In July of 1945, Vannevar Bush, the head of the federal Office of Scientific Research and Development, submitted a report to President Harry Truman outlining what he believed should constitute the basic principles for the government’s postwar scientific research apparatus. The
report
, which was prepared at the behest of the late Franklin Delano Roosevelt and given the sapid, FDR-inspired title “Science, the Endless Frontier,” would become a landmark for modern federal science policy and, in the words of Roger Pielke, “entrenched the concept of government patronage of scientific research in policy discourse.”
In the report’s introduction, Bush included the section “Freedom of Inquiry Must Be Preserved,” in which he asserted: “Colleges, universities, and research institutes are the centers of basic research. They are the wellsprings of knowledge and understanding. As long as they are vigorous and healthy and their scientists are free to pursue the truth wherever it may lead, there will be a flow of new scientific knowledge to those who can apply it to practical problems in Government, in industry, or elsewhere. … Scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown.”
Quite eloquent for an electrical engineer-turned-bureaucrat, if you ask me. But then again, Bush did boast quite the resume. Before being tapped by Roosevelt to lead the newly formed OSRD, Bush had served on the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and later as MIT vice president and dean of its school of engineering, in addition to other prestigious professional roles (including co-founding what would become Raytheon Technologies). And it was Bush’s report, and his personal political crusade, that lead to the creation of the National Science Foundation.
One wonders what the MIT man might think of the state of scientific inquiry, and of the government patronage structure he created, today. For it is becoming increasingly clear that a great deal of what we are funding with taxpayer largess is not so much “scientific inquiry,” as we would know it, but rather the political-ideological program calling itself “Science” with a capital S. Coincidentally, you need not look any further than MIT.
Last month, the much-vaunted institution made waves after disinviting a geophysicist from giving a public lecture due to complaints about his views on affirmative action. This sort of thing has been happening for years — the indispensable Foundation for Individual Rights in Education maintains a lengthy
database
for “scholars under fire” — but the particular nature of this incident seems to have broken through and caused alarm for some who would (and have) typically scoffed at the idea of a “campus free speech crisis.” Perhaps it is because it is MIT, a university so immediately associated with the idea of scientific study; perhaps it is because the putatively offending views of the scholar in question are so squarely in the mainstream; or perhaps it is because those set against the project of liberal science and ideological diversity are shouting the quiet part out loud.
MIT invited Dorian Abbot, a geophysicist and professor at the University of Chicago, to give a science lecture this autumn. As Michael Powell explained in a laudably fair
write-up
for the New York Times, Abbot was “a natural choice, a scientific star who studies climate change and whether planets in distant solar systems might harbor atmospheres conducive to life.” Yet on Sept. 30, MIT called off the lecture and rescinded the invite following complaints from faculty members and graduate students, as well as from others online — again, over Abbot’s views and past statements regarding affirmative action, not anything pertaining to the lecture or the content or efficacy of his scientific work.
That personal political or policy views far removed from one’s field can be held to invalidate that body of work, that thinking “the wrong thing” on affirmative action disqualifies you from participating in science, is bad enough. It gets worse, however, when considering Abbot’s comments that caused such (concentrated) outrage. “In videos and opinion pieces,” writes Powell, Abbot stated his view that affirmative action and diversity programs “treat ‘people as members of a group rather than as individuals, repeating the mistake that made possible the atrocities of the 20th century.’ He said that he favored a diverse pool of applicants selected on merit.” Specifically, Abbot had opposed a move within his own department at the University of Chicago to restrict a faculty search to female applicants and “underrepresented minorities,” with the exclusion of Asians. “Asians are a group that is not privileged,” Abbot told the Times. “It reminded me of the quotas used to restrict Jewish students decades ago.”
For the heinous views of treating people as individuals and selecting candidates based on merit, “his opponents in the sciences argued he represented an ‘infuriating,’ ‘inappropriate,’ and oppressive choice.” Whether or not you agree with Abbot (I do), such views are in no way bigoted and are well within both the political and cultural mainstream — something even acknowledged by some of his critics. Powell cites Phoebe A. Cohen, a geosciences professor at Williams College and someone who took to Twitter to fling opprobrium about Abbot being chosen to speak, who “agreed that Dr. Abbot’s views reflect a broad current in American society” yet believes “a university should not invite speakers who do not share its values on diversity and affirmative action.” She goes on to suggest Abbot’s views should come with greater consequences.
Powell then asks her, what of the effect that would have on academic debate? Cohen’s response is eye-rollingly facile: “This idea of intellectual debate and rigor as the pinnacle of intellectualism comes from a world in which white men dominated.”
This is a hand-waving rejection of the entire concept of liberal science.
As Jonathan Rauch explained with great felicity in his
Kindly Inquisitors
, a liberal intellectual system informed by the Enlightenment tradition, what he calls “liberal science,” shoulders the very possibility of generating scientific knowledge: “Liberalism holds that knowledge comes only from a public process of critical exchange, in which wise and unwise alike participate.” In our system, it is the clash of viewpoints, the testing of hypotheses, the seeking of error, the variety and interplay of opposing propositions that
create knowledge from beliefs and observations
. The liberal science “game” has rules that must be observed for it to work adequately, one of which is the application of standards such as rigor. Another is that no one is allowed a monopoly on truth, especially in matters greatly influenced by personal, subjective considerations. “Due to its nature as a decentralized system, liberal science frees knowledge from authoritarian control by self-appointed commissars of truth,”
writes
Jonathan H. Adler.
Cohen is
far from the only such commissar
. Last month, David Romps, a climate physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley,
announced
he was resigning from his post as director of the Berkeley Atmospheric Sciences Center. After the MIT lecture was canceled, Romps sought to have Abbot give the talk at Berkeley and, the former wrote on Twitter, “by extending the invitation now, reaffirm that BASC is a purely scientific organization, not a political one.” In the ensuing discussion among the faculty, he wrote, “it became unclear to me whether we could invite that scientist ever again, let alone now. I was hoping we could agree that BASC does not consider an individual’s political or social opinions when selecting speakers for its events, except for cases in which the opinions give a reasonable expectation that members of our community would be treated with disrespect. Unfortunately, it is unclear when or if we might reach agreement on this point.”
If the “game,” in Rauch’s metaphor, has rules, the would-be commissars of truth have set about replacing them with ones more suited to ideological orthodoxy. “Ever more fraught arguments over speech and academic freedom on American campuses have moved as a flood tide into the sciences,” writes Powell. “Biology, physics, math: All have seen fierce debates over courses, hiring and objectivity, and some on the academic left have moved to silence those who disagree on certain questions. … There is a rising call for ‘
citational justice
,’ arguing that professors and graduate students should seek to cite more Black, Latino, Asian and Native American scholars and in some cases refuse to acknowledge in footnotes the research of those who hold distasteful views.”
Setting aside the further degradation of the definition of “justice” — is there no avenue safe from the
concept creep
of justice? — “citational justice” is simply the next step down the slippery slope. There is some silliness to this, to be sure: Nobel laureate James Watson, of Watson and Crick double-helix fame, has been un-personed and deemed unacceptable by the scientific community owing to some statements he has made about African Americans and Africans, which range from indelicate to downright offensive bigotry. But good luck avoiding citing him or his work when it comes to DNA. Still, the bastardization of science, and rejection of free inquiry more broadly, into a nakedly political, fundamentalist program should have been obvious to anyone paying attention.
Much like TikTok, social justice Jacobinism is a great way for the mediocre to feel more important. My friend Noam Blum pointed out on Twitter
recently
, “A whole lot of this social justice outrage is just a guise for self-promotion. Hire me or my friends, cite me or my friends, give more comedy specials or show deals or awards or tenure to me or my friends. All for altruistic purposes, naturally.” I have taken to calling this type of thing guild bullying, by which I mean (as I wrote in these pages last
October
): “the efforts of individuals and groups of individuals within a field, class, or profession to consolidate power amongst themselves. This includes neutering ideological opponents or rivals, yes, such as ‘canceling’ someone or coercively reeducating them. But it also includes raising the barriers to entry in order to decrease future competition — think unnecessary occupational licensing requirements such as the bar exam or having a college degree but in the context of social behaviors. Higher education provides a prime milieu for guild bullying thanks to the isolation of the Ivory Tower and the necessity of many academics to provide continual justification for their own existence.” Don’t like that someone in your field was invited to give a prestigious lecture at a top-flight institution instead of you? Brand him a bigot and feel better about yourself.
We have seen this type of thing happen in journalism, in tech companies and media, in law schools, and in major corporations. But when it comes to knowledge generation, scientific research, and the rules of liberal science in the university, there are additional concerns. Thanks to our friend Vannevar Bush, the federal government disburses billions of dollars for research and development each year, with tens of billions of it going to colleges and universities. When working properly, this is a tremendous boon: The COVID vaccinations, developed by private companies and funded by public largess, provide a perfect example. But when research is undertaken at places that actively resist or stymie free speech or free inquiry, then we risk wasting billions of dollars of taxpayer funds on potentially fraudulent, shoddy, or worthless endeavors.
This is not simply hypothetical: The replication crisis currently afflicting numerous scientific fields has been widely established and written about. In sophomoric fields such as many of the “social sciences,” you end up with
specious nonsense
such as the Implicit Association Test, which purports to reveal the prevalence of individuals’ “implicit biases,” but in actuality is nothing more than warmed-over offal. In a “hard science” field such as medicine, the consequences of nonreplicable or inept studies are much worse.
Poor research environments produce poor science. Universities are and should be free to set their own ideological compasses, but the
salient issue
here is what happens when that political and ideological homogeneity yields policies and practices that stifle free inquiry. Frederick M. Hess and I
explained
in National Affairs back in 2018, “Speech codes, the heckler’s veto, and attempts to discipline those expressing ‘improper’ thoughts can stop certain questions from being asked and lines of research from being pursued, and they can make it less likely that suspect findings or methodologies will be thoroughly scrutinized.”
“Excluding people because of their political and social views diminishes the pool of scientists with which members of BASC can interact and reduces the opportunities for learning and collaboration,” the Berkeley professor Romps wrote on Twitter. “More broadly, such exclusion signals that some opinions — even well-intentioned ones — are forbidden, thereby increasing self-censorship, degrading public discourse, and contributing to our nation’s political balkanization.” The chilling effect of speech codes and stifling political homogeneity is already bad enough, and also
well-documented
, without adding further signaling of who is and is not allowed to be cited due to some warped notion of “justice.”
As Hess and I recounted, there are numerous studies showing that ideological and political uniformity “can undermine the validity of social psychological science via mechanisms such as the embedding of liberal values into research questions and methods, steering researchers away from important but politically unpalatable research topics, and producing conclusions that mischaracterize liberals and conservatives alike.” Applied behavioral science studies have similarly shown that research integrity can suffer when speech and inquiry are constrained, especially when researchers bring to them “high moral purposes.”
Speaking of “high moral purposes,” beyond the roughly $40 billion in taxpayer funding we give to colleges and universities for research and development alone, the last two years of pandemic life should make the significance of illiberal science even more immediate. When science is pursued thoughtfully and correctly, we get results such as the COVID vaccine, which was developed quickly, using breakthrough methods, and has saved countless lives across the globe. But the politicization and abuse of “Science” was rampant, as well: The World Health Organization lied and covered up for China’s authoritarian communist regime several times over; thousands of “Scientists” happily signed open letters declaring that racial protests were not “superspreader” events, even as churches, mosques, synagogues, and schools were forcibly shuttered. Our scientist in chief took it upon himself to lie about the efficacy of masks, then chose to lie about lying, only to admit eventually that all the lying was necessary because the hoi polloi are too stupid to be trusted with the truth.
COVID gave the lie to yet another faction of our expert class — not because vaccines don’t work (they do), and not because scientific research can’t produce incredible achievements (it can and did). It simply exposed how thoroughly and easily the very concept of “science” can be
distorted and bastardized
and how many of our scientific experts are simply naked partisans out for themselves.
“Scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown,” Bush wrote. It’s a shame so many of our so-called scientists have traded those tenets for woke McCarthyism.
J. Grant Addison is deputy editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
