Legal Insurrection readers may recall my piece on a GenZ doctoral student aiming to be an “outer space anthropologist” who asserted that human space exploration is “imperialist.”
This space cadet also painted a chilling vision of what wokeism has in store for serious research as it plans to tighten its grip via “science and technology studies.”
Science and Technology Studies is a small field that teaches us that science and technology are socially constructed entities. In other words, when we work on a scientific project or create technology, we don’t do so in an unbiased way. Science and technology are created with intention, cultural motivation, and political influence. Space projects are no different — they typically have a motivation or intention behind them, even if it’s not always explicit.
Now comes the chilling news that one of the more prestigious science institutions in this country plans to indoctrinate students into believing the “climate crisis” is real. The school has now implemented a graduation requirement for students: a course in climate change.
Courses must cover at least 30% climate-related content and address two of four areas, including scientific foundations, human impacts, mitigation strategies and project-based learning. About 7,000 students from the class of 2028 will be affected this year.“The most important thing is that UC San Diego wants to make sure we’re preparing students for the future that they really will encounter,” says Sarah Gille, a physical oceanographer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography who was part of the committee to create the new plan.The requirement won’t add any time to a student’s graduation schedule – it’s designed to be integrated into existing classwork. Forty one-quarter courses meet the goal, including “The Astronomy of Climate Change”, “Gender and Climate Justice”, “Indigenous Approaches to Climate Change” and “Environmentalism in Arts and Media”. Many of the classes that fall under the climate requirement overlap with courses that focus on diversity, equity and inclusion, the school says.
I have spent considerable effort providing solid science related to geologic history and solar research that counters all of these claims. I am pretty confident neither of the subjects nor serious fact-based counterarguments will be provided in these classes.
Rather than teaching young scholars how to approach science…
…UCSD is going to teach them what to think. I am glad I got my Master of Science degree in chemistry there when I did.
UCSD costs about $40,000 each year to attend. Yet, this senseless requirement has now diminished the value of any degree issued by the institution. Is it any wonder many GenZ Americans are reevaluating whether a college degree is worth the money?
I hypothesize a massive preference cascade is building for trade schools and apprenticeship programs.
Next on the list of woke insanity is an article in the science publication Nature demanding inclusion by using season-neutral language when issuing invitations to science conferences. The author asserts that to be properly inclusive, organizers should remember that summer in the northern hemisphere is winter in the south.
Extra points: The article also encompasses the “Indigenous peoples” angle.
And it’s not just a matter of temporal accuracy — many parts of the world experience wet and dry seasons that are not reflected in distinctions between summer and winter. And Indigenous communities often use seasonal calendars that align with their local environments, reflecting a deep connection with nature’s cycles.
Knowing as many scientists as I do, I sense they understand the difference in seasons between the two hemispheres without the virtue-signalling wording suggested in this piece. I am sure the arrangements they ultimately make are based on the needs of their attendees and the goals of the conference rather than monsoonal rains and meteorological inclusivity.
To conclude this review of October’s leftist takeovers in science, I need to turn to Nature once again. In another article published this month, the authors assert women who applied for assistant professor positions in North America were more likely to get job offers than men…because women are better at job interviews.
Of course, they clearly neglected a critical element that was even called out in the second paragraph of the piece:
The findings, published on the bioRxiv preprint server 1 , have not been peer reviewed. Still, they offer a sign that the academic job market might be making progress towards equity in hiring, says co-author Nafisa Jadavji, a neuroscientist at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale.
I will also note that progressive hiring has a snowball effect: Leftists will continually hire more leftists because theirs is the only correct position to hold. Since 2000, universities have taken a hard left turn, and the resulting short-shifting of potentially talented men in biology is one of its many toxic consequences.
With the above information in mind, the “Nature” article is a nauseating bit of equity propaganda that should be insulting to all serious researchers…male and female (if biologists are still allowed to distinguish only by two genders).
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