Academic Freedom Conference: Academic Freedom in STEM with Jerry Coyne, Luana Maroja, Anna Krylov, Mimi St Johns

Sergio:

I am going to monitor this discussion. I mean, I presume it doesn’t make sense to present the people because you all have the presentations in your file. So, as it was mentioned by Jonathan, the STEMs are doing much, much better in terms of academic freedom than humanities. Nevertheless, there are serious problems and I want to make some comment about my own experience in Romania where I spent my first 25 years and where science was distorted in two ways, scientific pursuits had not to come in conflict with ideology and professors and researchers had to be compliant, good standing members of the communist party. Social origin was an important factor too. Hiring was mostly ideologically driven.

Mathematics and theoretical physics were at least affected for obvious reasons. Genetics was heavily censored for ideological reasons, as we know. The new science of computers was disfavored as bourgeois and the blind sciences are populated by yes, opportunistic and often incompetent party [inaudible 00:01:32]. So the state of affairs in American sciences presents both similarities and differences and I hope that the panelists today will give us a sense of how they manifest in the domain they represent. So, I think Anna is going to talk first.

Anna:

All right, thank you. I’m a chemistry professor and if you had asked me five years ago about academic freedom in STEM, I would have said that this is not relevant to my everyday life. But things are different now. There has been an ideological takeover of our institutions, universities, professional societies, funding agencies, and publishing houses. The essential instruments in producing knowledge and educating next generation are academic freedom and merit based approaches to hiring, evaluation, promotion, and funding. These instruments are imperiled. Academic freedom is imperiled by modern forms of censorship and suppression. Merit based approaches to science and education have been replaced by social engineering such as quota systems based on people’s immutable characteristics.

Let me tell you what is happening in chemistry. The critical social justice ideas and new speak have now reached chemistry classrooms. Chemistry education needs to be reformed according to the Journal of Chemical Education, which published a diversity, equity and inclusion collection of 67 papers, exploring such topics as decolonization of the chemistry, curriculum, chemistry and racism, and gender and sexual orientation identities in the chemistry classroom. Naively, I used to think that your identity doesn’t matter in the chemistry lab and that if you add water to acid instead of acid to water, you will end up with chemical burns regardless of the color of your skin.

At USC, our Center for Excellence in Teaching has recently advised faculty to do the following. Introduce yourself with your pronouns on the first day of class, find the opportunities to normalize and include they, them pronouns, neo pronouns and non heterosexual, non cisgender relationships. This, they say, can be implemented across all academic fields. In your course… If your course provides reading assignments have at least one required reading item in the coursework involving LGBTQ+ contributors. This is new revised definition of excellence in teaching.

Using rigorous metrics to assess student performance in chemistry courses have become controversial because universities increasingly see students as paying customers and the customer is always right. And because, as a paper in PNAS Nexus claims, introductory courses such as general chemistry, which I teach, disproportionately drive minoritized students out of STEM. Michael Jones an adjunct professor at New York University was fired because students complained that his organic chemistry class was too hard and that the grades he assigned didn’t reflect their efforts.

What does our intellectual leadership has to say about it? Holden Thorpe, editor-in-chief of Science Magazine, a chemist himself, thinks that the graduate education needs to be reformed. He writes, “The faculty tortures the pre-meds with material they don’t need, such as chemistry.” I suppose. Inside Higher Earth Magazine chimes in, “Undergraduate STEM education is in the midst of reform movement. Change is happening in part because colleges are enrolling more diverse students who arrive with different needs and expectations. What is the prospect for the future STEM workforce if we continue lowering the standards and give everyone a happy A?”

Critical social justice is a [inaudible 00:06:10] chemistry publishing. Scientific publishers introduce DEI considerations into the editorial process. I serve as an editor for two chemistry journals. When renewing my contract with Wiley, I was asked to pledge my commitment to promote DEI in the editorial process and to strive to quote “ensure the best possible diversity, equity, and inclusivity in its editorial board, reviewer pool and authorship.” I refused to sign because I believe that the role of the editor is to make sure valid scientific research is published regardless of the authors immutable characteristics. After a long standoff, Wiley removed this clause from my contract.

Some publishers now set up quotas for editors and reviewers. Recently I was submitting a paper to the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences and when suggesting reviewers, I was asked to consider their race, gender, and country of origin. I always thought that the reviewers should be chosen on the basis of their expertise in the subject matter. Scientific publishing is one of the central pillars of what Jonathan Rauch calls the constitution of knowledge. Critical social justice subversion of its mission, publishing [inaudible 00:07:40] scientific research threatens the entire scientific enterprise.

Censorship is antithetical to the production of knowledge, yet it is now reality in scientific publishing. Editorial boards of the journals published by the Royal Society of Chemistry, the recently given guidelines to identify and prevent publication of content that is, quote, “likely to be upsetting, insulting, or objectionable to some or most people.” Censorship doesn’t stop at offensive language. The editors of Nature Human Behavior published an editorial where they state that they will not publish valid research if it may cause harm to groups or individuals. Now, this is an example from social science, but the idea of knowledge causing harm has already spread into STEM and some according to [inaudible 00:08:43] research, at the funding stage.

The proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has published a paper which proposes to institute ethics review boards as a prerequisite of funding with the goal to identify harms of the research to groups or societies. Examples of harms that this paper gives include risks that arise due to the technology being co-opted for nefarious purposes such as governments employing mass surveillance, potential harms to any population such as job loss due to automation, potential harms to specific subgroups such as technical barriers to using technology that is prohibitive to poor populations.

My research in computational chemistry could lead to new solar energy technology that could cause job loss in the coal industry. The algorithms for high performance computing that I develop could be co-opted for nefarious purposes. So by this criteria, my research can be censored out for good. This is only proposal, but unless we fight back, it’ll become reality such as mandatory DEI plans as a prerequisite for science funding. Department of Energy, our major funder, recently announced that each scientific proposal must now include a DEI plan demonstrating the commitment of the PI to quote, “promote equity and inclusion as an intrinsic element to advancing scientific excellence,” end of quote.

You have a brilliant idea how to solve the energy problem, don’t get too excited. DOE wants to know your plans for advising diversity, equity and inclusion. What are the prospects for scientific enterprise if our essential institutions such as those three responsible for funding, publishing, research and education replace their original missions by the critical social justice agenda? They’re not good. That worries me. This is why we are here.

Sergio:

Well, thank you very much. So, Mimi will tell us more about what’s happening in computer science.

Mimi:

Good morning. My name is Mimi St. John’s. I’m a junior at Stanford studying computer science and I’m presently editor-in-chief of Stanford’s independent and contrarian paper, The Review. And today I’m going to talk about how being a STEM student is gradually getting more and more restrictive both in terms of what you can and cannot say and the types of problems students feel comfortable working on. Part of the reason for this is the university’s continual obsession with identity politics and left-wing ideology. This creates what essentially amounts to a monoculture amongst faculty and students. If you want some of the same benefits of being an engineer without actually doing any of the work to be an engineer, you can become one of the DEI managers at Stanford School of Engineering.

The average DEI manager at Stanford School of Engineering actually makes more than the average software engineer in Santa Clara County. These measures do little except weave a web of political correctness. For example, the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department encourages faculty to lead discussions about, quote, anti-racism and says that professors should address anti-racism in their field safety guidelines. Further, there’s a general culture of protest around certain industries. We can take one of the examples of a recent climate protest that occurred at Stanford and if you think climate change is a real and pressing issue, you should want to devote as much engineering science resources to it as soon as possible. But a few weeks ago at an event for the new Doerr School of Sustainability, protestors crowded outside of the school to argue against its investment in fossil fuels. Signs read, “Injustice is not investment and Doerr School repent.”

All of this distraction takes away from the real issues that engineers need to solve and it’s not at all an efficient use of resources. If you’re a student and you want to do, let’s say petroleum engineering, you’re going to get backlash and it’s going to be looked down upon. Or in another example, if you want to work at defense, in defense, let’s say at Palantir or the CIA, the recruiters might not even be able to hand you a flyer on this campus without a student protestor getting in your way and blocking you from taking it. This has happened before, most recently, a couple weeks ago when the CIA tried to do a recruiting event on campus. It’s essentially decided via social pressure that you shouldn’t work for any of those places or in any of those industries. It actually makes one wonder how much of this is distracting from the actual work of engineering and STEM more generally and what will American engineering look like in 10 to 20 years if the country’s brightest students feel like they can’t work on many issues due to equity concerns.

For engineers, what’s most valuable is learning how to operate under time constraints, resource restraints, and fundamentally the mission is to solve concrete problems, not constantly be bombarded with questions of critical theory and social justice. These are just a few examples, but they exemplify Stanford’s stagnation from an academic standpoint. While the humanities courses are often obscure and focused on identity politics, the engineering and science courses, the ones which people think should be the most concrete and logical are often not. These DEI initiatives do little except destroy rational intellectual engagement on campus. Engineering is a results-oriented field, DEI is clearly not. Even though the administration keeps hiring more and more diversity bureaucrats, at the School of Engineering, Stanford’s diversity statistics have stayed relatively stagnant over the past 10 years. Their own data shows that as well.

At Stanford engineering, Blacks and Latinos are underrepresented in certain majors such as computer science, but are almost proportionally represented in all of undergraduate engineering. In the past 10 years, Latino enrollment has remained the same and Black enrollment has increased by 1% overall. It’s one of the jobs of students who care about this betrayal of reason to expose the continual destruction of intellectual thought on this campus and more broadly. It doesn’t matter if the declines happening in the actual curriculums themselves or in the nonsensical ways that so-called elite institutions think about diversity. The battle that’s being waged now is how do we take on college administrators when they create a monoculture, one that leaves little room for dissent from the leftist orthodoxy?

If one can’t find intellectual honesty at one of the most elite institutions in the world, then where can it be found? In individuals, in small groups of students and the supportive faculty members that still remain. I write about these issues in the Stanford Review and I have for the past three years. And yes, it’s true, some students won’t talk to you after they found out that you’re on the right, that you don’t buy the narratives about racism and sexism and every other possible ism that could exist and you might face backlash after you’ve written pieces like that. And a lot of conservative students are afraid to speak out because they worry about their future career prospects, that they could be canceled or prevented from having the same opportunities as anyone else.

But there’s hope at Stanford and more broadly. I’m still here speaking out and I do it because I know it’s important to voice these opinions. And the same is true for many other people in The Review and at Stanford. And for every student who publicly expresses their heterodox beliefs, there are another 10 behind them who thinks similarly, who ask the same questions and that are skeptical of the general leftist narratives. This can be found on small student groups on campus like The Review, like our conservative debate society, like at the Zephyr Institute, in an independent academic center off campus. And also many students like this can be found hanging around at the Hoover Institution doing research.

There is hope for genuine intellectual exploration because despite all the woke nonsense, it still happens. I’ve seen it. All those people and places I’ve just mentioned, that’s where there’s hope. And I’ll close with this message, first for students, create a culture of intellectual vitality amongst yourselves and explore heterodox thought. And for those who are now beyond their university education, know that at least some of us students are not lost. Thank you.

Sergio:

Thank you Mimi. Let’s now hear something about the biology. So, that’s Jerry.

Jerry:

You can hear me, I assume. So what Mimi and Anna said goes for computer science and chemistry also goes for biology as [inaudible 00:19:13] will agree with me. The academic freedom of biologists has been degraded and infiltrated in the last couple of years by ideology and this is to the detriment of the science. I’m not going to talk about the philosophy of that or the history of that. What I want to do instead is give you four examples of misstatements that are promulgated in biology by advocates of particular ideologies. The ideological pollution has come from both the right and the left, from the right opposition to global warming, creationism and so on. But the four I’m going to talk about have come from the progressive left instead of from the right.

So, here are the four examples. I’ll give you the misstatements that are promulgated by people who are ideologically inclined, try to correct them and then try to say why the ideology is affecting biology in these ways. Most of you have heard of these. The first one is simply the denial of discrete sexes in animals or plants. That sex is not a binary, it’s not bimodal, it’s a spectrum exactly like gender is. And I will admit freely that gender is a spectrum. It’s a sociocultural, sexual identification. The last webpage I looked on about gender had 150 of them including frog gender where you identify as a frog. However, biological sex is different. For many decades now, biological sex, sex and biology has been defined in a certain way. There are two types. Bodies organized around producing large immobile gametes, those are the females, and bodies organized around producing small mobile gametes. There are males. There are no intermediates.

So let me say there’re very few intermediates. The intermediates between males and females, which are intersex and hermaphrodites are about one out of every 5,600 individuals. So if you plot sex versus frequency, biological sex, you get something that looks like that. And for all practical purposes, sex is bimodal and denying that is simply wrong. Now, why do people deny that then? And it’s because they conflate sex with gender. Because there’s lots of genders and if there’s only two sexes and your gender does not somehow slot into one of the two sex roles of the biological sexes, then you’re seen as harmed or erased. Okay, well that’s a misconception. People have the rights depending on how they identify. So, that’s point number one.

Point number two also affects groups. It’s the claim that males and females are biologically identical on average in their behavior, mentation and choices. Okay, well, males and females can differ physically in terms of their mentality, choices, preferences, et cetera. Biologically, in terms of their genes, they are identical. Any differences that we see are due to environmental influences most often the patriarchy with the capital P. And there’s lots of examples of these claims that males and females really aren’t that different. There’s a recent editorial on the op-ed in the New York Times by Chelsea Convoy claiming that the maternal instinct is a bogus idea perpetuated by the patriarchy, despite the fact that in almost every other animal, including our closest relatives, there’s a big difference between how males and females interact with their offspring.

Now, why is this denial of differences between men and women? It’s because under the new ideology, groups that have differences imply a ranking, an idea of superiority, inferiority, often females being inferior. And so you can’t have differences. You cannot observe differences between groups because if you do, that somehow justifies the imposition of inferiority complex or inferiority trope on people. This one [inaudible 00:23:23] into number three because the differences in males and females are often evolutionarily conditioned, which is that evolutionary psychology is worthless as a discipline. And this has been made most vociferously by the blogger PZ Myers who made this statement, “The fundamental premises of evolutionary psychology are false.” Well, the fundamental premises of evolutionary psychology are simply that our brains as well as our bodies show traces of our ancestry over the past 6 million years. And that’s not false, that’s true, and I could give you a lot of data to show that in terms of behavior for example. Let’s just say that the denigration of evolutionary psychology is widespread.

Now, why is it widespread? That again, comes out of the ideology that we’re blank slates. I think that comes from Marxism where people are seen as infinitely malleable by the social environment. Whereas evolutionary college psychology tells us that we’re not blank slates, that we’re born with a little bit of writing on those blank slates. They can be changed a bit, but can only be changed within certain limits. And evolutionary psychology, I should add, for those of you who practice this discipline, does have a somewhat spluttered history, but in the long run, it’s produced many valuable insights such as differences in sexual behavior between men and women, differential [inaudible 00:24:50] kin and so on. So that’s number three. Its hereditarianism. By the way, hereditarianism is now a code word for eugenics. So, of course evolutionary ecology must have something to do with eugenics, so it’s bad.

The last one is the most difficult and touchy subject. That’s the claim and I’ll read this claim which has been made. It’s a misstatement, I think. It’s been taken from a source, I can’t remember. “Race is purely a social construct with no biological value and containing no biological information.” Now, let me say first that I do not adhere to the view of races as absolutely discreet, distinct, and geographically delimited populations that are absolutely diagnostic by their genetics. I don’t like to use the word race because of its history. I like ethnicity or populations. But nevertheless, populations and different ethnic groups do differ genetically and they do so in a meaningful way. One example is if you look at Americans and ask them to self-identify as Black, white, Hispanic or Asians, and then you take their genes, you’ll find out that you can identify them with 99.8% accuracy from their genes alone, which matches precisely with their self-identification.

Now, how can a social construct possibly lead to something like that? Well, race is… Ethnicity. I keep saying race because I’m biologist of the old school. But ethnicity is a spectrum of gene frequencies changing with geography throughout the world in a sort of [inaudible 00:26:27] or gradual way. And that gives us a lot of information of biological use. For example, if you do 23andMe and you found it useful as I have, when I discovered I was 98% Ashkenazi Jew, I didn’t think it was going to be that much. I mean, that’s based on genetic frequencies of different ethnic groups. More importantly, these gene frequencies have taught us the history of human migration throughout the world. And when these migrations happen, when we mated with the Neanderthals that we still carry Neanderthal genes with us. All of this comes from the biological meaningfulness of ethnicity.

Other things are medical uses, different ethnic groups have different incidences of conditions or diseases that can be useful to doctors, and forensic uses as well. If you want to identify the perpetrator of a crime by his or her DNA or reconstruct what a Neanderthal looked like from their DNA, you can do this. And it’s because different groups have biological differences. I’m not going to call them races, again, different ethnic groups. But pretending that everybody in the world is the same gets us nowhere. Why is this done? For the same reason why you’re not allowed to say that there’s differences between men and women. You’re not allowed to say that there’s differences between ethnic groups. Because if you do that, then automatically sort of the ideologues say, that sets up a ranking or a hierarchy which leads to bigotry, which leads to bad social consequences.

So, there’s two lessons from all of this, two bad things. One of which is heredity, which is eugenics, which is anti-blank slates, which is just horrible. And the second is differences between groups, which people say, and again, they don’t have to, leads to a ranking or hierarchy. What do we do? We’re supposed to say something positive about the future of this. Unfortunately, I really can’t say much positive. Lee Justin has written, and you should read it on his blog, his proposed timeline of what’s going to happen to the infusion of ideology into biology. And he says for the next 10 years, nothing’s going to happen. It’s going to even get worse. And maybe in the next 30 years things will right themselves and will get back to the truth again. But of course they could go back to the other way and be a right wing infused ideology.

If there’s only one lesson I wish to convey to the audience, it’s this. Be aware of the naturalistic fallacy and particularly of the appeal to nature, which is the false view that what we see in nature is good. You cannot look to nature for the ways that we see to behave. That’s connected with the naturalistic fallacy, but the appeal to nature is what you see in nature is good. The naturalistic fallacy is what we see in nature is what we ought to do. What I’ve demonstrated in my last short talk, and I hope I’m not over too much, is that what we are seeing in this kind of biological infusion into… Sorry, ideological infusion of biology is the reverse of appeal to nature. It’s not what we see in nature is good. It’s what we think is ideologically good, is what we must see in nature. Thanks.

Sergio:

Thank you, Jerry. What you said is really a wonderful illustration of how ideology can really interfere with the science. So, the next one is Luana, also biology.

Luana:

Yeah, so I am also a professor of biology. I work at Williams College, a liberal arts college. And like Anna, if you had asked me about academic freedom five years ago, I would have complained about the obsession with race, gender, and ethnicity along with the safety in campus, safe spaces, grade inflation, self grading, but I would not have expressed concerns about academic freedom per se. So each one of us have their own woke tipping point, which is the moment when you realize that social justice is no longer what we thought it was, but has instead morphed into an ugly authoritarianism.

For me, that moment came during an invited speaker talk when the religious scholar Reza Aslan stated that we need to write on a stone what can and cannot be discussed on college campuses and students gave a standing ovation. Having been born during dictatorship in Brazil, hearing that was alarming. And soon after that, my colleagues and I attempted to pass the Chicago Statement. My shock continued as the students broke into a faculty meeting screaming, “Free speech harms,” and demanding that white male professors sit down and confess to their privilege.

I miss the olden days when attempts to censor research in biology came from the right creationists. In those days, most students and administrators were actually on our side. Now, the criticism comes mainly from the left and we have to tiptoe. The risk of consolation is real. The restriction of academic freedom comes in two forms, in what we teach and what we research. And let me start with teaching. And before I start, I wanted to emphasize that this is not a hypothetical. The censorials and fear climate is already affecting the content of what we teach. So, Jerry already emphasized the issue with biological sexes, not genders, but sexes. And I can add a few anecdotes about this problem.

So as Jerry explained, sexes in biology are defined by gametes and it applies to both plants and humans. Large gametes are female, small gametes are males. Just to give an example, in mammals, an egg is 200,000 times bigger than a sperm. There is zero overlap. It’s full binary. In some Biology 101 classes, teachers are telling students that sexes are a continuum. In at least one college I know, teachers are using the gender unicorn and informing students that it is bigoted to think about sexes as discrete categories. Published papers ask us to be inclusive by limiting the sex discussion to the few species of algae and protests that produce the same size gametes, even though that is completely irrelevant to any animal or vascular plant.

In psychology and public health, many teachers no longer say male and female, but instead use the convoluted person with a uterus. Many of my colleagues do that. I had a colleague that during a conference, an evolutionary biology conference, was criticized for studying female sexual selection in fruit flies because he was a male. Another was discouraged from teaching the important concept of social conflict in animals because it might traumatize students. I was criticized for teaching king selection, which is the idea that animals tend to help their relatives. Somehow, this is an endorsement of Trump hiring Ivanka.

Another hot button, which Jerry already mentioned is teaching about heritability. If students are often happy to hear that there are genes for sexual orientation, but if you teach that most human personality traits and even school achievements have a heritable component, your students start to squirm. The same is true for population genetics lectures. While old race definitions are baseless, it is harder to lecture on how humans do differ among populations in geographic areas. Many of these differences are deeper than just skin color and relevance to health and wellbeing. Imagine the consequences of this lack of knowledge to medicine. After all, many genetic diseases vary between populations.

Another hot topic is that any explanation for disparities between African-Americans or Latinos and whites that does not involve systemic bias is taboo. Even if the explanation is not a hereditary one. Take cultural differences. I come from the third world and moved to the US when I was 23. I thus am very aware of the massive differences in culture and how that affects behavior. As a child, I was encouraged by relatives and societies to cheat in school and whenever personal gain was possible without causing much harm to others. Here this is horrifying and I adjusted. But think about the deep consequences of this difference. We can’t bring it up. I am immediately reprimanded whenever I bring culture or mention it.

So the language purity that Anna mentioned is also distressing. It gets in the way of spontaneity and good teaching. As an example, in my college, they teach that to TAs, to our TAs that the word guys is a microaggression. Students learn that inoffensive words are harmful, and this leads to a snowball effect where ever more insignificant words or gestures can be taken as proof of bigotry. Many professors I know will freeze in class when realizing that they are praising the work of a colonialist. People like Darwin, Newton and Hamilton. Many more will avoid mentioning historic figures if those were white and male.

So now let’s move on to the stifling of research. Some grants now focus almost exclusively on identity. And federal agencies such as the NSF now offer a surplus of grants with the purpose of broadening the participation of members of groups that are currently underrepresented instead of focusing on funding scientific questions. However, the field of research that is most directly affected is research related to humans, especially those dealing with the evolution of population and the genetics of intelligence. To give an example the NIH put barriers to access to the important database of genotypes and phenotypes, which combines genotypes and phenotypes of millions of individuals. These phenotypes include education, occupation, health and income. NIH rejects access to the data if it thinks that research could be stigmatizing. This happens even if the research has nothing to do with race or sex, but focus on education.

But why is education attainment any more stigmatizing than health, especially when all in individuals in the database are anonymous? Of course, the cost of the censorship are profound. Learning about what differentiates education attainment and occupation is more than an academic curiosity or a search for truth. Understanding the genetic pathways behind phenotypes might help us find solutions and help struggling children. The prestigious journal Nature Human Behavior just announced in a recent editorial that, “Although academic freedom is fundamental, it is not unbounded.” Here, they’re not referring to the ethical concerns to research participants, which are of course already in place, but they’re going beyond to include humans who do not participate directly in research, prohibiting research that is racist, sexist, ableist or homophobic, stigmatizes human groups or assumes that one group is superior to another.

But how can this be judged? Which serious scholar assumes that one group is superior to another or that some humans are more valuable than others? Empirical differences do not justify claims of superiority. Anyone who has dated more than one person or has had more than one child knows that intelligence has no bearing on human value and does not imply superiority and inferiority. Authors also recommend that we consulting ethics experts and advocacy groups. And to see the absurdity of this claim, imagine that the harmed groups were unborn children and the advocacy groups were pro-life and religious scholars. It is clear that when top scientific journals are guided by ideology, our academic freedom is severely constrained.

Sergio:

Thank you very much for everybody on this panel and we should start now have a conversation between the four of you. Maybe I can start with a question to Anna concerning whether in chemistry, you also see this influence of ideology on the actual research that takes place? Because in biology we saw that the influence is enormous, just like in Soviet Union during [inaudible 00:40:51], it seems to be sort of very similar what’s going on now with what was happening…

Anna:

Well, I think, I’m not working in a controversial area of research, but anything that has to do with climate or energy, I think…

Sergio:

Is affected

Anna:

… is affected. And I know that I used to be funded through combustion program and a few years ago, you rename this combustion programs to something else because combustion is not a good thing. Yeah.

Sergio:

Okay.

Anna:

There is that. But what worries me most in my field is influence through funding agencies and replacing merit based criteria by the social justice criteria like diversity, equity, and inclusion. That’s I think where biggest problem is for chemistry science, for chemistry research.

Sergio:

So Mimi, what about you in computer science? Do you think ideology is actually affecting research?

Mimi:

I think it’s definitely… I’m not sure about research, but I think it’s definitely affecting the day-to-day curricula of computer science courses and engineering courses more broadly. If you look at some of the electives that you can choose to take for an engineering degree at Stanford, it’s things like how to be an engineer, basically exploring the intersectionality of who is an engineer instead of actually doing the concrete math and programming and stuff like that.

Sergio:

Okay. So for all of you, in what sense, if you can explain how this ideology is influencing the ability of United States research to compete in the world? So Mimi, can you say a few words?

Mimi:

I think it’s definitely hurting our competitiveness in terms of engineering. If you look at what… This is supposed to be one of the best universities for engineering in the world, and you have a lot of the times, you have students who are just not focusing on, and faculty who are not focusing on, the actual math and science. And a lot of times people are discouraged from working in particular industries like defense or in fossil fuel research. And those are things that are arguably needed in the future and there are problems that really need to be solved there. But I have concern that they won’t be because people are discouraged for political reasons from working in those fields.

Sergio:

Okay, Anna?

Anna:

I think we will see devastating effect due to replacement of merit based hiring of faculty by critical social justice. And we drive already a number of bright people from science, from STEM, who are qualified, who have excellent ideas, but if they cannot fit into one narrowly defined diversity categories, they have very low chances to get hired. And it happens in chemistry on large scale. And really, it hurts to see these young people turned away and leaving to other occupations and sometimes other countries. So that will have long, I think, lasting effect on our competitiveness.

Sergio:

Yeah, so that’s what I said at the beginning. In my introduction I said that the way ideology affected sciences in Romania, but of course in all communist countries, was through hiring on one hand and the other one directly in the research in the way we heard that it’s actually happening in biology. So Jerry, can you say…

Jerry:

Sorry, I didn’t hear the question.

Sergio:

So the question was how… What’s happening on university campuses in United States is affecting the ability of United States to compete with the rest of the world in biology, in your case?

Jerry:

Our ability to do research and…

Sergio:

To be at the top of the field. I mean, I presume that in all these areas that we discussed today, United States was leading…

Jerry:

Yeah. I mean, there’s certain things you just can’t say. As Luana said, it’s affecting teaching. There was a woman who had… Not at my campus, although it’s going to, the University of Chicago is seen as the paramount free speech university of the United States. I’m here to tell you that that’s true, but there’s stuff bubbling beneath the surface that threatens to…

Sergio:

It only got good, by the way. It was a first, but…

Jerry:

Sorry?

Sergio:

It was ranked as good but not very good and not excellent.

Jerry:

Yeah, similar problems with our speech card. But there are things happening that threaten, in the next couple of years, to take us down. And there are a number of us, number of people here, who are fighting to maintain free speech. I’m no longer teaching, I’m emeritus. I’m not worried about this. What I’m worried about is being demonized, being ostracized simply for saying that there’s something like biological meaningfulness in ethnic groups is enough to get you called a racist, which I have been. If you say that the sexes are bimodal or even just binary, you get called a transphobe. And to any good liberal, and I’m a good liberal, I’m not like John said, on the extreme left, but I’m between the left and the center. But even to a good liberal, the moniker racist or transphobe is horrifying and it makes you just shut up. So this is kind of demonization occurs fairly regularly.

And I’ll just give one anecdote of what may happen in the future, which is that at the University of Southern Maine, a woman in the last month was removed from her classes because she taught her students that there were two sexes, that sex was bimodal. And this is the kind of punishment that may indeed occur. That there are things that cannot be said, that must not be said and if you say them you get punished.

Nadine:

Sergio, on behalf of the audience, I wanted to move into questions because we’re almost out of time. The panelists have been great, but is that okay?

Sergio:

Yes, please.

Nadine:

Thank you. So my name is Nadine Strathan. Thank you all very much. But I especially want to salute Mimi. We have so many colleagues who are tenured professors who do not dare speak up the way you do. And I have two questions for you. One is, what advice can you give to other students to… You can’t infuse them with courage, but you can give them advice. Secondly, what more can we do as professors and as administrators to empower and encourage more students to speak up the way you… and stand up the way you have?

Mimi:

So to the first question, I would say to students, don’t be afraid to speak out. I know that a lot of people worry about the career prospects. I know people worry about that, but there are a lot of kind people that do care and aren’t going to turn their backs on you if you say something heterodox, if you say something that questions the general narratives of universities like Stanford. And so I’d say keep that in mind and try to express your opinions, try to question if you see something that’s wrong. If you think something’s really wrong, kind of go after it and don’t nail yourself on a cross. But it’s easier than you think to speak out.

And then to the second question, I would say what faculty can do is basically just more of kind of taking on the administrations when they hire more and more DEI bureaucrats, when they want to put all these identity politics into syllabi. There’s land declarations are in many syllabi at Stanford, acknowledging that this used to be native land or something like that, or like BLM statements, fight all of that. And I think that students will become a lot more encouraged.

Jerry:

Let me add one thing to that, and this is for academics of all stripes. Every university in this land should adopt the Chicago Principles of free speech, the Calvin report in which institutions remain ideologically, politically and morally neutral. And the Shils report where merit should be the sole criterion for professional advancement.

Sergio:

Okay. So yeah, please.

Jonathan Berk:

Hello? Yeah, I’m Jonathan Berk. I’m a professor in the business school here. I have a question, but I just want to object to what you did. I know this is a very… I mean, yeah, this is a pretty controversial thing I’m going to say, but I don’t think Mimi should be clapped for being here. That feeds into exactly the problem, which is you find a student and you say, “Oh, what a hero the student is,” right? It’s not the student’s job, it’s your job. We are the leaders of this university, not the students. It’s our job. We’re supposed to be the professors, we’re supposed to be the teachers. We don’t expect the students to lead us. We lead the students.

Okay, question. There’s an elephant in the room here, which only Mimi tangentially spoke about, which I’d like to hear your opinion on, which is, I study charlatans in my research and I see what is happening. What is a charlatan? Somebody who doesn’t have a skill?

Sergio:

What is your research? Sorry.

Jonathan Berk:

I’m an economist.

Sergio:

Okay.

Jonathan Berk:

A charlatan is somebody who doesn’t have the skill, who enters a field, which is highly paid in order to get the pay without the skill. And I see the DEI, I see that a lot of the… You spoke about a gamete. It takes a lot of intellectual understanding to understand why gametes are important. It’s a lot easier just to say, “Oh no, they’re not important. All sexes are the same.” To what extent is this just a move for charlatans trying to get into the sciences?

Jerry:

Sorry, you repeat the last question. My hearing is somewhat deficient, so…

Jonathan Berk:

To what extent?

Jerry:

You’re talking about…

Jonathan Berk:

To what extent? It’s very easy to just say sex doesn’t exist, the science doesn’t exist, you don’t have to study. It’s very difficult to be a scientist, to understand the difficulty of science. To what extent is it people trying to get into the field? Mimi said one thing which, tangentially, she said, “If you want to get into the School of Engineering, the way you do it is you become a DEI officer.”

Jerry:

Yeah.

Jonathan Berk:

Right? To what extent is the underlying cause of this people who are trying to get the benefits of being a scientist without doing the work to be a scientist?

Jerry:

Yeah [inaudible 00:52:52].

Anna:

I think what you refer to is the… I think what you refer to is the opportunism and the kind of backdoor for people who do not want to do hard work, but they can go and easily… So I think it is an important ingredient and the factor in what is happening. And I think Jonathan Rauch, when he wrote about this Nature Human Behavior paper and analyzed it, he made an excellent point explaining this. He said something to the effect that, okay, if you’re just being editor of scientific journal, it’s kind of okay, it’s not very exciting job. You have to go and execute peer review process and all that. But if you appoint yourself, anoint yourself as someone who passes this moral judgment and makes the world better place, that’s much more attractive position in life. You see yourself as a hero and a white horse [inaudible 00:53:58]. And I think that drives some of this desire to be a saver.

Luana:

Can I say something?

Sergio:

I want the same thing. I mean, being a charlatan is definitely what brings a lot of people success. Yes.

Luana:

I just have something to add. I don’t think that this applies, for example, for the sex resistance. I think the resistance that there are two sexes actually come from people who are having the naturalistic fallacy or the appeal to nature. And they assume that if you do not see a continuing sex is out there and they’re mixing gender and sex, they think that you are erasing transsexual people, which of course is not the case. But there is a conflation and it’s this being good kind of thing. You cannot be evil, you cannot erase someone, you cannot deny their existence. And they’re just very confused, very conflated. Yeah.

Sergio:

Okay, let’s take other questions.

Eric Rasmussen:

Okay. Related to Jonathan’s… Related to Jonathan’s question, I’m an economist, Eric Rasmussen from Indiana, also, for Mimi especially. My son is a sophomore engineer at Purdue and he was an A student in high school, but he was never so relieved and happy in his life with a grade as the C he got in freshman engineering. So, there are these gatekeeper courses. At Stanford, is there still a tough bootcamp course you go through and maybe in the sciences generally?

Mimi:

It depends on whose teaching the course. It can be easier in some quarters. 106B, CS-106B, Introduction to Algorithms and stuff. That’s kind of like the filter course at Stanford. And 107, which is the CS systems course if you’re a computer science major. And so it definitely depends on whose teaching. It can be easier one quarter, a particular professor’s known for giving really, really hard assignments. And so it can be easier or harder depending on whose teaching it, which is different every quarter.

Sergio: