The Real War on Science: Identity Politics By Andrew Follett
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/the-real-war-on-science-identity-politics/
Emphasizing wokeness over true scientific inquiry will turn humanity’s pursuit of scientific truth into little more than an exercise in demagoguery.
T he best way to stop racial discrimination is to directly enshrine it into law via affirmative action in universities, according to the head of a major scientific journal.
“As science struggles to correct systemic racism in the laboratory and throughout academia in the United States, external forces press on, making it even more difficult to achieve equity on all fronts—including among scientists,” claimed an editorial in Science’s latest issue. It continued, “The dismantling of race-conscious admissions [to colleges] would deal another blow to equity in science.”
The editorial, titled “Science needs affirmative action,” was authored by none other than Science’s editor-in-chief: Washington University medicine and chemistry professor Herbert Holden Thorp.
Science is the most influential general-topic scientific journal, alongside its rival Nature. The prestigious peer-reviewed outlet boasts a weekly readership of almost 270,000 people and has been published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science since 1880.
Thorp claims affirmative action “gives deserving students a chance that they might not otherwise have, adding excellence to the higher education system. It also acknowledges that not all students have an equal opportunity to excel at objective measures like standardized tests and grades, and it levels the playing field by giving students and universities the chance to spotlight other important attributes and factors in the admissions process.”
Science should be about assessing objective reality, not giving in to the ideological fashions of the moment. Objective metrics such as a student’s GRE, SAT, or ACT scores or GPA do in fact predict the success of students in universities, according to research published in Science. This is true, no matter how much Thorp wants to believe otherwise. He would do well to pay more attention to the findings published in the journal he manages.
Furthermore, doing away with standardized testing would do nothing to help budding scientists from disadvantaged backgrounds. The science is quite clear on who benefits from eliminating objective academic measurements from the admissions process: the children of the wealthy. Research shows that no amount of family money spent on test preparation can greatly artificially boost low standardized-test scores. But it can buy a privileged teenager a “service trip” to build housing in Haiti, fencing lessons, or other “holistic” factors that make university admissions committees swoon. And when admissions committees consider race, that chiefly serves to harm applicants of Asian descent.
Those effects aren’t limited to universities. In my state, Virginia, progressives have pushed affirmative-action policies to discriminate against Asian-American students, many from working-class households, at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. It is the highest-ranking public high school in the United States and a springboard for aspiring scientists. The proposed “equity” policies would make the school, which is 70 percent Asian American, far whiter by “reframing our understanding of merit” and placing less emphasis on objective metrics in favor of holistic factors and so-called “racial balancing.”
A cynic might suggest that affluent white progressives are such strong proponents of doing away with objective academic admissions criteria precisely because there is less transparency, which inevitably benefits the connected and wealthy.
Thorp claims, “Failure to enroll a diverse undergraduate population has already excluded outstanding people from science, and limiting affirmative action will only make matters worse.”
Yet Thorp does not address the lack of ideological diversity in academia, a grave threat to the future of science. After all, according to one survey of top-rated liberal-arts colleges, 39 percent do not employ a single registered Republican professor. Only 6 percent of professors identify as Republicans. In some social-science fields such as anthropology, up to 60 percent of college professors openly admit they would discriminate against suspected Evangelicals, who are typically politically conservative.
If the academy continues down the path of becoming an ideological echo chamber, and strips away or lowers objective admissions standards as Thorp desires, the result will be a less-qualified student body selected mainly for political conformity and how many impressive extracurricular activities their parents could afford. Many scientists produced by such a model will devote themselves to promoting trendy left-wing newspeak rather than advancing humanity’s understanding of the world.
Unfortunately, we’re already well on our way to such a world. Identity politics has been triumphing over rationality in the scientific disciplines for some time. Back in 2016, Science interviewed the author of a peer-reviewed study titled, “Glaciers, gender, and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research.” The National Science Foundation gave Mark Carey a five-year grant to write his “feminist glaciology” paper. If Thorp and those who share his views get their way, such identity-politics-focused “science” may soon overtake legitimate scientific research.
The twisted “woke” vision of science would not just lessen meritocracy in academia, increase the advantage of children from wealthy households in admissions, allow anti-Asian discrimination, and further reduce ideological diversity among scientists. It would also create a biased canon of scientific knowledge, diminish the reputation of science in the public eye, and ultimately turn humanity’s pursuit of scientific truth into little more than an exercise in demagoguery.
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