WOKE ACADEMICS FEAR TRUMP WILL MAKE SCIENCE GREAT AGAIN

National Review

 

Woke Academics Fear Trump Will Make Science Great Again

By Andrew Follett

November 17, 2024 6:30 AM

 

Leading research institutions have only further discredited themselves with their fears that the Trump administration will depoliticize their work.

 

Woke academics funneling scientific funding toward political activism are terrified President-elect Donald Trump is about to Make Science Great Again.

 

Laura Helmuth, the editor-in-chief of Scientific American, responded to the news in a series of now-deleted tweets about Trump being her once and future president by stating, “I apologize to younger voters that my Gen X is so full of f***ing fascists” and urging “solidarity to everybody whose meanest, dumbest, most bigoted high-school classmates are celebrating early results because f*** them to the moon and back.” (Asterisks ours, not hers.)

 

Helmuth’s live-tweeted breakdown concluded with her asking advice “for what workplaces can do to help people who are devastated by the election,” showing that the activists attempting to take over science suddenly find themselves threatened. Helmuth is now leaving the publication.

 

Such activists have in recent years infiltrated even the hard sciences. They helped convince publications such as Scientific American and Nature to openly endorse Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, an action that even the Atlantic — which also endorsed Harris — admitted “undermines trust in expertise.” Records show that 93 percent of political donations from higher-education professionals went to Harris or other Democratic candidates.

 

Left unsaid is the clear worry that the massive taxpayer gravy train for left-wing causes masquerading as science is coming to an end. Government funders of science like the National Science Foundation openly admit they have paid $270 million since 2001 to introduce the intersectional framework of critical race theory into science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).

 

And to be clear, this money has rendered American science increasingly untrustworthy.

 

“Perhaps one of my biggest worries . . . is that Trump will be another nail in the coffin for trust in science,” given his anti-science rhetoric, Lisa Schipper, a geographer at the University of Bonn in Germany specializing in global warming, told Nature. Nature goes on to worry about a Pew Research survey finding trust in science has fallen steadily since 2019.

 

But the magazine never asks whether, perhaps, this rising distrust of increasingly partisan science is merited. Even Nature admits elsewhere that roughly half of “scientific” research in “soft” fields like psychology cannot be independently replicated.

 

Helmuth, for example, studied psychology and tried to expand Scientific American’s coverage of it during the pandemic after running a lecture tour aimed at combating “misinformation through science journalism.” Hilariously, she was once a “neutral” judge for controversies in science. Perhaps the real misinformation was coming from inside Scientific American all along?

 

As I previously wrote for this magazine, “Republicans and independents are right to be skeptical when scientists make broad claims for their research but can’t get consistent results, or when scientific findings are twisted or misrepresented to support the researchers’ ideological beliefs.”

 

The idea that the entire country, even supposedly liberal bastions such as universities, is awash in racism and sexism has seemingly become a consensus among these once-respected scientific publications. For example, in October, just before the election, Science chimed in, citing a research paper that claimed to have discovered “some of the most robust evidence of racial bias in promotion and tenure” at America’s universities.

 

“Among more than 1500 tenure and promotion decisions at five U.S. research-intensive universities, Black and Hispanic faculty members received more negative votes than their equally productive white and Asian colleagues,” wrote Science magazine in its summary of the researchers’ findings.

 

“In sum, the results support the double standard hypothesis and provide evidence that different outcomes in P&T decision-making processes contribute to the sustained underrepresentation of URM [underrepresented minority] faculty in tenured faculty positions,” the paper claimed.

 

The credulity-straining hypothesis is that American universities, the most left-wing places on the planet, famed for their diversity initiatives, are incredibly prejudiced against racial and ethnic minorities and against women. In this alternative worldview, the University of Michigan alone spending a quarter of a billion dollars on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) must have simply been a cover for the institution’s deep racism.

 

And mysteriously, nobody at Nature, Science, or Scientific American, or in the peer-review process, viewed this finding as odd, despite its basic statistical errors.

 

Analysis of the data by University of Buckingham political-science professor Eric Kauffmann shows clear evidence of “p-hacking” — effectively, torturing the data until they confessed to whatever the researchers wanted. The study’s findings claim that African-American and Hispanic scholars in universities are less productive because they contend with discrimination. Kauffmann’s analysis of the same data found exactly the opposite conclusion.

 

“Black and Hispanic candidates for full professor are significantly more likely to get promoted for their level of publications and grants than White or Asian candidates. Figure 3 shows a 10-20 point advantage for minority candidates over Whites/Asians,” Kauffmann wrote on his Substack. “This result is again significant at the powerful .1 percent level. . . . In short, academia discriminates against White and Asians when it comes to promoting people to professor.”

 

In other words, the data show a candidate’s perceived diversity resulted in a competitive edge, not in discrimination. But every single science publication’s reporting on the study favored left-wing racial ideology over scientific truth. As Kauffmann observed on X, “had they done the analysis properly, the paper would not have been published. But researchers and publications lapped it all up without question since it accorded with their priors.”

 

There’s little willingness and even less incentive in academia to question left-wing dogmas, which is why Scientific American claimed, with very little pushback, that European men invented women in the 18th century in order to have someone to oppress.

 

In an age when even DEI’s staunch backers in the New York Times admit that there’s no evidence DEI initiatives improve any of the problems they purport to solve, and quite a bit of evidence they make matters worse, why is “the science” going in the other direction?

 

It probably has something to do with the fact that academia has a powerful ideological — and, increasingly, financial — incentive to believe left-wing dogma, and all sorts of ways of manipulating data to make said data conform to such preconceptions.

 

Academia is privileging its own politically correct hypothesis, making a classic unscientific assumption of following ideology rather than the data. What’s worse is that Nature and Science are doing it, too. This raises the troubling prospect of a fundamentally biased canon of “scientific” knowledge.

 

How can academia be trusted when it gets something so obviously wrong? Maybe, just maybe, it can’t.

 

Can the new administration restore science funding to its rightful function of aiding the impartial search for truth, rather than serving as a taxpayer money-laundering scheme for progressive pet projects? Time will tell, but woke academia is on high alert.