Stand Up for Science? Try Standing Up for Scientists Shunned for Thinking Freely

Editor’s Note: The following article was originally published by the Observatory of University Ethics on March 11, 2025. The Observatory translated it into English from French. I have edited it, to the best of my ability, to align with Minding the Campus’s style guidelines. It is crossposted here with permission.

In a great burst of generosity, many scientists and even university presidents have pledged to welcome American researchers who are facing dictatorial power that deprives them of research funding because their project or disciplinary field displeases incompetent tyrants or simply because a particular forbidden word appears in their program.

This is all well and good, and we fully subscribe to it: scientists must stick together when science is threatened. Yes, but it must be done for all those threatened! The defense of science is a convenient excuse. French researchers have hardly spoken out when American scientists were harassed, threatened, ostracized, deprived of funding, suspended, or even dismissed for an offense of opinion. No one then suggested welcoming them to France. The suspicion of bias is all the stronger since, among the mobilized researchers, many have not hesitated, in recent years, to set themselves up as moral consciences. As is often the case, those who cheerfully mix genres between science and politics have the least qualms about presenting themselves as the paragons of the scientific ideal. Have we heard one single scientist of this fine enthusiasm? Stand Up for Science—an organized movement of scientific communities responding to perceived threats to scientific research under the Trump administration—to rebel:

• When Elizabeth Weiss was banned from her laboratory and the anthropological collections she studied because she posed with a Native American skull in her hands?
• When Bret Weinstein was violently booed by students on the Evergreen campus and was forced to resign, along with his colleague and wife Heather Heying?
• When Verushka Lieutenant-Duval was suspended by the University of Ottawa for uttering the taboo n-word, that one version ending in “a.”
• When Nicholas and Erika Christakis were driven to resign by excited and intolerant students who accused them—among other vague accusations—of wanting to create an intellectual space at Yale instead of a safe space?
• When Richard Bilkszto, a college principal at the Toronto Academy, was driven to suicide after a woke anti-racism fury persistently called him a “white supremacist” and reported him to the authorities, leading to his firing?
• When, on the Columbia campus and some others, anti-Semitic students morally harassed and physically brutalized Jewish students?

[RELATED: Anthropology in Crisis: Elizabeth Weiss Faces the Challenges of a Politicized Discipline]

All these are facts, and there are people behind these facts. Scientists, researchers, and honorable teachers whose careers have been broken, even destroyed. Here are a few, but everyone can find others. And let’s not talk about similar facts that took place in France, where a teacher-researcher, to take just one example, was sentenced to two years of suspension for similar facts, a not isolated fact that was not vigorously denounced. The selective indignation of our colleagues from Stand Up for Science. There is something biased and partial about it, and that is why a number of us refuse to join it.

Our mobilized scientists ignore the many militant excesses that have been highlighted, notably by our Observatory. What is the relationship between science and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) programs, which have been enthusiastically developed in many universities? Is it serious to confuse the cessation of these programs with a suspension of research funding, as a recent platform of Monde? DEI operations have nothing to do with science, and their suppression is a matter of sound management when we see the incredible sums that were devoted to them, to the point that the New York Times itself was alarmed by this. The University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor had recruited a total of 16 non-faculty employees, more than twice the number of faculty members. The National Science Foundation, in the physical sciences, focused nearly 10 percent of its grants on DEI, totaling $675 million in funding.

French scientists are protesting that certain words may be banned if our colleagues want to access federal funding. They forget that language has become a battlefield. For several years now, “political correctness” has been developing on American campuses, where language is shamelessly exploited to impose new ideologies, particularly with a strange use of pronouns. A coded vocabulary has been put in place, particularly around “gender theory.” It is therefore not surprising that expressions such as “body with vagina” to designate a woman or “sex assigned at birth” instead of biological sex are now on the blacklist of American academic institutions. Is the more obscurantist the one who opposes these expressions or the one who endorses them?

[RELATED: Deboning Anthropological Science: A Boneheaded Decision]

The same problem arises in France. Too many colleagues have allowed ideologies that have nothing to do with science to run rampant, when they have not supported and encouraged them. Concepts as vague as “systemic racism” or “patriarchy” have been brandished to describe French society without encountering much resistance. The spread of Islamo-leftism has been denied, including by the CNRS and university presidents. The pro-Palestinian and anti-Semitic demonstrations that have taken place in the grandes écoles and universities, where Hamas supporters have sometimes been given a triumphant welcome, have made it possible to gauge the extent of the disaster.

We very much hope that American scientists will be welcomed in France, but if it is to develop “gender studies,” “race studies,” “decolonial studies,” or “fat studies,” no: we already have all that here! The objectives of the DEI are noble, but have been perverted, in an improbable exaggeration, by ideologues who saw it as an end in itself, and not a means of improving social justice, which is everyone’s desire.

Dive into our Minding the World and Minding the Science columns for sharp insights on global higher education and in-depth analysis of STEM issues—from wokeism and scientific ethics to research funding and climate science.

Image: “Stand Up For Science in Seattle 2025” by LivingBetterThroughChemistry on Wikimedia Commons