intend to do. But change is coming, whether we like it or not. And it will be painful for everyone, both those well-prepared, and not.
STEM is broken. It was broken before woke ideology arrived. Wokeness just made things worse. So, everyone should put on their thinking caps, and start figuring out what to do. We are all pretty smart (not to brag or anything), and we ought to use our creativity and other resources to save our profession. Do not wait for someone else to do it. We are the ones we are waiting for.
Thank you for reminding us of so many key diagnostics of the downfall of STEM, and also of two of the prominent spokespersons who betrayed the essence of open, respectful scientific discourse. And, yes, Jim Simons, was a extraordinarily wonderful person, along with his family.