Burning A Scientist At The Stake

A letter from a reader. I know his name and his institutional affiliation. He is who he says he is:

I just received tenure at a major university (I’m in the Mechanical Engineering department), and I can echo how Orwellian things are getting. In fact please keep my identity and university confidential if you happen to post this email on your blog. To list just a few examples of what is going down in academia:

1) A recent diversity event literally had a Powerpoint slide titled “Words not to say anymore.” Words included on this list were ‘husband’, ‘wife’, ‘white paper’ (a term academics use for preliminary proposals), and several more. So for example, if I were to say to a colleague “I’d like you to meet my wife,” I would now be committing wrong-think. My first thought was that it could come across as too heteronormative, but even this doesn’t make logical sense given that gay people can also get married now. Perhaps they just want to de-emphasize marriage in general? And apparently describing paper as being white is now part of systemic racism or something.

2) In 2015, I attended their first ever workshop entirely focused on gender identity training. They handed out a 6-page handout of all the new gender terminology. They also flat-out stated, as if it were an absolute fact, that all reality is relative to psychology and that biology is irrelevant. Also fun: they directly implied that anybody who still thinks gender dysphoria is a mental disorder is a backwards bigot. And my favorite: when I talked to the diversity staff afterward to express concerns about the thought-control, they replied that they were simply responding to “the emerging consensus on gender and would be screening all future faculty hires accordingly.” Chilling stuff.

3) You may not be aware that a major chemistry journal, Angewandte Chemie, is in hot water for publishing an essay that committed wrong-think. In short, the author expressed concerns about affirmative action undermining meritocracy. I haven’t even read the essay, because within hours the journal pulled the link and now it is not even available. For those not in academia, it’s hard to explain how unprecedented this truly is. When a scientific article gets retracted, they always retain access to the original paper so people can see for themselves what the issues were. In other words, it is unheard of to completely remove all links to a retracted article; this is clearly motivated by an ideological panic. It gets better: two of their editors were suspended for simply publishing the essay and at least 16 of the journal’s advisory board members have resigned in protest. This seems to me a clear parallel to the furor over the recent NYT opinion piece by Tom Cotton. Now, I must emphasize that I cannot comment on the actual quality of the essay in question, as I cannot even find it. However, the simple fact that the journal is hiding the essay amidst an editorial mutiny speaks volumes to the current climate on race and affirmative action issues.

4) The Office of Inclusion and Diversity has made it clear that their ultimate goal is to have academia’s demographics identical to that of the state we live in. For example, they explicitly said that academia will be sexist until faculty are 50% female. Apparently, the basic fact that many women prefer to not work such highly stressful jobs so they can focus on raising their children must not be mentioned, a la Voldemort.

5) I am a member of the American Physical Society (APS). Unsurprisingly, last week we all received a newsletter from APS with a “Black Lives Matter” black banner. Perhaps more surprisingly, the banner included graphics of people protesting with signs stating “Shut down academia”, “Shut down STEM”, and “No justice, no peace”. Imagine that! A scientific society urging its members to shut down STEM and to end peace! My head spins as I watch scientists cut down the branch we all rest on.

What an e-mail! The writer goes on to emphasize that I cannot say his name or institutional affiliation, because he has a family to support, and can’t afford to be drive out of the field.

You think he’s paranoid? Well, read on. I looked into the situation he mentioned with Angewandte Chemie. Here is part of the “open letter” that the publisher of the journal wrote to “our community,” abasing himself for publishing wrongthink:

Strong action is of the utmost importance. Improving DE&I [Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion] at Angewandte Chemie will not stop here. As a journal and as a community, we must take an inward look at how we can meaningfully contribute to the dismantling of an often-biased academic system. Diversity only strengthens science, and inclusive science that reflects the world’s best thinking is our greatest hope for solving the problems facing society.

We’ll continue to share updates on our progress and welcome your involvement in helping us shape a more fair and inclusive system. We will take an active leadership role in becoming a beacon for DE&I. You have our promise that we will make significant strides forward.

Dr. Guido Herrmann

VP & Managing Director, Wiley-VCH

“Diversity only strengthens science” — ideological cant spoken like a man with a gun pointed at his head.

Chemistry World magazine reported on the controversy. Excerpt:

Brock University chemist Tomáš Hudlický’s piece was published on Thursday 4 June, as a reflection on Dieter Seebach’s 1990 review Organic synthesis – Where now?. Hudlický looks at eight factors that influence chemistry using a figure reproduced from his 2007 book The Way of Synthesis, published by Wiley. It purports to show that certain factors – such as information technology – can be either positive or negative, while others – like diversity – only exert a negative influence on the field.

Hudlický laments that diversity training has ‘influenced hiring practices to the point where the candidate’s inclusion in one of the preferred social groups may override his or her qualifications’. He also claims that efforts to increase women’s participation in science – like Gordon Research Conferences’ power hour – ‘diminishes the contributions by men’. Hudlický also asserts that skills transfer can only occur successfully if there is ‘an unconditional submission of the apprentice to his/her master’.

If you read the whole Chemistry World piece, which doesn’t quote the Hudlicky paper, you would think that the scientist had committed a war crime. I’m serious — read the report. Academics are incandescently angry at him. But what, specifically, did he say? Canada’s National Post reported a bit more detail about the controversy:

Hudlicky’s essay, called “‘Organic synthesis — Where now?’ is 30 years old. A Reflection on the Current State of Affairs,” was intended to honour a scientific article written by Prof. Dieter Seebach, 83, three decades ago. While some of the essay is more technical, in surveying more recent trends in organic synthesis, Hudlicky also writes about “preferential” treatment given to women and minorities.

“In a social equilibrium, preferential treatment of one group leads to disadvantages for another,” Hudlicky writes. “The rise and emphasis on hiring practices that suggest or even mandate equality in terms of absolute numbers of people in specific subgroups is counter-productive if it results in discrimination against the most meritorious candidates.”

Hiring practices, he said, have reached the point where a candidate’s inclusion in a “preferred” social group might override his or her qualifications.

This is certainly true. In journalism, it has been standard hiring practice for decades to favor candidates who are less qualified on the merits, based on their sex or race. I’ve seen it happen a number of times. Journalism is one thing; science is another. What is incredible, really just mind-blowing, is that Hudlicky’s claim cannot be argued about. It cannot be contested. It is like Galileo saying the earth orbits the sun. It violates a core dogma.

Canadian columnist Barbara Kay apparently has seen the original paper. She writes in defense of Hudlicky:

Another point of contention: Hudlicky’s remarks on skills transference. He used the locutions of “masters and apprentices,” a nod to Hungarian-British polymath Michael Polanyi’s concept of “tacit knowledge,” which can only be acquired by students working under, well, “masters,” as famously exemplified in the art of haute cuisine. Such relationships are demanding of apprentices, but produce high performance.

Unfortunately, in Hudlicky’s opinion, “many students are unwilling to submit to any level of hard work demanded by professors. The university does not support professors in this endeavor as it views students as financial assets, and hence protects them from any undue hardships that may be demanded by the ‘masters.’” Added to time constraints on professors, mentorship has diminished and with it the erosion of “the maintenance of standards and integrity of research.” A stern judgment, but obviously opinions based on years of empirical observation. Critics could voice disagreement; instead, they call for his career death.

Brock’s provost and VP, Greg Finn, hastened to situate himself at the head of the mob, brandishing a pitchfork in the form of an open letter to the Brock community. Hudlicky’s descriptions of the master-apprentice relationship, he said, “connote disrespect and subservience … [that] could be alarming to students.” And of course the obligatory accusation that Hudlicky’s observations “do not reflect the principles of inclusivity, diversity and equity included in the University’s mission, vision and values as approved by our Senate and Board of Trustees.” Ominously, Finn states, “further steps are being considered and developed.”

Alarming to students. Good grief.

More from the National Post:

Hudlicky, a Tier 1 Canada research chair in chemistry, refused to comment on Tuesday, saying it was on the advice of his faculty union.

However, he earlier told New York-based Retraction Watch that he was subject to a frightening witch-hunt.

“We are sliding back to Calvinism and burning at stakes. This is absurd,” he said. “I expressed my opinions and my words were totally taken out of context.”

Burning at stakes? No kidding! Science magazine blogger Derek Lowe compared the author of the paper to German science under the Nazis. Really, he did this:

I actually think meritocracy is an excellent thing, but if you just declare “meritocracy in place” as of this moment, you preserve an existing order that has treated a lot of people like second-class citizens and second-class scientists. Worse, it’s an order that has, over the many years, forced many of them unwillingly into those second ranks because the first ranks were closed off to them.

Which is wrong on the face of it, and counterproductive as well. The example is often brought up – as it should be – of what German science did to itself during the Nazi era, deliberately driving away an extraordinary array of intellectual talent. That’s an extreme example, but you can do the same thing more slowly and quietly by only allowing the “right” sorts of people access to what they need to develop their talents. There’s all sorts of room to argue about the most effective ways to address this situation – which has been going on for a long, long time and will not be fixed quickly – but starting off by decrying the current efforts to deal with the problems is not going to help anyone.

I would like to read the full Hudlicky essay. If anybody has it, e-mail me a copy. The hysterical moral panic in science over the paper, though, is incredibly discouraging to any honest person seeking a career in science. It’s totalitarian. It’s straight-up totalitarian. Get this: Prof. Hudlicky was born in 1949 in communist Czechoslovakia, and emigrated with his family to the US in 1968 to escape totalitarianism. And now look!

A Czech émigré is responsible for Live Not By Lies, my forthcoming book about soft totalitarianism. Here are the opening lines of the book:

In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell, and with it Soviet totalitarianism. Gone was the communist police state that had enslaved Russia and half of Europe. The Cold War that had dominated the second half of the twentieth century came to a close. Democracy and capitalism bloomed in the formerly captive nations. The age of totalitarianism passed into oblivion, never again to menace humanity.

Or so the story goes. I, along with most Americans, believed that the menace of totalitarianism had passed. Then, in the spring of 2015, I received a phone call from an anxious stranger.

The caller was an eminent American physician. He told me that his elderly mother, a Czechoslovak immigrant to the United States, had spent six years of her youth as a political prisoner in her homeland. She had been part of the Catholic anti-communist resistance. Now in her nineties and living with her son and his family, the old woman had recently told her American son that events in the United States today reminded her of when communism first came to Czechoslovakia.

What prompted her concern? News reports about the social-media mob frenzy against a small-town Indiana pizzeria whose Evangelical Christian owners told a reporter they would not cater a same-sex wedding. So overwhelming were the threats against their lives and property, including a user on the Twitter social media platform who tweeted a call for people to burn down the pizzeria, that the restaurant owners closed their doors for a time. Meanwhile, liberal elites, especially in the media, normally so watchful against the danger of mobs threatening the lives and livelihoods of minorities, were untroubled by the assault on the pizzeria, which occurred in the context of the broader debate about the clash between gay rights and religious liberty.

The US-born doctor said he had heard his immigrant parents warn him about the dangers of totalitarianism all his life. He hadn’t worried—after all, this is America, the land of liberty, of individual rights, one nation under God and the rule of law. America was born out of a quest for religious liberty, and had always been proud of the First Amendment to the US Constitution that guaranteed it. But now there was something about what was happening in Indiana that made him think: What if they were right?

They were right. They are right. You watch: this is going to prove to be a civilizational catastrophe. Where can a scientist go now to do research free of ideological chains? Two years ago, Dr. Hudlicky received a top honor at Prague’s Charles University, honoring his lifetime achievements in chemistry. Wouldn’t it be ironic if he had to return to his homeland to finish his scientific career in freedom?

And to think that liberals today believe that fundamentalist Christians are the real enemy of science and technology. It’s cultural leftists within the institutions of the profession who are destroying free thought and the conditions under which science thrives. Look at what has happened to Hudlicky, whose writing is so dangerous that nobody can be allowed to see it, ever, lest they lose their souls. What chaps me is the self-righteousness you see among journalists, scientists, and others in these professions, who consider themselves to be dedicated to fearless truth-telling. The opposite is the case.

Serious question to academic readers, especially in STEM: why should anyone enter the field when it is falling under the shadow of political thought control?

 

 

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