Category: Cancel Culture

Maarten Boudry on the policing of academia

January 30, 2026 • 10:15 am

My friend Maarten Boudry, a Belgian philosopher, has been increasingly demonized for his heterodox views, especially on the Hamas/Israel war, since he is sympathetic to Israel (he isn’t Jewish). In the latest post on his Substack site, also published in condensed form in The Jewish Chronicle, Maarten recounts how there is a near-unanimity among European academics that Israel is the Great Satan. Any dissent on this issue is ruthlessly suppressed. Because of this, one gets a false impression, says Boudry, that European academia is united in hating Israel, Zionists, and, by extension, Jews.

Boudry himself, as you see below, has lost his position at the University of Ghent because of his outspokenness.  In the article he does a small experiment showing that there is indeed dissent that Israel is committing “genocide”, but academics who disagree about the Israeli “genocide” dare not speak up. This “spiral of silence”, as Steve Pinker calls it, suppresses speech, and is one reason why many American universities are beginning to adopt institutional neutrality—a policy that promotes free expression.

Click below to read the Substack piece. 

Unless you’re in Europe, you have no idea how strong and pervasive the anti-Israel pressure is. In an article in Quillette, Maarten and I described how we and another academic were canceled from giving a talk at the University of Amsterdam on the ideological suppression of science—a talk that had absolutely nothing to do with Israel. And yet we were explicitly told by the student science organization that our talk was cancelled because of our views on Israel. That was my first experience with cancellation, and believe me, it affected me strongly. I couldn’t believe that fellow scientists were blackballing us simply because of our views on the war, and for a talk that had nothing to do with that war. We were, apparently, tainted.

But on to Maarten’s narrative; his quotes are indented below. He begins by describing the academic consensus that Israel aims at genocide in Gaza, and recounts his own demonization.

In Europe, social pressure is even more intense than in the United States. A petition opposing the IAGS resolution garnered hundreds of signatories in the U.S., but only a handful in Europe—primarily in Germany and around a single London-based center for antisemitism research. In the Low Countries, where I live, my stance on the Gaza war has left me increasingly isolated within the ivory tower. In an interview with the Belgian newspaper De Morgen, the rector of my alma mater, Ghent University, declared that any academic questioning the genocide in Gaza can no longer rely on the protections of academic freedom: “This is a line that cannot be crossed.” Five professors have called on the previous rector to discipline me for my “Zionist-tinged” views. I’ve also been deplatformed twice at the University of Amsterdam for my views on Israel, a matter I detailed inQuillette together with my friend and fellow cancellee, the biologist Jerry Coyne.

And yet, for the past two years, I have been receiving regular emails from academic colleagues that can be summarized as follows: “I completely agree with you and am glad that you’re fighting this battle, but please keep it quiet—I don’t want to get into trouble.” The social pressure to condemn Israel, preferably in the strongest possible terms, has become so intense that many dissidents no longer dare to speak out. After a number of such discreet messages of support, I began to grow annoyed. To the outside world, it appeared as if I was the only academic rejecting the official narrative—but in reality, many others agreed with me.

This reluctance to speak up gives rise to what psychologists call pluralistic ignorance: people mistakenly assume that they are alone in holding a dissenting opinion and therefore either remain silent or misrepresent their own views, inadvertently perpetuating the illusion of consensus and raising the social cost of dissent.

Maarten then did a nonscientific experiment (there could have been respondent bias), but one showing there’s a lot more sympathy for Israel than you’d guess from living as a European academic:

In the spirit of the [“Emperor has no clothes”] fable, I wanted to see whether there was a way to break the spell. What if people could anonymously explain why they believed the emperor was naked, without exposing themselves to social or professional risk? To test this, I collected anonymous testimonies from academics with dissenting views on Israel and Gaza, by putting out a call on X in Dutch. The testimonies that landed in my inbox were both sobering and chilling.

Chilling to the reader, but also chilling to speech. Academics in Europe won’t dare to speak in sympathy with Israel, or contest the stupid “genocide” canard against Israel, for fear of professional repercussions. There’s a long list of responses, but I’ll give only a few:

A senior lecturer at a Dutch university writes: “I’m afraid to share my thoughts freely with my colleagues and feel restricted in my freedom to speak openly about this.” A philosophy professor describes academic debate on the war in Gaza as effectively “impossible”: “Critical voices are silenced through exclusion, dismissal, and sometimes even violence. In such circumstances, I don’t feel compelled to express my critical thoughts openly.” Another Dutch lecturer admits bluntly: “I certainly keep my mouth shut about my views to my colleagues.”

. . . . Among the testimonies are also voices with the relevant expertise, rarely heard in mainstream media. A professor of military law stresses that “extreme caution is required” on the question of genocide and warns against “jumping to conclusions.” Some actors, he notes, “automatically assimilate the conduct of hostilities with acts of genocide, but this reasoning seems incorrect to me.” A doctor of law and former advisor to the International Court of Justice, who has pored over previous genocide dossiers for many years, writes in a lengthy email: “I am not convinced that Israel is committing genocide, but I am currently raising capital and will not risk taking this position publicly.”

Dissenting opinions can be found even at the highest levels of academic institutions. A vice-chancellor of a Belgian university observes: “The Gaza mania that is currently prevailing seems to me a collective madness. The call to declare what Israel is doing a genocide is in line with this.” Yet in official communications, universities often strike a different tone, shaping and constraining the debate. A Ghent academic notes that the election of our new rector Petra De Sutter—who is strongly anti-Israel—further worsened the atmosphere: “I saw this tendency strengthen following the rector elections. Either you were outspoken, or else you were better off keeping quiet. The election result and the political convictions of the new rector have reinforced their ideology.”

. . . .Another lecturer’s testimony illustrates how subtle yet pervasive the professional and social repercussions can be, even for tenured staff: “I stopped reposting and commenting about Israel on X after noticing that my university suddenly stopped sharing any of my achievements. While colleagues were receiving retweets and links to their projects, mine went unnoticed, whereas this had never happened before.” The pressure extended to the social realm, with colleagues unfollowing him or no longer responding to messages. Ultimately, he gave up the fight for family-related reasons: “The decisive factor came when my wife asked me to leave the fight to others. We simply cannot afford to lose our jobs.” Several colleagues describe struggling with guilt for remaining silent, scolding themselves as “cowards” or “sell-outs.”

And the understatement of the year:

Several colleagues explicitly argue that the academic hostility towards Israel stems from antisemitism.

This hostility, says Boudry, also obtains largely in Canada, and in Europe can degenerate into threats of violence for those sympathetic to Israel or Jews:

Even before October 7, an Israeli academic working at a European university relates how he moved his tutorials off campus, because the threat of physical violence was constantly on his mind, even though his academic field was completely unrelated to Israel or the Middle East: “I always worried about being known as an Israeli and outspoken about my views that someone could just show up and attack me.” After the October 7 massacre and the ensuing Gaza war, of course the situation became far worse. An anti-Zionist website hosted on a server in the Netherlands even placed bounties for assassination as high as $100,000 on the heads of Israeli academics.

If you think this violence is directed simply against “Zionists”, and has nothing to do with Jews, I have some land in Florida to sell you. People didn’t stop to survey people’s views on Israel before they commit massacres on Australian beaches or in American synagogues.

In the end, Boudry concludes that censoriousness, threats of professional reprisal, and threats of violence have produced an artificial and false consensus about Israel being The Great Satan:

The academic consensus on Israel is, therefore, partly a mirage. Pluralistic ignorance, suppression of dissent and fear of professional and social reprisal have produced an artificial unanimity that is untethered from evidence and reasoned debate. In particular, the “Gaza genocide” accusation has become the Left’s equivalent of the stolen election hoax on the American Right—a baseless claim that signals ideological allegiance precisely because it defies logic and evidence. It functions much like mantras such as “men can get pregnant” or “scientific and Indigenous ways of knowing are equally valid”: deep down everyone understands that it’s nonsense, but that is precisely what allows it to serve as an ideological litmus test. Breaking the spiral of silence will require more people to step forward and call out such nonsense, thereby lowering the social cost of dissent.

Again, the only remedy for this is a tough one; dissenters must be willing to speak out in a climate of hostility. And European universities must do more to allow free speech. I don’t know of any university outside the U.S.—though here I may be wrong—that both promotes freedom of speech and maintains an policy of institutional neutrality, whereby the school takes no official position on moral, ideolotical, or political issues. If we think we have things bad in America, remember that it’s far worse across the pond.

******

A poster in Dam Square, Amsterdam, photographed in May, 2024:

University of Austin: The anti-woke University circles the drain

January 19, 2026 • 9:45 am

The University of Austin (UATX), not to be confused with the University of Texas at Austin, was founded in October, 2021 as a sort of heterodox university, one where all viewpoints could be represented and debated. In this sense it was a counter to “elite” universities like Harvard and Princeton, whose faculty are almost entirely liberal and where free speech policies are sometimes abrogated. Wikipedia says this about the founders:

The University of Austin was conceived in May 2021 when venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, St. John’s College president Pano Kanelos, British–American historian Niall Ferguson, and journalist Bari Weiss met in Austin. The proposal was publicized six months later in an article by Kanelos in Weiss’s newsletter Common Sense (which has since evolved into The Free Press).

Founding faculty fellows included Peter Boghossian, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Kathleen Stock. Other advisors included former Harvard President Lawrence Summers, former ACLU President Nadine Strossen, and former president of the American Enterprise Institute Arthur Brooks.

In November 2021, the university’s website listed Robert Zimmer, Larry Summers, John Nunes, Gordon Gee, Steven Pinker, Deirdre McCloskey, Leon Kass, Jonathan Haidt, Glenn Loury, Joshua Katz, Vickie Sullivan, Geoffrey Stone, Bill McClay, and Tyler Cowen as advisors to the university.

On November 11, 2021, Robert Zimmer announced his resignation from the university board, saying that UATX had made statements about higher education that “diverged very significantly from my own views”.[26] Shortly thereafter, Pinker followed suit. UATX apologized for creating “”unnecessary complications” for Pinker and Zimmer by not clarifying [sooner] what their advisory roles entailed.[28]

The founders and founding faculty are indeed a mixture of left- and right-wing people, and, with proper guidance and care, as well as a judicious selection of faculty, UATX had the possibility of turning into a decent alternative to other high-class but left-oriented schools.  That was the original aim. Sadly, it did not happen.

I sensed trouble with Steve Pinker and our President, the late Bob Zimmer, resigned in November. There must have been something about the ideological leaning of the university—the feeling that it was founded to follow an antiwoke ideology rather than just allow all viewpoints to be erred—that turned off Steve and Bob. Here’s a FB post by Steve in response to a new article in Politico about UATX:

I don’t know why Bob Zimmer resigned, as he wasn’t explicit about it except to say, as the article notes, ““The new university made a number of statements about higher education in general, largely quite critical, that diverged very significantly from my own views.”

According to this new article in Politico by author and criminal justice professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice Evan Mandery,  UATX entered the drain in the spring of 2025 when the right-wing nature of the school became explicit. And now more advisors and faculty have resigned, and it looks as if the school (which is unaccredited, but might be in two years) is doomed. But the trouble started almost immediately when the school was founded. Read about this mess by clicking the screenshot below:

Here are some of the people involved in UATX (indented quotes are from the article):

Kanelos identified 32 people as trustees, faculty members and advisers to the new university including Jonathan Haidt, the NYU professor whose work Kanelos evoked in proclaiming that UATX would produce an “antifragile” cohort with the capacity to think “fearlessly, nimbly, and inventively”; Summers; Pinker; the playwright David Mamet; Glenn Loury, an economist at Brown University; computer scientist and podcaster Lex Fridman; authors Andrew Sullivan and Rob Henderson; the journalists Caitlin Flanagan, Sohrab Ahmari and Jonathan Rauch; Stacy Hock, an investor and philanthropist; and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a conservative, Dutch politician-turned-writer known for criticizing Islam’s treatment of women, and who is married to Ferguson.

The list leaned right, to be sure. Loury, who is Black, zealously opposes affirmative action. Mamet had called Trump “the best president since Abraham Lincoln.” Hock served as chairwoman of an organization called Texas GOP 2020 Victory. Several of the academics had experienced backlash for taking conservative positions. These included Dorian Abbot, a geophysicist who’d had a planned lecture at MIT on extraterrestrial life canceled over his views on DEI; Peter Boghossian, who’d resigned from Portland State University in part because of the institution’s response to his sending hoax articles to academic journals; and University of Sussex professor Kathleen Stock, who’d faced protests over her allegedly transphobic views, which she disputed.

I’m not sure if Boghossian and Stock can be said to “lean right”, but never mind. But also on the list were Pinker, Strossen, and Haidt, all of whom see themselves as classical liberals.

Resignations began early, as the school’s ideological antiwoke agenda was manifest from the outset.  Others who resigned were Geoffrey Stone, Vickie Sullivan, Andrew Sullivan, Heather Heying, Nadine Strossen (former head of the ACLU), Jon Haidt, and Jonathan Rauch. This gutted the advisory board of most of its well-known liberals. Heying said she resigned because she didn’t think the university’s vission was “sufficiently revolutionary,” and Pinker emailed Mandery with further explanation:

“Dissociation was the only choice,” Pinker told me in an email. “I bristled at their Trump-Musk-style of trolling, taunting, and demonizing, without the maturity and dignity that ought to accompany a major rethinking of higher education.” Furthermore, Pinker added, “UATX had no coherent vision of what higher education in the 21st century ought to be. Instead, they created UnWoke U led by a Faculty of the Canceled.”

That was pretty much my view as well. If you look at the curriculum page of UATX, you’ll see that science is pretty much limited to math and data analysis.  As Mandery notes, the curriculum was in places bizarre. He reproduces the syllabus below, saying”

Indeed, the syllabus I reviewed for a class called “Intellectual Foundations of Science II” covered a range of topics unusual for a science class including “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.” A student who’d taken the course shared a slide with me on “ensoulment” — the principally religious question of when a soul enters the human body — and said that the class had been told that IVF but not abortion could be consistent with the Catholic belief about ensoulment.

Enlarge this if you want to see part of the science curriculum, best described as a “dog’s breakfast”. Francis Collins on God? People from Colossal Biosciences on “de-extinction”? There is apparently no introduction to basic biology, but just a bunch of topics of current popular interest. This is no way to get a biology education.

Here is what’s represented as a slide from the class above. This does not belong in a biology class; it’s theology:

(from Politico): A slide on “ensoulment” — the principally religious question of when a soul enters the human body — was shown in the class. | Obtained by POLITICO

Another quote from the article:

The poor quality of the science offerings had bothered Heying and Pinker. “Others thought I was the token liberal,” Heying told me, “but I came to understand myself as the token scientist.” In an email, Pinker wrote, “They should have hired a widely esteemed scientist and proven program builder to set up their science division.”

As far as I can see from looking at the curriculum, they don’t have a decent one that could undergird a quality liberal-arts education.  The goals of UATX at the outset were admirable, but the ideological motives of the founders eventually warped the school:

Over the past three months, I had more than 100 conversations with 25 current and former students, faculty and staffers at UATX. Each had their own perspective on the tumultuous events they shared with me, and some had personal grievances. But they were nearly unanimous in reporting that at its inception, UATX constituted a sincere effort to establish a transformative institution, uncompromisingly committed to the fundamental values of open inquiry and free expression.

They were nearly unanimous, too, in lamenting that it had failed to achieve this lofty goal and instead become something more conventional — an institution dominated by politics and ideology that was in many ways the conservative mirror image of the liberal academy it deplored. Almost everyone attributed significant weight to President Donald Trump’s return to power in emboldening right-leaning hardliners to aggressively assert their vision and reduce UATX from something potentially profound to something decidedly mundane.

There are a lot of other issues discussed in this long article, issues like how it dealt with a sexual harassment violation, abrogating the school’s own rules for how to adjudicate violations.  This all culminated in a meeting on April 2 of last year when conservative founder Joe Lonsdale laid down a right-wing law for UATX:

. . . in the afternoon, all of the professors and staff were summoned, quite unusually and mysteriously, to a closed-door meeting. It had been called by Joe Lonsdale, a billionaire entrepreneur who’d co-founded the data analytics company Palantir Technologies with Thiel. Together with Ferguson and the journalist Bari Weiss, Lonsdale had been a driving force behind the creation of UATX and was a member of the board of trustees. But he wasn’t often present on campus, and it was almost unheard of for a member of the board to summon the staff, as Lonsdale had.

. . . . . “Let’s get right into it,” he said. Then, with heightened affect, Lonsdale explained his vision for UATX — a jingoistic vision with shades of America First rhetoric that contrasted rather sharply with the image UATX had cultivated as a bastion of free speech and open inquiry.

. . . “It was like a speech version of the ‘America love it or leave it’ bumper sticker,” one former staffer told me, and if you didn’t share the vision, the message was “there’s the door, you don’t belong here.” Like many of the people I spoke with for this story, the staffer was granted anonymity for fear of reprisal. “It was the most uncomfortable 35-to-40ish minutes I’ve ever experienced. People were shifting uncomfortably in their seats.”

. . .In an email I obtained that was sent to [President] Kanelos, the provost Jake Howland, the university dean Ben Crocker and a fellow professor, Morgan Marietta, Lind related what Ferguson had told him:

“According to Niall, under the constitution of UATX Joe Lonsdale, as chair of the board, had no authority to tell those of us at the meeting:

“That all staff and faculty of UATX must subscribe to the four principles of anti-communism, anti-socialism, identity politics, and anti-Islamism (this is the first time I heard of these four principles);

“That ‘communists’ have taken over many other universities and that he, Joe Lonsdale, would stay on the board for fifty years to make sure that no ‘communists’ took over UATX (the identity politics crowd and some Islamists are a threat, but the Marxist-Leninist menace in 2025?)”

Lind said when he asked for definitions of “communists” and “socialists,” he’d been told they included anybody who didn’t “believe in private property” and “hate the rich.” This, he wrote, struck him “as a libertarian political test excluding anyone to the left of Ayn Rand.” Lonsdale had said that the board would make a case-by-case determination on whether “New Deal liberals” would be allowed to work at UATX. Lind said that he considered himself “an heir to the New Deal liberal tradition of FDR, Truman, JFK and LBJ.” He was “in favor of dynamic capitalism in a mixed economy, moderately social democratic and pro-labor, and anti-progressive, anti-communist, and anti-identity politics.”

According to Lind, Londsdale repeatedly said that if the faculty weren’t comfortable with what he was saying they should quit.

“So I quit and I walked out,” Lind wrote.

A lot of the other resignations, including from notables like Strossen, Rauch, and Haidt, followed. There were emendations of the schools’ constitution, giving the President more power, and the Provost resigned, presumably after told he’d be fired.

Now things are in a mess. I sure as hell wouldn’t send a student to UATX to get a good education, for what they’ll get is a spotty but an anti-woke education. Yes, I am by and large anti-woke myself, but I am also pro-liberal-education, and by “liberal” I don’t mean “Left-wing’ but “liberating the mind”—through free inquiry.

At the end Mandery has two questions:

The first: Where was Bari Weiss? Many of the people I interviewed told me about internal conversations and shared internal emails. Weiss, who remains on the board of trustees, was almost never present in the conversations as they were related to me, and while I saw many emails on which Kanelos and Ferguson were copied, I never saw any including Weiss.

Weiss, one of the founders, was the person whose presence brought in many donations, but she seems to have absented herself from UATX. This may be because she’s burdened with running both The Free Press and CBS News, but she did not respond to a request for a comment.  But wait! There’s more!:

The second question: Was UATX a hard-right project from the start? Based on my reporting, I don’t think it was. I was struck by the sincerity of the commitment to free speech and open inquiry from so many of the people with whom I spoke. A few were Trump supporters, but many more were best identified as anti-woke moderates or liberals. The university’s saga has a strong sense of historical contingency — that it could have gone quite differently had some high-leverage moments gone otherwise. A notable example is the episode surrounding Dan’s alleged violation [the sexual harassment charge] and expulsion, which several former staffers and faculty suggested was exploited by the Straussians as evidence of dysfunction in their successful second coup attempt.

So UATX, in its very first full year, was eroded by the very thing it tried to avoid: pervasive ideology in the curriculum:

When students returned for UATX’s second year, it was difficult not to notice the drift. The Tuesday night speaker series, at which attendance is mandatory, leaned unmistakably rightward — guests included Patrick Deneen, originalist judge Amul Thapar and Catherine Pakaluk, a Catholic University business school professor who’d written Hannah’s Children, about the 5 percent of American women who have five or more children.

As Mandery says, “The pluralists had lost.” Indeed.  Nobody took care to forge a proper curriculum, and the right-wing bent of those who didn’t resign is forcing the school into a conservative version of Harvard—except it’s not nearly as good as any of the “elite” colleges that UATX aped.

My prediction is that the whole enterprise will fail. And if it doesn’t, it will never be a good place to send students, even though admission is based purely on meritocracy and tuition is free.  Other schools may be full of left-wingers, but most of them don’t impose their views on the students in class, and it’s still possible to get a good education.

Mommas, don’t let your babies grow up to be UATX students.

A new issue of J. Controversial Ideas on censorship in the sciences

October 28, 2025 • 9:30 am

For several years a group of us have been working on a paper on censorship in the sciences, and it’s finally come out in the Journal of Controversial Ideas (go here to access all the papers ever published). This “heterodox” journal founded in November 2018 by moral philosophers Francesca Minerva, Jeff McMahan, and Peter Singer. It’s peer-reviewed and open access, but believe me, the reviews are every bit as stringent as those for a science “journal of noncontroversial ideas.”

At any rate, our paper came out, but I didn’t realize that it was part of a special issue on censorship in the sciences until Heterodox at USC posted an announcement. Here’s part of it:

A special issue of the Journal of Controversial Ideas published today explores the serious problem of censorship plaguing the sciences, from the classroom to the research lab to scientific journals. The special issue contains 9 peer-reviewed papers including:

●     From Worriers to Warriors: The Cultural Rise of Women by Cory Clark, Executive Director of the Adversarial Project at the University of Pennsylvania

●     Fire the Censors! It’s the Only Way to Restore Free Inquiry by Robert Maranto, 21st Century Chair in Leadership at the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas

●     Silencing Science at MIT: MIT Shows that Cancel Culture Causes Self-Censorship at STEM Universities by Wayne Stargardt, President of the MIT Free Speech Alliance

●     With Friends Like These: On the Role of Presupposition in Pseudo-Defenses of Free Speech on Campus by Mike Veber, Associate Professor of Philosophy at East Carolina University

The collection expands upon subjects discussed at the Censorship in the Sciences conference held at the University of Southern California in January 2025. Over 100 academics gathered for three days to discuss what constitutes censorship, how this problem impacts scientific research and teaching, and how to combat its spread.

The collection also includes an introduction highlighting the themes discussed at the conference.

Contrary to the popular belief that censorship emanates mostly from authoritarian governments or religious mandates, this conference and follow-up publications, including this special issue, revealed that self-censorship and censorship attempts led by academics against their peers form the majority of “cancellations” occurring within the academy today.

Moreover, such censoring of science originates largely from the progressive left. This is unsurprising, given that the academy is now overwhelmingly dominated by faculty who self-identify as liberal or progressive.

Such intra-academic censorship is a serious problem, as the introduction to the special issue makes clear: “Academic jobs and promotions require letters of recommendation from colleagues. Grants necessitate approval from other academics, as do publications. Thus, control over the careers of scientists from within academia influences what subjects are researched and what scientific information is disseminated. In short, it is academics who are the gatekeepers of knowledge production and dissemination. They have the means to block publication, funding, and even employment of their peers.”

 

You can peruse the contents, and choose which papers you want to read, if any, by clicking on the screenshot below.  You can get our paper, which puts present instances of censorship in historical context (including censorship in Soviet Russia), by clicking below.

And the abstract:

The 20th century witnessed unimaginable atrocities perpetrated in the name of ideologies that stifled dissent in favour of political narratives, with numerous examples of resulting long-term societal harm. Despite clear historical precedents, calls to deal with dissent through censorship have risen dramatically. Most alarmingly, politically motivated censorship has risen in the academic community, where pluralism is most needed to seek truth and generate knowledge. Recent calls for censorship have come under the name of “consequences culture”, a culture structured around the inclusion of those sharing a particular narrative while imposing adverse consequences on those who dissent. Here, we place “consequences culture” in the historical context of totalitarian societies, focusing on the fate suffered by academics in those societies. We support our arguments with extensive references, many of which are not widely known in the West. We invite the broader scientific community to consider yet again what are timeless subjects: the importance of freely exchanging views and ideas; the freedom to do so without fear of intimidation; the folly of undermining such exchanges with distortions; and the peril of attempting to eliminate exchanges by purging published documents from the official record. We conclude with suggestions on where to go from here.

It’s a cry in the wilderness. . . ,.

A panel of authors from the anthology “The War on Science”

October 8, 2025 • 11:45 am

As I’ve mentioned, the anthology The War on Science, edited by Lawrence Krauss, has gotten some flak from “progressives”. These critics argue that it really should have been a book about how Trump and the Republicans are attacking science rather than a book about how the Left is damaging science. I’m not going to go after that whataboutery again, as I’ve done it before. No one side is immune from criticism, and there are a gazillion people noting, correctly, that Trump is doing rather serious damage to scientific funding right now. But how many people are showing how the leftist ideology is injuring science? QED. (Full disclosure: Luana Maroja and I have a chapter in this book, one that’s a slight revision of one we wrote for The Skeptical Inquirer.)

At any rate, there is now a longish video, featuring Krauss and three authors, with moderator Joshua Katz.  Everyone on the panel is listed below in bold.  It was based on a discussion held by the American Enterprise Institute, and if you want to damn it because the AEI is a generally conservative venue, damn away, but you’ll be outing yourself as narrow minded.  Here are the AEI notes for the discussion that I’ve put below.

On October 2, AEI’s Joshua T. Katz hosted an event to discuss The War on Science, a new volume to which he and several other AEI fellows contributed chapters.

After brief opening remarks from AEI’s M. Anthony Mills, the Origins Project Foundation’s Lawrence M. Krauss, the volume’s editor, delivered a presentation offering historical context for the book and detailing some notable instances of the imposition of ideology on scholarly practices. Each panelist then gave brief overviews of their respective chapters: AEI’s Sally Satel discussed her chapter “Social Justice, MD—Medicine Under Threat”; AEI’s Carole Hooven discussed her chapter “Why I Left Harvard”; and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni’s Solveig Lucia Gold discussed “An Apology for Philology,” a chapter she coauthored with Dr. Katz.

Following these remarks, the panelists engaged in a discussion moderated by Dr. Katz, and the event concluded with a Q&A, wherein panelists fielded questions from the audience.

Event description

Among assaults on merit-based hiring, the policing of language, the denial of empirical data in medicine and science, and the replacement of well-established standards with ideological mantras, rigorous scholarship is under threat throughout Western institutions. To make matters worse, many who have spoken up against this threat have faced professional consequences, creating a climate of fear that undermines the very foundation of modern research. In The War on Science, the Origins Project Foundation’s Lawrence M. Krauss assembles a group of prominent scholars from wide-ranging disciplines to detail ongoing efforts to impose ideological restrictions on scholarship—and issue a clarion call for change.

Solveig Lucia Gold, Senior Fellow in Education and Society, American Council of Trustees and Alumni
Carole Hooven, Nonresident Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute
Lawrence M. Krauss, President, Origins Project Foundation
Sally Satel, Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute

Moderator:
Joshua T. Katz, Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute

Now I haven’t yet listened to the whole thing, as I cannot abide long podcasts and videos, so I’m going through it person by person.  So far I’ve heard Krauss’s nice opening (31 min.), which spares no science-warping ideologue from the Left, giving lots of cringeworthy examples.  If you have the patience to listen to a 1.5-hour long discussion all the way through, knock yourself out and comment below.

Critics of Colossal Bioscience’s “de-extinction” efforts get targeted by lawsuits and smears

October 6, 2025 • 11:00 am

I’ve written extensively about Colossal Bioscience’s efforts to bring back extinct animals, “de-extincting” species like the dire wolf, the woolly mammoth, and the dodo (see here for some posts). And I’ve been pretty critical of their efforts, arguing that they are not producing genuine extinct species but modern species that have been genetically tweaked to have some superficial resemblance to modern species. Besides that, which I consider pretty misleading to the public, Colossal has wavered in its claims, going back and forth between saying that they are/are not producing extinct species.  For my taste there’s just too much hype, too much rancor, too much waffling, and too much capitalism.

There have been other scientific critics, too, including mammoth expert Tori Herridge, a paleontologist at Sheffield (she turned down an offer to join Colossal’s advisory board), and, as the EMBO article below reports, “Vincent Lynch, an evolutionary developmental biologist at the University at Buffalo, who studies elephant embryos; Flint Dibble, a zooarcheaologist at Cardiff University, who runs a podcast called “Archaeology with Flint Dibble”, and Nick Rawlence, “a paleogeneticist at the University of Otago in New Zealand.”

As the EMBO Reports article below describes (click to read for free), these critics of Colossal have been subject to “Dark PR tactics”:  they’ve been smeared in various obscure publications by anonymous writers, or writers who won’t answer emails, attacked in articles that later disappear, and even threatened with lawsuits for using Colossal material, like videos, which were apparently employed with “fair usage”.

But it doesn’t look as if these threats come from Colossal; in fact, the evidence is against it.

The authors of of the EMBO piece are identified this way: “Howard Wolinsky is a freelance journalist based in Chicago, USA. Holger Breithaupt is an editor at EMBO reports. Yehu Moran is Professor of Ecology and Evolution at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an academic editor at EMBO Press.”)

A few descriptions of the attacks on Colossal’s critics:

Herridge, Lynch and Rawlence have been targets of smear articles and blog posts that questioned their credentials, professional integrity and intentions. Lynch and Dibble have been targets of digital copyright infringement claims. Lynch said he was accused of violating copyright on X and his account was permanently suspended. Dibble had to fight similar charges for what he described as fair use of videos from Colossal and the popular Joe Rogan Experience podcast. He said the aim was to shut down his YouTube podcast, but he won appeals.

Herridge, who said she was offered a seat on Colossal’s science advisory board but declined, was featured on Feb. 7 in an article in BusinessMole, an online website covering small business: “The Controversy Surrounding Tori Herridge: Are Her Scientific Critiques Dangerously Unqualified?” This article had the byline and photo of Samuel Allcock, the founder of PR Fire, a UK-based PR company. Laura Johnson, Managing Director of PR Fire, stated that Allcock had left the company in 2024. Allcock did not respond to email inquiries, nor did BusinessMole.

. . . . On March 31, an anonymous hit piece about Herridge appeared in an online news site, The Signal, covering California’s Santa Clarita Valley, under the headline “TrowelBlazers and the Cult of Visibility: A Critical Look at the Intersection of Science, Media and Branding”. TrowelBlazers is a project of Herridge and three other scientists to honor “the contributions of women in the ‘digging’ sciences: archaeology, geology, and paleontology, and to outreach activities aimed at encouraging participation, especially from under-represented minorities”. The article, which has now been taken down, stated that the story was paid for by an advertiser. The Signal did not respond to inquiries about this article. TechTock also attacked Herridge on its YouTube channel; @MrTechTok could not be reached for comment.

. . . Throughout the summer, a series of articles questioned Lynch’s credentials and integrity and claimed he is a misogynist, which he said he found especially offensive. On March 7, A Typical Work Day, a website aimed at business people, ran an anonymous piece “Vincent Lynch’s Failures in Genetic Research Cast Serious Doubts on His Authority in the De-Extinction Debate.” It has been taken down. On June 2, GreenMatters ran “Questioning Credibility: Lynch’s Stem Cell Shortcomings”. GreenMatters did not respond to a query. On June 6, Lynch was again smeared in an anonymous piece in CEO Today Magazine entitled: Vincent Lynch’s Repeated Failures in Stem Cell Research.”

On July 3, The Daily Blaze ran a piece questioning Lynch’s credentials entitled “Everything You Need To Know About Vincent Lynch, Evolutionary Biologist”, and the USA Daily Chronicles ran a piece claiming Lynch is a misogynist. Both have been taken down after EMBO reports made inquiries. Both websites are part of the Price of Business Digital Network run by Kevin Price and Gigi Price under the name Coco Media, LLC, which also includes The Price of Business syndicated radio show.

There’s a lot more in the article.

Indeed, some of the language from the different smear sites has been similar, leading people to think that the smear were generated by chatbots.

While these articles and blog posts have appeared in different media—often websites catering to specific topics that have little or nothing to do with science, evolution, or conservation—they all share commonalities, such as similar introductions, trying to discredit the targeted scientists’ expertise, or question their neutrality or integrity, and seem to be generated by chatbots. A semantic analysis of the articles about Herridge and Lynch shows considerable similarities in particular for those targeting Lynch, suggesting that these may have come from the same source (Fig. 1). While the two earlier articles against Herridge have a byline—Sam Allcock and an external advertising source—most of the later articles against Lynch are all anonymous; the html code of the CEO Today article lists Jacob Mallinder, their head of digital marketing, as an author. The site did not respond to queries about the possible role of Mallinder and blocked the sender’s email address after the first attempt to contact them.

For several reasons, I don’t think Colossal is involved in this at all. First, they flatly deny it. I have to give credit to Colossal’s George Church for his denial:

Church speculated that Colossal fans might be behind the anonymous smear articles, which he called “a tempest in a teapot”. “Maybe they’re trying to ‘help’ in some misguided way. If ‘fans’ want to engage in the conversation, ideally, they would use their real names (as Ben, Beth, and I do) and avoid ad hominem comments”, he said. “These folks questioning expertise and credentials, ironically, have zero credentials themselves (due to anonymity), and their editors are not showing strong responsibility.”

Further, the articles appear in journals or magazines with minimal readership. If Colossal wanted to attack its critics, it would do so on its site, on YouTube, or in big-name places.  But they haven’t done so, save for a few comments and videos by chief scientist Beth Shapiro, using her own name.

Third, the articles are often anonymous, and when they’re not, attempts to contact the author or the publication either show that the author doesn’t exist or doesn’t respond.

Finally, the articles have often been taken down after EMBO contacts the journal/magazine.

All of this suggests that Church is right: these are, as Matthew (another critic) speculated, “Colossal fanbois.”  Matthew and I are just happy that the fanbois didn’t go after us.  I did write a Boston Globe op-ed critical of de-extinction in addition to quite a few pieces n this website, and Matthew has been critical of it in his books.  But as critical as I am of Colossal, I have to give them credit for responding openly and publicly, even if I find their responses inadequate.

My only question is this: why would somebody be so keen on de-extinction that they try to ruin the reputation of scientists who criticize it?  I can understand cancellation campaigns based on ideological differences, but bringing back the wooly mammoth? These anonymous and cowardly cancellers are either marinated in Jurassic Park, or have too much time on their hands.  Either way, they are not engaging in the give-and-take that occurs in real scientific criticism, including our criticisms of Colossal and their responses.  Instead, they attack people rather than ideas. The Colossal fanbois are good at only one thing: discomfiting critics by using ad hominem arguments.

Maarten Boudry’s job at the University of Ghent endangered because he has “Zionist-tinged opinions”

August 27, 2025 • 10:30 am

Maarten Boudry, a Belgian philosopher at the University of Ghent, is not a timorous man.  You’ve met him before when he wrote this recent post defending our anthology, edited by Lawrence Krauss, against claims that we should not be criticizing the Left’s intrusion into science when the Right is doing it more vigorously. You may also recall that both he and I were deplatformed when we were supposed to hold a discussion on science and ideology at the University of Amsterdam, and this cancelation was done for a completely irrelevant reason: we were “too sympathetic to Israel.” Having visited both Belgium and the Netherlands in recent years, I have become depressingly aware of how anti-Israel, if not anti-Semitic, these countries are, perhaps because of a large influx of Muslim immigrants.

(I should mention by way of self-aggrandizement that Maarten and I also co-wrote a paper in Philosophical Psychology on the cognitive status of supernatural beliefs: my only philosophy paper, and one that gives me a soupçon of credibility in philosophy.)

But I digress. The point of this post is to show how anti-Semitic academia really is in the Low Countries, to the extent that Boudry has been threatened with being sanctioned (and certainly with having his speech chilled and repressed) simply for defending Israel in published interviews.  And he’s standing up to some of his colleagues who would take away his professorship.

I reproduce some of the history of to this conflict, putting Maarten’s background explanation as well as the exchange of emails in indented text. Bold headings are mine, as are the words that are flush left.

Introduction from Maarten:

A few words on the context of the letter bellow. What “triggered” my colleagues was a joint interview I gave to a Flemish magazine alongside a rabidly anti-Zionist MP (interestingly, he was from the Right), who stormed out after 20 minutes because he couldn’t take it anymore. You can read it here in the archive (right-click “translate” in Google).

This MP actually subscribes to the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Netanyahu knew about the October 7 pogrom in advance and deliberately let it happen, sacrificing 1,200 of his own citizens—women, men, and children. The fact that such a figure sits in our parliament says everything about the state of Belgian politics.

During that interview I made remarks they deemed so offensive that they urged the Board of Directors to discipline me. As an aside: I dislike these double interviews and hesitated to agree, since the result is always an extremely condensed, truncated transcript that strips away nuance, context, and sources. You’re at the mercy of the journalist—not that he did a bad job, but such reduction is inevitable. And it’s always weak to attack a sound-bite interview rather than engage with what I’ve actually written in my book or opinion pieces, where the arguments are properly developed and sourced.

When I asked Maarten who the author of the letter below (Herman Mielants) was, Martin replied,

Herman Mielants is a professor emeritus (UGent) and physician, specialized in rheumatology.

And when I asked why Mielants wrote the letter below, Maarten replied:

Why did Mielants write the letter? Because he’s fervently anti-zionist, like many people on the Left, and he’s so dogmatic that he cannot tolerate a colleague dissenting with his own “correct” view. In general, public opinion in Belgium on Israel is an echo chamber: many people are completely shocked to hear about Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005, or about Arabs in high positions in the Israeli parliament and in the courts. They have no idea.

Here’s Mielants’s Letter to Ghent professors about Boudry’s “impure views”, demanding some kind of punishment. (The rector is the head of the University). 

From: Herman Mielants
Sent: Friday, July 25, 2025 9:06 PM

To: rector; Petra De Sutter

Cc: Jean Jacques AMY; Marleen Temmerman; Marc DeMeere Jan Tavernier <

Subject: FW: Double interview Jean-Marie Dedecker vs. Maarten Boudry

Importance: High

Dear Rector and dear future rector

The undersigned, professors emeritus of Ghent University (Marleen Temmerman, Jan Tavernier, Mark Demeyer, and Herman Mielants), are deeply concerned about the Zionist-tinged opinions of philosopher Prof. Maarten Boudry. While Boudry certainly has the right to freedom of expression, he coldly distorts the truth regarding the Gaza issue. He defends outspoken Zionist ideas regarding the apartheid regime since the beginning of the state of Israel, as well as the illegal occupations of the Palestinian territories and the genocide currently being committed in Gaza. In a recent publication in De Morgen, Omer Bartov, professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University USA, himself a Jew and former Zionist, concludes that Israel is undoubtedly committing genocide in Gaza. The denial of this genocide is all the more cynical now that starvation, especially of children, is also being used as a weapon of war. Maarten Boudry’s ideas reflect extremely negatively on the objectivity of Ghent University. Given Maarten Boudry’s authority and charisma as Professor of Philosophy, who inherited the chair from Prof. Etienne Vermeersch, we ask the Board of Governors of Ghent University to make it clear to Prof. Maarten Boudry that Ghent University attaches importance to an objective approach to humanitarian problems and to promote this in his academic teaching and publications.

Below you will find the letter from Prof. Em. Jean-Jacques Amy, Professor Em. VUB, which he sent to Knack, following a conversation between Jean Marie DeDecker and Maarten Boudry, with the approval of JJ Amy [JAC: those letters aren’t attached here]

Kind regards
Prof. Em. Rheumatology, Herman Mielants, U Gent

More from Boudry about his job at Ghent:

About my current position: I don’t have tenure, only a part-time (50%) research position until the end of the year. Even the Etienne Vermeersch Chair which they mention, which I held for four years, was not a tenured position. By the way, it would be virtually impossible for me to get such a position in the academic climate post-7/10. Even before that I was already a controversial figure (for my views on islam & migration, climate policy, etc.), and there was an outcry about the appointment in the Flemish media. But today it would be a non-starter, and my rector would never risk it.

And, as he notes, “Here is my reply to the miscreants.” It is bold and unapologetic:

From: Maarten Boudry
Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2025 at 19:15
Subject: Re: Dubbelinterview Jean-Marie Dedecker vs. Maarten Boudry
To: Jean Jacques AMY
Cc: Rik Van de Walle, rector, Petra De Sutter, Marc De Meyere, Marleen Temmerman, Jan Tavernier, M.Galand Pierre, Maarten Boudry

It is disheartening that some academics, even after decades-long careers at universities, still fail to grasp the meaning and value of academic freedom. The debate over the war in Gaza is still raging among scholars and experts. I have never denied that the Israeli army has committed war crimes in Gaza—such crimes occur in nearly every war—and I have myself often voiced sharp criticism of Netanyahu and his far-right allies (see my book and previous articles, which are naturally more detailed and substantiated than a condensed interview transcript).

What I emphatically deny is that a “genocide” is taking place in Gaza, and I am far from alone in this view. Holocaust scholars such as Norman Goda and Jeffrey Herf, historians like Benny Morris, legal experts including Julia Sebutinde of the ICJ, and specialists in urban warfare like John Spencer share this position.

Your letter, by contrast, contains almost no argumentation; it simply repeats, in indignant tones, the familiar accusations of “genocide,” “apartheid,” and “open-air prison.” Anyone who seeks to prematurely shut down scholarly debate, even calling for sanctions against dissenting voices before the ICJ has issued a ruling, betrays a complete lack of understanding of academic freedom and of the UGent motto Dare to Think. Even Omar Bartov’s article in The New York Times, which you cite, acknowledges the intense debate among experts over whether genocide is the right term. What is particularly cowardly is that you demand disciplinary measures behind the back of the person targeted.

Most troubling, however, is your repeated pejorative use of the term “Zionist.” That I supposedly hold “Zionist-tinged views” is, in your eyes, sufficient reason to urge the Board of Directors to sanction me. Yet “Zionism,” at its core, is simply the pursuit of self-determination of the Jewish people. Unless you deny that same right to every other people in the world, your argument is therefore guilty of antisemitism.

But by all means, feel free to engage in antisemitism—that, too, is part of the academic freedom I cherish. I can recommend it highly to all of you.

Cheers
M.

I fear that Maarten’s day as a scholar at Ghent University—or any university—are numbered.  Yes, we have our haters and antisemites in American universities, but it is much, much worse in Belgium and the Netherlands. I should add that he is not Jewish.

Lawrence Krauss interviews Carole Hooven

August 9, 2025 • 12:00 pm

This is one of the twenty-odd interviews that Lawrence Krauss conducted to support the new book he edited, The War on Science, comprising essays about the pollution of academia by ideology. (Nearly all of us indict ideology from the Left, though many of us, including me, admit that the Right is currently a bigger threat to science—but perhaps only temporarily.)  As you know, I am not a fan of podcasts and long videos, but I’m trying to listen to as many of my cowriters  as I can (Luana Maroja and I have an essay in the volume, but didn’t do an interview).

Here’s an interview with Carole Hooven, whom you’ve surely heard of as an evolutionary biologist specializing  in testosterone and the evolutionary basis of sex differences. (Her book T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us, is excellent.)  When teaching at Harvard, she made the mistake of saying that there were only two sexes, and that statement snowballed into a huge fracas. Hooven’s colleagues in human evolutionary biology wouldn’t support her for emphasizing the biological facts about biological sex, for that’s a minefield that demonizes those who enter it as “transphobes”. As Carole recounts in her Free Press piece, “Why I left Harvard,” she got in trouble for simply speaking the truth. If you know Carole, you’ll know the she’s eminently civil and polite. She just wasn’t ideologically correct. Here’s an excerpt of the FP piece, which she reprinted as the essay in The War on Science.

In the brief segment on Fox, my troubles began when I described how biologists define male and female, and argued that these are invaluable terms that science educators in particular should not relinquish in response to pressure from ideologues. I emphasized that “understanding the facts about biology doesn’t prevent us from treating people with respect.” We can, I said, “respect their gender identities and use their preferred pronouns.”

I also mentioned that educators are increasingly self-censoring, for fear that using the “wrong” language can result in being shunned or even fired.

The failure of her colleagues to defend her for speaking the truth is reprehensible, and eventually the pressure forced her to leave her department.  The rest you can hear in this video (the interview starts at 4:04).  There’s a lot more than the Harvard-cancellation story: Carole’s had an interesting life, starting as a primatologist working in Africa, and you’ll learn something about that, too. Have a listen.