Religion is a Mental Illness

Academia’s Missing Men

Men are disappearing from science and academia. The public perception is, however, exactly the opposite.

Quillette

The voyage of discovery that science offers can take us furthest when it is open to the best and brightest, regardless of who they are and where they come from. Great scientific minds often emerge from unexpected backgrounds. Many scientific disciplines remained effectively closed to ethnic minorities and to women for far too long. But over the past 50 years at least, science has opened up and a host of affirmative action programs have been created to encourage women and minorities to consider careers in the field.

For some activists, however, these efforts have not gone far enough. In response, universities, industries, and research institutions have instituted a vast bureaucracy designed to promote Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: a behemoth that is growing at a rate far exceeding that of investment in new faculty and facilities.

This has resulted in some disturbing new trends in academia and scientific institutions more broadly. In a desire to include women and minorities, white males are often excluded, and too often women and members of minority groups are tokenized by being promoted primarily for their gender or skin color.

This tokenism has affected the most prestigious institutions. It was a bone of a contention at this year’s Lindau Nobel Laureate meeting. Citing fellow laureate Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, who has questioned the use of gender quotas in STEM and warned against “discrimination against men,” Nobel prizewinner Kurt Wüthrich commented that he felt discriminated against “in the climate that this meeting is being held.” He was particularly dismayed by the fact that the female laureates were placed in the front row of a group photo—an example, he felt, of insulting tokenism. “I would feel horrible if presented in this way,” he said. “It was ridiculous, fully ridiculous.” As a result of voicing these views, Wüthrich was accused of violating the meeting’s code of conduct.

That may have been a minor issue of optics, but his more general point is valid. Look at almost any online photo promoting science and you will find this kind of tokenism.

Here are several examples.

The first is from a recent article in Science, the official journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Scientific societies should encourage all young people to consider a career in scientific discovery. Science nevertheless seems to feel the need to present a patronizing advertising image, featuring three women and two men of color.

In an email encouraging young people to embark on scientific careers, the American Physical Society presents an image of five women and a black man. The omissions—presumably done in the name of diversity—are obvious and embarrassing.

In advertisements for their annual general meeting, which attracts over 10,000 scientists from all over the world, the APS shows three women and one male of color.

For hundreds of years, white men in lab coats were presented as the face of science. It is time to change that picture. But we should do without losing touch with reality or becoming overtly patronizing.

This trend of prioritizing women and minorities is not restricted to advertising and public relations but is affecting faculty appointments at every level.

Let’s start at the top. Six of the eight Ivy League universities—Harvard, Brown, Penn, Cornell, Dartmouth, and Columbia—now have female presidents, as do UC Berkeley and MIT.

MIT is a particularly striking case. Despite comprising many traditionally male-dominated STEM disciplines, its upper management team is largely female. The head of the MIT Corporation, the President, the Director of Research, the Provost, the Chancellor, and the Dean of Science are all women. The Institute’s core discipline, the School of Engineering, consists of eight departments, five of which are led by women. This is clearly not a coincidence, nor is it likely, given the demographics of the place, that this is simply the result of choosing the best people for those jobs. Were the situation reversed—if most of the faculty were female, but the leading administrators were all male—there would be an outcry.

It is still the case that most full professors, in most STEM disciplines, are male. But the reasons for this are often misunderstood. It generally takes decades to attain this rank, and many full professors have been in their current positions for over 30 years. Even if the hiring system were now biased in favor of women, they would not yet have achieved parity at the senior level.

And the hiring system may well be biased. Thanks to the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion infrastructure that dominates almost every major US university today, affirmative action initiatives have affected the hiring of junior faculty across the board.

It is difficult to obtain national statistics on this, but in 2015, before DEI initiatives reached current heights, a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences revealed a two to one preference for female candidates for tenure track positions in STEM.

New faculty announcements suggest a similar bias. For example, in 2021, UCLA announced the following new appointments in the physical sciences: Abigail Doyle (Chemistry and Biochemistry), Alvine Kamaha (Physics and Astronomy), Courtney Shelly (Statistics/Mathematics), Qianhui Shi (Physics and Astronomy), and Hong Wang (Mathematics). It did not appoint any new male faculty. Similar examples abound.

We can detect comparable trends further up the tenure ladder, too. For example, MIT has just announced the election of six new Fellows to the American Physical Society. This represents a significant career milestone for the successful candidates. I was happy to see that they include my well-deserving former graduate student, Hong Liu, but that aside, the trend seems clear.

Affirmative action is not the only explanation for the increasing paucity of white males in such positions. The American Physical Society offers a plethora of programs designed to assist pre-tenure female (and sometimes male minority) faculty in physics. There are conferences, leadership programs, internships, grants, workshops, networks, site visits, guidelines, scholarships, fellowships, and prizes. There are no similar programs for young white male scientists, although many of them face similar career challenges.

In US academia in general, women now receive more doctoral degrees than men.

Women also occupy most faculty positions in post-secondary institutions.

While it is heartening that the climate for women in academia has been improving, these figures suggest that the laser focus on recruiting, retaining, spotlighting, and promoting women in STEM may have become superfluous.

As April Bleske-Rechek and Michael Bernstein have shown, while men still occupy three quarters of STEM positions (despite the fact that the percentage of women in STEM has more than doubled since 1980), the situation is precisely reversed in the fields of health, education, administration, and literacy. While massive efforts are underway to correct the imbalance between men and women in STEM, there have been no concomitant efforts to increase the numbers of men in female-dominated professions. People do not seem to perceive the latter imbalance as a problem. In a recent survey of over 800 recent college students, Bleske-Rechek and Bernstein found that the students were overwhelmingly more concerned about male overrepresentation in certain high status professional positions than about female overrepresentation in others.

This was the case even though the female-dominated disciplines were not considered lower status than the male-dominated ones.

Other data in the study suggest that gender gaps in male-dominated disciplines are significantly more likely to be attributed to sexism or discrimination than they are in female-dominated disciplines.

These results align with recent work by Matt Grawitch et al., summarized here. Grawitch and his colleagues found that both male and female respondents were more likely to judge that an interaction between a banker and a client had been sexist when the banker was male and the client female than the reverse. We are far more likely to attribute sexism to disparities that favor men than disparities that favor women.

The impression that universities are primarily concerned with hiring, supporting, and promoting women may be contributing to the fact that, at entry levels, young men are leaving higher education in their droves.

We can see the results of this in the California State universities: the undergraduate student body at Cal State Los Angeles is 59 percent female, and 67 percent of its graduate students are female; Sonoma State is 63 percent female; San Diego State is 57 percent female; Humboldt State is 58 percent female; Cal State East Bay is 61 percent female. Nationwide, around 60 percent of students are female. And the gender gap is growing. Recent data show a significant downward trend in male college enrollments, which has coincided with the increasing prevalence of DEI programs.

The reduction in male undergraduate numbers is partly caused by the fact that young women are graduating from high school in higher numbers than their male counterparts. In fact, women now graduate at higher rates than men at all educational levels.

Similar trends are emerging at pre-university level. Consider this announcement of the finalists and winners of the 3M Young Scientist Challenge.

It is no surprise to see a high prevalence of Indian and Chinese students among this group, as East and South Asians have been outperforming white students for some time. What is perhaps more surprising is that the finalists included only one young Caucasian male.

Perhaps this is partly due to way such programs recruit applicants. Consider this advertisement for the Regeneron Science Talent Search.

Is the nearly complete absence of white males in these images the result of a decision to highlight women and minorities—or are fewer white men getting involved in such programs than ever before?

We may be moving towards a future in which women will be significantly better educated than men and will occupy far more of the jobs that require professional qualifications and skills. The societal impacts of this are unknown.

We must continue to ensure that higher education and scientific training remain open to people from all demographics. But we should not encourage diversity at the cost of driving away talented people. Our fixation on raising the profile of women and minorities in science by minimizing the role and status of men in general, and white men in particular, is misplaced.

After more than 40 years of intense affirmative action efforts, it may be time to take our thumbs off the scale and let a natural balance emerge. Young males—and white males in particular—should not be discouraged from pursuing higher education in science, or from engaging in any other field of intellectual activity.

"I don’t know which is more dangerous, that religious beliefs force some people to choose between knowledge and myth or that pointing out how religion can purvey ignorance is taboo. To do so risks being branded as intolerant of religion."

-- Lawrence M. Krauss

"Keeping religion immune from criticism is both unwarranted and dangerous."

-- Lawrence M. Krauss

“To assume the truth, to assume the answer before you ask the question, leads you nowhere.”

-- Lawrence M. Krauss

“The universe is the way it is, whether we like it or not. The existence or nonexistence of a creator is independent of our desires. A world without god or purpose may seem harsh or pointless, but that alone doesn't require god to actually exist.”

-- Lawrence Krauss

"The tapestry that science weaves in describing the evolution of our universe is far richer and far more fascinating than any revelatory images or imaginative stories that humans have concocted. Nature comes up with surprises that far exceed those that the human imagination can generate."

-- Lawrence M. Krauss, “A Universe from Nothing”

"Without science, everything is a miracle. With science, there remains the possibility that nothing is. Religious belief in this case becomes less and less necessary, and also less and less relevant."

-- Lawrence M. Krauss, ”A Universe from Nothing”

“It's hard to imagine a more extraordinary claim than that some hidden intelligence created a universe of more than a hundred billion galaxies, each containing more than a hundred billion stars, and then waited more than 13.7 billion years until a planet in a remote corner of a single galaxy evolved an atmosphere sufficiently oxygenated to support life, only to then reveal his existence to an assortment of violent tribal groups before disappearing again.”

-- Lawrence Krauss

“Hate speech involves people, not ideas. No idea is sacred.”

-- Lawrence M. Krauss

Lawrence Krauss: Why the easily offended are a threat to scientific progress

The mantras of diversity, inclusion and anti-racism are placing feelings above academic freedom

nationalpost.com

There is a growing public perception that being offended confers special rights while also imposing obligations on the offending parties. It doesn’t. Or at least it shouldn’t. Nevertheless, perhaps as a consequence of the current educational focus on issues of diversity, inclusion and anti-racism, this warped viewpoint is insinuating itself into higher education and research at a level that is increasingly threatening free speech, academic freedom and with it, scientific progress.

While there are many academic areas where raw political sensibilities might impact on scholarly discourse, it is hard to think of chemistry as such an area.  Nevertheless, new guidelines for accepting and editing papers were recently sent to editors of the prestigious Journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

“Following the publication of the article by (Tomáš Hudlický) in (German journal) Angewandte Chemie and the identification of a potentially offensive image in a journal, a set of guidelines has been produced by RSC staff to help us minimise the risk of publishing inappropriate or otherwise offensive content. Offence is a subjective matter and sensitivity to it spans a considerable range; however, we bear in mind that it is the perception of the recipient that we should consider, regardless of the author’s intention . … Please consider whether or not any content (words, depictions or imagery) might have the potential to cause offence, referring to the guidelines as needed. ” (italics mine)

I’ll get to the reference to the article by Hudlický, because that itself is very telling. For the moment, let’s concentrate on the italicized sentence. Considering the perception of any and all recipients, regardless of author intent, can effectively freeze all discourse. It is hard to imagine any sentence spoken in the public domain today that cannot possibly be construed as offensive to someone.

Lest one think that this is too great an extrapolation based on the guidance language alone, if one refers to the accompanying guidelines, one will find offensive content defined as “Any content that could reasonably offend someone on the basis of their age, gender, race, sexual orientation, religious or political beliefs, marital or parental status, physical features, national origin, social status or disability.” In short, there is room to offend absolutely everyone.

Consider what subjects could now be reasonably censored by editors according to this new edict. Much of evolutionary biology could now be verboten, since the very subject offends the religious sensibilities of many Americans. Same too with The Big Bang. What about geology, where estimates of the age of rocks directly contradicts the hopes of young earth creationists? Much of genetic research is already the source of vocal protest, especially the genomics of diverse populations, and any investigations of correlations between race and other genetic traits. Sex and gender clearly become untouchable because of the widely varying views on the similarities and distinctions between the two. Studies of climate change are already sensitive touchstones, and both new claims of serious implications of climate change, or studies that demonstrate that some earlier claims were overblown, will offend one or another side of the political fence.

What about paleontology and archeology and scientific study of finds like the Kennewick Man ? Aboriginal groups wanted to repatriate the remains of this 9,000 year old skeleton found in 1996 near Kennewick, Wash., in order to shield them from scientific study, because their cosmology was in conflict with the reality that domestic populations had their origin in the migration of earlier humans tens of thousands of years ago? At the time, the scientific community didn’t back down in the face of misplaced religious or cultural sensibilities.

Today, however, the Society for American Archaeology censored a talk by two archaeologists concerned about similar creationism creeping into archeology. The scientists argued that the current Native American Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) allows repatriation decisions to be made on the basis of Indigenous creation stories, an accommodation that would not be made for Western-based religious myths. The Society claimed that such language did not “align with SAA values.” Individual SAA members accused the talk of being “anti-Indigenous,” “racist” and part of “white supremacy.”

If studies of pure science subjects may be impacted, there is no doubt that studies in areas including the sociology of science will be doomed. Chemists at Barnard College, who developed a recent course in “Chemistry and Racism,” which focuses on dealing with systemic racism in chemistry without providing any evidence that such a thing exists in the first place, will no doubt take offence at studies that suggest that any racism in science is not systemic.

In higher education there used to be a vigorous debate between proponents of affirmative action and those who argued that this would negatively impact on merit-based promotion. Studies on either side of this debate are likely to offend some in the other camp.

In this regard, it was particularly interesting that the preamble to the new RSC guideline mentioned an article by Tomáš Hudlický of Brock University, on the state of organic synthesis in honour of the 83rd birthday of chemist Dieter Seebach. In the article Hudlický questioned whether efforts to promote diversity by prioritizing inclusion of certain groups may be done at the expense of meritocracy. The reaction was swift. Following an outcry by a predictably offended social media mob, the journal involved retracted the article, removed it from its web site , and replaced several editors involved in its publication.

Lest one assume that in areas far removed from hot button issues the thinking that led to the RSC editorial guidelines is likely to have little effect, consider a recent example from the Journal of Hospital Medicine. Having published a piece in April entitled “Tribalism: The Good the Bad and the Future,” discussing the dangers to medicine of tribal in-group and out-group behaviour, the editors of the journal immediately retracted the article in response to social media reaction that these terms can be hurtful to some. They then removed all references to the “tribes” and “tribalism,” including a definition of these terms that was provided at the beginning of the article. They then republished a revised version and wrote an editorial in May apologizing for their act of “microaggression” by publishing a piece with terms whose connotations some people might find offensive.

As the above example illustrates, offensive language is now often rephrased as hurting feelings, with concomitant feelings of abuse or discrimination. An associate vice-president at Mount Royal University in Alberta, linda manyguns, eschews the use of capital letters, except when it comes to Indigenous people, because capitalization is a hurtful symbol of western hierarchy.

Similarly, language offence can be interpreted as a form of harassment, producing a hostile environment that can produce suspensions or firing. Several academics have described to me how they have removed potentially offensive lessons and language from their teaching materials, not merely because of the risk of offending some students, but because of the potential ramifications for their own academic job security.

If the quashing of writing, discussion and open inquiry reflected in these episodes becomes the norm rather than the exception, the future of education and scientific publication doesn’t look good. Perhaps the editors of scientific journals should reflect more deeply on the context of offence by reading what various authors have had to say on the subject.

The polymath British writer, actor, and intellectual, Stephen Fry, wrote in 2005 : “It’s now very common to hear people say, ‘I’m rather offended by that.’ As if that gives them certain rights. It’s actually nothing more… than a whine. ‘I find that offensive.’ It has no meaning; it has no purpose; it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. ‘I am offended by that.’ Well, so f**king what.”

Less provocatively, the late writer and journalist Christopher Hitchens, wrote, “If someone tells me that I’ve hurt their feelings, I say, ‘I’m still waiting to hear what your point is.’ In this country, I’ve been told, ‘That’s offensive’ as if those two words constitute an argument or a comment. Not to me they don’t.”

Hitchens, who died in 2011 would have found the new world of publishing today very different than the one in which he produced his brilliant, if sometimes-biting essays and books. I suspect much of what he wrote then simply wouldn’t be published today.

Anna Krylov, a distinguished chemist at the University of Southern California, unearthed a more distant example of the historical disconnect with modern concerns about the risk of causing offence is not new in science. Anton van Leeuwenhoek’s pioneering development of microscopy in the seventeenth century helped found modern microbiology. When he discovered spermatozoa in semen, he was concerned that communicating his new results might cause offence. As he put it, when communicating his results to the President of the Royal Society for publication in its Philosophical Transactions, “If your Lordship should consider these observations may disgust or scandalize the learned, I earnestly beg your Lordship to regard them as private and to publish them or destroy them as your Lordship sees fit.” Fortunately for the progress of biology, his lordship wasn’t as concerned about causing offence then as are the editors of modern scientific journals, and van Leeuwenhoek’s results were published.

The bottom line is this: If you are offended by something you read, or your feelings are otherwise hurt, you own the problem. You can choose to deal with it in a variety of ways, either by refusing to read any potentially offensive material, by ignoring the offence, or by writing cogently in response, critiquing the ideas one finds offensive. But it is your problem to deal with. Others are not obliged to cater to your sensibilities in advance, nor need they be censored after the fact. In my day, recognizing this reality was called growing up.

Lawrence M. Krauss, a theoretical physicist, is President of the Origins Project Foundation and host of The Origins Podcast.  His most recent book is The Physics of Climate Change.

"Forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.”

-- Lawrence M. Krauss.

“We are made of star stuff.”

-- Carl Sagan

Opinion | How ‘Diversity’ Turned Tyrannical

What began as an effort to hire more minorities has turned into a demand for ideological engagement.

www.wsj.com|Lawrence Krauss

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was supposed to host Thursday’s John Carlson Lecture on climate. MIT’s department of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences canceled the event because the speaker turned out to have expressed a dissenting opinion—though not about climate science. University of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot argued in a Newsweek piece that universities’ obsession with “diversity, equity and inclusion,” or DEI, “threatens to derail their primary mission: the production and dissemination of knowledge.” If MIT wanted to prove Mr. Abbot’s point, it could hardly have done better. (His lecture will be hosted instead by Princeton’s conservative redoubt, the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.)

DEI efforts have been under way for decades, but recently they have come to dominate teaching and research agendas, including in the hard sciences. Many scientific disciplines, including my own area of physics, had too few women and minorities in the 1970s and ’80s. Newly established diversity offices developed procedures to counter the possibility that underlying issues might interfere with ensuring both excellence and diversity. As chairman of a physics department in the 1990s, I had to write a statement justifying each appointment we made that went to a white man.

Once entrenched, the DEI offices began to grow unchecked. They became huge and expensive offices not subject to faculty oversight and now work to impose “equity” not only by discriminating in favor of female and minority candidates but by demanding and enforcing ideological commitments from new faculty.

Traditionally, applicants for a science faculty position submit published articles, recommendations from mentors and colleagues, and a statement of their proposed research and teaching interests. University selection committees use this information to assess their qualifications for research and teaching.

Several years ago, one began to see an additional criterion in advertisements for faculty openings. As a recent Cornell ad puts it: “Also required is a statement of diversity, equity and inclusion describing the applicant’s efforts and aspirations to promote equity, inclusion and diversity through teaching, research and service.” This sort of requirement became more common and is now virtually ubiquitous. Of the 25 most recent advertisements for junior faculty that appeared in Physics Today online listings as of Oct. 15—from research institutions like Caltech to liberal-arts colleges like Bryn Mawr, and even in areas as esoteric as quantum engineering and theoretical astrophysics—24 require applicants to demonstrate an explicit, active commitment to the DEI agenda.

This isn’t merely pro forma; it’s a real barrier to employment. The life-sciences department at the University of California, Berkeley reports that it rejected 76% of applicants in 2018-19 based on their diversity statements without looking at their research records. A colleague at a major research institution, who asked to remain anonymous to protect her students, wrote to me: “I have a student on the market this year, agonizing more on the diversity statement than on the research proposal. He even took training where they taught them how to write one. It breaks my heart to see this.” Other colleagues relate that their white male postdocs aren’t getting interviews or have chosen to seek jobs outside academia.

This is happening not only in universities. Last week the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a biomedical research charity, announced a $2.2 billion initiative aimed at reducing racial disparity, made possible by a contraction in its funding of significant research for senior investigators. The initiative includes $1.2 billion in grants for early-career researchers. Science magazine reports that because antidiscrimination law prohibits disqualifying applicants on the basis of race and sex, the recipients will be chosen based on their “commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion,” in the words of the institute’s president, Erin O’Shea. How? “Diversity statements,” she says, are “a very promising approach.”

The DEI monomania has contributed to the crisis of free speech on campus. As Mr. Abbot’s cancellation illustrates, even tenured senior faculty aren’t immune.

Stephen Porter, a North Carolina State education professor, has sued the school, alleging that it “intentionally and systematically excluded him from departmental programs and activities that are necessary for him to fulfill his job” for speaking out against the DEI agenda.

All this creates a climate of pervasive fear on campus and shuts down what should be an important academic discussion. After I wrote an article in these pages about the intrusion of ideology into science, I heard from faculty around the country who wrote under pseudonyms that they were afraid of being marginalized, disciplined or fired if administrators discovered their emails.

Beyond these fearful faculty members, and talented would-be scientists who will be dissuaded or excluded from academic research, DEI offices are working to indoctrinate incoming students. This year at Princeton, the New York Post reports, freshmen were required to watch a video promoting “social justice” and describing dissenting debate as “masculine-ized bravado.” If such efforts succeed, a new generation of students won’t have the opportunity to subject their own viewpoints to challenge—surely one of the benefits of higher education.

Critics have likened DEI statements to the loyalty oaths of the Red Scare. In 1950 the University of California fired 31 faculty members for refusing to sign a statement disavowing any party advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government. That violated their freedom of speech and conscience, but this is worse. Whereas a loyalty oath compels assent to authority, a DEI statement demands active ideological engagement. It’s less like the excesses of anticommunism than like communism itself.

Mr. Krauss, a theoretical physicist, is president of the Origins Project Foundation. His newest book is “The Physics of Climate Change.”

“You don’t have to believe in God, you don’t have to like it — you have to participate. If you don’t, that’s okay — you don’t have to work here,” the boss says.

“You’re getting paid to be here. This is our first core purpose. So if you don’t want to participate, that’s okay. Leave your stuff here, you don’t have to work here. It’s not an option.”

When one employee objects, he is cast out.

“Well you can’t work here,” he tells him. “So what are you going to do? Listen, you can go get an attorney, leave your stuff here — we’re done.”

“It's hard to imagine a more extraordinary claim than that some hidden intelligence created a universe of more than a hundred billion galaxies, each containing more than a hundred billion stars, and then waited more than 13.7 billion years until a planet in a remote corner of a single galaxy evolved an atmosphere sufficiently oxygenated to support life, only to then reveal his existence to an assortment of violent tribal groups before disappearing again.

-- Lawrence Krauss

In Defense of the Universal Values of Science

The progress of modern science has been a truly global phenomenon.

quillette.com

Title: Scientists vs. Science: Race, Gender, and Anti-Intellectualism in Science

Abstract: Black thought can help us free science from the white supremacist traditions of scientists. Scientists vs. Science will use Black feminist and anti-colonialist analyses to show that white supremacy is a total epistemic system that affects even our most “objective” areas of knowledge production. The talk hinges on the development of the concept of white empiricism, which I introduced to give a name to the way that anti-intellectual white supremacy plays a role in physicists’ analysis of when empirical data is important and what counts as empirical data. This white empiricism shapes both Black women’s (and other) experiences in physics and the actual knowledge produced about physics. Until this is understood and addressed directly, systems of domination will continue to play a major role in the practice of physics.

“I have challenged several theologians to provide evidence contradicting the premise that theology has made no contribution to knowledge in the past five hundred years at least, since the dawn of science. So far no one has provided a counterexample. The most I have ever gotten back was the query, ‘What do you mean by knowledge?’ [..] Had I presented that same challenge to biologists, or psychologists, or historians, or astronomers, none of them would have been so flummoxed.”

-- Lawrence M. Krauss, “A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing”