The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Alessandro Strumia | The War on Science Interviews | Day 14

Episode Date: August 7, 2025

To celebrate the release on July 29th of The War on Science, we have recorded 20 podcast interviews with authors from the book. Starting on July 22nd, with Richard Dawkins, we will be releasing one interview per day. Interviewees in order, will be:Richard Dawkins July 23rdNiall Ferguson July 24thNicholas Christakis July 25thMaarten Boudry July 26thAbigail Thompson July 27thJohn Armstrong July 28thSally Satel – July 30Elizabeth Weiss – July 31Solveig Gold and Joshua Katz – August 1Frances Widdowson – August 2Carole Hooven – August 3Janice Fiamengo – August 4Geoff Horsman – August 5Alessandro Strumia – August 6Roger Cohen and Amy Wax – August 7Peter Boghossian – August 8Lauren Schwartz and Arthur Rousseau – August 9Alex Byrne and Moti Gorin – August 10Judith Suissa and Alice Sullivan – August 11Karleen Gribble – August 12Dorian Abbot – August 13The topics these authors discuss range over ideas including the ideological corruption of science, historical examples of the demise of academia, free speech in academia, social justice activism replacing scholarship in many disciplines, disruptions of science from mathematics to medicine, cancel culture, the harm caused by DEI bureaucracies at universities, distortions of biology, disingenous and dangerous distortions of the distinctions between gender and sex in medicine, and false premises impacting on gender affirming care for minors, to, finally, a set of principles universities should adopt to recover from the current internal culture war. The dialogues are blunt, and provocative, and point out the negative effects that the current war on science going on within universities is having on the progress of science and scholarship in the west. We are hoping that the essays penned by this remarkable group of scholars will help provoke discussion both within universities and the public at large about how to restore trust, excellence, merit, and most important sound science, free speech and free inquiry on university campuses. Many academics have buried their heads in the sand hoping this nonsense will go away. It hasn’t and we now need to become more vocal, and unified in combatting this modern attack on science and scholarship. The book was completed before the new external war on science being waged by the Trump administration began. Fighting this new effort to dismantle the scientific infrastructure of the country is important, and we don’t want to minimized that threat. But even if the new attacks can be successfully combatted in Congress, the Courts, and the ballot box, the longstanding internal issues we describe in the new book, and in the interviews we are releasing, will still need to be addressed to restore the rightful place of science and scholarship in the west. I am hoping that you will find the interviews enlightening and encourage you to look at the new book when it is released, and help become part of the effort to restore sound science and scholarship in academia. With no further ado, The War on Science interviews…As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project YouTube. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi, and welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host Lawrence Krause. As many of you know, my new book, The War on Science, is appearing July 29th of this year in the United States and Canada. And to celebrate that, we've interviewed many of the authors of the 39 authors who have contributed to this volume, and we have 20 separate podcast interviews

that will be airing over the next 20 days, starting July 22nd, before and after the book first appears. With many of the authors in the book on a host of different subjects, the authors we will have interviews with in order of appearance over the next 20 days are Richard Dawkins, Neil Ferguson, Nicholas Christakis, Martin Boudre, Abigail Thompson, John Armstrong, Sally Sattel, Solveig Gold, and Joshua Katz, Francis Wooderson, Carol Hoven, Janice Fiamengo, Jeff Horsman, Alessendro,

Sturumia, Roger Cohen and Amy Wax, Peter Bogosian, Lauren Schwartz and Arthur Russo, Alex Byrne and Modi Gorin, Judith Sisa, and Alice Sullivan, Carleen Grible, and finally, Dorian Abbott. The topics that will be discussed will range over the need for free speech and open inquiry and science and the need to preserve scientific integrity, stressed by our first podcast interviewer Richard Dawkins and we'll once again go over historical examples of how academia has been hijacked by ideology in the past and the negative consequences that have come from that

to issues of how specific disciplines, including mathematics, have been distorted and how certain departments at universities now specifically claim that they are social activists, and a degree in their field is a degree in either critical social justice or social activism, not a degree in a specific area of scholarship, how ideology is permeated universities. We'll proceed also to discuss issues in medicine. Sally Settel will talk about how social justice has hijacked medicine,

and also when it comes to issues of gender-affirming care, we have a variety of authors who are going to speak. about the issues there and how too often gender affirming care claims are made that are not based on empirical evidence. In fact, falsely discuss the literature in ways that are harmful to young people. We will talk to several people who, for one reason, another, have been canceled for saying things. Francis Whittleson at Mount Royal University in Canada and Carol Hoeven from Harvard, who eventually had to leave Harvard after saying on television that sex is binary in biology. We'll be talking to people who've looking at the impact of diversity, equity, inclusion in academia,

and how it's restricting free inquiry, and also restricting, in many ways, scientific merit at those universities. And finally, Dorian Abbott, the last contributor to our series, will be talking about three principles he believes are essential to separate science, and politics and keep academia free from ideology and more for open questioning and progress and to make sure that science is based on empirical evidence and where we go where the evidence is, whether it's convenient or not, whether it's politically correct or not, and we're willing to debate all ideas that nothing is sacred, a central feature of what science should be about and what in some sense this podcast is about. So I hope you really enjoy the next 20 days

and we've enjoyed bringing it to you. So with no further ado, the war on science, the interviews. Well, Alessandro Strumia, thank you so much for being here remotely. It's nice to see you and meet you virtually at least, even though we've been working together as you contributed to the book. And I want to talk about your contribution to the book called the Leaning Ivory Tower. But first, this is an origins podcast, and I always, at least, try to find out how people got to where they are now, or at least to the point of writing

what you wrote, you're a theoretical physicist, you're a theoretical particle physicist, right, trained as a particle physicist? Yes, sir. And did you study it, did you do all your training in Italy? Yes, yes. I was mostly working between Pisa and Geneva at Cern. Between the two. And that's how you. you had a connection to CERN as a visiting scientist or as a, did you have an official position at CERN or no?

Yeah, you have been many times with different positions. Last time I was a guest professor. Okay, okay. And what, and so you've obviously been interested more than just pure theoretical physics. What was your, was your area of theoretical physics? of particle astrophysics at all? Or I know you at one point you talk about dark matter.

I mean, which just happens to me particle astrophysics as probably no is one of my, was one of my main research areas over the course of my career. I like working on multiple topics now trying it. Time to time, what seems

more interesting. And in particular, I was at CERN because at that moment, there was the new collider. So it was the most interesting place. Yeah, absolutely, yes. They were, I was, when I spent a year, there was a lot earlier, but they were in the process of, of course, building it. And you had an interest in, which will be relevant to what you're right about, in bibliometrics. Where did that come from, that interest?

Just by random, because I was at CERN and CERN has a big, database of millions of paper in fundamental physics and some friend at CERN has the computer skills to download the world database. So we started playing with numbers at the beginning. We didn't care about gender just to study physics, not the various topics on physics. Well, CERN had the big database. old enough to remember back in the days when CERN and there were one or two places

where you could go and get all the preprints and CERN was one before things everything went online and I remember when I was even when I was there what a treat at the time it was to go to the CERN library because it was easier to find things this was in the 90s

than other places. Now of course one could just sit in one's computer and find everything but CERN and so I can see the temptation to finding things And in any case, your interest in bibliometrics in some sense got you tangled up with a problem. And you got tangled up in 2018. You happened to be at CERN and CERN was hosting a workshop about gender. And did you decide?

So you did a bibliometric study. again, was it just for fun or did you have an interest in this gender issue? Why did you bother even attending that meeting or being a part of it? I was at CERN and people started putting papers everywhere to promote it. So just by chance I had all the data needed to test their claims. All the codes ready. So I did the check and I understood I was in trouble. Yeah, well, let's talk about the trip.

So you pointed out, I mean, the conventional wisdom at the time, of course, and still among many people, is that of course there are fewer women in physics and that in STEM in general. And you say at the very beginning your essay, according to the politically correct mainstream theory, STEM, science, technology, engineering, mathematics disciplines conspire to keep people out. This happens despite the fact that Western academia is one of the most progressive environments globally. Why should these champions of diversity seek to exclude women, especially in countries with higher levels of gender equality? To me, this seemed to be a bizarre conspiracy theory. It certainly defies logic. And so I conducted a basic bibliometric check that CERN could have performed before hosting claims that physics discriminates against women. What was the check that you did? Well, we did various checks. For example,

checking if the number of papers at the hiring of citation of various bibliometric indicators would have shown some discrimination against women. Then the chern workshop would have been justified. And you found that, for example, I think what you talk about in the article is that you calculated the number of papers published in citations received by each author at the time that they were hired to see if women needed on average higher indices than men.

And of course, you found that there was no difference, right? Well, if I avoid using sexist colors and put men in pink and women in blue, now I will be the president of CERNA. Yeah, okay, but, yes, but of course, that's not what you found. You found what other studies had also found, that there was no, at that point, at least in bibliometricated, there was no evidence of discrimination at all, right? Yeah, let's say, yeah. So you did what a theoretical physicist might do, and the kind of thing I would do, and most scientists would do, and say, okay, there is this empirical fact that there are fewer women, and one test of a possible explanation failed, the fact that there was evidence of discrimination. So you proposed an alternative hypothesis, which is the kind of thing a scientist would do. this explanation in work, let's see if there's another explanation. Sounds innocuous.

And your other explanation was based on two facts, both of which have an empirical basis and other contexts. And let me read what you said here. So I also presented an alternative interpretation of the gender gap, hoping that an audience of scientists could accept a disagreement from simple-minded egalitarianism. The data could be explained, assuming two things, that current female underrepresentation in STEM is domally due to two factors. First, gender differences in interests and higher male variability. Gender differences in interests of systemizing activities along the people versus things dimension, namely whether people are interested in professions and whether women are interested in professions

preferentially and involve people versus things as compared to men. That is a large, well-known effect in psychology. And higher male variability, which we'll talk about a second, is a small effect. Bibliometric distributions revealed a 10% gender gap in variance. So do you want to explain a little bit higher male variability? Because it's a topic that has, of course, been quite provocative, and at least one university president at Harvard lost his job for mentioning it. So why do you describe it a little bit?

So, yeah, and when the Harvard president mentioned it, somebody in the audience felt sick. So I hope my body will die now. It's just something that was first noticed by Darwin. And it means that if you measure value, physical traits of people like heights, like heights, mass, various things. The typical result is that

there is a bigger difference among men than among women. It's 10% difference in variance using some scientific language. And so, yeah, I knew this was a bad thing to say because some people every time that

somebody mentions this somebody gets fired and next psychologist wrote a variety of review showing that the fired person was right and yeah when I did my

bibliometric checks I found exactly this 10% bigger difference among male authors in essentially whatever good bibliometric indicator. Okay, and, you know, 10% have more bibliometric references, 10%. You know, they're on the tails.

Some fraction have less and some fraction have more. And the argument that, of course, got people in trouble like Larry Summers was that if males in their distribution have a bigger variance, then there are more males at the extreme high end and more males at the extreme low end. And therefore, because there are more males, at the extreme high end, say, have mathematical abilities, say, then you might expect that they would

overcompensate, that they would be overrepresented in fields like theoretical physics that require mathematical capabilities. There, of course, be more males on the lower end, but that wouldn't be represented. That was the argument that might, that plausibly could

have some impact, because you point out, it's not a large one, but you knew from Larry Summers and other people that who had trouble. You said, after my talk, I privately warned some colleagues at trouble was possible. And of course, they said there was no reason to worry. But then CERN immediately stated, CERN stands for diversity and canceled your talk while deeming it highly offensive. What do you mean canceled your talk? Because you already given your talk. So maybe to clarify

things for people, what do you mean by cancel the talk? Talks typically have a website with slides, with recording, and all disappeared. All my data disappeared. Yeah, so they canceled it after the fact. You gave it and then they took any evidence, any memory of it, the talk from their site and any ability for people to listen to what you had to say, which is, even if they disagreed with it, this is the key point. rather than saying we disagree with this talk, if that's what they wanted to say,

and you can listen to it and see their attitude was, we disagree with this talk and no one should hear it, which of course is the opposite of free and open inquiry, where we debate issues that we may disagree with. And I thought this is particularly interesting. You said, in my opinion, a scientific organization should have stated, we stand for science. We take no institutional position on socio-political issues, including diversity and gender, and we respect individual free speech. So they could have said, we don't endorse or condemn this view.

This is a view, and we're presenting it, and people can make their own decision, which you might think for a scientific organization. But they didn't do that. And in the process of not doing that, you make a point that they almost shot themselves in the foot because by canceling your talk, in some sense they promoted it, right? Yeah, at the end, you know, it could have remained a talk among 40 people,

and instead it became a worldwide media storm. Yes, I heard about it well after the fact. and I certainly wouldn't have known about it otherwise. And you make a point that, you know, discussing natural human differences can be considered offensive. And some people are offended by that idea. And, and, and, and I love this quote, which I mean,

I wrote a book about Richard Feynman, as you may know, which defined quantum man. I read your book, yes. But that's not a quote I put in the book, and I love this quote. You quote Richard Feynman saying, one of the signs of intelligence is to be able to accept the facts without being offended. I'd love the reference to that quote later on if you could give it to me, because it's a great quote.

But you point out that that distinguishes sort of science from non-science. You say by refusing to accept input from biology, in this case you talk about sociology, a part of sociology becomes flawed and at odds with important observations. So the idea is scientific results may be offensive, but it doesn't matter. They are what they are. And the data you presented was data. One could argue about the interpretation, but the data is the data.

One is as a former senator, you should say one's entitled to one's own opinions, but not one's own facts. and and and and so this was of course a real a real problem for you and should be a problem for anyone and but the as you also point out you're not the only person to speak on this issue whose papers have been canceled in fact in the in the in the in the article you reference a bunch of other people who's from many different journals whose papers were cancelled. I don't know if you want to talk about any of those here. Yeah, I have a list of other people who wrote even more innocuous papers about gender and

the stem, and they get published. A few days later, a big storm happens, and these papers disappear. One is particularly crazy. No, it's written by somebody called the Cormendi. I don't know him. I do. I know him well. I hear now he's a senior person who worked on bibliometrics because he wanted to help with being more meritocratic.

His paper was totally in no. I think activists got angry just because they see the word of bibliometrics and reminded me. So they attacked him. And he he canceled his own paper, he had the book ready, he canceled the book, and here he went to Brazil. Yeah, no, John Cormand, he was a well-known astronomer, distinguished astronomer, who, and the point of his book and paper was simply to say, let's look for metrics that may allow us to look at young people and better assess their likelihood as being successful at senior levels. right now when you promote people it's kind of all kind of

not all subjective but it's anecdotal sometimes it would be good to look for some other tools we could use quantitative tools that may not be the only tools we apply but they could assist us so when we're assessing people for promotion we have more than just you know a few letters of recommendation and personal impressions and um and you know i it's not something I would have spent my time on personally, but nor would I necessarily, you know, I'm always skeptical. But that's all he did. But you're right. He was attacked and it was attacked so badly.

He was shocked that he, as you say, he took, it was published in the proceedings of National Academy Sciences. He withdrew it. And the book was printed and all the copies destroyed. And then he wrote a very Maoist apology. He wrote a long letter of apology for having offended people. it really hurt him. In fact, actually, I think it's fair to say. I don't think John will mind. I asked John if he would contribute to our book, and he was so traumatized by his experience

that he said he'd rather not even return there. It was a really hard experience for him. He was shocked. I guess he wasn't aware of what was going on in public. So when this happens, is really hard. But, you know, I think, so he was retired, so

he could have not cared about consequences. Also, so let me say so, yeah, some people are skeptic about Bibliometrics, but there are countries that are really not meritocratic. In these countries, you know, Bibonometrics would really help

the US in Canada, you tend to do more or less good things. Other countries are really problematic. Well, I mean, look, the point is that more data is always better than less data. You can choose how do you weigh it. But to close your ears and go, nah, nah, nah, rather than hear something, is not what you would expect from scientists or from any reasonable level of scholarship. Now, after what happened in the 2018 work drop, any attempt by you to then,

to then sort of participate tended to be repelled. As far as I know, you the archive, the physics archive, which I should step back. The paper you gave at CERN that was canceled

was later published, right, in a scientific journal? Yes. And it was the only paper from that workshop that was published, you say? Yes, yeah. Okay. Now, the physics archive was created, actually, by a former colleague of mine at Harvard when I was there, and it's wonderful. It basically has all publications and anyone from around the world can read publications before they're published or after they're published. And it democratized science in many ways because when I was young and at Harvard, it used to mail your preprints to a few select institutions.

and people at those institutions would read your paper and have access to it before physicists from the rest of the world and could follow up on it and they'd always be able to scoop others. With the archive, your research appears that anyone around the world can read it the next day, which is wonderful. But despite being published, your paper apparently has been refused to be even put on the archive. Is that right? Yes. So I submitted it like a preprint. No, archive is a preprint.

And they said, no, we cannot put it. try again when it's published two, three years later it was published so I told them, okay, here is the paper and they said they blocked me

without any explanation and they never explained they never explained why it couldn't be published at some point they told me that they don't publish stuff on this topic but in reality they even accepted

criticism to my paper But they accept the criticism, but not the paper. Yeah, they accept the author of politically correct, but trivial wrong papers about the same topic. Criticism to my paper that makes little sense, not my paper. And I am still insisting at some point, you know, archive is at Cornell. At some point, Cornell announced an initiative to restore free speech. I contacted them. They never applied.

And did you I there is an appeal process on the archive Did you ever Did you go through that appeal process at all or no Some point they told me that if I insist I will get blocked from everything They often do that

Yeah okay At example now at some point I had to post a paper In memory of Stephen Weinberg I could put in physics Because I was blocked because of gender Wow. Wow. Okay. And it wasn't just the archives. I guess in 22 you went to get back at CERN to a talk on dark matter. And apparently your talk there got canceled, which had nothing to agenda. It was just on dark matter. So somebody invited me to give lessons about Dermatter at the Cern School about physics.

Yeah, I've done that myself two decades earlier. Yeah. So I tried to refuse, but I could not refuse. I accepted. At some point, some organizer canceled it because they still hated my essentially ideas about gender. And then finally, Tad, I suppose, final insult injury. In 2024, CERN hosted another gender meeting six years later. And obviously, they wouldn't allow you to to participate? Is that true?

So I propose them to discuss what now was published and also update. But no, this was not allowed. Instead, they allowed to present very strange stuff. For example, there was a scientific discovery where some people interviewed 27 progress progressive white male in physics. And so they had the slide with title, White Man, Ignorance leads to complicity racism, racism, even when they are well-meaning.

And nobody got offended. That's... So what I find totally crazy is that people at Cern, I know them. I talked about them. I would have never respected that they were able of canceling giants. I really lost... So before, I believe, they were good scientists. I know. So, yeah, I know them, but it's difficult to respect them.

They view these, you know, canceling giants as if these were totally normal. Yeah, it's interesting to see how people who in one... Well, scientists are people. And in one field, they can act like scientists, but then when it comes to sensitive issues, political issues or ideological ones, people become ideological. And the whole process of science is designed to overcome our natural tendency to want to believe things we like. It's kind of a shame that.

But so my paper now was published on a scientific journal. The editor is still alive on a body killing, not fired. So if people have some... a bit of courage. These problems can be solved. Well, in principle, that's right. And one of the ways to try and solve them is talk about them and have academics talk about them.

That's one of the purposes of the book, as I'll talk about at the end, because you talk about what we can do in your paper as well as other people. And, you know, one of the ways we can do is talking about this and get the community to realize what the issues are. But you point out that, of course, in 2018, you know, the idea of gender workshops was designed to just make advertisements more inclusive to encourage people, to the kind of things that all of us would like to do.

That sound good. We make sure we don't discourage people. But then things have become more restrictive. We went from sort of encouragement to quotas. And you want to talk about that a little bit? Well, so to me, I read in 2018, it was obvious that if they forbid the same truth, it's because they have some goal.

And now at that time, you know, if you say that the goal of this was getting quotas, you get fired as unethical. Now it's written on official job announcement. This job can only go if you self-identify as women or rationalized or LGBT2 plus 2S or something. So this means that...

Yeah, if you... Einstein, wants to apply to a physics position with this kind of quotas. He cannot, unless he decides, I am female. And then they can hire Einstein.

And I hear that about half of position in Canada research chairs. I like this. This is totally crazy. Totally crazy. Yes, I've written about that. And it is, yeah, it's a signing

quotas when requiring 50%, especially when it's actually even worse, because, you know, in principle it says, okay, let's have 50% women. They're 50% women in the world. But if the workforce contains 10% women, let's say, then requiring 50% women to have positions is clearly inappropriate because you're really, if you're worried about demographics, you should say that it should reflect the demographics of the distribution of the field. And in fact, what you say about quote is, I like the way.

you put it. You said, rather, senior physicists discriminate against young colleagues to seek absolution for sins they haven't committed by granting privileges to individuals who have not suffered discrimination. So the idea is young people come along. They're not guilty of anything necessarily. And one discriminates against one class because to someone make up for past wrongs by giving privileges to other people who really, you know, not only didn't suffer discrimination early on, but didn't, you know, do anything in particular to get those privileges. So it's an interesting way of thinking. Now, you point out, and you're not the first person to point out, that this kind of thinking is sort of based on what's called postmodernism,

which has roots in Marxism, the idea of oppressed and oppressors that all interactions can be seen as power interactions. Do you want to talk a little bit about, I don't want to spend a lot of time on but I know it's an issue that that is of interest to you. Do you want to spend a little time talking about that? Let me just say that. When I wrote about this, I got discouraged. People told me, you are a physicist. You should not write about gender.

You should not write about sociology and so on. And I wish I had the same success in physics as I had with this stuff. because what I wrote in this article now is a main topic. There is now the president of the United States who is acting and saying essentially along these lines. I even got some details right. And all of this was written before the elections. Yeah, it sounds crazy, but now it's a reality.

Well, I want to get to that near the end because I think the point about this that's really pointed out is that if the internal community doesn't solve the problem, then they're going to be external people who try to do it, but they won't do it in a way that really reflects scientific freedom. But we'll get there. I think, you know, you make the two simple points as we start talking about what we can do. First of all, you say, to understand current issues, one needs to move beyond the social constructive, postulate and consider the different groups follow approximately normal distributions with varying means and variances for relevant characteristics.

Some differences, after all, may be biological. You know, that's a fact. And you make a statement which shouldn't even need to be said. When I read it, I almost laughed because why do we need to say this? But it says, allowing free speech and science on these sensible topics would help prevent bigger ongoing mistakes. You'd think that that's something we should all know. But you really point your finger at the West, especially at the United States, arguing that really, you say U.S. academia and consequently Anglo-academia has become the main source of the problem.

You want to explain that? Well, so I have a part where I argue that the gender together with critical race theory and something else called decolonization is part of a political ideology. That's why it's been pushed using censorship,

violence and legal against everybody who opposes. And so what happened is that in the US this become institutionalized in universities. I see, somehow try to describe how this happened historically.

For example, this has not yet happened for example in my country. The U.S. started accepting professors paid by various sources while for some reason Italians don't like this. By the way, just to interject for a second, just to make it clear, you still have your job in Italy, right?

Yeah, I mean, you didn't... One. I only lost 70% of my salary. Okay, wow, okay. But you still have... But yeah, and did that come from the affiliation to CERN? Is that... Yes, yes.

Yeah. I know many European scientists who have affiliations to CERN and a lot of their salary comes from CERN to supplement their countries. But you still have your faculty position. in Italy. Probably it's better if I don't talk here. Okay.

Yeah, no worries. I don't want to further endanger you. But when you talk about the U.S., you did, I particularly liked something you said because when we talk about what's now become diversity, equity, inclusion, for most Americans who don't know the issue,

they would say, how could you be against diversity, equity, and inclusion? They're all things we're all in favor of, and of course they are. But you point out, DEI statements, diversity, equity, and inclusion, but they're Orwellian in the sense that the words don't mean what they say they mean, at least as they're applied. And I like what you said. These words, designed to obfuscate old liberal ideas and make them sound like kinder versions of liberalism, hide a precise political meaning. Equity means replacing equal opportunities with equal outcomes.

Diversity means replacing individual merit with group-based discrimination, and inclusion means excluding those who disagree. And I thought that that was a, that's a lovely quote, because of course I agree with you. And that's the reason many of us are speaking out about these issues is because we're not opposed to diversity, equity, inclusion, as most people would interpret those terms. It says they're being applied,

which is ultimately is discriminatory and against a meritocracy. And that's part of the problem. And of course, it's being attacked, as you pointed out, by the new administration in the United States. Before that, you do say there's a political takeover and quoted an article from the Atlantic, which said, the ideas of a radical vanguard are now the instincts of entire universities,

administrators, faculty, students. Group identity assigns your place in a hierarchy of oppression. Between oppress and oppressed, no room exists for complexity or ambiguity. And that's from a, it's from a, well-known article in the Atlantic. And that certainly, that is what motivated, I would say, just to make it clear, the group of people that I asked to contribute to this book to write this book, because these are internal problems. And as we get to what can be done, the way to solve these internal

problems is to try and approach the culture of what's going on at universities and work from within. And it's important that scientists and other scholars speak out. So let's go to the end of of your talk where you say what can be done. You said if academia recovers, the current period will be remembered as historically dire, akin to the legacies of Lysenko and McCarthy. What makes the current failure more shameful

is that it is self-inflicted within democracies. It could have been avoided with a bit more courage. The other ones were indeed external, externally inflicted. These are internally afflicted. And in what sense, I think that statement, it could have been avoided with a little more courage, a very important statement. I wanted to ask you to elaborate on that a little bit.

Well, so as I argue in my text, what happened was a political takeover of academia, where a group of activists started fighting against professors to get power, to get positions. of course, activist won and the way they did was to get enough power and next start attacking everybody there to dissent and then individually

professors prefaced to stay silent to avoid problems but in this way they got a huge collective problem and so essentially that's why I believe there is

no longer any internal solution. Now, institutions. Yeah. Well, I'm hoping, I mean, there may not be. I'm hoping that our book and other things like it where well-known scholars speak out will help encourage our colleagues to speak out. And ultimately, at universities, things can only change, that the faculty change, change things.

And until we get more, until the dominant part of the community speaks out in favor of free inquiry and open inquiry, it's not going to happen, I think. And I don't think it can be legislated from above, in my own opinion. In fact, your point, you make this point, which I think is really important. You say, yes, a lot of this happened because moderates could have

prevented the problem originally, but preferred to stay out of it. And that's, you know, you and I are both experiences. Most academics would rather just duck their heads and just go about their work and not be bothered by these things. And so I think most of my colleagues who weren't, you know, activists,

just said, oh yeah, well, okay, I'd rather not get involved. I'd rather keep below the radar so I don't get attacked, and I'd just go about my own problem, and then the problem gets worse. But you said something that was particularly prescient, I think, and you mentioned it before. You see, I concluded my 2018 CERN talk with the warning that politicized scientific institutions risk being involved in messy political battles.

These are now unfolding. In some states, political authorities started forbidding by law, the worst aspects of DEI or removing grievance studies, these actions risk conflicting with academic freedom. And I think that's one of the real lessons. We are seeing in, one could applaud certain things that have been done by, that have been done by the current administration in Washington or by various legislatures, but they're not the right solutions. I mean, yes, the solution isn't to forbid ideas you don't like. So the current administration would prefer to forbid talking about diversity, equity, and inclusion.

And in fact, the government in the state of Florida forbid, you know, courses on certain subjects to try and overcome this political takeover. But that's not the right solution because that's awful for universities. There's no way, I hope you would agree with me, government should not be involved in legislating what can or cannot be talked about. I understand their rationale, and the rationale is exactly what you talked about. And so the reaction to academics not changing the culture from within is that you risk external forces who have no interest in free inquiry, fundamentally, and no interest in open

debate. Instead, you risk encouraging them to shut down the debate and shut down the ideas they don't like so that they can only enforce the ideas they do like. That's what's been happening in the United States right now. In some sense, some people would argue the solution is at least as bad as the problem, but I don't know whether, you know, history will tell. But I think that's why I would argue that ultimately that kind of external pressure is, will, maybe the solution because it will cause faculty to realize that they need to at some point

fight for free speech, no matter what, rather than have ideas imposed from above. What do you think? Well, so there was no this authoritarian problem with the left-work ideology. Now there is an attempt from the top that, yeah, these two can be seen as authoritarian. And I also see an authoritarian attempt to go against the authoritarian attempt. know, if you try arguing with people, what the Trump is trying to do is the only possible attempt

they block you instantaneously. Yeah, yeah, it's okay. It's hard to have these conversations, but these are the kind of conversations we have to have. So I'm really happy that we're having them now and that we'll have these podcasts associated with the book

and that the conversations are in the book, people are in agree or disagree, but we should understand the situation. And I think we need, as I say, Ultimately, communication and discussion and debate are the only ways to resolve important questions. That's what scientists are based. Science is a social discipline based on a dialectic that allows open debate and open debate, not so you can hear other, so that the people whose ideas are free to speak about them, but so that you're free to hear other ideas and change your mind. And I like the last sentence of your paper, which I think summarizes things pretty well.

You said, achieving stability will require using free speech to maintain to mainstream the reason of the failure. Differences don't imply discrimination. And that's ultimately the point. When we can have this discussion rationally and intelligently, then we'll move forward. And I appreciate your bravery in saying it and your bravery in speech. speaking up and I certainly appreciate your piece in our volume and our discussion today. I want to thank you for being here. It was a pleasure to talk to you. And good luck. And good luck there. And maybe we'll one day get to meet in person instead of just virtually. But it's

been a pleasure. Thank you. Hopefully. Okay. Bye. Yeah. Thanks again. Hi. It's Lawrence again. As the Origins podcast continues to reach millions of people around the world, I just wanted to say thank you. you. It's because of your support, whether you listen or watch, that we're able to help enrich the perspective of listeners by providing access to the people and ideas that are changing our understanding of ourselves and our world and driving the future of our society

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