The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Niall Ferguson | The War on Science Interviews | Day 2

Episode Date: July 24, 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 29thElizabeth Weiss July 30thSolveig Gold and Joshua Katz July 31stFrances Widdowson August 1stCarole Hooven August 2ndJanice Fiamengo August 3rdGeoff Horsman August 4thAlessandro Strumia August 5thRoger Cohen and Amy Wax August 6thPeter Boghossian August 7thLauren Schwartz and Arthur Rousseau August 8thAlex Byrne and Moti Gorin August 9thJudith Suissa and Alice Sullivan August 10thKarleen Gribble August 11thDorian Abbot August 12thThe 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 last. 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 Budry, Abigail Thompson, John Armstrong, Sally Sattel, Solveig Gold, and Joshua Katz, Francis Wooderson, Carol Hoven, Janice Fiamengo, Jeff Horsman, Alessandro Strumia, Roger Cohen and Amy Wax, Peter Bogosian, Lauren Schwartz and Arthur Rousseau, Alex

Byrne and Modi Goren, Judith Sisa, and Alice Sullivan, Carleen Gribble, 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 will 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 has permeated universities. We'll proceed also to discuss issues in medicine. Sally Settel will talk about how social justice is 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, inclusion in academia and how it's restricting free inquiry and also restricting in many ways scientific merit at those universities. And finally, Doreen Abbott, the last contributor to our series, we'll 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, Sir Neil Ferguson, who I have known indirectly in many ways for a long time. It's been very little time with. It's great to be with you virtually now. And thank you very much for coming on. Thank you for allowing a contribution to the book, The War on Science, a wonderful contribution.

So I appreciate both your coming on and your contribution. It's great to be with you, Lawrence, and to have a glimpse through your window at Nova Scotia. Yeah, well, it's a lovely refuge. And I understand I'm glimpsing the UK behind you, but you are. In any case, speaking of the United Kingdom, I mean, you spend a lot of time in the United States. This is an origins podcast, and your contribution to the book is called The Treason of the Intellectuals. It's based on a piece you're released in the Free Press in 2020. and it's a wonderful piece that I want to get to. But I want to talk about your origins

and basically the different factors that led you to be writing this and the other things you're writing. We just talked and I learned you were born in Glasgow, which is actually much better than its reputation, in my opinion. But I don't know if you agree. The first question I have for you is your father was a doctor and your mother was a physics teacher.

And so I always like to ask people, why on earth didn't you go into physics? I'm the black sheep of the family. My sister did, and she's a physicist at Yale. Oh. And I was the awkward one who, despite actually doing pretty well at mathematics at school, insisted on reading history at Oxford. And that was because, I guess, partly I like the idea of particles with consciousness

would be more difficult. They are. And that's correct. It is very, very difficult to do social or historical physics with humans as the particles. But the other reason was reading Tolstoy as a schoolboy. And I was a voracious reader as a child. Still am. Still my preferred form of entertainment.

I'd rather read a book than watch a movie or listen to a podcast. And reading War and Peace when I was, I don't know, 13 or 14 or 15, At the end of war and peace, which is a wonderful novel, perhaps the greatest novel ever written about history happening to more or less ordinary people, at least Russian aristocrats, Tolstor asks a big question and the question is, what is the power that moves nations? Why did this all happen? Why did Napoleon manage to lead an enormous army of Frenchmen into Russia? Why did all these events unfold as they did? And I thought, that is actually the most interesting question. What is that power that moves nations?

I think I should study that. So I consciously broke away from the parental preference for physics and went to what people disparagingly call the humanities. Well, by the way, your sister is, I taught at Yale and fit in the physics department, but I guess we ever overlapped. I taught there a long time ago. You might have crossed her path as Kate Ferguson when she was doing her. PhD there and then for a time was at Penn.

And recently she and her husband Mark Lemon returned to Yale. And so the family is much more a science family. I am the outlier. And I think I should just own that. I'm not, I'm not ashamed. You know, you don't have to apologize. In fact, I have to say, I love history. and I actually, well, I share your interest in it.

I actually took time off from, I started doing history and physics, and I took a year off school to actually work on a history book when I was an undergraduate. And because it was the Communist Party in Canada and the Depression and all of those people were dying. Anyway, it's a long story, but. Well, I think the best educated, people can somehow straddle these worlds. And I'm in my long complaint, longstanding complaint has been that we're very bad at giving an education

that is simultaneously rooted in the scientific method, keeps people up to speed with their mathematics, gives them a sense of the way the natural world works at every scale, and introduces them to the great works of, of human civilization. If you can do both those things, then you're a truly educated person, but it's hard. It's hard, and unfortunately, nowadays, it's even harder as the canon, as people demand less and less of students. And, you know, it's interesting that you say that, and we'll get to it in a way, because history certainly is humanities, but for me, and people

accuse people like me of believing in something called scientism. I don't think so. It's the scientific method is just empirical evidence and critical thinking and reasoning. And really, I mean, that's applicable everywhere. That's an essential part of history. Yes. Good history, which requires evidence. And of course, there's interpretation. And as you point out, it's much more complicated. I tell people that's why I do physics. It's much simpler than most other things. We call it on experiments. There's only

one. Yeah, exactly. sample size of one. And for all these reasons, we can't do time travel, at least not so far, and other than in our imaginations. But I do think that the scientific approach has been fundamental to my work. I became an economic historian. Yes. Because at Oxford as an undergraduate,

I realized that I was about the only numerate historian. The rest of them had all kind of given up doing math. in their early teens, but in Scotland, one didn't do that. So I was really quite well trained as a mathematician, and I thought, well, here's an edge. If I do economic stuff, then at least I will be able to use data, however rough and ready, the historical data may be. And I became particularly attracted to financial history because in financial history, you can use data that contemporary is recorded.

There's lots and lots of trade data and tax data. going right back to the Middle Ages in most advanced civilizations. And so I was always attracted to the kind of history that would juxtapose what people were thinking at the time, which we can tell from their letters and diaries, with what was happening, which we can tell from customs revenues and things like that. And one of my tutors at Oxford was Gerald Harris,

who was a wonderfully dry medievalist. And he explained to me that medieval history was best understood through public finance and pipe rolls. And I kind of probably arrived at Oxford with romantic motions of knights in shining armor and damsels in distress. But within a very short space of time, I realized it was actually all about tax receipts. So that was my way into history. And I'm still a much more number crunching historian than most. Yeah, absolutely. I know that from having read you.

But you answered my next question, which is why financial history, I was wondering why you went into that area of business history. I was I was, I guess, inculcated with a respect for economics by reading Adam Smith at around the same time as I was discovering Tolstoy. And when I was trying to work out what kind of history to pursue, there was a dreadful moment when I nearly did my dissertation. on Viennese satire in the time of Karl Krauss. And the great Norman Stone, who was one of my advisors, said, you'll spend all your time trying to translate jokes into English, and they won't be funny, really do something economic instead. And I then chose to write on the German hyperinflation of the early 1920s,

we're figuring that if I was going to crunch numbers, then I should crunch the biggest possible numbers. And in hyperinflation, you get enormous numbers. And that just seemed inherently interesting. Yeah, no, I thought, well, as a cosmologist, I've always been a fan of big numbers myself. You get really big numbers in hyperinflation. And I'd learned some of the, I suppose, very basic skills of econometrics, just dealing with some of these very intractable data series that tended to break down at some point in 1923 when the statistics office would run out of money to pay the statisticians. But it was a very good thing to do early on.

And once I had picked up the skills of understanding what a price index is and understanding how, for example, a balance sheet would work under conditions of hyperinflation, was quite well set up to write some other financial history. And that led pretty naturally to the history of the Rothschild banks and then to the war books. So there was a kind of logic to it, even if in some ways I was just following my nose. Yeah, I mean, you've been able about a lot of different subjects. But your point about German hyperinflation may have answered my next question, which is why Germany?

I mean, you went to Germany after Oxford, didn't it? Yes. Well, the central problem of modern history is why did Germany go completely haywire and produce Hitler and the Third Reich? when in the 1920s, it seemed to be the most scientifically advanced society in the world, certainly with the best universities, where if you were, say, Oppenheimer, you had to show up. You had to do a tour of duty in Germany because that was where the real science was done. And so the central problem for anybody who's trying to understand modernity is why would such an advanced society,

which had the best universities and the most Nobel Prizes in the heart of, sciences. Why would it go so wildly off the rails as to produce a regime as catastrophic and evil as Hitler's Third Reich? So I wanted to work on that problem. I guess my generation of historians thought there were a finite number of interesting questions. One was, of course, the Russian Revolution. The other was Nazi Germany. And if you were kind of an East Theton and wanted a good life, you worked on Renaissance Italy. But those were the options, really, for graduate study. Nobody, at least in my generation, gave it nearly enough thought to East Asian or South Asian history.

Interesting. Well, of course, that's a wonderful segue to the piece. But before we do it, I would be remiss. I mean, part of what the book is all about is concern about what's happening in the African world, as you talk about your piece. but also the no cancel culture. And my understand, I don't know if it was your first real confrontation with it, was with your wife, I, or C. Alley, was disinvited from a commencement address. And I think you wrote about, did that cause you to write and think about what was going on at universities,

or had you already begun to be concerned? I was dimly aware prior to 2014 that things were not quite as I had imagined they would be. And I moved across the Atlantic, which was in 2002. I was as happy as could be in my early teaching positions at NYU and then at Harvard. I was in a kind of euphoric state because they seemed more dynamism, more energy. than there had been at Oxford in the 1990s. But I'd begun to pick up some signs of coming trouble. It wasn't until Ayan, my wife, Ayan Herssey Ali's experience with Brandeis,

that I fully grasped how cancel culture worked, though. And it was seeing this bizarre sequence of events in which she was first invited to give a commencement address at Brandeis and then publicly disinvited because of a kind of online petition signed by a motley crew of Islamists and professors of queer studies, that was for me the kind of wake-up call because that just seemed outrageous to treat somebody in that way, particularly Ayan, somebody whom we should all revere for courage

and a commitment to women's rights. So look, I'm an old-fashioned chivalry. exorious person and this insult to my wife made me pretty angry. Well, as it should, I think, yeah, absolutely. Well, I want to get to the piece, but there's one other question I have, you have moved across the Atlantic and you have changed institutions a lot. And I've changed institutions, but I wonder, is it because of seeking new energy and dynamism or is it because the institution,

ratio. I don't think one should do the same job for more than 10 years as a general rule. I mean, I know people who've spent their entire careers at Oxford or at Harvard and God bless them, but I'm not sure it's the most strategically stimulative way to build your career. And I had run out a little bit of energy and enthusiasm at Oxford by the late 90s. My sense was that it would be healthy to see how things worked on the other side of the Atlantic. This wasn't just brain drain driven by higher salaries. I had a strong sense that the intellectual energy around economic history and economics was at a higher level in the United States. And also that the big questions that I was interested in were being addressed in the United States in a more consequential way. than in the United Kingdom. Henry Kaufman, who was a big donor to NYU,

once pitched me with the following question. He said, you know, you seem to spend a lot of time writing about money and power. And I couldn't really deny that since I'd written a book about the Rothschilds and I'd written books about the World War. Yeah. And I said, no, you're right. He said, so why don't you come to where the money and the power are? And there I was sitting in Jesus College, Oxford, in, I suppose,

it was Tony Blair's Britain. And this question was running through my mind when 9-11 happened. And I was watching the collapse at the Twin Towers in my study in, I guess it's a Jacobian quad through a mullioned window. I could see the cord and I could see on my laptop the images from New York. And in a very, I suppose, Scottish way, I marched towards the sound of gunfire. And very soon after that, resigned my fellowship and accepted a job at NYU. Oh, fascinating.

Okay. Well, I did that segue after you'd done this beautiful introduction to the treason of intellectuals, of the intellectuals with your piece, which deals with aspects of how, in this case, that German academia played a role in the rise of the third right. And in fact, the epigraph of this says, anyone who is a naive, relief in the power of higher education to instill morality has not studied the history of German universities of Third Reich. And it would, and the title of your piece relates to a piece from 1927 from the eventual philosopher Julien Brenda. And, and, and he was condemning

at that time that exactly what he, well, very presciently what he thought was a dissent that would eventually, as you point out, lead to the Third Reich. Do you want to elaborate on that a little bit? Yes, Sir Bender's essay on the treason of the intellectuals was really focused on a European-wide tendency for academics and public intellectuals to align themselves with the radical right, though there were plenty who also were aligning themselves with the radical and undemocratic left. And I was impressed by the prescience of this piece because what's very interesting about Hitler's rise is how popular the Nazis are in the universities. I had been teaching at Oxford the Third Reich special subjects, which had allowed me to get quite familiar with the literature on the Nazi vote, Nazi party membership, the spread of Nazism from his early origins in the 20s. until it's coming to power in 1933.

One of the things that you quickly learn from the studies of the sort that I was reading is that people with university degrees, including professors, were relatively early to be won over by Hitler. And it was, in fact, less educated people, particularly Roman Catholics in southern Germany, who were sort of late if they ever switched over to supporting the regime. And so if you delve into the history of the then great universities, the Heidelberg, the Tübingen's Marburg, which there's a wonderful book about by Rudy Koshar, you realize that the environment of the German universities was highly conducive to the spread of Nazism,

partly because students were already in a radical right milieu that dated back to before the First World War. They had these fraternities, Bush and Shafton, which tended to be quite nationalistic. And professors, a significant number of professors were attracted to the Nazis because they were so repelled by the Weimar Republic, not just because it had in effect accepted Germany's defeat in World War I, but also because it stood for a kind of cosmopolitan democracy. And finally, there were career opportunities to be had because there were significant numbers of extraordinarily able Jewish professors as well as students in the German universities, as in the Austrian universities,

as in many European universities. And Nazism was a great way to get them out, to deprive them of their status and then of their jobs, always an attractive option for people who would like academic jobs. So this was for me very insightful. What it taught me, Lawrence, was that the most prestigious universities in the world in the 1920s, within a decade by the mid-1930s, were bastions of national socialism, with people willing to dedicate their careers to writing scholarly works that were supportive of the regime,

ranging from treatises on racial theory and the inferiority of Jews to Aryans to horrific dissertations later in the regime's history on the optimal use of dental fillings from the victims of the Holocaust. Exactly something you mentioned in the article. And I want to get to some of those examples because some of them are horrifying. But as a historian, of course, you use this example of history to point out. And I thought, I used to think it was Mark Twain's quote, but Steve Pinker told me that I was wrong the other day, that this famous quote that history may not repeat itself, but it sure rhymes a lot. But Twain didn't say that. It's not clear who first said it.

But Twain actually has a line about history being like looking through a kaleidoscope. And as you turn the collidoscope, the patterns recur. And that's actually a more vivid image, but somehow it doesn't trip off the tongue in the way that history doesn't repeat itself. It rhymes. But in any case, you know, use this example. And you say a century later, American Antigem has gone in the opposite political direction, leftward instead of right word. But it's ended up much in the same place. The question is whether we, unlike the Germans, can do something about it.

And that's, you know, that's the purpose of your piece. It's also the purpose of the book, which is to make it clear that there's a problem. talk and have people from within academia, not people outside criticizing it, and also people from a variety of ends of the political spectrum. But, but, you know, people from inside pointing out the problems and the cultural problems and what we need to do about it. And, and, but this historical example is sobering and I want to go through it. In fact, but the, you know, in fact, you say for nearly 10 years, I marveled at the treason of my fellow intellectuals and the willingness of trustees, donors, and alumni to tolerate the politicization of American universities.

universities by a liberal coalition of woke progressives, adherence of critical race theory, and apologists for Islamic extremism. And part of this was involved in something, which is now known as DEI, diversity, equity and inclusion. And as you know, I'm sure as someone like me who's talked about this, when you say that there's a problem with the people say, how can you be against diversity, equity, inclusion? All those words sound good, but they're a cover for something else. And I assure this piece, which was written, I guess, in December, 2023, was written partly in response to the October 7th events.

And the response, of course, of Harvard and Klutgin Gay and the political follow-up that happened after that. Do you want to explain that a little bit? Yes. the path that led from council culture circa 2014 to nine years later, the extraordinary scenes on college campuses in the wake of October 7th, 2020, was a long and winding one.

Let me try and summarize what I think happened. Over time, political activism in the classroom in the department committee room became more and more tolerated and entirely skewed to the left. And so I would hear colleagues overtly discriminating on political grounds in meetings about appointments, which was, I thought, shocking, but it was also not challenged by many people. this then was accompanied by discrimination on racial grounds dressed up in the language of diversity, equity and inclusion, which it was hard to be against, as you just said, because who could possibly be against those things? And it took a little time to explain to people that, as in all authoritarian illiberal movements, language was being perverted because these three things, in fact, were being, used to mean the opposite. The pursuit was not of diversity, but of uniformity. There was actually a

distinct lack of due process, never mind equity in much that I saw going on. And the people that were being excluded, not included, were anybody who dissented from these progressive trends. It reached the point that Harvard, where I was teaching from 2004 to 2016, was a 95% liberal institution. And close to that percentage amongst undergraduates, it effectively became an appendage of the Democratic Party in a whole range of ways. Now, I was uncomfortable as I realized this was going on, uncomfortable about the admission system where it became obvious that some discrimination was going on. against Asian candidates. And yet, whenever I would raise questions about these matters, I was stunned by how few of my colleagues would agree with me,

that there might be an issue. There was a kind of consensus that it was good, that it was fine, and that I should, you know, bow down before my woke overlords. And I'm not inclined to do that. Of course, we all, who all of us who kind of spoke out, would get into trouble because there was a playbook for dealing with the dissident elements. First of all, you had to make clear that they were dreadful people morally in whatever way you could, whether in the student newspaper or on social media.

If you could find some character defects, that was ideal because you didn't want to have an argument with them. What most impressed me about the progressive woke left was there. deep reluctance to engage in argument where character assassination was preferred. So there was an atmosphere that became increasingly uncomfortable in the classroom even. And I suddenly realized that the university I'd been attracted to back in the early 2000s had changed. It was a place where people were self-censoring. it was a place where that line between politics and scholarship that Max Weber drew so clearly

had been entirely blurred, it was a place where the pursuit of excellence was no longer the top priority, whereas to my mind, the whole point of the university is you give people lots of freedom in order that they pursue the greatest possible intellectual achievement. And all of this was just crumbling away, rotting away. I think the rot really began before 2014, but I became alive to it around about that time. And so there came a point when it just wasn't, in fact, prudent for me and Ayan to stay at Harvard. And we moved to the Hoover Institution at Stanford. And I have to admit that was partly because I didn't think Harvard could guarantee my wife's security in the face of threats from the Islamists that were directed at her.

To be fair, the Kennedy school stuck up for Ayyarn's right to teach, even when the Islamists tried to shut her down. But the Harvard attitude to security was really quite shocking. The Occupy movement was able to deliver a somewhat insulting, so-called gift directly to my office. They videoed this. And the reception has essentially told them. exactly where my office was. If they'd had more malicious intent than they had, it could have ended badly. So we had to move somewhere where there was at least a consciousness of the need for security. And that's what we did in 2016. But I wish it had really solved the problem,

because we found that Stanford had all the same pathologies that Harvard had. And then I realized, oh, no, it's actually all the universities. And Hedrolux Academy and Greg Luchianos organization fire, the foundation of individual rights and expression, they showed that what I'd experienced at Harvard and was also encountering at Stanford was across the board that all the universities had problems of undergraduates reporting that they were censoring themselves and couldn't speak freely in class, academics, saying that they were finding it impossible to pursue certain lines of inquiry. And that was, for me, a revelation. The whole system had become at some level rotten. Well, exactly. It's because.

become ubiquitous. And, you know, I know in the piece, you frame, that's what was so, in some sense, it's so infuriating about clotting gay's tolerance of the anti-Semitic diatribes at Harvard as an example of tolerating free speech, which would have rung a little less hollow had everywhere else in the university free speech been tolerated. Examples, you know, I mean, that you don't talk about, but I mean, people getting rid of for reasons like Roland Friar at Harvard, who, you know, they've found a reason to censor him, but he'd been speaking about some politically incorrect things at the same time and misgendering. And even, and one of the, one of the authors of another author are piece, Carol Hoeven, who was basically removed from a position for saying that there were two

sexes. I mean, that, when you, when you, when you frame that against someone, who says kill all the Jews. Oh, well, one, we should tolerate one, but two sects. No, no, no, no, no. I think it was the sudden discovery of quasi-1st Amendment rights on campus in the wake of October 7th that was most galling when Claudine Gay and other administrators had been quite clearly clamping down on academic freedom. The Roman Friar case is the most shocking one, though, Carol Hovens was also bad, but Rollins was a, for me, a particularly enraging case because he knew that he faced pushback and hostility for the work that he was doing, particularly the work on police violence.

Because the key paper challenged the fundamental premise of Black Lives Matter, which was that the police disproportionately used lethal violence against African Americans. And Roland showed that that wasn't true. Yeah. And as an African-American who had grown up very much on the wrong side of the tracks, Roland was, for me, the shiny example of what we were getting right with respect to diversity. He had a remarkable career from, you know, a lowly college football team through the University of Chicago to Harvard. He's a brilliant man.

Harvard should have cherished the talent. that Roland brought. And instead, they went after him. But they didn't go after him in quite the way that he and I'd expected. They went after him with a bogus Me Too case based on entirely spurious evidence. That's what you should never have been countenance. And the fact that that case was pursued to the point that he was suspended without pay for two years and had his lab shut down. on the basis of a couple of jockey text messages,

that told you that those involved were bad people, very bad people. And they should not be forgiven for that. I know that Claudine Gay drove the case against Roland very hard. That's why I brought it up, exactly. So, you know, you've got me onto a subject by which I feel very strongly. We've all had our run-ins, I think, over the years. but that for me was the most outrageous case.

And it revealed a really interesting thing about the progressives who drove that case, that their willingness to go along with people bearing false witness, their complete disregard for due process, their readiness to leak information to the New York Times as well as the Harvard Crimson. It was an outrageous performance and it really should have consequences, much greater consequences than there have been for those who were responsible. And, you know, I think the other point here is that, and it's relevant. You know, we may have gone off in the tension, or not really, it's relevant because it's not just the activists.

It's the higher level institutional leaders who recognize, who are willing to find a pretense to easily dismiss something that might seem embarrassing for them into the social media. And on a dime, in this case, Roland Friars work on the police, well, that, you know, there's going to be a pushback on that. Let's find a way to remove this problem. and it happens all and that the fact as you as we'll discuss that extremely

distinguished academics are willing to also sort of move in the direction of what's convenient politically is it there's a long history of that and in fact one of the contributors of this book who I just was speaking to Joshua Katz who was at Princeton

was also removed in a very similar way that is another case about which I think for speaking out that was another outrageous case. And it's, you know, they'll find, so the idea is that, you know, universities, I view, and this is a personal sense, but I think I get a lot of evidence for this,

that one of the real problems, and we'll talk about this, because at the very end of your piece, you talk about, is removing leaders enough, but, but institution leaders not only don't have backbone, but the willingness to stand up for what a university is all about versus, versus, is trying to avoid politically inexpedient things that might affect donors is a real problem. And so, you know, you're right. There's a activism in the academy and on outside, which is a real problem.

But if as long as leaders, until leaders are willing to have some backbone and stand up for what universities are all about, I think it's a huge problem. Well, I came to the conclusion that there was a chronic problem of governance. that in all the universities, no matter what their history or institutional design, there wasn't really much that could be done if the tenured faculty or the administrators decided to become entirely illiberal and to turn the university into some kind of political rather than scholarly enterprise, it was the lack of any real checks and balances that struck me. It wasn't enough, I think, to say trustees aren't doing enough. Because the entire Harvard corporation who is

responsible for the fiasco of Claudine Gay's presidency and not one of them, as far as I could see, has done the honorable thing and resigned, as they all should. So I concluded that there needed to be some innovation in university governance. And it was clear to me that it was not going to happen in the established universities. And that was what led to the foundation of the University of Austin, where it seemed possible to start over and to come up with the system of governance which protected academic freedom, ruled out discrimination, and also created due process by having a judicial or judicial branch that could check the errors that might be.

be made by by a president or by or by faculty. So I'm very committed to that shift. It is, of course, extremely hard to start a new university and it's supposed to be the incumbents of a great racket that they don't really want new entrants spoiling. But I don't think there's any other way because what happened in the United States in the last 20 years was that nearly the entire education sector went off the rails and in no case was the really very effective countering. Even when it was obvious that discrimination was going on, that there was no due process, there was not much recourse. And indeed, one of the things that most struck me in the last decade or so was the way

that students as well as faculty who fell foul of the progressive bureaucracy was, would be put in a kind of Kafkaesque investigation, which could drag on interminably jeopardize their career prospects as well as the sanity. And it was that lack of due process when ordinary students fell foul of the machine that most convinced me that was a governance problem. Yeah. Well, there's – but I think, you know, when it comes back to me, as you said, there's not much you can do if the administration and the faculty become a liberal. In this case,

and this will come back to a question I have for you at the end of this, but in the case of most universities, I don't think it's that most faculty are a liberal. I think most faculty just don't want to, I just want to keep their heads down. And you talk by that a little bit, and again, we'll get back to the German history, but, but, you know, they'd just rather avoid it and do their work. And I think that's the general, frankly, the general faculty behavior is not bravery, but just to keep your head down and hope that people don't notice what you're doing so you can get on with what you're doing. I think that's the kind of structural weakness of academics as a profession. Yes.

That we all have a desperate longing to be left alone in our studies or laboratories to get on with our research. and given that with every passing year, either teaching or administration take bigger bites out of that research time, it's an understandable impulse. But what it means is that the governance breaks down if the faculty are notionally some kind of legislative body, this is the Republic of Letters ideas, where faculty believe that they are some parliamentary element in the university's body. The trouble is if large numbers of the MPs don't turn up because they're in their labs or studies, then an activist minority can quite quickly direct what the faculty committees do. And that the battles over policy on diversity, equity and inclusion were fought in committees.

and the decisions that led to discrimination. And I think one should use that term, because I'm absolutely clear that discrimination went on in broad light of day in multiple ways at multiple universities. This was all possible because very large numbers of academics just checked out and acted like it really wasn't their job to show up and vote against these things. That kind of quieted. or apathy or whatever wants to call it.

Of course, characterizes behavior in authoritarian regimes throughout history. And I think if one had a time machine and could go back to Marburg in the mid-1930s, the streets wouldn't be full of professors doing the Hitler salute, but rather professors scaring from library to study, hoping not to be asked. a political question, they might get them into trouble. That's right. Okay. But if at some level, universities become a center for activism instead of scholarship and education,

it's a problem. There's a quote that I came to mind when I was reading your piece that I have to ask you. And it's from Larry Summers, another person who was driven out at Harvard, the former president of Harvard, who said, and it's, I put at the beginning of the book, that universities need to abandon the concept that they have a central role in moral education. I wanted to ask you about your perception of that quote because, well, let me just ask you. Well, I think that moral education is a part of the package. I mean, the point of a university, as the name suggests, is that it encompasses a whole range of disciplines. And the ideal university education would give you at least enough philosophy. to be aware of some of the ethical problems that you're likely to confront in life.

I think the mistake was to think that the presidents and provost and other administrators were part of an explicitly political or sociological project to which all other activities should be subordinated. Yeah, exactly. I mean, one needs to study moral philosophy. It's hard to study philosophy without at least part of your time being spent on ethics. But you also need to take a trip over to the government department, the politics department, and look a little bit at representative government and study politics.

And you should study religion too. In an ideal world, you do all of the above. But you study it as a scholar, dispassionately, not with a political prejudged position that you're seeking to impose. And this was the confusion that I saw happening on a regular basis. Exactly that. And it begins with, we can't hire him. He's a conservative. Yeah.

That's part of it, exactly. but I think it's the idea that there are certain, there are certain claims about the world that can be questioned and that are, that are, and that you want to inculcate people to believe that. You know, when that quote, it's not, I agree with you. It's not that I think universities, the goal of universities is hoping that people make good moral decisions, but, you know, there's an old statement. We want to teach people how to think, not what to think.

Yes. And I think that's the point that the hope is that if you educate people enough, they'll make good decisions and they'll be better citizens and all the rest, but not tell them what being a better citizen is in terms of what, you know, this belief versus that belief. Now, to get back to the, because we talked about how most faculty, as you say, in Marburg, maybe we're scurrying, hiding in the library, but the thing that that is, is striking about your piece, one of the many things,

is that it's not just that. It's that it's that the academy and leading academics were strident. and among the leading people to support the nonsense, the worse than nonsense, the horrific things that were going on. I was taken by, you know, the first example of Weber, who I, you know, there's this quote, in a democracy, the people choose a leader whom they trust,

and the chosen man says, now shut up your mouth and obey me. And the people, the parties are no longer free to interfere with the leader's business, this notion of an acceptance of an autocratic, rule. And then many of the examples you give later of individuals. And maybe I'll just, you know, there's so many I wanted to go through, but we've taken more time talking about important concepts. But the examples you mentioned earlier of people, leading people

who, who, you know, Laura says, right down to the last deepest fiber in myself, I belong to the furor in his wonderful movement. And putting, and German think tank, working on this and as you point out, people writing scholarship on how to get gold from bones, that this tendencies of academics to support actively the leading political correctness, which then was Nazism and now in many ways is, you know, I don't like the term woke, but is critical social justice, if you want to say. I think the historiography of the Third Reich shows how this works. It was clear what Hitler's worldview was, even if it was not written up in a tremendously

sophisticated way. And so one worked towards the furor. This is the phrase that Ian Kershal makes much of in his excellent two-volume biography. And many academics worked towards the furor. So historians would write books illustrating. why it was that the German folk had a mission to colonize Eastern Europe far into what was then the Soviet Union, because historically these had in fact been alien or Germanic lands. There's so much of this politicized scholarship.

I remember wandering around the library at the University of Hamburg in the 1980s when I was a graduate student, looking at all the dust-covered volumes from the 1930s and 40s that were still there, but nobody dared touch because they were full of this kind of thing with terms like Germantum in the title. So there's a pretty impressive body of pseudo-scholorship that is essentially providing Nazism with the software. think of the ideology as the operating system, which is racial hierarchy and its assumptions

about what needs to be done to achieve Leibensraim, living space and racial purity, what's interesting about the German universe is that they really produce lots and lots of software, lots and lots of texts that explain how you actually carry this out. The German legal profession, the legal academics supply all the really quite complex legislation necessary to turn Jews into second-class citizens and so forth. So what we see in the 30s and going into the 1940s is the universities as agents of an illiberal and indeed genocidal regime. What is always interested me is that it's incredible and beyond the comprehension of today's

American academics, that a comparable process could have been at work on their watch in their universities, because their immediate reaction is to say, how dare you compare us with that dreadful period? And my response is, is there a very huge difference if in the end, the undergraduates of Harvard and Columbia are marching through the campuses. chanting anti-Semitic slogans. You've arrived at the same destination by different routes, but you have the same sense of moral purity

that they had in the 1930s. You've failed to understand how utterly you've betrayed the true academic vocation. And that true academic vacation, I think Weber spelt out very well in the lectures and politics and sciences vacations. They're separate. Weber has this great line about he who enters the lecture hole should leave aside his politics.

And I, when I was teaching at Harvard, would try very hard to make it hard for the students to guess what I thought politically. I didn't want that to be in any way knowable from the way I taught the history of Western civilization, which was one of the outline courses I used to teach. But to my consternation, it became virtuous to engage in avert political discrimination. To say at a faculty meeting, we cannot hire this person because this person is a conservative. That, which to me was a kind of shocking thing to say, was a sign of real revolutionary virtue. So that was the cultural shift that struck me. Not that I want to say that these things are identical.

Clearly, the path is different in the United States. The United States is a democracy. The hostility to wokeism and to progressive excesses has produced a political backlash and led to the re-election of Donald Trump. And Trump is waging a war of his own now against Harvard. Yeah. So the analogy is, of course, not intended to be a perfect one, but I do think those who steered Harvard onto the rocks of a liberalism and discrimination who now turn around

and want to pose as the heroes of the drama resisting wicked President Trump, I think should try to live more in truth and recognize that they brought this upon the moment. themselves. And if they had run the university according to the fundamental principles of good academic governance, of academic freedom, the right of professors to say things that might be shocking. Because how else does the paradigm ever get shifted? I mean, that's surely at the heart of the scientific enterprise that the great shifts are at first shocking and against the consensus and also that we should prioritize above all else excellence. I mean, if we lose sight of those things, I think what you see at Harvard is where you end up with a plagiarist as president

who's published nothing of any value. Yeah. Well, in fact, actually, yes. And you point out that, I mean, it's not lost on you or in the central piece of the article is that the result of this was to lose, in this case, Jewish professors, but, you know, was to for these, you know, these German universities, which had been the envy of the world in the 20s and 30s, by the time of the 40s and certainly after the war, we're no longer, you know, took years to, we're no longer, we're backwaters. Because, because there were, in this case, people left or were removed. And, and, and I think it's interesting to see, there is, we're seeing as a scientist.

and I've written about this, that where there are committees, now there's two ways in which people are leaving academia, good people, at least in the United States. One is because of reaction to environments that they can't in which they are not free to speak

and they go somewhere where they can just do their work. There's a famous example now in the United States of Australia that shocked me of a chemist who moved to China because he felt freer to speak in the laboratory in China about whatever he wanted to than he did in Australia at the time. But in this case, in the case of Germany, it was systematic removal of Jews. In the case of, it's not just, you know, what may have begun as sort of not hiring conservatives moved with

the level of DEI to not hiring people who are good because they're the wrong identity. And, and, you know, they're famous examples that, which I've given and others of, you know, of universities, bureaucracies in Berkeley, for example, of, in biology of, of removing 76% of the candidates for biology positions on the basis of they're not basically signing the right kind of loyalty oath to DEI before you look at the research. And you look and you say, well, all of these departments now are agonizing about that, about whether people are sufficiently anti-racist. In Singapore and China and elsewhere,

people are just trying to do science and they're doing it and they're being able to do it. And it's so you see that a similar potential impact that as Germany removed itself as a scientific leader, that the West could easily do the same by its fixation on keeping out merit and good, and open scholarship and open questioning and curiosity-driven research. I think the lesson of the German case is that great universities can become mediocre universities

if they make Faustian pacts with the realm of politics. It's not that Heidelberg doesn't exist or too being vanished. They're still there. They're just not in the rankings. They're not making major contributions. And that fate can very well before the elite universities of the United States. They go down by a different path, but they go down. And I think that's quite likely, actually, because the damage that's been done in the last

decade or so is quite hard to undo. It's hard to imagine a university president having the courage and the necessary power to get rid of the monstrous regiment of progressive administrators, the enormous numbers of people hired in recent years to police thought and speech on campus. And it's hard for me to imagine how the tenured faculty can be reshaped to be a more intellectually diverse group than they have become, because they are by definition tenured.

So I think it's quite hard to fix. And what's being done by the Trump administration, I don't think really helps because it's such a bazooka that's being fired at Harvard when a scalpel would have done better that in fact the bad elements at Harvard will just dig in and wait for the political cycle to reach 2028. and carry on posing as the successful resistance to Trump. So I think the fate that lies ahead is in fact to be surpassed by other institutions. And if you're right, Lawrence, and a significant number of scientists choose to go elsewhere

because the conditions of work are preferable, then that poses a threat not just to the elite universities in the United States, but to the United States itself. Exactly, because the position in the United States is well known, has been based on generations earlier curiosity driven research that's driven at least 50% of the GNP of a country. And I hesitate to say that to a financial historian. But, you know, there's been a lot of studies that show that.

But, you know, it's interesting. You've got a wonderful segue to the end of your piece where you said it will take a lot more than a few high-profile resignations to reform the culture of America's elite universities, largely because of the armies of DEI. Now, I did want to spend the last few minutes talking about post-your piece and Trump. I mean, so Trump, and I wrote a piece early on, I was astounded at how quickly, in this case it was related to, I think, the Department of Energy or, or some edicts, executive orders that did attempt to dismantle those armies of DEI people. And at the time, I was shocked that in principle it could be done. You've already alluded to the fact that, and I want to go, because I think Trump has created even more damage in a different way. And it may be an area where you and I disagree, which I hope we'll get to if we do.

but do you think that the executive orders and such are enough to get rid of at least the ingrained bureaucracy of the I, which I agree with you is the major problem because university presidents come and go, faculty come and go, but bureaucracies only grow. And right now they dominate in power, or certainly a few years ago, they dominated the power having been at a university. You could see that everyone was, they determined what happened. Do you think the Trump executive orders and what's happening now can actually potentially dismantle those bureaucracies?

I think some of it is probably good in the sense that the administration has exercised powers that I think it legitimately has, given that so many universities receive large amounts of federal funding to try to require that these DEI bureaucracies are dismantled. I think that's broadly good because they weren't going to be dismantled spontaneously by the universities. And indeed, what's fascinating is the readiness of the universities to try simply to relabel these bureaucracies and keep the game going. I think it's also good that the problem of discriminatory.

in admissions and appointments has been identified and that legal challenges are being mounted there, I think some of the universities were very vulnerable to a Bob Jones type case. I think it would have been quite straightforward to show that discrimination had gone on at, say, Harvard on a different basis from the segregationist discrimination at Bob Jones, but certainly enough discrimination to be in violation of civil rights law and therefore to justify removing the tax-exempt status. So there was some, I think, great material to work with there. What one can't condone is the claim of the administration that it can somehow run the universities from Washington, D.C. That's a complete case of overreach.

And I think it's self-defeating because it's so clearly indefensible. Therefore, one has to say in a rather wishy-washy way that like the curate's egg, parts of it are good. But parts of it are bad. And I do wish there had been somewhat better design. Because here the public is, I think, strongly behind the administration. I think one can't overstate the extent to what. which the public was truly fed up with DEI and the excesses of the progressive left. And so the administration was on strong political ground and it was dealing with institutions

that were tremendously vulnerable because of the things that they had done. So to bring a bazooker to this fight when really well-crafted litigation was required was, I think, a mistake and ultimately counterproductive. Well, here we agree completely, the idea of Zuka rather than the scalpel. The fact that, look, there was a problem, and you deal with the problem by attacking the problem, but not by destroying the system. And the reaction, the assumption that, yes, there's a lot of openness in universities, and therefore universities are by definition bad, and all faculty at university are definition bad,

is a tragedy. And actually, I think it's worth pointing out, because when this book, comes out with title of war on science. I know I already seen a pushback online. How can you talk about this war in science? There's another big war in science going. And I think it's important to recognize that it is. It's a very different kind. I see it as an external war. The other war is an internal war. It's harder to, you know, the culture of universities are harder to change. And that's why I think it needs, I felt it needed public statements by academics and internally to speak about it, which is why I really wanted to produce this book.

But I actually just wrote a piece, partly motivated by your piece. I see, actually, frankly, and I want to see if you disagree with me here, I see a greater danger in this new war on science, specifically because what the administration is doing is saying all university research is bad, and we're therefore going to basically end support of science, fundamental science. real first rate science. Harvard may have problems. It may just it did discriminate against white Asian males. It it it allowed rampant anti-Semitism. But the but the really good faculty at Harvard were going on about their work and the scientists in particular were doing great

Harvard as a great institution of science and other what places are. And if you say we're going to get rid of it all you throw the not only do you throw the baby out with the bathwater, but you risk, in fact, doing, I think, exactly what was done in the examples you give in Germany. If you wholesale end support of what's really good, for whatever reason, whether it's Judaism or wokeness or whatever, if you destroy the scientific infrastructure, you're hitting the really good faculty, not just the progressives. The example that really hit me was a colleague, a former colleague of mine in Harvard, who's an exceptional physicist who wrote that he'd had research grants for 35 years and now the National Science Foundation had canceled his, along with their wholesale cancellation

of other things. And when you think about that, I think it risks the United States basically. Once you do that, I think you say the future is China or Europe or somewhere else. And so I made that connection interesting to what had happened to German universities today. And so far I found the conventional, the Times and the Wall Street Journal did not want to make a connection of what's going on to Germany. I've submitted to the free press. It'll be interesting to see what happens. But I wonder if you agree with me on this or not or whether you disagree with me.

Well, I think one war on science has led to the other. Exactly. I agree. And what's striking to me is that colleagues and indeed relations like my sister who lament the slash and burn disruption of science funding are reluctant to admit that they were in the laboratory and not at the faculty meeting when we were at peak wokeness. It was, to me, very striking during the years of the great wokening. that when one was being publicly flayed, the silence from one's colleagues was deafening.

Yeah, silence was deafening. And so one war has led to the other, by allowing universities to be politicized, by allowing what happened in the 2010s to go on, a generation of eminent scientists are now paying paying a price for their unpolitical passivity. I don't condone this at all because I agree with you that if we tear up the research funding of particularly the pure science that it's never going to get done in Silicon Valley, it's a huge self-inflicted wound, particularly at the time when the United States is clearly in a second Cold War. with a more sophisticated rival than the Soviet Union was.

People's Republic of China may not be quantitatively as good at science as the United States, but it can really do it at a scale. And the sheer scale of the investment in research and development is already beginning to pay dividends. For us, at the same time as they are ramping up their R&D to do this, is extraordinary to the point of suicidal. But those who lament this second war on science were absent, were not in sight when the first war was being waged. And so I hear their lamentations with a certain bittersweet ambivalence. My sense is that the fight that had to be fought was back in the 2010s when fundamental principles,

of academic freedom and meritocracy were being compromised by activists who were given carte blanche to engage in discrimination. Where were you all? Where the hell were you all when this was happening? And now you come to me and say, wicked Trump has cancelled my grant. And my response is, what goes around comes around. There were probably plenty of scientists running around in the rubble in 1945, lamenting the fact that their laboratory had been bombed flat

by the Royal Air Force. And the response at that point was you didn't do much to stop Hitler if I remember rightly you were a party member. So don't come crying now. This is the problem about the historical process that one damn thing

leads to another. And what goes around comes around. And if you sit back, and let the Claudine Gaze run Harvard. You don't have really much recourse when Donald Trump comes along with his bazooka. Yeah. Well, that's, I mean, certainly one can say, yes.

I guess there's no doubt about that. I guess what saddens me is that the difference between this bazook and what was going on is that even as much as I, and for years have detested what was been going on and lack of academic freedom, due process, etc. Open inquiry, free speech. I felt at least that I knew somewhere in the heart of the university

there was good work being done. Yeah, but Lawrence, there was also a ton of bad work. Oh, there wouldn't be a crisis of replication. There wouldn't be a crisis of replication if there wasn't a lot of garbage. There was a lot of garbage. But now I kind of worry that now I kind of worry that the, you're right, the reaction to this is extreme and but I I I it worries me that it's it's it's going to just I felt that there was a nip a nugget that could be saved and if we get rid of that nugget I'm worried I'm certainly worried

about the future in the United States and um of research and and in the west and and we will see but you're right we we we perhaps the lesson of history is that we should have had taken the lesson from history. And one of the, I think one, I'll paraphrase, I think one of the last lines of one of the pieces in the book, but it's more or less that the price of academic freedom is internal vigilance. But I think, I think at some level, this is the problem. And I'm very happy that you, as extremely happy that you are part of this group of people are willing to speak out at a time when this was written before Trump came in, at a time when not many people would speak out. And I think, I have always felt that if one's going to change the culture, at some point, one has to get

distinguished academics willing to speak out, and you're certainly one. And I thank you very much for having contributed. And I, the only problem, Lawrence, is that you are now going to have to do a second volume, war on science two. Yeah, that's right. In which the same contributors can opine on what we now see. And I think, I think I'm not entirely same at facetiously. I think you probably do need to weigh in. I have already written an essay about the Trump war on Harvard. Yeah. Because I think those of us who condemn the war on science in its woke form,

have to condemn the war on science in its MAGA form, that kind of follow-up, I think, is something we're bound to do. Well, we'll get involved. We're both right. And it's wonderful to have had this chance to chat with you. And if the book allowed us to have this chat, I'm really happy for the incredible amount of work of hurting 39 cats. You did a lot of herding, and you probably wanted.

I imagine you want to curse me for suggesting a second volume. The minute you said, my heart sank, exactly. But thank you very, very much for, as I say, contributing that piece and for this discussion, which is wonderful. And I look forward to the chance to talk again. Absolutely. And maybe when Volume 2 or maybe down in Texas or wherever. But thank you.

That would be great. Thanks, Lawrence. 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. 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 in the 21st century. If you enjoyed today's conversation, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also leave us private feedback on our website if you'd like to see any parts of the podcast improved. Finally, if you'd like to access ad-free and bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Originsproject.org. This podcast is produced by the Origins Project Foundation as a non-profit effort committed to enhancing public literacy and engagement with the world by connecting science and culture. You can learn more about our events, our travel excursions, and ways to get involved at originsproject.org. Thank you.