The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Peter Boghossian | The War on Science Interviews | Day 16

Episode Date: August 9, 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 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, will 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, 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, Peter Bogosi, it's always good to talk to you. It's nice to see you again, even afar. I hope you're doing well. Thanks. I'm doing great. Thanks for having the conversation with me. We're far away from me, but I hope we can be together in real life sometime soon. I want to. I'm very happy when I can list it that. Anyway, I'm also particularly happy that you contributed to this volume of the war on science, a rather pugnacious piece, if I may say. And I'm glad you took the time to do this. But before we get to your piece, which is called understanding why plagiarists are not fired from Veritas to DEI, this is an origins podcast. And even though we've talked before, I like to talk a little bit about your background.

Sure. You grew up in Boston. What part of Boston? I grew up outside the city in a little town called Norwood, and I lived there until I was 18. And so were either your parents educated? Do they encourage you to read or anything like that? I grew up in a very bookish family. My mother was constantly reading. My father had a master's degree in civil engineering and public administration. Ah. Yeah. So he was an engineer, civil engineer. He was a civil engineer. Okay. So you're not, yeah, you're first in your family, put a college or anything like that. Yeah. And my grandparents were all immigrants to the United States. And so I grew up with a immigrant mentality about grit and hard work. Yeah.

Your parents wanted more for you that as all they, they wanted you to do better than them. But they nevertheless had least in it. Your mother went to college too or no? Yeah, she went to college. And I was, you know, I was very, I don't want to see resentful, but I was a little bitter every time my dad would correct my grammar or he would talk. And I remember when he got used to get mad at me because I would slack off. You know, as I said, he was a civil engineer and he would make me dig ditches.

And he would say things like, if you don't, you like this, and I'd say, no, he said, well, then get an education. And so. Oh, that's good. That's great. That's a great. Oh, I like that. Okay.

You don't like this? Get an education. That's wonderful. Yeah. So if your dad was an engineer, I'll ask you the question that I ask most people, which is, because I can't understand why people don't go into science. Why didn't you go into science? I was never a math guy. My father was really good at math. Like he would have a deck of cards and he would go, he would just say stop and he would say stop.

And he would tell me the sum of the numbers. Wow. Wow. Wow. That's amazing. So yeah. You did, I shouldn't say you didn't do science because my understanding is you did an undergraduate major in psychology. Is that right?

Yeah, that's kind of bogus. That's soft science. That's what it says, you know. It was just an undergraduate major in everything or nothing or what was it? No, it was psychology, but psychology is a soft. I mean, you have to know. It's a very soft science. You didn't go into the real science.

I agree with you there. Yeah. Yeah. And so it was the math that held you back. But, okay. It's just that I just didn't find it interesting. Yeah. Oh, interesting.

Now, well, we'll get to that because, of course, math is an important part of some elements of philosophy, the logic in particular. Correct. I'd say math, but I'd say that kind of reason. I published a piece on that in the Philosopher's magazine. If you want to be good in science, if you want to be good in philosophy, study math and science. Well, hey, we're in agreement there. But yeah, and logic, well, I mean, I've just been, I wrote a paper recently on a theory of everything.

It involved a lot of logic math, and it was interesting for me and new in some ways. You went to Marquette. Was that on a basketball scholarship, or what was it? No. No, no, it was, you know, I wish I could tell you some high reason, but I wanted to go where the drinking age was younger and there's a lot of Dungeons and Dragons and I could have a good time. And I wanted a place that was cold and that was kind of far away. And I went from a Catholic, I went to a Catholic high school and made me the man I am today. And then I went to Marquette.

I always wanted to live in Milwaukee. I have no idea why. But I just like Wisconsin. and I like the, I don't know, I have just something about the frigidity of the winter that I was drawn to. Interesting, interesting. Huh, you still like winter? Yeah, better than humidity. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, because he lived, well, he lived in Oregon for a long time.

It doesn't have much of a winter, but. Yeah, and I'm totally, I can't, I'm so happy I'm moved the places to become a cesspool. Yeah, oh, I know, I know, we'll get there. Anyway, and then you went to, then you switched from philosophy, from psychology, you went to Fordham, you went back to your root. This is a lot of talk about me. You sure we want to keep talking? I know, I know, but I have to disentangle all of this before we can get to where you've written. So I was a psychology major and a philosophy minor.

And then I think I lived in, I can't, so long ago. And then I, yeah, then I went to graduate school at Fordham and studied philosophy. So that's when, what, I'm wondering what made you sort of, what got you interested in philosophy? And this would be relevant for what we're talking about. I've always liked the most intense experience of things. Like, I've always liked philosophy was, to me, the most intense intellectual activity. I think physics would be up there too. But in martial arts, it was, I did stick in knife fighting for a long time.

With drugs, it would be DMT. So I've always liked kind of one of the most absolutely intense experience of something. It's a kind of aliveness in a sense. but it's a way to challenge myself. I mean, you only live once, so you might as well do it. So philosophy in a sense is the most intense intellectual experience you're saying. Well, that's why I got into the atheism stuff because I thought, wow, this is as deep as it gets, you know, thinking about questions of God, but it turned out to be rather silly.

The whole, there was really nothing behind us all nonsense. Yeah, it's pretty easy. It's not, I mean, it's pretty easy to dispense with God if you think about it. Yeah, I said, I said to my, my, uh, my buddy Matt, I said, you know, these are incredibly sophisticated arguments. At the time, you debated Craig twice. I was reading Craig stuff and other people's stuff. All of the apologetics.

I was doing a deep dive. And I said, wow, these are really incredibly sophisticated arguments. He said, no, they're not sophisticated at all. And the more I thought about that, the more profound it was to me. And the more I read about it, Swineburn and others, the more I realized there was just no there there was just nothing to them. And then once I started really understanding what the arguments were, they just dissolved.

They were just silly. So it was a total waste of my time to do it anymore. Well, it wasn't necessarily a waste time. You used so later on when you talk to people about it. Well, you know, it was a waste of my intellectual effort because there was just nothing there. You know, yeah, I can understand that. But you got into atheism after, I was always intrigued. I think I asked you this when we were together once, but you went to PSU to do a doctor in education.

Yeah. Because you were interested in, I guess, was it being interested in prisons? that got you, why you went, why did you, you were interested in the philosophy of education, I guess. Is that right? Is that what you did there? Yeah. Yeah. And that gets back to my dad being a civil engineer. I've told the story before, but maybe it's worth telling. So we were hiking when my dad and I almost never hiked. We were hiking one day and we came across a stream that was filthy and polluted. And I said to him, how do you, how do you clean the, how do you, how do, How would you clean the stream up?

He said, oh, that's easy. You can get out about 80% of the particulates if you just dump bales of hay in. But if you want to go, the closer you get to 100, the more cost prohibitive it is. It's very expensive. So you need secondary and primary cleaning methods. It's electricity. It's stuff. And it just completely blew my mind when he told me that.

And I think it was at a certain point in your life, you're ready to hear something. or because at the time I was lifting a lot of weights and I was training very intensely in martial arts and I realized that in the physical domain that principle was operative as well. Like from weightlifting, for example, if you're bench pressing or squatting from 9 to 10 is more difficult than one to nine.

Yeah, sure. I wonder if the same principle was operative in the cognitive domain. So then I thought to myself, what if we could just dump bales of hay in people's cognitive structures? And I thought, well, who's, cognitive structures are kind of polluted. And I thought to myself, well, people who have already been compromised or vulnerable, that would be prison inmates. And then I thought to myself, well, geez, I wonder if you could design a very simple, cost-effective intervention to help people reason morally

and think through issues to basically dump bales of hay. And that's where I came up with the idea. I see. About my dissertation. Okay. Well, you know, there was more we could talk about, but you've convince me, the reason I'm not going to go further into your ridiculous time at PSU many years as this professor, I still don't understand how they legally allowed that. But anyway, but I think this is a good segue because I think the interest in moral education and education in general is a good segue, because your piece is about the fact that something which is fundamental to education and scholarship is not being taken seriously. And you view that as a a signal of some of a deeper problem.

Well, the whole institution. So I think, so let me, let me read the beginning of your piece and, and, and we'll go on from there. You say, you are the provost of a major U.S. research university. After a fair administrative proceeding, it's been conclusively determined that one of your faculty has plagiarized large sections of the dissertation. By the way, I think fair administrative proceeding is an oxymoron. I've never heard of such a thing.

But anyway, I thought about that. Anyway, has been one of your faculty. these plagiarized large sections of this station. You have the following options. A, terminate their employment, B, give them written warning, C, terminate their employment and revoke their licensure, and D, do nothing. And you say, if this question were asked 15 years ago, people find bizarre, the answer is A or C. Yet today, university administrators have answered unequivably D. There's an ideology undergirding decisions to turn a blind eye to academic plagiarism. Okay, I'm going to hand it over to you. Why? Okay. Well, let me just say,

a few things. So accept the academic proceedings as fair. Just accept that by Fiat. The original draft that I had for the piece is I gave three examples of things. And one example I gave was the fire department. If somebody had, if someone in a fire department, let's say that you're the fire chief in a fire department. And you found out that a large number of people cheated on their fireman's exam, whatever you call a fireperson exam, whatever is. What would you do? Well, I mean, if you attained your credentials fraudulently, in this case, it would be questionable whether or not you knew what is required to put out a fire. That assumes there's some kind of competence hierarchy, but let's just assume there is. Well, you would fire them, right?

Not only for unethical behavior, but because you don't know if they can discharge their duties. So why would it, like, or air traffic controllers or pilots or anything else for that matter? But the fact that Harvard and, I mean, I gave a rather lengthy list of people who had plagiarized him. Claudine Gay even plagiarized her acknowledgments in her dissertation, which is a rather astonishing feat. And the fact that she wasn't fired and these people aren't fired, and I think this is where you and I have a very substantive disagreements. And I'm more than happy to talk to you about this because I do side with Rufo. I think the whole system needs to be burned down. Well, I come from the hard sciences where I see people doing physics and science, and most of them just kept their head down and thought it was ridiculous.

But the point is that there's a lot of good work being, the reason I don't, I'll tell you why I don't think the system should be burned down is that you, you got to separate the wheat from the shaft. And there is excellent and important work going on at Harvard and other places in science and hard science. and that's going to dramatically impact and, in principle, help the economy of the United States of security, et cetera, et cetera. And if you take that down along with the rest, you've done, you've sort of been off your nose despite your face. And I, so that's why I guess I disagree. I mean, we can have that conversation. I'm happy to have that conversation. The idea that you would not fire a plagiarist. And I said in the piece, which everybody knows is true, the reason we don't fire. The reason that plagiarists haven't been farred is because they're predominantly African-American.

Yeah, let's get there. Let's get there. You point out, Claudine Gay, you're quoted the Harvard chief diversity officer, Sherry Ann Charleston, is also serial plagiarist. But serial plagiarist, not just like, I'm sorry to pause you. I think this is really important. Sure. So, you know, when we did our dissertations, when they did their dissertations, they did their dissertations years ago. So it's not like they just cut and pasted a piece of text and then forgot to quote it. Like this is a willful, deliberate, conscious thing that they did. You know, when I did it, I took a book and I had to type it in and I, so this, this isn't an accident. This is deliberate. It is deliberately cheating. It is obtaining your credentials fraudulently.

and then using that to leverage yourself into an academic position to teach other people. And the fact that those people are not fired, the system is corrupt. It's been irreparably damaged. And again, it would be very, very simple to correct this matter is the same thing that applies to students and the same to faculty. Again, as I wrote in the piece, this isn't my rule. This is a rule. The plagiarism rule has been around from day one. Yeah, yeah.

with students, if they plagiarize there, it depends. There's a variety of actions you can take, first a warning or at least, and they don't get credit, and then removal. Yeah, and I would argue that professors should be held to a higher, not a lower standard than students. Yeah, certainly. I would agree with you there. I think, by the way, that's why I like physics, because you don't have to reference at all. You just have to do it. But anyway, if you're rich your timing, you don't have to read anything. But with physics, in the hard sciences, you have another problem with data fabrication. So in science, much in physics as biology, because there's more money in biology than physics. I think it's the lure of money that pushes that. In physics, that you don't generally strike it rich for, for, you know, fabricating your data. And so there's less, there's less motivation for that. But not as if it doesn't happen. But the great thing about physics also is you a lot, well, the way science works is you have a lot of people doing it. And if you fabricate your data, it's pretty quickly discovered that you did. And that's science is self-correcting. No one expects scientists.

to be perfect or in fact to even even be good. But the scientific process is designed, in fact, because people aren't good and because people like to believe nonsense and people like to think of coincidences as significant. The scientific process is designed to overcome that, the natural inclination of scientists and people to sort of do the wrong thing by having a system where other people check it and there's open debate and fierce debate and you have to defend your results and, you know, you know the whole this. So I think it's important. Yeah, I agree. I mean, you're again, master of the obvious. And that's been institutionalized in our academic systems and throughout the

pure review process. But what's happening now in, I don't know if you like the term soft sciences or what have you, but in non-hard science fields, we have replication crises, it's went from 50 to 60 percent of papers in psychology. It's up to 65, 70 percent of papers in economics. There's a replication crisis across all domains of thought and all disciplines. Yeah, it's certainly a problem, and there are many factors, and I think you've hit one. In fact, let's go to it a little bit more. You talk about Helen Pluck Rose, we both enjoy and you've written things with her, in fact. And she talks this new sort of orthodoxy that sort of allows that kind of plagiarism

and encourages it in certain people and certain identity groups or identity individuals. as applied postmodernism. You want to talk about that for a second? Correct. So applied postmodernism, it's Helen Pluckroes' term. She mentions it in the book. I think she wrote about it in pieces subsequent. In cynical theories, I think. Yeah, in cynical theories. She, she, anyway, so she has a wonderful description of the problem. It started with the postmodernist, Derrida Foucault, Leotard. She's a great piece, how French intellectuals rule in the West and published an aerial magazine, years ago prior to cynical theories. And those domains of, and postmodernism was manifest in the

institutions as applied postmodernism. And she gives examples of multiple studies. In fact, the studies like the dog park paper and gender place and culture and journals in which they've taken specific aspects of postmodernism and run wild off the reservation. with them, queer theory would be an example. But the larger piece... Sorry, go ahead. Well, I mean, you quote a definition. I wonder if you get this, her definition,

quote, society has been constructed in service of dominant groups by their having created and perpetuated discourses, waves of speaking about things that exist to marginalized people of color and particularly women of color, both actively and passively. Correct. And I mean, sort of, and I think, you know, that kind of, and then you argue, I guess. The point is that you argue that that thinking, and you quote some some person as privileged preserving epistemic pushback, you know, basically the privilege people seek

to preserve or maintain their dominance of course as an argument for why you should try and subvert this and why plagiarism is sort of a falls out naturally. So could you, could you, could you, Follow that line of reasoning for me. Yes. So that's Alison Bailey's concept. She's an applied post-mineist writer, a privilege preserving epistemic pushback. We see it in the writings of Harvard Law Professor Derek Bell.

We see it in basically all applied post-monism is that privilege will seek to preserve itself. And in other words, the privilege don't voluntarily give up their privilege. So it has to be remediated somehow or taken from them or some something, some intervention has to happen within the system so that privileged people will give up their privilege, or forced to give up their privilege. And so there are many, many ways to do this. The black lesbian writer, Audrey Lord, talks about the master's tools disassembling or disabling the master's house. So the idea is you can't, the master's house is oppression, it's racism, it's patriarchy, it's ableism, etc.

And the reason we got here is through epistemic adequacy, science, basically the tools are reason. So you can't use the tools of reason and science to disassemble the master's house. You need to use alternative tools. And those are alternative tools are one of the things that can alleviate people from oppression, specifically systemic oppression, because they believe that systems have been designed to oppress other people. And the way to remediate that is to make sure that you have more,

marginalized people in positions of authority, specifically blacks. And then also, you actually say that, but then you also give another argument which should push it further. Not only marginalized people hold positions of power and authority, but two, for oppressed people and their allies to create and institutionalized lines of peer-reviewed literature that change discourses and actively promote certain values. Yeah, absolutely. So this is a very complicated concept to understand. I'm reminded of what Helen Joyce the author of Trans said about all issues in trans

which I've made this argument for years. It's just so crazy that people don't believe it. And if it were just a little less crazy, people would say, oh my God, this is horrific. I can't believe it. But it's just so insane. And so you have things like citation justice

and it's basically forwarding And I just put a tweet out about this recently. I have this treat with somewhat sarcastic. Like, oh, it's too bad people didn't warn us about this years ago. I did a video on this or a rooftop in New York. Citation Justice is forwarding the citations of marginalized scholars, particularly African Americans and trans scholars. And so that's the other thing.

When you're talking about scientists, that's been resonant in my head. You know, where were all the scientists? they remain silent about, you know, what was happening to their colleagues. They signed diversity statements. They talked about that. So I view scientists is largely complicit in this whole thing. Yeah, you know, I think, and I've had a discussion with Neil Ferguson and for who also could give you the book that's basically saying, yes, scientists were going about doing

their work and keep their heads down or just signing things because they, you know, they didn't want to be bothered. And now it's coming back to haunt them. And now in some sense it's shodden for it. It's like, okay. they can complain now. You know, but it is true. There were cowards.

Yeah. Yeah. But academics are in fact cowards as part of, it's one of the prerequisites in general, I think. Yeah. And the reason, I think there's my, my speculation as to why that is, is because of tenure, the process of tenure is like, if you forgive the turn of phrase, I'm using it specifically, surrender. Uh-huh.

And I'm sure you get the reference. And that is, you know, you have to be a good, boy or girl to get a tenure track position. You have to tow the party line, be a good boy or girl to become associate professor. You have to tow the party line. You have to keep your mouth shut. You have to

promote the dominant orthodoxy, particularly the dominant moral orthodoxy until you get full professor. And if you've done that for 20 years, seven from associate to I mean from assistant to associate, if you've done that for 20 years, then of course you're going to

habituate and inculcate the idea of surrender. You're just basically institute, you're kind of self-actualizing cowardice. Interesting, interesting. Okay, well, I have to think about that one. But yeah, but I think it's more a self-selecting process that academia. That's also part of it. Academia is a very, you know,

you're supposed to be bold with ideas, but there's no safer environment than academia. And I think, you know, you have this whole institutional framework behind you, and then you leave that. When you go out in the real world, you see that those safety nets don't exist. And so it's a very safe, comfortable environment. And I think, you know, people are bold with ideas, but when it comes to, you know,

I think that's why most academics find it uncomfortable to speak out in public, because it's much more uncomfortable to speak in an unregulated public forum than it is in an academic situation where there are all sorts of sort of mores and rules. And any case, those rules have also been broken by people bringing bullhorns, in by people reporting you to the bias response team, which over 200 universities have if you don't tow the party line to my buddy Bruce Gilley has been repeatedly harassed for his piece, the case for colonialism. I mean, to this day, his chair, everybody is trying to make his life miserable.

And so I'm not sure I'm buying. I think that would have been true 20 years ago before the application of applied postmodernism and critical social support. Yeah, I see less of it in, you know, again, in physics, in the academic aspect of physics, I tend to see less of it. But, you know, I shared a department and I saw people who I knew were, I mean, it's also sociological. I tried to hire some very, like, chroniclastic individuals, some very strange people who were excellent. And, and of course, the system didn't, ultimately didn't allow that because, you know, because they, where they were white or they were men or? No, no, not, not. That was even, I've had that happen.

No, in this case, just that they were, they were outspoken and they were, they offended some people and, you know, in the process. You know, they have to be well behaved in the interview process and all the rest. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a process by which you, you know, your call, your, it's your colleagues are going to choose not some, not someone from above, but generally your colleagues were going to choose if you're there. And part of the process is to play well with your colleagues. So yeah. Anyway, but, but we're, but we're digressing a little bit. But so the idea. That does reify the morally fashionable, right? Yeah. Okay. Anyway, go ahead. Yeah. Okay.

And so, but you come down to basically seeing this applied postmodernism, which is sort of attacking the system by ensuring that people who don't have power get positions and then dominate the literature. As you say, marginalized people need to, in this applied postmodernism, marginalized people need to contribute to the literature that actively undermined. minds oppressive power structures and then codify that literature as university policy, which is correct. I think what you're arguing in some certainly, certainly Claudia and Gay would be a good example of that in sense she.

A paradigmatic example of that. Yeah, yeah, because as university president, she made a big effort to, before saying that, you know, that saying kill all the Jews was free speech, made a big point of ensuring that individuals who would maybe said that, you know, the, the the conventional ocean of the police are racist. Roland Pryor. Well, yeah, Roland Pryor. And he was a broad, academician, and she went after him

because he had the wrong opinion. Yeah. His opinion was substantiated by overwhelming data. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, you say once... But they don't value facts in evidence. Listen, this is a very, very important. Anyway, you say,

so you make this argument, once you recognize that, it's clear that you understand how academic administration have only one option D. do nothing when convicted of plagiarism. Any other response would work against the objective of disrupting the system. So do you want to elaborate on that at all?

Yeah, I still have an idea stuck in my head that I want to get loose up. The idea of facts and evidence, facts and evidence on a gotcha. Facts and evidence like the Roland Friar case with Collin and Gay. She doesn't value facts and evidence. she values narrative. So it's not as if someone can present facts and evidence to her. And she'll say, oh, well, geez, this is facts and evidence. No, that's not the point of the institution. The point of the institution is to push certain narratives forward. So facts and evidence are largely irrelevant. And then the second thing, so what was the actual question you asked? Well, I was just going to say,

you make a statement that logically, once you recognize that this is applied postmodernism is the idea, it tells you why the response has to be not terminating the person. Because otherwise it would be by not terminating you're actively working against the objective of, or by terminating you're actively working against the objective of postmodernism or applied postmodernism, which is disrupting the system. Yeah, that's why facts and evidence are irrelevant, because it's not about facts and evidence. It's about disrupting the system.

The master's tools cannot disable the master's house. Okay. then act in evidence to get rid of oppression, patriarchy, cis heteronormitivity, et cetera, you need to use something else. And something else is putting more black people and trans people into positions and making sure their literature is forwarded. So it's a very, it's super postmodern ideas that there is no knowledge, there's nothing objective about it.

It's that it's whatever the story is. It's whatever the story that you're good at telling is. Okay. now, okay. And then, but you point out, and this is obviously a really sore issue for you and an important one, and I want to just emphasize at the end, make this statement, the implications of tolerating plagiarism in academia are profound. And why? Well, because it's a legitimacy crisis. It makes it so that no one trusts our institutions. And no one trusts our institutions because they shouldn't be trusted. Because the people at the helm, in this case,

president of Harvard is a serial plagiarist. You know, the president of Harvard was found innocent of plagiarism even before they conducted a trial. You think that would have been the case if it was a white heterosexual man who was not in a wheelchair who did not call him could be not pulling the wrong body? No, of course not. So it is a, it's just, it's just so obvious to me, Lawrence. The whole thing is so obvious. That's why sometimes I really wonder if I'm living in a simulation. I remember the discussion we got about that conversation. Yeah. Sometimes I wonder if I'm living in a simulation.

I mean, so many things are so obvious to me that it seems like we have all these NPCs running around who are just indifferent to, they're indifferent to the deficit. They're indifferent. So we have a, you cannot let people who play, if you value the truth, which they don't, they're applied, they're postmodernness. But if you value the institutions and the. truth-seeking mechanisms of the institutions and the method of error correction and falsifiability, which got us the fruits of the Enlightenment and all of our gadgets and goodies. If you value that

at all, you cannot have people who have obtained their credentials fraudulently in positions of power. This is a no-brainer. Yeah, I think that it's, you know, you said trust, and I think that's right. It's removed trust in the university. But I think the second point for me is more important that if you allow that, then you get in the way of what scholarship is all about, the progress of knowledge. And that to me is even more. I mean, the trust of the public is important because they are supporting universities at some point.

But for me, universities are designed to push knowledge forward and to question and and to discover things. And if you de-legitimize that process by having people who don't do that, then it gets in the way of scholarship, which is what university is. are all about. And for me, the discovery of knowledge is the most important thing. That's why it's been much my life. All right. Let me, let me throw this out to you. So your penultimate book, I think, was about climate change, correct? My what? Your penultimate book? Well, I have had one since then on the edge of knowledge, the unknown unknowns. But it's okay, climate change.

You're very prolific. I apologize. So one of the reasons that we don't want everybody to have the same ideological orientation is because people who don't share that ideological orientation won't trust the research that comes out of the institution. So if everybody is on the left in an institution and then they come out with a paper about climate change, for example, no one's going to believe it. Why would they, why would somebody, why would they trust it? Well, I don't, I'm not sure they should because it's not going to be obvious that it's produced on the basis of the merit of the individual scholars, that it's non-ideological, that someone tried to falsify it. It could be some kind of like Soviet narrative.

Yeah. Well, I think, I mean, you're right in this sense that the, well, you're right in general, but I mean, in the sense that the other things universities should do is disseminate that knowledge, not just creative, disseminate it. And that disseminating that knowledge is vital for a, a health. society, and if you can't disseminate effectively because you've lost the trust of people, then then that's a huge problem. There's no doubt about that. So I want to comment on that.

If your credibility is gone, then you've lost it. 100%. So I go around the world and I've asked people in almost, I mean, just so many countries right now, what would it take to change your mind? What would it take to change your mind about ergosy or anything else. And one of the reasons I wrote that piece was because that's what it would take to change my mind that the universities are worth salvaging if they fired people who plagiarized. And that seems to me to be the most uncontroversial idea imaginable. If somebody has plagiarized, they're an academic and they have plagiarized their dissertation or subsequent works, you fire them. but when we can't manage to do that, we're lost.

I just, I have no confidence in the system. It contributes to the legitimacy crisis of the institutions. It's been hijacked by people who have jobs for life. Again, as I said in the article, if I told you that 20 years ago, what should we do with people who are plagiarists? I mean, of course you would fire them. Yeah, no, I think, I think, yeah, look, I mean, the idea, well, I mean, I'm never, I always liked, I guess I like to find out what's happening. I mean, if they've, what the cause of it was before I find them. But ultimately, if people have

obtained their credentials illegitimately and don't have the, and haven't demonstrated the skills necessary to have the job they have, then they shouldn't have it. Right. And I think, let me, let me read your concluding words. Yeah. Can I comment before you do that? Sure. So if you think about the, the examples I gave before of a firefighter and an air traffic controller, yeah. Yeah. If you say, well, they should be fired. if they obtain their credentials through fraud and if there's corruption in the system, they should be fired. But if you say that academicians should not be fired, what you're really saying is that academia is not important.

And those things are important. So you're making a judgment about the importance of the domain. Yeah, I guess, look, yeah, however, yes, although I guess I hesitate to. do anything sort of ubiquitously or in all cases. You know, without looking at cases. If someone, for example, if an air traffic controller, I find out at some level falsified that they got a BA or whatever that, but after 20 years, I've discovered that the best air traffic controller that we have, that they have native instincts or skills, I might be willing to mediate that.

But, you know, so I guess in each case, I'm willing to look at for exceptions, I guess, as well. Okay. So let me, let me, if I may push back on that. Of course, you always do. Yeah. You know me. Yeah. So an air traffic controller is found, and then we can talk about one year, five year, 10, year, 20 years, to have cheated.

We, and except by fact that we know for fact that they cheated on their air traffic controllers exam. Mm-hmm. If you do not fire that. person. Then you engender mistrust in the system. Yeah, then I understand. You tell other people they can, they can, and you suggest it's okay. And you're sending the message about what you think about the system. It's a kind of corruption that faster. I understand. Absolutely. Your point is well taken. Anyway, let me give you the last word by reading your last words. Okay. In conclusion, hopefully not the last words, but last words of this particular piece. In conclusion, the reason

plagiarists are not fired stems from the dominating influence of applied most modernism and its emphasis on DEI. This ideology prioritizes the preservation of marginalized voices within institutions over the adherence to traditional academic integrity. The decision not to fire plagiarists highlights the urgent need to reevaluate principles that govern academic institutions and their ethical commitments. As we move forward, the academic community must decide whether it values truth or DEI. An important statement. And one of the reasons we've written this book is, and I've included so many different people

from the book with different views of many things, is that there are problems in academic culture. And these are people speaking from inside, people who have experience with a wide variety of fields and a wide variety of politics. But it's important that within, as academics, we speak out as well as, you know, we're full of people from the outside. but it's important. I think when people see the English scholars and writers from a wide variety of districts

speaking out, maybe I'm hoping that people will get the message that truth is what matters. And I do appreciate you contributing to that discussion and contributing the discussion today. Thank you very much. Thanks. I appreciate it. 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.

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