‘We have to encourage academics to speak up’: Lawrence M. Krauss on why the politicization of universities is so dangerous for society

Video

Lawrence M. Krauss, theoretical physicist, award-winning author, and host of The Origins Podcast, discusses his new book, The War on Science: Thirty-Nine Renowned Scientists and Scholars Speak Out About Current Threats to Free Speech, Open Inquiry, and the Scientific Process. He outlines the costs and consequences of the politicization of universities, the threats to free speech and open inquiry from the Left and the Right, and the need for universities to focus on excellence in the scientific pursuit rather than political values.

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Program Transcript

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SEAN SPEER: Lawrence, thanks for joining us at Hub Dialogues and congratulations on the book.

LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS: Well, thank you. It’s nice to be with you, at least virtually.

SEAN SPEER: Let’s start with the book’s origins. How did you come to the decision to produce it and what were you hoping to achieve?

LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS: Well, that’s a good question. It was a slow process. I’ve been like a number of my colleagues, I’ve been writing for some years about my concerns about the incursions of ideology into academia and the lack of speech free speech and cancel culture and all many of the things we talk about in the book. And so while I’ve been writing op EDS and opinion pieces in various newspapers and magazines, I realized that we needed to do something more drastic. And as I had been talking to numerous colleagues about this, I decided first I actually thought of writing a book about it and then I thought it would be more powerful, potentially. Even though anthologies, I admit, normally actually have limited appeal to some people, in this case, I hope it’ll actually enhance the interest of the book. I wanted to be able to. I didn’t want this book to be classified as a right wing attack or whatever, X attack as it would be. And I also wanted to get colleagues from a wide variety of disciplines so it wouldn’t be seen from as a physicist just. Or something like that, or as a natural scientist and ones who are across the political spectrum. Yes, because what’s really important, I think, if we’re going to address this culture war issue, is that we have to encourage academics to speak up. And for good reasons.

Many academics either are afraid to speak out because they see what happens to their colleagues and we talk about that in this book, or like a lot of academics, they’d rather just sort of hang below the radar, keep their head low, avoid the controversy and just get on with their work. And that’s okay. Except what’s happening is that the problem is getting worse and in addition, at least in the United States, not so much yet in Canada, because the academic community hasn’t responded. There’s been essentially an attack by the current Trump administration and others to look at label all of academia as left wing woke and attack the whole shebang. And that’s a problem because there’s obviously lots of good research going on. So the idea was to encourage other academics speak out to show that if I got a distinguished enough group of people that we weren’t afraid to speak out, but also to get the public interested in this because the public hears again from the outside attacks and all sorts of other things. But if they can see what’s going on, and some of the stuff that’s described here, you wouldn’t believe if it wasn’t really happening, that there’s got to be public pressure, not just on universities, but on governments to try and not to try and open up and encourage merit in hiring.

In Canada, as we’ll probably talk about, there’s these efforts to appoint people based on demographics rather than ability, and that’s a real problem. And ultimately the public, I think, has to apply pressure at universities because another big problem, and this is a long answer to your question, a number of questions, but another big problem is that one of the real sources of the problem is our university administrators and scientific administrators who lack the backbone to speak out to address issues of free speech, who would rather avoid a controversy online than and either fire or remove a colleague or suppress an article, then stand up for what universities are all about. And that’s the real problem. These people have no backbone, no spine. And often in some cases, in some universities, it’s not even the academic administrators, the academics who are administrating. It’s some DEI bureaucracy who are calling the shots. Diversity, equity, inclusion bureaucracy. And they’re not even made up of faculty. And they don’t have any skin in the game of actually teaching or research or production of scholarship. And that’s a real problem. So, anyway, those are the reasons for producing the book as we did, and I’m very happy that we have. It was like herding cats, as you can imagine, but we have a very diverse group of scholars, intellectually diverse, disciplined diverse, and also politically diverse.

SEAN SPEER: Yeah, that’s a comprehensive answer, and we’ll pursue some of those different lines of analysis over the course of the conversation. But if we can stay a minute on the group of contributors, it’s enormously impressive, as you say, and involves writers from Richard Dawkins to Steven Pinker to Jordan Peterson and others. I want to take up precisely the point you raised, though, about the potential social costs for academics to raise their hand and possibly even participate in a project like this. What was the reaction on the part of scholars and thinkers when you approached them about contributing an essay? To what extent were people apprehensive about weighing into these issues?

LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS: There were people who remain unnamed who really were sympathetic but felt that they didn’t want to speak out. And I understand that because I’ve seen what’s happened. On the whole, I was really gratified that people were willing to spend time on this and have been ever since the beginning of the process, you know, always issues about this, but the people have worked hard and in the editing process being willing to go back and forth and check and produce really excellent pieces, I did what I believe in, which is academic freedom. I chose people based on excellence and in some sense on their ability to add to the discussion in different areas. But then I didn’t tell people what to do. Some people ask me, you know, what should I write on? But I basically said, write on something that you feel passionate about. And so it’s interesting to see there’s some overlaps between discussions and there’s some people have different views. But on the whole, the fact that we’re able to get this broad a group of excellent people involved I think really bodes well because it really means that there’s a new and growing interest among really active scholars to try and quell what’s been going on and get universities back into the business of scholarship and knowledge production.

SEAN SPEER: As we weigh into the book substance, let’s zoom out for a minute. Lawrence, you write in the introduction that science is under threat not from the outside, but from within. What do you mean by that? And why should we be especially concerned about what you call ‘internal sabotage?’

LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS: Okay, first of all, I should say the book was written before the current Trump administration was elected. And there’s a little addendum in my introduction and a few of the other pieces. There are attacks from the outside, and I’ve written about them extensively. The Trump administration, as I said at the beginning, is painting a broad brush view as basically all scientists and all academics is woke or anti Semitic. You know, there are universities that have. Harvard’s had real problems, but you don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. And there are huge cuts in really important research that are happening and those need to be fought. And I want to stress that, but it’s a very different fight with the ballot box and other things. But what we’re talking about is this internal culture war. And why should people care? Because ultimately, well, there’s two reasons. It is infringing upon the quality of research that’s being done across the board at universities in North America and in the West in general. And in the long run, that’s going to impact people’s livelihood and well being, because the fundamental research, fundamental curiosity driven research today will be the engine of the economy 25 years from now in this country. And yet you see already academics being discouraged and young people moving elsewhere. And obviously Europe and China are taking advantage of that. But also, if they’re interested in the education of their children. That’s really important.

It’s not just faculty that are afraid to speak out. It’s students. It’s young people who are often afraid, especially if they happen to be conservative or any actually, whatever their views on gender. You see this. It’s really remarkable that in many universities created things called safe spaces to save people from ever hearing anything they disagreed with. All that’s done is caused more anxiety and more fear among the student population. Also, these young people in, say, take physics in my area, young people or graduate students, many of them realize that there’s no hopes for jobs if they happen to be, say, white or Asian males in Canada and in the United States, largely over the last few years. And it shouldn’t be the case. It should be a meritocracy. So if people are worried about their futures and economic futures, that’s one thing through the production of knowledge. But the other is if you have children and you’re interested in their futures, you should be concerned about this as well.

SEAN SPEER: As you’ve alluded a couple of times, one of the reoccurring themes in the book is the tension between inclusion and excellence. How do we reconcile efforts to broaden participation in science with the imperative to, as you say, uphold its meritocratic foundations?

LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS: Well, look, I think there’s a lot of different ways. Most of my life I’ve spent with not just doing my scientific research, but being involved in public education, understanding. One of the ways to broaden interest is to get people excited, is to go out in the community and speak and write things that people are interested in and find ways to grab people’s excitement, because young people are intrinsically excited by science and we turn them off often. The other is, look, if you really look, there are inequities in society, but those inequities are not best addressed at the level of professors at universities. People have PhDs. If you really want to address inequities, you want to go and look at the school systems. You want to go into inner city schools, and you want to provide resources for young people so they have advantage and they have access to the tools that they need to get to that level. We want to work on providing security for single parents and other people so their kids can go to school. So those are the kind of things I think are necessary if you really are interested in equities in that level at universities. First of all, it’s the last place to deal with these things. Secondly, there, it’s just bogus to suggest that there’s sexism or racism. Universities, historically, they’ve been the most tolerant groups in places in the world. I was chairman of a physics department for 15 years, and already in the 1990s, for example, if we did not hire a woman when we had a faculty search, we had to write a special letter explaining why that wasn’t the case. And I was proud of the fact that I hired the first two women faculty in my department. That was the concern.

But there was real concern. This is 30, 40, 50 years ago in this. And these inequity issues have been addressed. To claim that there’s gender inequity is bogus, except for the fact that there is gender inequity because males are now underrepresented at universities. The ratio of undergraduates is almost 60 to 40 percent female to male. Graduating students all the way up to doctorates and including STEM, business. Females dominate. And so I think if you create these artificial affirmative action approaches, they’re not necessary. They don’t work on the whole either. And they also demean the people who you hire. Take, let’s take Canada research chairs, this nonsense where the federal government decided that Canada research chairs, the sort of prime research endowed chairs that the government gives in the country, originally created, by the way, to encourage expatriate Canadians to come back, have to reflect the background demographics of the country to the last decimal point.

So 50.9 percent have to be female and certain number have to be indigenous and a certain number have to be other minorities. It’s ridiculous because the background pool into various disciplines. Isn’t that background demographics? And you obviously get situations like the University of Toronto and several other universities that have said over the next five years they’re not going to hire any white males into these positions. Well, that’s just absolutely ridiculous. But it demeans the people you hire because it puts an asterisk next to their name forever. Because you can ask were they hired because they were the best or because they were a woman or something else. And so it really is destructive in all ways. And in various places, there’s lots of statistics showing that it doesn’t change the applicant pool and it doesn’t change basically the background demographics. People tend to choose what discipline they want to go into because they’re interested in it. If you take the Scandinavian countries, which are probably the most equal when it comes to gender in terms of opportunities, they have among the biggest disparities in certain STEM disciplines, because people choose, for whatever reason, females tend to want to be in life sciences more than, say, physics or math. And it doesn’t mean that they don’t have the capabilities, but it’s often a choice. And so this notion that everything has to be represent background demographics, that there has to be equal outcomes rather than equal opportunities, is just the worst way of thinking about things because ultimately it’s exclusionary.

SEAN SPEER: I would just say in parentheses, Lawrence, for our Canadian listeners and viewers. Not only does this inclusion, excellence dynamic play out, as you say, amongst individual hires and individual scholars in Canada, it also tends to play out across different institutions. The federal government, in the distribution of resources, aims to ensure every university from Lakehead in Thunder Bay to St. Mary’s in Halifax to the University of Toronto roughly has the same distribution of research funding, which in a way runs counter to the basic purpose of supporting the best and most promising research in the country. So it manifests itself in a lot of different ways.

LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS: And, you know, let me jump in there, you know, please. Governments, I believe in democracy when it comes to administration, of when it comes to politics, but not universities. Universities should not be democracies. They should be meritocracies. And that’s for the good of everyone. And that’s independent of all of the recent stuff we, we have to. Universities are places to encourage excellence and reward it, and the public gets rewarded in the process. But also something that’s worth stressing that I think maybe even many Canadians don’t know, certainly most Americans don’t know when I talk to them, that Canada has institutionalized discrimination, that you’re allowed legally this ridiculous Supreme Court ruling that you’re allowed to discriminate now to make up for past discrimination. So somehow two wrongs definitely make a right. It’s the most ridiculous notion. And so you see these ads saying we’re looking for the best candidate, but they have to, they have to self identify as either a female two spirit or, you know, or being indigenous. And it’s just, it’s just, it reads. And most people among the public who read that are shocked.

SEAN SPEER: Yes. Okay, so we’ve set out your compelling critique of this tendency towards what one might characterize as affirmative action or the infusion of politics in the pursuit of science and university administration. But let’s, for the purposes of fairness, steelman the other side for a minute. They’d ostensibly argue that science has never been value neutral, that it’s always reflected the cultural norms and. And hierarchies of our time. How do you respond to critics who say that pushing for decolonization or the diversification of science is actually an overdue correction rather than a threat.

LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS: Well, I think it’s, it misunderstands first of all how what science is all about. Let me take the most extreme example. There are two authors in a book who write about mathematics. Now you think mathematics would be the area of the human intellectual inquiry which is the least related to the vicissitudes of society issues. But there’s a huge push to decolonize mathematics.

SEAN SPEER: Yes.

LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS: Now what does that mean? Pi is Pi and the power series for Pi is hard. And by the way, some of the best power series for Pi were discovered by self educated, famous Indian mathematician Ramanujan who just discovered these things. And so first of all, mathematics is independent of issues of colonization or not. Now some people say, well most recent mathematics has been done in the west, but okay, fine, that’s fine, but the results are independent of that. Moreover, the origin of mathematics, the origin of zero and algebra. Al Jabar from, from. From the Arab countries. So even the notion that it needs to be decolonized is ridiculous. But it goes even to further extremes that somehow mathematics itself represents an exclusionary because it’s hard. And science, you know, there’s a, it’s one of the grants that went, that went in Canada for the decolonization of light, federal grant for the decolonization of life says one of the problems of physics is it’s hard. So we’ve got to make sure it isn’t hard. And that’s a problem. Let’s decolonize it. Let’s make it less hard by making it less sophisticated and less rigorous. In the United States there was a, and I’ll call it a white paper, although now that would be decried on mathematics education in California, the public schools. And it said things like seeking the right answer or showing your work are examples of white supremacy. There have been articles and this is what’s ridiculous. When I used to teach at Yale and I taught in the physics department and we’d look down the hill at the English department and it was full of deconstructionism and we’d laugh and say that would never happen in physics. And then you see these ridiculous articles that are appearing in physics journals about whiteness in physics, arguing for example, the use of whiteboards is somehow an example of white supremacy.

So this notion of decolonizing is just verbiage that often has without any underlying intellectual premise and often wrong. And it also suggests often, once again, it’s kind of almost a racist argument that somehow these other Indigenous groups or other minorities somehow can’t do this stuff and we have to make it more, we have to water it down in some way so that they can do it. Another example that, and one of the reasons I included in the book, even though it’s not science per se, comes from a classics professor at Princeton. Princeton removed the requirement, if you’re taking a degree in classics, the Greek and Roman world, that you ever have to study Latin or Greek. I mean, now what was the motivation behind that? Well, essentially the motivation is a racist one. The argument that somehow people from certain minority groups can’t handle Latin and Greek and therefore we don’t want to remove them from the opportunity of learning of doing classics. But it’s essentially a racist premise. So often this, this decolonization argument is itself racism.

SEAN SPEER: Yeah, it reminds me of former George W. Bush, former President George W. Bush’s line about the soft bigotry of low expectations.

LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS: Exactly. And one sees it all over. And essentially that’s what’s happening when you do this, demographics. The argument that unless you provide a leg up at some level, certain groups cannot compete and you know, it’s, it’s harmful to everyone I think.

SEAN SPEER: Indeed. Now some would say that science is supposed to be self correcting, which is to say that bad ideas are eventually weeded out by the scientific method itself. Why isn’t that happening? Has the mechanism of self correction broken down?

LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS: Well, it’s broken down in certain areas and that’s one of the reasons, I mean, that’s probably the thing that matters to me most, is that nothing is sacred in science or in academia. Every question is important and science is a dialectic, it requires active criticisms. When you write a paper, you expect people to look for what’s wrong and only in that way will the best ideas flourish. But in a world where you’re worried about offending, that just destroys the whole way of sciences. Bruce. Now, in certain areas of science, of course, that kind of active dialect is going on. In many areas of physics, it’s going on. But if you see certain areas of biology where they say gender issues, it’s not. And what’s happened is that the scientific institutions, that’s universities, governments and journals, have simply caved in because of fear of attacks by social media. Take the journal Nature Behavior or the Royal Society of Chemistry journals. The editors have written saying we will not publish articles that might offend people, even if the science is correct, that might offend disadvantaged minorities or any other group. And that, I mean, how anyone could say that and still publish a science journal is reprehensible. And it’s ultimately this climate of fear and unwillingness to stand up for what’s true that I think is hurting the scientific method in certain areas.

And several of our researchers in the book talk about how if you’re, say, studying genetics, you’re warned not to look at genetic and race issues. You’re warned not to look at those questions, even though they may be important. Or even worse, people may say, that’s kind of, all of, that’s kind of esoteric. Take medicine, health. One of the things people worry about most, okay, in certain areas, you’re told, for example, government institutions will not support research, say, on sickle cell anemia, where the population base you’re looking at is black. Why? Because those are the people who get sickle cell anemia. Instead, you have to water down the base or you can’t even talk about sex or race in the context of your results, which again, produce scientific results that are nonsense. And that’s really hurting research in those areas. And by the way, one should say education. Take canmeds, which I talk about here, a proposal of the Canadian Medical association, which basically says, and I won’t quote it verbatim here, that in the training of doctors, social justice concerns should be more important than medical expertise. How many people out there would like to go to a doctor who is sympathetic to social justice concerns but doesn’t know medicine? I mean, that’s really the problem. I mean, I just, it’s. It’s awful.

SEAN SPEER: Along the lines that we’ve been discussing, Lawrence, the book raises serious questions about the role of universities as ongoing stewards of truth and reason. And it had me thinking, are we seeing a civilizational shift in what the academy is for and what’s at stake if the university abandons its Enlightenment inheritance?

LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS: Well, that’s a really good question. And I mean, the Enlightenment universities are supposed to be the preservers of the Enlightenment and enhancers of the Enlightenment. And if that goes away, you tend to basically, truth goes out the window. It’s much easier for people to authoritarian governments. Although there’s a good article in the piece about how academia and Nazi Germany just jumped on the bandwagon immediately. And of course, what happened? All the good academics left Germany. The German universities were the best in the world before the war. And then 28 Nobel laureates left Germany because they were Jewish or otherwise, excluded and moved and essentially built the intellectual basis of the West. And I think what you see is if the Enlightenment goes away, first of all one of the things that happens is the shift means that demographically, and I use that word, or geographically, the center of excellence moves and that’s going to happen. That’s happening. You know, China isn’t standing by to worry about a lot of these questions. And it’s, and it’s not just China. It’s, it’s other countries as Singapore, other, other countries as well. And Europe is and, and, and is looking at taking advantage of, of these problems. And you’re seeing academics move now.

So when it comes to the actual overall scientific development, that may not hinder it, but it’ll affect countries in the west, it’ll affect the US And Canada. It’ll certainly affect them if they’re no longer the centers of scientific excellence. But I think we all lose, yes, ultimately knowledge. You know, I’m, I’m often say, I’m often proud of the fact that nothing I’ve ever done in my scientific career, which I think has been produced a lot of interesting things, is ever going to have any practical significance whatsoever. And, and I, and I, I’m not necessarily proud, but I have to say it because it shocks people. But these, but that’s what living is all about. You know, people often say, well, what good is understanding the beginning of the universe or the future of the universe, or esoteric particle physics? And one of the reasons is that science, one of the benefits of science is it produces technology. But people lose sight of the fact that maybe only that one of the side benefits of science, the real benefit of science is changing our perspective of our. Ourselves. No one seems to ask what’s the purpose of a Picasso painting or a Mozart symphony. You pick, you know, a Shakespeare play. Okay. That they make what, what they make living worthwhile. And if we stop asking questions, then our culture becomes stale and, and that to me is one of the biggest tragedies of all.

SEAN SPEER: Yeah, well said. What, what a, what a great answer. I, I want to ask a bit about the threat to the university from the left and the right. You’ve written in the past about the politicization of science from the right, including on climate change, intelligent design and so on. Is the threat from the left today fundamentally different or is it a mirror image?

LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS: No, I think it is fundamentally different because it’s eternal. You tended to see the threats, the attacks on what was going on, academia often coming from. Yeah, the right in the past, and those are some of the issues you’re talking about. But there are other ones, homosexuality, gay rights, et cetera, as external and in Fact, it was the academy that was the guardian of the Enlightenment in that regard, and also moving forward without regard to whether the results were convenient or not. And I think the problem, and one of the reasons we’re speaking out is that this is an eternal attack that the academy has been taken over by largely, unfortunately, what one would call left wing activists. I mean, certain parts of the academy. And again, I want to stress there’s great work going on in universities, but you’re seeing whole disciplines being hijacked or being attacked. And one of the writers in the piece, Abigail Thompson at University Irvine in California, talks about the fact there are several departments specifically say a degree in our field is a degree in social activism. I mean, you know, it’s not a degree in Spanish or history or culture, it’s a degree in social activism. And that of course is an anathema to the progress of knowledge. And so I think that’s what’s really different about this attack from the left. And it has to be fought differently. I think one can legislate certain things and the Trump administration has done some good things. They’ve legislated getting rid of some of the power of DEI bureaucracy, some of the anti Semitism that’s going on, punishing universities have extreme anti Semitism. But you ultimately can’t fight injustice with other injustice. You can’t fight, you can’t say, we don’t like what’s being taught in diversity, equity, inclusion, so we’re going to outlaw it. You have to allow even bad ideas to be spoken about. And I think that that’s quite important. But one of the other, I think one of the other things that makes this attack from the left different is it’s producing this huge counterattack from the right. And you didn’t see that of course before an attacks from the right. So it’s quite different.

SEAN SPEER: You mentioned near the outset that one of the goals of the book was to preempt top down changes that would be harmful to these institutions. With that in mind, Lauren, what are some of the active institutional reforms that you think would be useful and productive to the better pursuit of science?

LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS: Okay. Yeah. The last section of the book is, is all about proposals to make, you know, to make things better. And, and there are a few. I, I particularly like Dorian Abbott’s article. But, but there are a few articles here on what, what universities can do. And basically it’s to make a statement that academic freedom is essential and free speech is essential. But more than just a statement to, there’s a series of, there’s the there’s the Chicago principles, basically, to say that universities will not make political statements, even that would be a huge thing. And to recognize, I think two of the quotes I put at the beginning of the book are one from Lawrence Summers, who was the former president of Harvard Universities. The universities need to abandon the concept that they have a central role in moral education, that it’s their job to tell people what’s right and what’s wrong. That’s not. It’s their job to get people to think and question. And hopefully if more people think and question, society will move in a positive direction. Heather McDonald Rob University has no capacity to eliminate hate, nor should that be its mission. You know, again, hate will hopefully be eliminated by enlightening, by exposing people to new ideas, by getting people to realize that other groups have something interesting to say. And so I think that what we need is first to get universities to make these statements, to basically say the university does not stand behind any political position, will not promote a political position that universities will promote based on merit and excellence. Okay, These are all important aspects of what universities need to do.

But they also want virtual signal that we won’t get administrators who try and stand out in front of the mob by saying things that are just nonsense in order to glean support. And one of the things that hopefully the other way we can change things is that donors, and we’re seeing it in the United States to some extent, big donors, for example, to Harvard when there was that rise of anti Semitism after October 7 began to remove their funding. And hopefully we’ll see people who donate or who potentially send their children to universities, they should march with their feet and speak out as well. And universities will respond because certainly in the United States, at least, where universities require external donations and most university presidents are largely salesmen now, they’re not academics that way, but you get people like an old, I guess I say friend of mine, Francis Collins, who was the head of the National Institutes of Health for over a decade, when he comes out and says biomedical research is inherently systemically racist, which is first nonsense, but secondly, it’s clearly virtue signaling, because if he believed it, he would resign because he was head of the organization that was in charge of biomedical research and ostensibly, therefore, he was promoting racism for his whole career. That’s just nonsense.

SEAN SPEER: Yes. A penultimate question, in light of some of the things you’ve said, particularly with respect to the dynamics within public institutions and private ones, let me just set it up and I’d be interested in your reaction. Of course, Most Canadian universities are still predominantly funded by the government through different means. Is the obligation there different, Lawrence, than it may be in a private institution, which is to say one may not like what’s happening at Harvard, but if it is mostly self financing, with the exception of some public research dollars, and it wants to act in a crazy way, it can fill its boots. On the other hand, do governments have some responsibility to taxpayers to intervene into public institutions? And if so, how do they do that without harming academic freedom?

LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS: Well, these are obviously complex questions. I think governments, if they’re funding universities, have an obligation to taxpayer to make sure the universities are educating and are doing what universities are supposed to do. And you’ve seen that. You’ve seen cuts in funding diverse universities. I won’t speak up, but I graduated from a university, was having problems for many years, and I’d go lecture, give public lectures to try and help them and encourage them to improve, but they were getting cut in their funding. And I think governments have an obligation if universities aren’t producing, and by producing, I mean the quality of the research, the quality of education not determined by governments but by peers is, is down. I think, I think they have an obligation to taxpayer in that regard, but they don’t have an obligation to the taxpayer to say, we don’t like what those universities are teaching.

SEAN SPEER: Yes.

LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS: Or we don’t. We don’t. We. We don’t think those universities are adhering to our political goals and therefore we will not fund them. And if our political goals are, as I say, affirmative action, we’re going to, or, or in some cases, and as it happens, unfortunately, in Florida, you know, if our political goal is to say, you can’t talk about diversity, then we’ll not fund those universities. That’s ridiculous. The legislatures couldn’t get involved. Public institutions have an obligation to the public, but not an obligation, and to the government that funds them, but not an obligation to parrot or support the principles of that government, but rather to obligation to, to do the best for the commons, to produce a population that is the best possible population for that democracy, one that has skills which will help the economic growth of that society, but also a population that’s lifelong learners that’s able to be skeptical, to question so that they can choose the best politicians, they can judge, they can judge policies by whether they’re working or not. And so what universities should be doing is producing the best educated populace not to support any specific goal, but to rather be there to question and at the same time to be attractive to people. So they want to be educated, not to be places where people are afraid to exist in, not in places where males, for example, won’t go for one reason or other. They need, certainly, universities. If you have many universities, there’s competition, and there should be competition.

And universities should become attractive not by necessarily just providing the most luxurious athletic programs, but by having the most intriguing academics. And you see, and people are interested. You see, when you have great academics, you see their classes are flooded and they’re huge, and people want to go to places like that. And so it’s not just the periphery. You really have to provide substance. But I don’t think. But, you know, private universities and private institutions are different, and they can choose to behave strangely. And, you know, there are religious universities in the United States that do, for example. But in that case, if they’re not, if they’re choosing to violate the. The general premises of what government thinks education should all be about, then they shouldn’t get government support. But Harvard’s a Harvard University, and it’s got a huge endowment. But it depends, crucially I was at Harvard, and it depends vitally for the success of its science on government funding. And what the Trump administration right now is doing by cutting its funding to Harvard is hurting that university tremendously. You’ve got the best physicists in the world in some places who’ve been funded for 30 years, and suddenly their funding’s been cut. They have to tell the bull stocks that they’ve recruited from around the world to come work with them. They can’t pay them anymore, or the graduate students that they can’t put them, bring them on. So believe me, private institutions aren’t very private.

SEAN SPEER: Let’s close out on a nod to a cautious optimism, if we can. Is there a path back, Lawrence? What should concern scientists, students and. And even citizens do to preserve the integrity of scientific enterprise?

LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS: Okay, sure. And I think, you know, I’m just actually reading a book for a podcast I’m going to do called the End of Woke that, you know, there’s lots of evidence that a lot of the nonsense kind of peaked in 2021, 22, and is subsiding somewhat. It’s not going away. There’s still nonsense going on. And that in the book is very, very prescient in that sense. But I think the public has turned a corner to a large extent. The public is looking at this and is now being exposed to some of this. And I think that when the public understands what’s going on, it inevitably leads to changes. Politicians don’t lead, they always follow. And when the public wants changes, then there are changes. I think one is beginning to see. And this book, I hope, is a harbinger of that, that the academic community is willing to speak out to cure its own problems. That in spite of the fear and concerns, that scientists are willing to speak out and academics more generally. So I think there is room for optimism here. But it’s a long haul because unlike, say, external wars where you can fight at the ballot box and the government changes, it changes. Part of the problem here is that you’ve had a system that’s required, say, young people to do these loyalty oaths and write these, you know, saying that their work is vitally going to fight anti racism, even if they’re studying string theory in 11 dimensions. Okay, that somehow that’s vitally going to. And so a lot of young scientists I know just go along with the verbiage to get the job, but you tend to be also producing a lot of true believers. And they’re going to be in the system for a long time. And so we have to constantly be vigilant, I think, and we have to. The faculty have to not only speak out, but be willing to criticize, willing to criticize each other programs. That’s beginning to happen more. And so I’m certainly more optimistic than I was before. If I thought it was lost cause, I probably wouldn’t have spent the effort putting this book together.

SEAN SPEER: Well, if one is looking for a source of optimism, they ought to read the war on science. 39 renowned scientists and scholars speak about, speak, speak out about current threats to free speech, open inquiry and the scientific process. Lawrence Krauss, thank you so much for joining us at Hub Dialogues.

LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS: Thank you. I really enjoyed the discussion. Thanks for having me on.

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Lawrence M. Krauss, theoretical physicist, award-winning author, and host of The Origins Podcast, discusses his new book, The War on Science: Thirty-Nine Renowned Scientists and Scholars Speak Out About Current Threats to Free Speech, Open Inquiry, and the Scientific Process. He outlines the costs and consequences of the politicization of universities, the threats to free speech and open inquiry from the Left and the Right, and the need for universities to focus on excellence in the scientific pursuit rather than political values. You can listen to this episode on Amazon, Apple, and Spotify. Program Transcript This is an automated transcript. Please check against delivery. SEAN SPEER: Lawrence, thanks for joining us at Hub Dialogues and congratulations on the book. LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS: Well, thank you. It’s nice to be with you, at least virtually. SEAN SPEER: Let’s start with the book’s origins. How did you come to the decision to produce it and what were you hoping to achieve? LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS: Well, that’s a good question. It was a slow process. I’ve been like a number of my colleagues, I’ve been writing for some years about my concerns about the incursions of ideology into academia and the lack of speech free speech and cancel culture and all many of the things we talk about in the book. And so while I’ve been writing op EDS and opinion pieces in various newspapers and magazines, I realized that we needed to do something more drastic. And as I had been talking to numerous colleagues about this, I decided first I actually thought of writing a book about it and then I thought it would be more powerful, potentially. Even though anthologies, I admit, normally actually have limited appeal to some people, in this case, I hope it’ll actually enhance the interest of the book. I wanted to be able to. I didn’t want this book to be classified as a right wing attack or whatever, X attack as it would be. And I also wanted to get colleagues from a wide variety of disciplines so it wouldn’t be seen from as a physicist just. Or something like that, or as a natural scientist and ones who are across the political spectrum. Yes, because what’s really important, I think, if we’re going to address this culture war issue, is that we have to encourage academics to speak up. And for good reasons. Many academics either are afraid to speak out because they see what happens to their colleagues and we talk about that in this book, or like a lot of academics, they’d rather just sort of hang below the radar, keep their head low, avoid the controversy and just get on with their work. And that’s okay. Except what’s happening is that the problem is getting worse and in addition, at least in the United States, not so much yet in Canada, because the academic community hasn’t responded. There’s been essentially an attack by the current Trump administration and others to look at label all of academia as left wing woke and attack the whole shebang. And that’s a problem because there’s obviously lots of good research going on. So the idea was to encourage other academics speak out to show that if I got a distinguished enough group of people that we weren’t afraid to speak out, but also to get the public interested in this because the public hears again from the outside attacks and all sorts of other things. But if they can see what’s going on, and some of the stuff that’s described here, you wouldn’t believe if it wasn’t really happening, that there’s got to be public pressure, not just on universities, but on governments to try and not to try and open up and encourage merit in hiring. In Canada, as we’ll probably talk about, there’s these efforts to appoint people based on demographics rather than ability, and that’s a real problem. And ultimately the public, I think, has to apply pressure at universities because another big problem, and this is a long answer to your question, a number of questions, but another big problem is that one of the real sources of the problem is our university administrators and scientific administrators who lack the backbone to speak out to address issues of free speech, who would rather avoid a controversy online than and either fire or remove a colleague or suppress an article, then stand up for what universities are all about. And that’s the real problem. These people have no backbone, no spine. And often in some cases, in some universities, it’s not even the academic administrators, the academics who are administrating. It’s some DEI bureaucracy who are calling the shots. Diversity, equity, inclusion bureaucracy. And they’re not even made up of faculty. And they don’t have any skin in the game of actually teaching or research or production of scholarship. And that’s a real problem. So, anyway, those are the reasons for producing the book as we did, and I’m very happy that we have. It was like herding cats, as you can imagine, but we have a very diverse group of scholars, intellectually diverse, disciplined diverse, and also politically diverse. SEAN SPEER: Yeah, that’s a comprehensive answer, and we’ll pursue some of those different lines of analysis over the course of the conversation. But if we can stay a minute on the group of contributors, it’s enormously impressive, as you say, and involves writers from Richard Dawkins to Steven Pinker to Jordan Peterson and others. I want to take up precisely the point you raised, though, about the potential social costs for academics to raise their hand and possibly even participate in a project like this. What was the reaction on the part of scholars and thinkers when you approached them about contributing an essay? To what extent were people apprehensive about weighing into these issues? LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS: There were people who remain unnamed who really were sympathetic but felt that they didn’t want to speak out. And I understand that because I’ve seen what’s happened. On the whole, I was really gratified that people were willing to spend time on this and have been ever since the beginning of the process, you know, always issues about this, but the people have worked hard and in the editing process being willing to go back and forth and check and produce really excellent pieces, I did what I believe in, which is academic freedom. I chose people based on excellence and in some sense on their ability to add to the discussion in different areas. But then I didn’t tell people what to do. Some people ask me, you know, what should I write on? But I basically said, write on something that you feel passionate about. And so it’s interesting to see there’s some overlaps between discussions and there’s some people have different views. But on the whole, the fact that we’re able to get this broad a group of excellent people involved I think really bodes well because it really means that there’s a new and growing interest among really active scholars to try and quell what’s been going on and get universities back into the business of scholarship and knowledge production. SEAN SPEER: As we weigh into the book substance, let’s zoom out for a minute. Lawrence, you write in the introduction that science is under threat not from the outside, but from within. What do you mean by that? And why should we be especially concerned about what you call ‘internal sabotage?’ LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS: Okay, first of all, I should say the book was written before the current Trump administration was elected. And there’s a little addendum in my introduction and a few of the other pieces. There are attacks from the outside, and I’ve written about them extensively. The Trump administration, as I said at the beginning, is painting a broad brush view as basically all scientists and all academics is woke or anti Semitic. You know, there are universities that have. Harvard’s had real problems, but you don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. And there are huge cuts in really important research that are happening and those need to be fought. And I want to stress that, but it’s a very different fight with the ballot box and other things. But what we’re talking about is this internal culture war. And why should people care? Because ultimately, well, there’s two reasons. It is infringing upon the quality of research that’s being done across the board at universities in North America and in the West in general. And in the long run, that’s going to impact people’s livelihood and well being, because the fundamental research, fundamental curiosity driven research today will be the engine of the economy 25 years from now in this country. And yet you see already academics being discouraged and young people moving elsewhere. And obviously Europe and China are taking advantage of that. But also, if they’re interested in the education of their children. That’s really important. It’s not just faculty that are afraid to speak out. It’s students. It’s young people who are often afraid, especially if they happen to be conservative or any actually, whatever their views on gender. You see this. It’s really remarkable that in many universities created things called safe spaces to save people from ever hearing anything they disagreed with. All that’s done is caused more anxiety and more fear among the student population. Also, these young people in, say, take physics in my area, young people or graduate students, many of them realize that there’s no hopes for jobs if they happen to be, say, white or Asian males in Canada and in the United States, largely over the last few years. And it shouldn’t be the case. It should be a meritocracy. So if people are worried about their futures and economic futures, that’s one thing through the production of knowledge. But the other is if you have children and you’re interested in their futures, you should be concerned about this as well. SEAN SPEER: As you’ve alluded a couple of times, one of the reoccurring themes in the book is the tension between inclusion and excellence. How do we reconcile efforts to broaden participation in science with the imperative to, as you say, uphold its meritocratic foundations? LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS: Well, look, I think there’s a lot of different ways. Most of my life I’ve spent with not just doing my scientific research, but being involved in public education, understanding. One of the ways to broaden interest is to get people excited, is to go out in the community and speak and write things that people are interested in and find ways to grab people’s excitement, because young people are intrinsically excited by science and we turn them off often. The other is, look, if you really look, there are inequities in society, but those inequities are not best addressed at the level of professors at universities. People have PhDs. If you really want to address inequities, you want to go and look at the school systems. You want to go into inner city schools, and you want to provide resources for young people so they have advantage and they have access to the tools that they need to get to that level. We want to work on providing security for single parents and other people so their kids can go to school. So those are the kind of things I think are necessary if you really are interested in equities in that level at universities. First of all, it’s the last place to deal with these things. Secondly, there, it’s just bogus to suggest that there’s sexism or racism. Universities, historically, they’ve been the most tolerant groups in places in the world. I was chairman of a physics department for 15 years, and already in the 1990s, for example, if we did not hire a woman when we had a faculty search, we had to write a special letter explaining why that wasn’t the case. And I was proud of the fact that I hired the first two women faculty in my department. That was the concern. But there was real concern. This is 30, 40, 50 years ago in this. And these inequity issues have been addressed. To claim that there’s gender inequity is bogus, except for the fact that there is gender inequity because males are now underrepresented at universities. The ratio of undergraduates is almost 60 to 40 percent female to male. Graduating students all the way up to doctorates and including STEM, business. Females dominate. And so I think if you create these artificial affirmative action approaches, they’re not necessary. They don’t work on the whole either. And they also demean the people who you hire. Take, let’s take Canada research chairs, this nonsense where the federal government decided that Canada research chairs, the sort of prime research endowed chairs that the government gives in the country, originally created, by the way, to encourage expatriate Canadians to come back, have to reflect the background demographics of the country to the last decimal point. So 50.9 percent have to be female and certain number have to be indigenous and a certain number have to be other minorities. It’s ridiculous because the background pool into various disciplines. Isn’t that background demographics? And you obviously get situations like the University of Toronto and several other universities that have said over the next five years they’re not going to hire any white males into these positions. Well, that’s just absolutely ridiculous. But it demeans the people you hire because it puts an asterisk next to their name forever. Because you can ask were they hired because they were the best or because they were a woman or something else. And so it really is destructive in all ways. And in various places, there’s lots of statistics showing that it doesn’t change the applicant pool and it doesn’t change basically the background demographics. People tend to choose what discipline they want to go into because they’re interested in it. If you take the Scandinavian countries, which are probably the most equal when it comes to gender in terms of opportunities, they have among the biggest disparities in certain STEM disciplines, because people choose, for whatever reason, females tend to want to be in life sciences more than, say, physics or math. And it doesn’t mean that they don’t have the capabilities, but it’s often a choice. And so this notion that everything has to be represent background demographics, that there has to be equal outcomes rather than equal opportunities, is just the worst way of thinking about things because ultimately it’s exclusionary. SEAN SPEER: I would just say in parentheses, Lawrence, for our Canadian listeners and viewers. Not only does this inclusion, excellence dynamic play out, as you say, amongst individual hires and individual scholars in Canada, it also tends to play out across different institutions. The federal government, in the distribution of resources, aims to ensure every university from Lakehead in Thunder Bay to St. Mary’s in Halifax to the University of Toronto roughly has the same distribution of research funding, which in a way runs counter to the basic purpose of supporting the best and most promising research in the country. So it manifests itself in a lot of different ways. LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS: And, you know, let me jump in there, you know, please. Governments, I believe in democracy when it comes to administration, of when it comes to politics, but not universities. Universities should not be democracies. They should be meritocracies. And that’s for the good of everyone. And that’s independent of all of the recent stuff we, we have to. Universities are places to encourage excellence and reward it, and the public gets rewarded in the process. But also something that’s worth stressing that I think maybe even many Canadians don’t know, certainly most Americans don’t know when I talk to them, that Canada has institutionalized discrimination, that you’re allowed legally this ridiculous Supreme Court ruling that you’re allowed to discriminate now to make up for past discrimination. So somehow two wrongs definitely make a right. It’s the most ridiculous notion. And so you see these ads saying we’re looking for the best candidate, but they have to, they have to self identify as either a female two spirit or, you know, or being indigenous. And it’s just, it’s just, it reads. And most people among the public who read that are shocked. SEAN SPEER: Yes. Okay, so we’ve set out your compelling critique of this tendency towards what one might characterize as affirmative action or the infusion of politics in the pursuit of science and university administration. But let’s, for the purposes of fairness, steelman the other side for a minute. They’d ostensibly argue that science has never been value neutral, that it’s always reflected the cultural norms and. And hierarchies of our time. How do you respond to critics who say that pushing for decolonization or the diversification of science is actually an overdue correction rather than a threat. LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS: Well, I think it’s, it misunderstands first of all how what science is all about. Let me take the most extreme example. There are two authors in a book who write about mathematics. Now you think mathematics would be the area of the human intellectual inquiry which is the least related to the vicissitudes of society issues. But there’s a huge push to decolonize mathematics. SEAN SPEER: Yes. LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS: Now what does that mean? Pi is Pi and the power series for Pi is hard. And by the way, some of the best power series for Pi were discovered by self educated, famous Indian mathematician Ramanujan who just discovered these things. And so first of all, mathematics is independent of issues of colonization or not. Now some people say, well most recent mathematics has been done in the west, but okay, fine, that’s fine, but the results are independent of that. Moreover, the origin of mathematics, the origin of zero and algebra. Al Jabar from, from. From the Arab countries. So even the notion that it needs to be decolonized is ridiculous. But it goes even to further extremes that somehow mathematics itself represents an exclusionary because it’s hard. And science, you know, there’s a, it’s one of the grants that went, that went in Canada for the decolonization of light, federal grant for the decolonization of life says one of the problems of physics is it’s hard. So we’ve got to make sure it isn’t hard. And that’s a problem. Let’s decolonize it. Let’s make it less hard by making it less sophisticated and less rigorous. In the United States there was a, and I’ll call it a white paper, although now that would be decried on mathematics education in California, the public schools. And it said things like seeking the right answer or showing your work are examples of white supremacy. There have been articles and this is what’s ridiculous. When I used to teach at Yale and I taught in the physics department and we’d look down the hill at the English department and it was full of deconstructionism and we’d laugh and say that would never happen in physics. And then you see these ridiculous articles that are appearing in physics journals about whiteness in physics, arguing for example, the use of whiteboards is somehow an example of white supremacy. So this notion of decolonizing is just verbiage that often has without any underlying intellectual premise and often wrong. And it also suggests often, once again, it’s kind of almost a racist argument that somehow these other Indigenous groups or other minorities somehow can’t do this stuff and we have to make it more, we have to water it down in some way so that they can do it. Another example that, and one of the reasons I included in the book, even though it’s not science per se, comes from a classics professor at Princeton. Princeton removed the requirement, if you’re taking a degree in classics, the Greek and Roman world, that you ever have to study Latin or Greek. I mean, now what was the motivation behind that? Well, essentially the motivation is a racist one. The argument that somehow people from certain minority groups can’t handle Latin and Greek and therefore we don’t want to remove them from the opportunity of learning of doing classics. But it’s essentially a racist premise. So often this, this decolonization argument is itself racism. SEAN SPEER: Yeah, it reminds me of former George W. Bush, former President George W. Bush’s line about the soft bigotry of low expectations. LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS: Exactly. And one sees it all over. And essentially that’s what’s happening when you do this, demographics. The argument that unless you provide a leg up at some level, certain groups cannot compete and you know, it’s, it’s harmful to everyone I think. SEAN SPEER: Indeed. Now some would say that science is supposed to be self correcting, which is to say that bad ideas are eventually weeded out by the scientific method itself. Why isn’t that happening? Has the mechanism of self correction broken down? LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS: Well, it’s broken down in certain areas and that’s one of the reasons, I mean, that’s probably the thing that matters to me most, is that nothing is sacred in science or in academia. Every question is important and science is a dialectic, it requires active criticisms. When you write a paper, you expect people to look for what’s wrong and only in that way will the best ideas flourish. But in a world where you’re worried about offending, that just destroys the whole way of sciences. Bruce. Now, in certain areas of science, of course, that kind of active dialect is going on. In many areas of physics, it’s going on. But if you see certain areas of biology where they say gender issues, it’s not. And what’s happened is that the scientific institutions, that’s universities, governments and journals, have simply caved in because of fear of attacks by social media. Take the journal Nature Behavior or the Royal Society of Chemistry journals. The editors have written saying we will not publish articles that might offend people, even if the science is correct, that might offend disadvantaged minorities or any other group. And that, I mean, how anyone could say that and still publish a science journal is reprehensible. And it’s ultimately this climate of fear and unwillingness to stand up for what’s true that I think is hurting the scientific method in certain areas. And several of our researchers in the book talk about how if you’re, say, studying genetics, you’re warned not to look at genetic and race issues. You’re warned not to look at those questions, even though they may be important. Or even worse, people may say, that’s kind of, all of, that’s kind of esoteric. Take medicine, health. One of the things people worry about most, okay, in certain areas, you’re told, for example, government institutions will not support research, say, on sickle cell anemia, where the population base you’re looking at is black. Why? Because those are the people who get sickle cell anemia. Instead, you have to water down the base or you can’t even talk about sex or race in the context of your results, which again, produce scientific results that are nonsense. And that’s really hurting research in those areas. And by the way, one should say education. Take canmeds, which I talk about here, a proposal of the Canadian Medical association, which basically says, and I won’t quote it verbatim here, that in the training of doctors, social justice concerns should be more important than medical expertise. How many people out there would like to go to a doctor who is sympathetic to social justice concerns but doesn’t know medicine? I mean, that’s really the problem. I mean, I just, it’s. It’s awful. SEAN SPEER: Along the lines that we’ve been discussing, Lawrence, the book raises serious questions about the role of universities as ongoing stewards of truth and reason. And it had me thinking, are we seeing a civilizational shift in what the academy is for and what’s at stake if the university abandons its Enlightenment inheritance? LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS: Well, that’s a really good question. And I mean, the Enlightenment universities are supposed to be the preservers of the Enlightenment and enhancers of the Enlightenment. And if that goes away, you tend to basically, truth goes out the window. It’s much easier for people to authoritarian governments. Although there’s a good article in the piece about how academia and Nazi Germany just jumped on the bandwagon immediately. And of course, what happened? All the good academics left Germany. The German universities were the best in the world before the war. And then 28 Nobel laureates left Germany because they were Jewish or otherwise, excluded and moved and essentially built the intellectual basis of the West. And I think what you see is if the Enlightenment goes away, first of all one of the things that happens is the shift means that demographically, and I use that word, or geographically, the center of excellence moves and that’s going to happen. That’s happening. You know, China isn’t standing by to worry about a lot of these questions. And it’s, and it’s not just China. It’s, it’s other countries as Singapore, other, other countries as well. And Europe is and, and, and is looking at taking advantage of, of these problems. And you’re seeing academics move now. So when it comes to the actual overall scientific development, that may not hinder it, but it’ll affect countries in the west, it’ll affect the US And Canada. It’ll certainly affect them if they’re no longer the centers of scientific excellence. But I think we all lose, yes, ultimately knowledge. You know, I’m, I’m often say, I’m often proud of the fact that nothing I’ve ever done in my scientific career, which I think has been produced a lot of interesting things, is ever going to have any practical significance whatsoever. And, and I, and I, I’m not necessarily proud, but I have to say it because it shocks people. But these, but that’s what living is all about. You know, people often say, well, what good is understanding the beginning of the universe or the future of the universe, or esoteric particle physics? And one of the reasons is that science, one of the benefits of science is it produces technology. But people lose sight of the fact that maybe only that one of the side benefits of science, the real benefit of science is changing our perspective of our. Ourselves. No one seems to ask what’s the purpose of a Picasso painting or a Mozart symphony. You pick, you know, a Shakespeare play. Okay. That they make what, what they make living worthwhile. And if we stop asking questions, then our culture becomes stale and, and that to me is one of the biggest tragedies of all. SEAN SPEER: Yeah, well said. What, what a, what a great answer. I, I want to ask a bit about the threat to the university from the left and the right. You’ve written in the past about the politicization of science from the right, including on climate change, intelligent design and so on. Is the threat from the left today fundamentally different or is it a mirror image? LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS: No, I think it is fundamentally different because it’s eternal. You tended to see the threats, the attacks on what was going on, academia often coming from. Yeah, the right in the past, and those are some of the issues you’re talking about. But there are other ones, homosexuality, gay rights, et cetera, as external and in Fact, it was the academy that was the guardian of the Enlightenment in that regard, and also moving forward without regard to whether the results were convenient or not. And I think the problem, and one of the reasons we’re speaking out is that this is an eternal attack that the academy has been taken over by largely, unfortunately, what one would call left wing activists. I mean, certain parts of the academy. And again, I want to stress there’s great work going on in universities, but you’re seeing whole disciplines being hijacked or being attacked. And one of the writers in the piece, Abigail Thompson at University Irvine in California, talks about the fact there are several departments specifically say a degree in our field is a degree in social activism. I mean, you know, it’s not a degree in Spanish or history or culture, it’s a degree in social activism. And that of course is an anathema to the progress of knowledge. And so I think that’s what’s really different about this attack from the left. And it has to be fought differently. I think one can legislate certain things and the Trump administration has done some good things. They’ve legislated getting rid of some of the power of DEI bureaucracy, some of the anti Semitism that’s going on, punishing universities have extreme anti Semitism. But you ultimately can’t fight injustice with other injustice. You can’t fight, you can’t say, we don’t like what’s being taught in diversity, equity, inclusion, so we’re going to outlaw it. You have to allow even bad ideas to be spoken about. And I think that that’s quite important. But one of the other, I think one of the other things that makes this attack from the left different is it’s producing this huge counterattack from the right. And you didn’t see that of course before an attacks from the right. So it’s quite different. SEAN SPEER: You mentioned near the outset that one of the goals of the book was to preempt top down changes that would be harmful to these institutions. With that in mind, Lauren, what are some of the active institutional reforms that you think would be useful and productive to the better pursuit of science? LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS: Okay. Yeah. The last section of the book is, is all about proposals to make, you know, to make things better. And, and there are a few. I, I particularly like Dorian Abbott’s article. But, but there are a few articles here on what, what universities can do. And basically it’s to make a statement that academic freedom is essential and free speech is essential. But more than just a statement to, there’s a series of, there’s the there’s the Chicago principles, basically, to say that universities will not make political statements, even that would be a huge thing. And to recognize, I think two of the quotes I put at the beginning of the book are one from Lawrence Summers, who was the former president of Harvard Universities. The universities need to abandon the concept that they have a central role in moral education, that it’s their job to tell people what’s right and what’s wrong. That’s not. It’s their job to get people to think and question. And hopefully if more people think and question, society will move in a positive direction. Heather McDonald Rob University has no capacity to eliminate hate, nor should that be its mission. You know, again, hate will hopefully be eliminated by enlightening, by exposing people to new ideas, by getting people to realize that other groups have something interesting to say. And so I think that what we need is first to get universities to make these statements, to basically say the university does not stand behind any political position, will not promote a political position that universities will promote based on merit and excellence. Okay, These are all important aspects of what universities need to do. But they also want virtual signal that we won’t get administrators who try and stand out in front of the mob by saying things that are just nonsense in order to glean support. And one of the things that hopefully the other way we can change things is that donors, and we’re seeing it in the United States to some extent, big donors, for example, to Harvard when there was that rise of anti Semitism after October 7 began to remove their funding. And hopefully we’ll see people who donate or who potentially send their children to universities, they should march with their feet and speak out as well. And universities will respond because certainly in the United States, at least, where universities require external donations and most university presidents are largely salesmen now, they’re not academics that way, but you get people like an old, I guess I say friend of mine, Francis Collins, who was the head of the National Institutes of Health for over a decade, when he comes out and says biomedical research is inherently systemically racist, which is first nonsense, but secondly, it’s clearly virtue signaling, because if he believed it, he would resign because he was head of the organization that was in charge of biomedical research and ostensibly, therefore, he was promoting racism for his whole career. That’s just nonsense. SEAN SPEER: Yes. A penultimate question, in light of some of the things you’ve said, particularly with respect to the dynamics within public institutions and private ones, let me just set it up and I’d be interested in your reaction. Of course, Most Canadian universities are still predominantly funded by the government through different means. Is the obligation there different, Lawrence, than it may be in a private institution, which is to say one may not like what’s happening at Harvard, but if it is mostly self financing, with the exception of some public research dollars, and it wants to act in a crazy way, it can fill its boots. On the other hand, do governments have some responsibility to taxpayers to intervene into public institutions? And if so, how do they do that without harming academic freedom? LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS: Well, these are obviously complex questions. I think governments, if they’re funding universities, have an obligation to taxpayer to make sure the universities are educating and are doing what universities are supposed to do. And you’ve seen that. You’ve seen cuts in funding diverse universities. I won’t speak up, but I graduated from a university, was having problems for many years, and I’d go lecture, give public lectures to try and help them and encourage them to improve, but they were getting cut in their funding. And I think governments have an obligation if universities aren’t producing, and by producing, I mean the quality of the research, the quality of education not determined by governments but by peers is, is down. I think, I think they have an obligation to taxpayer in that regard, but they don’t have an obligation to the taxpayer to say, we don’t like what those universities are teaching. SEAN SPEER: Yes. LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS: Or we don’t. We don’t. We. We don’t think those universities are adhering to our political goals and therefore we will not fund them. And if our political goals are, as I say, affirmative action, we’re going to, or, or in some cases, and as it happens, unfortunately, in Florida, you know, if our political goal is to say, you can’t talk about diversity, then we’ll not fund those universities. That’s ridiculous. The legislatures couldn’t get involved. Public institutions have an obligation to the public, but not an obligation, and to the government that funds them, but not an obligation to parrot or support the principles of that government, but rather to obligation to, to do the best for the commons, to produce a population that is the best possible population for that democracy, one that has skills which will help the economic growth of that society, but also a population that’s lifelong learners that’s able to be skeptical, to question so that they can choose the best politicians, they can judge, they can judge policies by whether they’re working or not. And so what universities should be doing is producing the best educated populace not to support any specific goal, but to rather be there to question and at the same time to be attractive to people. So they want to be educated, not to be places where people are afraid to exist in, not in places where males, for example, won’t go for one reason or other. They need, certainly, universities. If you have many universities, there’s competition, and there should be competition. And universities should become attractive not by necessarily just providing the most luxurious athletic programs, but by having the most intriguing academics. And you see, and people are interested. You see, when you have great academics, you see their classes are flooded and they’re huge, and people want to go to places like that. And so it’s not just the periphery. You really have to provide substance. But I don’t think. But, you know, private universities and private institutions are different, and they can choose to behave strangely. And, you know, there are religious universities in the United States that do, for example. But in that case, if they’re not, if they’re choosing to violate the. The general premises of what government thinks education should all be about, then they shouldn’t get government support. But Harvard’s a Harvard University, and it’s got a huge endowment. But it depends, crucially I was at Harvard, and it depends vitally for the success of its science on government funding. And what the Trump administration right now is doing by cutting its funding to Harvard is hurting that university tremendously. You’ve got the best physicists in the world in some places who’ve been funded for 30 years, and suddenly their funding’s been cut. They have to tell the bull stocks that they’ve recruited from around the world to come work with them. They can’t pay them anymore, or the graduate students that they can’t put them, bring them on. So believe me, private institutions aren’t very private. SEAN SPEER: Let’s close out on a nod to a cautious optimism, if we can. Is there a path back, Lawrence? What should concern scientists, students and. And even citizens do to preserve the integrity of scientific enterprise? LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS: Okay, sure. And I think, you know, I’m just actually reading a book for a podcast I’m going to do called the End of Woke that, you know, there’s lots of evidence that a lot of the nonsense kind of peaked in 2021, 22, and is subsiding somewhat. It’s not going away. There’s still nonsense going on. And that in the book is very, very prescient in that sense. But I think the public has turned a corner to a large extent. The public is looking at this and is now being exposed to some of this. And I think that when the public understands what’s going on, it inevitably leads to changes. Politicians don’t lead, they always follow. And when the public wants changes, then there are changes. I think one is beginning to see. And this book, I hope, is a harbinger of that, that the academic community is willing to speak out to cure its own problems. That in spite of the fear and concerns, that scientists are willing to speak out and academics more generally. So I think there is room for optimism here. But it’s a long haul because unlike, say, external wars where you can fight at the ballot box and the government changes, it changes. Part of the problem here is that you’ve had a system that’s required, say, young people to do these loyalty oaths and write these, you know, saying that their work is vitally going to fight anti racism, even if they’re studying string theory in 11 dimensions. Okay, that somehow that’s vitally going to. And so a lot of young scientists I know just go along with the verbiage to get the job, but you tend to be also producing a lot of true believers. And they’re going to be in the system for a long time. And so we have to constantly be vigilant, I think, and we have to. The faculty have to not only speak out, but be willing to criticize, willing to criticize each other programs. That’s beginning to happen more. And so I’m certainly more optimistic than I was before. If I thought it was lost cause, I probably wouldn’t have spent the effort putting this book together. SEAN SPEER: Well, if one is looking for a source of optimism, they ought to read the war on science. 39 renowned scientists and scholars speak about, speak, speak out about current threats to free speech, open inquiry and the scientific process. Lawrence Krauss, thank you so much for joining us at Hub Dialogues. LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS: Thank you. I really enjoyed the discussion. Thanks for having me on.

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