When I was young, my parents immigrated with me to the United States from China. I was told, and I really thought, that America, with its Constitution and Bill of Rights, was more "free" than Communist China. Yet when I went to college for the first time, all I found was censorship and struggle sessions. I can confirm that what Dr. Maroja is saying here is absolutely happening in campuses all across America.
I thought college was for free discussion of beliefs, but all I found was a panopticon-style environment where students told on each other over their beliefs. I don't know if America really is the "land of the free" anymore.
“As an evolutionary biologist, I am quite used to attempts to censor research and suppress knowledge. But for most of my career, that kind of behavior came from the right. In the old days, most students and administrators were actually on our side; we were aligned against creationists.”
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I am highly skeptical that anyone alive has actually experienced suppression in the university or corporate context at the hands of creationists.
"We each have our own woke tipping point—the moment you realize that social justice is no longer what we thought it was, but has instead morphed into an ugly authoritarianism."
Dr. Mareja, I will ask you the same question I've asked many others... are you prepared to vote for some deplorables? Because if you're not, this is just empty whining.
Those of you in academia are almost completely responsible for this insanity. Postmodernism was bred in your petri dish. It was cultivated in your growth medium. And even when it outgrew the lab about 10 years ago, you still did nothing about it. You were just fine with with the revolution as long as the only people up against the wall were the people you hate (who you identified as "religious creationists").
You would insist, I'm sure, that postmodernism was bred in the humanities, not the hard sciences. You would be right. But the hard sciences were uniquely qualified to push back on it. Instead, they retreated into smug self-righteousness, "good thing we're so much smarter than the history majors; this stuff could never infect STEM." You could have stopped it; instead you spent years inventing threats from "creation scientists" to make yourself feel better. As an aside, has it occurred to you that your very own rules ("creation science isn't real science and need not be countered") are being used against you by the woke? You already circumscribed science to keep religion and philosophy out of it; the woke are just circumscribing it further. By any standard, you really did do this to yourselves.
So back to my original question. Are you ready to make common cause with some fundamentalist Christians? Are you ready to vote for a pro-life candidate who promises to reign in woke universities? Are you ready to sacrifice your LGBT views to get a candidate who opposes slicing the private parts off children? Are you willing to climb into bed with some deplorables if that's what it takes to defeat the woke? Because if you're not, if you vote for the same party on Tuesday that you always have, you're a hypocrite.
I don't mean to be gruff, really. But I've been sounding this alarm for decades and no one listened -- certainly not anyone from your class, the "smartest people in the room". You're a little late to the party, but welcome anyway. We really are glad to have you, because we really do believe the other side is truly dangerous. But only if you're really committed. If you're only here to tweak a few things and make sure biology is cleaned up... and then you'll go back to throwing us under the bus, don't bother sticking around.
Luana, I know what you mean. I also lived through the Brazilian dictatorship nightmare and moved to the US 8 years ago (I was 62, a little older than you). Now we are living another nightmare, the all-encompassing nightmare of fake, nonsensical truths that you so well describe. This scenario, I believe, is far more threatening and dangerous than our old political situation, as it throws doubt on the very nature of humans, and on nature itself. We could understand the lust for power shared by our generals; one cannot understand an imposed truth that denies the most basic human knowledge and threatens you with an absolute lack of logic. It is maddening. It belongs in old, dystopian science fiction books, not in real life, and it should be treated like this. The actions of people like you can help. Abraço
In my business I’ve been running into this buzzsaw for years.
Courtroom testimony by experts has actually been tossed when they testify that genotypes can determine injury or disease predilection. Imagine that! So we’ve been reduced to educating expert witnesses to avoid such statements and instead concentrate on lay explanations that emphasize phenotypes and other “non-discriminatory” factors.
It’s a load of bull that science gets cancelled in the courtroom
I’ve been arguing for years that leftist and illiberal activism and militancy is much more insidious and dangerous than from the right. Now mainstream folks are starting to wake up. I hope it’s not too late.
Western civilization is collapsing. It had a good run. Welcome to the new dark ages. We will be colder, hotter, and darker. We cannot discuss certain topics. We are vilified for our beliefs or lineage. Very sad.
Communists infiltrate schools. It's a play they've done every single time, to great success. They teach ideology and words to divide and then further promote their dogma to those they've brainwashed. I'm sorry the author is going through this. My friends in sciences all over the world are the same thing. Classics depts too (although their departments are being dismantled because of "white privilege.") K-higher learning is captured by the communists at this point. It's really time people acknowledge this capture, and do something about it. Either watch your kid's k-12 schools like a watchdog, or homeschool. The info they are getting, often subversive, is dystopian. But even that isn't as safe as it should be. Sending children to colleges and universities which are becoming more focused on CRT or BLM or safe spaces or trans issues than actual studying is also a risk. I've known several homeschooling families who's children go to our state university for a year, come back angry, entitled, and screaming the same thing" the world is going to end, white men are horrible, I'm horrible for being white," etc. Two have come back trans. My circle isn't that big btw. This isn't normal. We have stop this or else science, and the world, won't survive.
It is even worse than Maroja's fine article describes. Research funding is becoming highly ideological and identity-based in even the hardest sciences. Proposals receiving the highest evaluations of merit are mysteriously not funded. Incompetent if not outright fraudulent social science research is funded.
Researchers have to comply with ideological statements which they dare not challenge. Examples have been made of others. One's career and income are very much at stake and it is overt. The fangs have been bared.
It is encouraging to see a group of scientists standing up against this. Many more secretly support it, and are silent out of fear now.
As a graduate of Williams, I am not surprised. Williams has really devolved from a top-ranked academic institution into a left-wing propaganda outfit. The change is extremely recent, less than 10 years old. And I saw the beginnings of this while I was a student pursuing social sciences there. The only shock here is that there were any professors left who would say anything about this issue. The hard sciences at Williams and other liberal arts colleges have always thought they were exempt from the excesses of the social sciences. That was naive and comes from a mistaken belief that professors should only do research and teach. They just silo’d themselves and their departments away from involvement in student life, administrative duties and from other departments on campus. By doing so, they exempted themselves from the conversation and allowed more radical ideas to gain a serious foothold. This has led to unqualified hires for professors and administrators and the acceptance of an ever-more radical, less heterodox student body. And now they have no choice but to obey the new orthodoxy or leave.
My theory is that Williams and other schools are in a positive feedback loop that will spiral out of control. What will stop the madness is the loss of prestige, declines in enrollment and the decline of the school’s endowment (which are all already happening and expected to worsen).
I had a great fondness for my school, which has been seriously tainted by the last several years. It’s just not the place it used to be. I wouldn’t send my kids to Williams or any similar school and I refuse to give money or participate in alumni events.
The Closing of the Western Mind 2.0. Same cause as the first version: a religion/cult seized control of Western Civilization. It will produce the same result: The Dark Ages.
When I was young, my parents immigrated with me to the United States from China. I was told, and I really thought, that America, with its Constitution and Bill of Rights, was more "free" than Communist China. Yet when I went to college for the first time, all I found was censorship and struggle sessions. I can confirm that what Dr. Maroja is saying here is absolutely happening in campuses all across America.
I thought college was for free discussion of beliefs, but all I found was a panopticon-style environment where students told on each other over their beliefs. I don't know if America really is the "land of the free" anymore.
This wins the award for the most terrifying article I've read this month, and the good Lord knows I've had plenty of choices. This has to stop.
“As an evolutionary biologist, I am quite used to attempts to censor research and suppress knowledge. But for most of my career, that kind of behavior came from the right. In the old days, most students and administrators were actually on our side; we were aligned against creationists.”
—————————————————
I am highly skeptical that anyone alive has actually experienced suppression in the university or corporate context at the hands of creationists.
"We each have our own woke tipping point—the moment you realize that social justice is no longer what we thought it was, but has instead morphed into an ugly authoritarianism."
Dr. Mareja, I will ask you the same question I've asked many others... are you prepared to vote for some deplorables? Because if you're not, this is just empty whining.
Those of you in academia are almost completely responsible for this insanity. Postmodernism was bred in your petri dish. It was cultivated in your growth medium. And even when it outgrew the lab about 10 years ago, you still did nothing about it. You were just fine with with the revolution as long as the only people up against the wall were the people you hate (who you identified as "religious creationists").
You would insist, I'm sure, that postmodernism was bred in the humanities, not the hard sciences. You would be right. But the hard sciences were uniquely qualified to push back on it. Instead, they retreated into smug self-righteousness, "good thing we're so much smarter than the history majors; this stuff could never infect STEM." You could have stopped it; instead you spent years inventing threats from "creation scientists" to make yourself feel better. As an aside, has it occurred to you that your very own rules ("creation science isn't real science and need not be countered") are being used against you by the woke? You already circumscribed science to keep religion and philosophy out of it; the woke are just circumscribing it further. By any standard, you really did do this to yourselves.
So back to my original question. Are you ready to make common cause with some fundamentalist Christians? Are you ready to vote for a pro-life candidate who promises to reign in woke universities? Are you ready to sacrifice your LGBT views to get a candidate who opposes slicing the private parts off children? Are you willing to climb into bed with some deplorables if that's what it takes to defeat the woke? Because if you're not, if you vote for the same party on Tuesday that you always have, you're a hypocrite.
I don't mean to be gruff, really. But I've been sounding this alarm for decades and no one listened -- certainly not anyone from your class, the "smartest people in the room". You're a little late to the party, but welcome anyway. We really are glad to have you, because we really do believe the other side is truly dangerous. But only if you're really committed. If you're only here to tweak a few things and make sure biology is cleaned up... and then you'll go back to throwing us under the bus, don't bother sticking around.
Luana, I know what you mean. I also lived through the Brazilian dictatorship nightmare and moved to the US 8 years ago (I was 62, a little older than you). Now we are living another nightmare, the all-encompassing nightmare of fake, nonsensical truths that you so well describe. This scenario, I believe, is far more threatening and dangerous than our old political situation, as it throws doubt on the very nature of humans, and on nature itself. We could understand the lust for power shared by our generals; one cannot understand an imposed truth that denies the most basic human knowledge and threatens you with an absolute lack of logic. It is maddening. It belongs in old, dystopian science fiction books, not in real life, and it should be treated like this. The actions of people like you can help. Abraço
Great piece!
In my business I’ve been running into this buzzsaw for years.
Courtroom testimony by experts has actually been tossed when they testify that genotypes can determine injury or disease predilection. Imagine that! So we’ve been reduced to educating expert witnesses to avoid such statements and instead concentrate on lay explanations that emphasize phenotypes and other “non-discriminatory” factors.
It’s a load of bull that science gets cancelled in the courtroom
I’ve been arguing for years that leftist and illiberal activism and militancy is much more insidious and dangerous than from the right. Now mainstream folks are starting to wake up. I hope it’s not too late.
Stop supporting colleges that cave into extremists
Western civilization is collapsing. It had a good run. Welcome to the new dark ages. We will be colder, hotter, and darker. We cannot discuss certain topics. We are vilified for our beliefs or lineage. Very sad.
So what do we do about it, gang?
Communists infiltrate schools. It's a play they've done every single time, to great success. They teach ideology and words to divide and then further promote their dogma to those they've brainwashed. I'm sorry the author is going through this. My friends in sciences all over the world are the same thing. Classics depts too (although their departments are being dismantled because of "white privilege.") K-higher learning is captured by the communists at this point. It's really time people acknowledge this capture, and do something about it. Either watch your kid's k-12 schools like a watchdog, or homeschool. The info they are getting, often subversive, is dystopian. But even that isn't as safe as it should be. Sending children to colleges and universities which are becoming more focused on CRT or BLM or safe spaces or trans issues than actual studying is also a risk. I've known several homeschooling families who's children go to our state university for a year, come back angry, entitled, and screaming the same thing" the world is going to end, white men are horrible, I'm horrible for being white," etc. Two have come back trans. My circle isn't that big btw. This isn't normal. We have stop this or else science, and the world, won't survive.
“In psychology and public health, many teachers no longer say male and female, but instead use the convoluted “person with a uterus.””
WHAT?! There is something seriously wrong with society today.
It is even worse than Maroja's fine article describes. Research funding is becoming highly ideological and identity-based in even the hardest sciences. Proposals receiving the highest evaluations of merit are mysteriously not funded. Incompetent if not outright fraudulent social science research is funded.
Researchers have to comply with ideological statements which they dare not challenge. Examples have been made of others. One's career and income are very much at stake and it is overt. The fangs have been bared.
It is encouraging to see a group of scientists standing up against this. Many more secretly support it, and are silent out of fear now.
This will end progress in health and medical care
Galileo would be familiar with the situation of which the author complains. We have regressed 590 years in the past 5.
As a graduate of Williams, I am not surprised. Williams has really devolved from a top-ranked academic institution into a left-wing propaganda outfit. The change is extremely recent, less than 10 years old. And I saw the beginnings of this while I was a student pursuing social sciences there. The only shock here is that there were any professors left who would say anything about this issue. The hard sciences at Williams and other liberal arts colleges have always thought they were exempt from the excesses of the social sciences. That was naive and comes from a mistaken belief that professors should only do research and teach. They just silo’d themselves and their departments away from involvement in student life, administrative duties and from other departments on campus. By doing so, they exempted themselves from the conversation and allowed more radical ideas to gain a serious foothold. This has led to unqualified hires for professors and administrators and the acceptance of an ever-more radical, less heterodox student body. And now they have no choice but to obey the new orthodoxy or leave.
My theory is that Williams and other schools are in a positive feedback loop that will spiral out of control. What will stop the madness is the loss of prestige, declines in enrollment and the decline of the school’s endowment (which are all already happening and expected to worsen).
I had a great fondness for my school, which has been seriously tainted by the last several years. It’s just not the place it used to be. I wouldn’t send my kids to Williams or any similar school and I refuse to give money or participate in alumni events.
The Closing of the Western Mind 2.0. Same cause as the first version: a religion/cult seized control of Western Civilization. It will produce the same result: The Dark Ages.