The Universalism of Mathematics and its detractors
Relativism and Radical Equalitarianism threaten STEM disciplines in US
Introduction
The scientific enterprise in United States is being seriously challenged by powerful anti-scientific trends. Postmodern relativism, under the pretense of anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-colonialism, anti-ableism... is undermining the very foundations of science as a search for truth. Radical egalitarianism, disguised under the name of equity is undermining the critically important criteria of selection and rewards based on merit. Our elementary and secondary educational system, already very weak to start with, is being further and irreparably degraded by incompetent and heavily ideological, woke, schools of education throughout the country. The process of the bureaucratization of science post WWII, has taken an ominous turn with the extraordinary recent growth of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) bureaucracies in our universities and research institutions and their increasing interference with the scientific process. Add to this the disastrous dependence of our STEM disciplines on foreign born talent as well as the increasing competitiveness of China’s universities and research institutions, and you get a rather dire picture of the future of the US science and engineering.
To carefully analyze all these factors is far beyond the scope of this essay. I will focus instead only on how the first two factors mentioned above, postmodernist relativism and radical egalitarianism, act together to erode the status of mathematics as “the highest pinnacle and highest height of the culture of rigorous knowledge”- [Hilbert].
Full Article
Based on the content of a lecture given on January 10, 2023 at the Symposium “Perils for Science in Democracies and Authoritarian Countries” at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, January 10, 2023
Sergiu Klainerman
Higgins Professor of Mathematics
Princeton University
Addendum
The author would like to draw attention to the very recent, comprehensive, meta-analysis study on gender bias in US academia today: “Exploring Gender Bias in Six Key Domains of Academic Science: An Adversarial Collaboration’’ by S. Ceci, S. Kahn and W.M.William
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An excellent paper by Seriu Klainerman. Thank you