Academic Freedom

From Heather Heying ( Bret Weinstein’s wife, also a biologist) at Wall Street Journal: The revolution on college campuses, which seeks to eradicate individuals and ideas that are considered unsavory, constitutes a hostile takeover by fringe elements on the extreme left. Last spring at the Evergreen State College, where I was a professor for 15 years, the revolution was televised—proudly and intentionally—by the radicals. Opinions not fitting with the currently accepted dogma—that all white people are racist, that questioning policy changes aimed at achieving “equity” is itself an act of white supremacy—would not be tolerated, and those who disagreed were shouted down, hunted, assaulted, even battered. Similar eruptions have happened all over the country. What may not be obvious from Read More ›

You know, that non-PC nerd who was warned that it wasn’t safe for him to go back to teach and eventually settled for $500k. From Eric Owens at Daily Caller: School officials at the 4,000-student school received approximately 120 incident reports involving 180 students during the days-long series of protests, reports The Olympian, the main newspaper in the town surrounding Evergreen State. “Of those 180 students, approximately 80 were found responsible for their actions,” Evergreen State spokeswoman Sandra Kaiser told The Olympian. “They received sanctions ranging from formal warnings, community service and probation, to suspension.” Read the rest of the story, it gets crazier. Then: Last month, school officials announced that Evergreen State is now facing a $2.1 million budget Read More ›

From Ian Miles Cheong at Daily Caller: Evergreen State College has settled a tort claim with professor Bret Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying for $500,000 in connection to the 2017 “Day of Absence” protests, which saw anarchy spread throughout the campus earlier this year. “Through a series of decisions made at the highest levels, including to officially support a day of racial segregation, the college has refused to protect its employees from repeated provocative and corrosive verbal and written hostility based on race, as well as threats of physical violence,” their claim stated. Weinstein alleges that he was frequently called a “racist” by his peers for his refusal to support the so-called “Day of Absence,” which demanded white students Read More ›

From Fern Elsdon-Baker at New Scientist, reporting on that recent study of people who question evolution, It sounds startling. Nearly 30 per cent of adults in the UK say evolution can’t explain the origin of humans. That rises to nearly 50 per cent for human consciousness. Does that mean we’re increasingly following a vocal minority in the US who deny the science on fringe religious grounds? … Unexpectedly, 44 per cent felt that evolutionary processes cannot explain the existence of human consciousness. It might be tempting to assume that this is just a reflection of the number of religious believers. However, while faith does appear to amplify individual doubts about evolutionary explanations, it is not the only factor at work. Read More ›

From an op-ed at Nature: Scientists might have made a difference, had they protested against laws that now threaten what can be taught in our classrooms, argues Brandon Haught Haught is complaining about an academic freedom law in Florida that restricts the use of science courses for propaganda purposes: Advocates of the law were widely quoted as claiming that evolution is just a theory and that anthropogenic global warming is in doubt. It would have been invaluable if scientists at local universities had issued simple statements: yes, evolution is a fact; the word ‘theory’ is used differently in science from how it’s used in casual conversation; and the basics of human-caused global warming need to be taught. Perhaps authoritative voices Read More ›

What? In the world of “social justice,” someone actually noticed biology prof Bret Weinstein? Someone took time out from hearing the angst and hoo-haw of “[fill in the blank] studies” students to look at the science education issues? From Michael Shermer at Scientific American: One underlying cause of this troubling situation may be found in what happened at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., in May, when biologist and self-identified “deeply progressive” professor Bret Weinstein refused to participate in a “Day of Absence” in which “white students, staff and faculty will be invited to leave the campus for the day’s activities.” Weinstein objected, writing in an e-mail: “on a college campus, one’s right to speak—or to be—must never be based Read More ›

From Conor Friedersdorf at the Atlantic: As the fall semester begins, 15 professors from Yale, Princeton, and Harvard have published a letter of advice for the class of 2021. Think for yourself. The “vice of conformism” is a temptation for all faculty and students, they argue, due to a climate rife with group think, where it is “all-too-easy to allow your views and outlook to be shaped by dominant opinion” on a campus or in academia generally. Mmmm, yes. Especially if one who opposes the group think could get expelled, fired, burned out, or end up in the hospital, … They warn that on many campuses, what John Stuart Mill called “the tyranny of public opinion” doesn’t merely discourage students Read More ›

Announcing from on high that it is Against Discrimination, Nature tells us: Science cannot and should not be used to justify prejudice.  No indeed. But is there any general wish that it did? Then, Difference between groups may therefore provide sound scientific evidence. But it’s also a blunt instrument of pseudoscience, and one used to justify actions and policies that condense claimed group differences into tools of prejudice and discrimination against individuals — witness last weekend’s violence by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the controversy over a Google employee’s memo on biological differences in the tastes and abilities of the sexes. A nice touch that, to equate hapless engineer Damore’s ejection from the Goolag with white supremacist violence. The two Read More ›

From Heather Heying, weighing in on the Google foray into post-modern truth, which smacked an unwary engineer upside head, at Quillette: Should We “Stop Equating ‘Science’ With Truth”? Damore’s heresy turns on innate differences between men and women that have never been noticed by anyone in the history of human life on the planet except him. So, of course, the entire obsolescent traditional media melted down in shock. Heying: Evolutionary biology has been through this, over and over and over again. There are straw men. No, the co-option of science by those with a political agenda does not put the lie to the science that was co-opted. Social Darwinism is not Darwinism. You can put that one to rest. There Read More ›

Lots of people are now saying that the king is a fink*. A friend kindly offers some useful update links on the subject: Neuroscientist Debra Soh defends Damore. No surprise, she is also not a fan of the marchin’, marchin’ pussyhats for science and has warned about the danger of fad post-modern concepts like intersectionality invading science and just plain stompin’ down hard on fact. Updated: Breitbart News’ interview series, Rebels of Google, has revealed an atmosphere of profound fear at the company, in which employees who challenge Google’s hyper-progressive narratives face bullying and ostracization from co-workers, and frequently find themselves added to blacklists aimed at destroying peoples’ careers both inside and outside Google. Our last interviewee even described an Read More ›

The one who got drowned in diversicrat social media politics. The story provides good illustration of the way in which traditional media today are not up to the job of newsgathering in a non-gatekeeper digital age and should not be trusted. From Bre Davis at the Federalist: Here Are All The Media Outlets Blatantly Lying About The Google Memo E.g.: 3.Time Magazine: The magazine that’s been slowly dying for nearly a decade published a writeup of the ordeal, calling the memo a “tirade” in their headline: “Google Has Fired the Employee Who Wrote an Anti-Diversity Tirade, Report Says”. To anyone who’s actually read the memo, it’s clear a “tirade” is the least accurate way to describe it. It’s calm, it’s rational, Read More ›

From Bob Grant at The Scientist: After a sweeping research misconduct investigation, China’s Ministry of Science and Technology (MST) has found nearly 500 researchers guilty of engaging in a peer-review fraud scam. Announced late last week (July 27), MST’s findings indicate that 486 scientific paper authors engaged, to some degree, in a scheme to nominate either fictitious or paid peer reviewers who would write positive reviews of their manuscripts. … MST is meting out stiff penalties to the guilty researchers. These range from suspending their research projects and canceling grants to rescinding promotions or even harsher retribution. “They will face punishment according to the Communist Party of China discipline regulations and the regulations on personnel from public institutions,” He told Read More ›

Just trying to get it is more than some might expect. From Peter Wood, Geoffrey Clarfield, Gwyneth Custred, and Carol Iannone at National Association of Scholars (NAS),  The The Kingdom of Speech is an extraordinary display of intellectual independence.[1] This is a book that treats Charles Darwin as a toplofty prig and Noam Chomsky as a haughty fake—which is to say it aims to harpoon two of the biggest whales of modern secular thought. Tom Wolfe, writing at age eighty-five with the deftness and assurance of Queequeg on the prow of Starbuck’s boat, undertakes these perilous ventures with his accustomed nonchalance. Having dispatched modern art in one book and modern architecture in another, why not aim a spear or two at Read More ›

You know, Dawkins dumped at Berkeley and all that. From Elliot Kaufman at National Review: Why must ardent secularists from the Islamic world like Ayaan Hirsi Ali — the type of people the Left looks to for inspiration in the history of Western secularism — be deemed bigots, while Sharia-supporting conspiracy theorists like Linda Sarsour are cherished? Why has criticizing Islam caused the New Atheists to cross a red line in the progressive imagination? These positions make no sense if one thinks of the Left as seriously secular, convinced of the need to end the reign of superstition. But American liberals profess neither the passionate skepticism of David Hume nor the honest, urgent atheism of Nietzsche. They prefer to embrace Read More ›

Pos-Darwinista writes to call our attention to several preprints on why dissent is bad in science. Okay, okay, there is good dissent, which is accepted by the Establishment, and then there is bad dissent, which is not accepted by the Establishment. Text Galileo. 1. Climate Skepticism and the Manufacture of Doubt: Can Dissent in Science be Epistemically Detrimental?: Biddle, Justin and Leuschner, Anna (2015) [Preprint] Abstract: The aim of this paper is to address the neglected but important problem of differentiating between epistemically beneficial and epistemically detrimental dissent. By “dissent,” we refer to the act of objecting to a particular conclusion, especially one that is widely held. While dissent in science can clearly be beneficial, there might be some instances Read More ›