How STEM is Sleepwalking into Wokery

Amid the febrile ideological skirmishes that have begun to break out across Canadian university campuses, the impartial observer would quickly conclude that dark clouds are gathering over our modern society when they notice academic scientists contemplating ushering such counter-rational notions as “Indigenous science” into their classrooms. The thought that a new generation of physicians in Canada might qualify in the profession believing the ancestral knowledge and value systems of the Inuit and Métis should play as much a role in your diagnosis as an MRI scan seems at once risible and regressive to most Canadians. But, if you trace that doomsaying prediction back to today’s university quadrangles, you soon realise that it is merely a logical consequence of what we ungovernable, outspoken academics are now planning to teach.

Did I say ungovernable? I misspoke. Tenured Faculty like myself—an organic chemist, as it happens, and the gatekeeper to many a daunted would-be medical student’s aspirations—are meant to enjoy a climate of free thought and enquiry, bolstered in our beliefs and assertions by recourse to evidence. We are encouraged to speak our minds, to profess our subjects. Know this, then: the remorseless onslaught of critical social ‘justice’ driven by the equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) commissars who now pervade our universities’ administrations long ago approached the gates of the STEM disciplines, and have now, Odysseus-like, smuggled a Trojan horse into the walled city of reason that was built on the foundations of the Western Enlightenment. A hostile takeover is imminent.

Such remarks sound like hyperbole. Far from it. My employer, the University of Toronto, is widely regarded as the strongest among all the schools in Canadian higher education, eminent for its rigour in the science, technology, engineering and medical (STEM) fields. Yet, last week, I attended a town hall hosted by our department at the UofT’s Mississauga campus that, throughout its ninety minutes of taxpayer-subsidised blathering and predictable exchange of word-salad platitudes, succeeded in only one thing: laying bare the unvarnished reality that even the scientists are captive to an irrational and incoherent ideology—one that seeks to correct every single perceived structural imbalance in authoritarian fashion—and are far down the path of gaslighting themselves into policing speech, enforcing quotas and undermining the recognition of merit, all in the name of being kind. It’s not too surprising, really. Scientists are timid creatures in the public square. In the comparative privacy of our chosen fields we seek affirmation by advancing ideas that we can support with data, ever careful not to overstep the tacit boundaries we were taught to impose upon ourselves when making our claims to new knowledge. Outside, we see politics as a distraction, a past-time that, inexplicably, absorbs our colleagues in the social “sciences” (a broadly understood joke among colleagues), leaving us Enlightened thinkers free to make useful discoveries. Tracking down a scientist in an influential administrative role at the university is like questing for an endangered, if not quite extinct species. Nothing delights a science professor more than to be left alone to concentrate on science. Don’t ask me about gender ideology, don’t bother me with magical ideas about sex falling on a spectrum, don’t trouble me with questions of race or class. We have evidence, mountains of it, and we will point to it; now go away!

At the town hall, meanwhile, new concerns have arisen. The Dean—a newcomer to our campus who has been described to us as ‘a stalwart advocate of equity, diversity, and inclusion’—for the first time requires all Faculty to supply him with an EDI statement this year as a part of our annual performance evaluations. Many of us are nervous, and perceive this new bureaucratic requirement as an ideological litmus test, and knowing that we might well be drawn into a lie to ensure our continued good standing in the eyes of the watchful administration. And so we listen attentively. Our host, a senior professor and career administrator from among our ranks, goes on to reveal to us the results of our departmental climate survey on EDI matters. Unsurprisingly, bearing in mind that we launched the survey during the Fall examination period, and by dint of the less-than-enthralling subject matter, only a single-digit percentage of our undergraduate students responded (although among graduates, staff and Faculty the response rate was far higher). First, let’s examine the demographics. Among the respondents, the majority were women in a subject already widely chastised for its preponderance of men, one in ten identified as somewhere in between, and—heart-warmingly for me as a gay man—a full quarter claimed membership of the 2SLGBTQIA+ WiFi password community (a misnomer if ever there was one: at last glance, we don’t have an elected leader who represents us all). The cold, unvoiced empiricist in me instantly dismisses this as an unrepresentative sample, crippled by self-selection bias. Only vocal activists would be magnetised into completing this survey; yet here we are, twenty minutes in, admiring a pair of Likert trend-lines mapping responses to emotive ‘feelings’ questions, conveniently and oppressively divided between racialised and non-racialised respondents. “What does non-racialised mean, here? Don’t we all have a race? Are we talking about another species?” There are moments in one’s life when you simply know that a chord has been struck, and, in this instance, the evidence came in the shape of the dumbstruck silence that followed. Awkwardly, after what felt like an age in geological time, the host replied sheepishly, “Yes, no; I’m not sure.”

We pressed on deeper into foreign territory. It seems evident that no one present is an expert on the matter in hand; and there will be straw-grasping, and there shall not be buns for tea. Someone helpfully remarks, “racialised people are people who experience racism” which is the kind of circular definition that has led critics like Douglas Murray to ridicule the now disgraced academic Ibram X. Kendi as a race-hustler. The idea that Caucasians are somehow immunised from racial slurs is a delusion, and itself constitutes a form of soft racism. Later, another graduate student expresses their concern that a worrying number of respondents did not count anyone in the department as a friend. Whoever would have mischaracterised young scientists as having social difficulties? My reaction was to propose, rather, we dismantle the artifice that demands people define themselves primarily by their declared allegiance to a suite of different identity groups. Surely, by lowering the barriers imposed by the ever-present identity politics, we would enhance a much broader sense of community? But I was quickly dismissed: another outspoken graduate declared this to be a “non-sequitur,” and went on to hijack the moment, intervening in the kind of brusque, narcissistic and self-entitled fashion so prevalent among modern students: behaviour that a decade ago would be an unthinkable afront to the unspoken code of practice and observance of the knowledge hierarchy that was once the norm in higher education. “I don’t like it when people cite the poststructuralists, nor bring up identity politics,” he told me later, privately. “It is so divisive.” Naturally, he means rather to onboard his peers to the new thinking by skipping any debate, because there is, necessarily, a mission-critical need to prevent malleable young minds being alerted to the existential peril his line of argument, and this whole ideological movement, suspicious as it is of rational thinking, represents.

The meeting was rapidly sliding into rhetoric and grandstanding, and our host strove to refocus the conversation. Did the students approve of the new ‘Lab Agreement’ protocol, whereby research professors make bilateral commitments to their graduate students? “Yes,” opines our outspoken superstar, “It’s one of the single best things that has emerged as an EDI initiative!” The interlocutor, whose personality has visibly shrunken like a flaccid balloon at a victory party for the losing candidate in a General Election, takes heart. “That’s really encouraging. I must admit I haven’t gotten around to doing mine yet.” I call this out as a poor excuse. “Let us all have formal contracts, and align ourselves with industry,” I urge. There are sage nods of approval among the graduates. Really? You want to make the type of contractual commitments that restrict and dictate your conduct in the private sector, and import those behaviours into the hallowed halls of the academy? I think not. The current crop of students seem not to realise, still less value, the freedom they are afforded during these precious short years that indelibly mark their intellectual lives. Universities are places to think critically, to indulge in free enquiry, to find out what you want to do in life. There might be a broad ‘social contract’ of behaviour, but there is no place for pseudo-employment contracts of this sort, because contracts call for lawyers, and lawyers live for litigation. I rest my case.

We slogged on to the end. On the final slide: Indigenous science in the classroom; but we had run out of time, governed by the vicissitudes of campus room-booking. What did I learn today? Our students demand equity, but no one seems quite to know when we will have achieved it. They want drop-boxes for complaints stationed on every floor in every building on campus. And because even one disgruntled attention-seeker is one too many, they fully expect allegations of discrimination in the department to shrink to zero. Now.

But wait just a moment. Based on what threshold of evidence, precisely? And how exactly will that improve the teaching quality and the academic climate in the classroom? It just adds up to a recipe for mutual distrust, a decline in mental health among professors, as well as among students, by proxy, the spiralling of resentment across the campus, and, perhaps worst of all, the death of spontaneity, good humour and innovation in the classroom.

In all of this, I hold the students themselves blameless. It is we Faculty who must take the responsibility; and most especially the science professors, who have sat back and wholly failed to erect the barricades on the eve of the siege. Instead, they threw open the gates and welcomed these bearers of strange ideological gifts. In the words of Peter Boghossian, the American philosopher and outspoken critic of the social justice movement, all that remains to us now is to “burn it all down.” Lest we forget those Christian places of worship in Canada so reprehensibly put to the torch this past year, this is not an incitement to violence—because, as we all know from Harvard’s former president, Claudine Gay, “it depends on the context”—but, rather, it is a metaphor. Let us also not forget that it is within the power of Canadians to reclaim and rebuild their institutions. Ironically, the emblem of my own institution is a venerable oak tree. Likeminded Canadians need simply to forage for the kindling.

As we disperse, it is time for contemplation. My appeals for rationality—“Aren’t we all scientists here? Do we not all believe in Enlightenment values? And argue for our beliefs with evidence?”—had been met with glares of disapproval. What is going wrong? These are scientists, my people. How have we become so unmoored from reality? There will of course be another meeting. There is always another meeting in academia. We will return to the question of including Indigenous science on the curriculum. And one day quite soon, we will ask ourselves: why did we start down this path of unreason? Canada needs to wake up before it gets that far.

Leigh Revers is Associate Professor at the University of Toronto