Dear Far Left and Right: Butt Out of Science

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By Joann DiGennaro, CEE President

If you’re looking for data on how American students stack up against the rest of the world, there are no shortage of ominous surveys to choose from. According to the venerable Pew Research Center, 15 year-olds from the U.S. have lower math scores than students in 34 countries and fare worse in science than their peers in 22 other nations. Our students lag behind the likes of Vietnam, Latvia, and Slovenia in both surveys.

If this is news to you, you haven’t been paying attention. Our ability to stay at the highest levels of scientific excellence has been severely eroded over the past number of years by two camps of ideologues: the politically-correct Left and the doctrinaire extreme Right.

Although members of each side share vastly different views, they have one very unfortunate thing in common – both are doing damage to American research, innovation, and economic competitiveness. 

I’ve been in the educational arena for more than three decades. In 1983, the late US Admiral H.G. Rickover and I founded the Center for Excellence in Education (CEE), an organization dedicated to supporting America’s best and brightest young STEM scholars. Our flagship program is the Research Science Institute (RSI) at MIT, during which we offer the highest achievers from around the country the opportunity to participate in cutting-edge research with MIT staff and students at no cost.

But, for the first time since I can remember, there are worrying things happening at American universities and in society at large that are no longer on the fringe.

On the Left, there is a raging, absurd debate about Trigger Warnings: a heads-up for students that a particular book, course, or subject might cause some sort of psychological distress. For example, Oberlin College acknowledges that Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart is an important book; however, “…it may trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide, and more.”

The university recommends teachers to duly warn students by writing, for example, “Trigger warning: This book contains a scene of suicide."

Challenge: Can you think of a single, important work of fiction or non-nonfiction that doesn’t contain disturbing material? Our greatest literary works portray – and rightly so – the horrors of humanity: slavery, genocide, misogyny, and more.

It’s a shame that this even needs to be said, because it should be so patently obvious to everyone, but don’t we send our students to college to learn and debate about these exact issues? And how can they ever come up with the solutions to the world’s great challenges if we’re so concerned about shielding them from unsettling information?

These aren’t children. If they’re old enough to die for our country, they should be old enough to read Invisible Man without being warned in advance that the book deals frankly with racism.

Truly, this is PC culture run horribly amok.

On the other hand, you have extremists on the right who refuse to let the facts get in the way of the stories they want to tell. Whether it’s climate science, evolutionary biology, or anything else that threatens something they choose to believe for religious or political reasons, they are short-changing American students and our national ability to remain globally competitive.

Of course, skepticism is the basis of science. True science is about constantly offering and testing new hypotheses. Scientists continually seek to improve, sharpen, or replace existing theories with new ones. As such, it requires great humility.

For ideologues, humility is replaced with hubris. They are unwilling to put certain things on the table for examination, lest they threaten their social, political, or religious agendas.

The late, great American physicist Richard Feynman said it best in only seven words:

"If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong...."

Joann P. DiGennaro is President of the Center for Excellence in Education (CEE), which she founded with Admiral H.G. Rickover in 1983. Ms. DiGennaro is responsible for administrating CEE’s national and international programs