The War on Science:
Thirty-nine renowned scientists and scholars speak out about
current threats to free speech, open inquiry, and the
scientific process
by Lawrence M. Krauss, ed.
Post Hill Press, 2025, 430 pages, no index
Reviewed by T. Nelson
After pounding my head against the wall for years warning that science is under attack, it now seems that academics are coming around to my point of view. Either that, or all that pounding just made me dizzy.
The new consensus in the political press is that the woke movement and its main weapons (cancel culture, censorship, deplatforming, and DEI) are dying. As well they should. It was impossible to practice DEI and ‘anti-racism’ at the same time because they are opposites. The ideology was doomed by its own logical contradictions. Based on what these 39 well-known scientists and scholars say, however, woke may not be as dead as people think.
What is the war on science?
The war on science, as these authors see it, is a concerted attempt by political activists to eliminate merit and rigor in science.
One weapon the activists use is cancel culture, in which anyone who writes or says something the activists don't want to hear gets deplatformed and fired—tenure notwithstanding. Stating the fact that there are only two sexes, mentioning the fact that males have greater variability in intelligence than females, or stating that there is such a thing as race are all firing offenses.
Of course people are getting canceled and censored everywhere, not just in academia. But what happens in academia trickles down to everyone. One ideological professor can create dozens of incompetent pharmacists, doctors, and engineers. Losing one's position is also a much bigger deal in academia than in the real world because the academic hiring procedure is hopelessly corrupt. The hiring process is deliberately made byzantine and time consuming to make it hard to hop to another job at the first sign of trouble as is routinely done in industry.
This is why astrophysicist Christian Ott, who was forced out of science because his female postdocs invented false stories about him, recommends victims not resign: you'd be unemployable in academia at that point. If you leave, the bureaucrats don't have to transfer your grant to the new institution—and often they don't.
Section 1 is about free speech and censorship. Section 2 discusses ideological corruption in academia. Section 3 is a collection of articles by victims, including Ott, whose careers were destroyed by activists. The remaining sections (4, 5, and 6) discuss DEI, the gender wars, and possible solutions.
In Section 3, Ott gives the following points of advice:
Universities care only about appearance and their revenue streams and will ruthlessly distort the truth.
Investigations by a university are corrupt. Never give them more than is absolutely necessary.
Once they rule against you, you must sue them immediately.
Never resign.
You will never receive any support from any of your colleagues.
Diversity
Another weapon is DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), which is the new name for racial discrimination. Maybe you thought the Civil Rights movement did away with racism and preferential treatment. Wrong. In the past few decades, blatant racism and racial discrimination have spread like wildfire through the universities and government. Diversity statements, a form of coerced loyalty oaths, became mandatory and scientific merit has been virtually eliminated as a hiring consideration.
The result, as anyone who reads the scientific literature knows, was a flood of papers claiming absurdities such as that sex is a continuum and that “systemic racism” is the greatest health hazard in the country. The public knows about the poorly designed clinical experiments that experts used to deceive them during the COVID epidemic. Imagine if our nuclear weapons were designed this way.
Censorship, deplatforming, and ideological bias are forms of unscholarly behavior that are incompatible with the mission of a university. In fact, that's the main issue: is the mission of a university to create and transmit new knowledge or to change the world? If the latter, college professors will become social workers and the search for knowledge will end.
Why should you care?
I'd venture to say that my relatives who bombard me with anti-Trump conspiracy theories from Substack have never heard of Lawrence Krauss, Heather Mac Donald, Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, Sally Satel, Amy Wax, Jordan Peterson, or the other illustrious authors in this book, unless it's from rumors that they're bad people who shouldn't be listened to.
Some people even think there is no such thing as cancel culture, deplatforming, or even DEI. They've been told that censorship is a good thing because ideas they don't agree with don't deserve to be heard. That includes basic facts that have been known for centuries, and it keeps expanding. Worse, what's replacing them are mostly politically motivated lies.
In Section 4 (DEI), Janice Fiamengo, in what is the most hard-hitting essay in the book, puts it this way:
If there is any satisfaction to be taken in sorry affairs such as this one, and in the current state of equity hiring, it is perhaps in an ironic prediction: more equity hiring will not bring us to the promised land. . . .
[T]he white women who drove the culture of victimhood and reparation are no longer always holding the reins . . . there may be black lesbian scholars who may call out [black classics scholar Dan-el Padilla] Peralta one day on an inappropriate comment or an oppressive flick of his eyelash.
Academia as we knew it, that bastion of nerdy specialization and beautiful esoteric knowledge and curiosity-driven research, is dead, and the trendy new socially relevant so-called scholarship that killed it is a sickly thing, likely to be easily picked off by new waves of righteous warriors.
The erroneous belief, akin to Lysenkoism, that putting someone in a technical or scientific position automatically makes them smart, as race activist Ibram X. Kendi and his fellow activists believed, will mean loss of rigor in all the sciences. It's already happened in medicine. Lauren Schwartz and Arthur Rousseau document how activist groups successfully stopped JHU from publishing the results of their own studies on hormonal and surgical interventions on children with gender dysphoria.
One of the authors says that Lysenkoism was responsible for tens of millions of deaths from starvation, both in the Soviet Union and in China, where Lysenko's principles were also followed. As science changes into a contest to see who can lie the most convincingly, the similarity is ominous.
Science won't die. It just won't be done here. We'll still be able to fly in airplanes. They just won't be manufactured here. We'll still be able to say America is the richest, most scientifically advanced country in history. It just won't be true.
What the authors say
Back to Section 1, where Alan Sokal says that censoring findings that someone somewhere might find offensive, as Nature does, harms those affected by the missing knowledge. How could you believe anything in a journal that tells you in advance that it will only publish things that support their ideology? Anna Krylov and Jay Tanzman make the same argument when they write:
When scientists hide selected facts to promote their political agendas, the public rightfully perceives them as politically motivated agents rather than objective and trustworthy experts. [p.79]
Academics and bureaucrats now openly discriminate on political,
racial, and sexual grounds for hiring, publications, grants, and promotions.
At least the bureaucrats had an excuse: they must follow the rules imposed
from above. Both NSF and NIH were demanding ideologically based science.
It took root at NIH under the guise of
Plan
for Enhancing Diverse Perspectives or
PEDP, which forced researchers to write grant
applications to cater to the ideology of diversity. As of March
2025, the official PEDP page is now blocked: you get 403 Forbidden.
The Trump-haters at Mother Jones and Nature are not happy.
But bureaucrats love rules, so they must comply.
What beneficiaries of diversity say
In case people think the recipients of equity hiring are sitting on their unfair gains fat and happy and convinced that everything is now fair, here's Janice Fiamengo again, who is one such beneficiary:
It's not clear what there is to be proud of in (at least implicitly) admitting that, a full century after being granted legal and political equality with men, women still aren't capable of competing with men on merit and that the government must ride to their rescue with imposed quotas and exclusions. . . white men's taxpayer money pays for significant professional advantages for female, racial minority, or sexual minority academics who then, more often than not, make a career out of claiming to be oppressed and advocating for more professional advantages. [p.246]
White male candidates who apply for these positions were not told that they were wasting their time, but they were. . . We were explicitly told to insist that the candidate had been chosen for her outstanding qualifications. In this way, the overt rejection of merit was hidden from general view.
She asks:
For how long will white (and now Asian) men tolerate such unjust discrimination? How long can the general population ignore what is going on?
That's a good question. The general public is the group most affected by diseases that will remain uncured once merit is gone. Why aren't they complaining? If they cared about staying alive, one would think they'd be at the gates with battering rams and pitchforks demanding change, as the AIDS activists did.
As an official guy (having had a doctor at birth who, as JK Rowling once quipped, made a lucky guess), here's what it all means. It means knowing that an academic title is no longer a guarantee of competence or even basic literacy. It means writing statements professing loyalty to an ideology you find despicable. (Granted, most of them are now written by ChatGPT, which is a lot better at lying than any human can ever be.) It means overlooking scientific fraud done by your colleagues for fear of retribution. It's fair to ask why anyone would want to work in such a place.
Fiamengo's article is not the only one that is hard-hitting, rigorously logical, and honest. But the articles from males are generally more passive and resigned, perhaps because they've had much of the fight beaten out of them. Fiamengo, like all those hired under DEI who are actually competent, will always be under a cloud of suspicion as people will always wonder whether they were hired for their skill or to fill a diversity quota.
The search for truth logically implies that there must be such a thing as
truth. Wokeism denies this, claiming that all knowledge is just a tool of
oppression. Richard Dawkins is one who has figured out that this
contradicts the basis of science. He's still an atheist, but he now
realizes that not all religions are created evolved equal. Welcome,
friend, to the club!
Most of the authors are academics, and some of them treat the war on science as just another somewhat interesting problem. Some, like Maarten Boudry, don't even mention science but give us a critique of the origin of antisemitism on our campuses and in the Middle East. Others stuff their sentences with politically correct pronouns—a form of affirmative action for pronouns. Even Dawkins still feels compelled to say that President Trump is “loathsome” as he praises him for slashing academic bureaucracy.
But wait, didn't Trump abolish DEI? What's all the fuss about?
You might think now that the US Supreme Court ruled that DEI is illegal, President Trump has declared that DEI is no longer acceptable, and Jay B. is cleaning up NIH that the problem is solved save for a handful of crazies in various “Studies” departments. That's the impression this book gives. It is false.
Contrary to media reports, the DEI activists in universities and government are not all gone. Universities won't give up their racist practices easily. Most are lying low, knowing that Trump will be gone in a few years, maybe (they hope) sooner. Some are merely rebranding.
To stop them, the government will have to prosecute them over and over just as it did in the Civil Rights era. As Jordan Peterson puts it:
There are no imaginable circumstances under which extant Ivy League institutions, for example, would be likely to dispense with the 80 percent of administrative staff that would have to disappear for any real change in orientation to occur.
. . . It is, therefore, highly possible that the academy in the West is rotting because it is, in fact, dead and cannot be revived in anything resembling its current form. [p. 413]
Solutions
The slaveholders in the South believed, just as firmly as activists who believe in DEI, that slavery was a beneficial and noble institution. It took a brutal civil war to change their minds. To save science, what we really need is a revolution in how science is run.
In the last section, Steven Pinker and other reformers have some good ideas for solutions. But just as a disease can't be cured without knowing what causes it, finding the cure to academic rot depends on identifying its cause. The cause is academia's dependence on government funding. Unless its members are fiercely independent and tough (and I assure you there's no one like that in academia), government funding produces complacency and motivates an ideology that justifies bigger government and more funding with less effort. We need to create conditions that will force schools to compete for the most competent researchers—and provide the researchers with the means and freedom to do their job.
That could be done with incentives to encourage private industry to do basic research as it did in the past. The university will remain unsalvageable as long as it has no competition, and it will stay political as long as there is no cost to unscholarly behavior. To get politics out of science, we must get science out of the university. Break the monopoly of university research by diversifying science funding. Make AT&T Bell Labs great again!
aug 13, 2025, 6:02 am. edited for brevity aug 14 and 15 2025
