In Focus delivers deeper coverage of the political, cultural, and ideological issues shaping America. Published daily by senior writers and experts, these in-depth pieces go beyond the headlines to give readers the full picture. You can find our full list of In Focus pieces here.
Lawrence Krauss, a renowned theoretical physicist and outspoken atheist, is not an eager critic of the Left, nor of academia, which he regards as historically the most enlightened part of society. Despite recent attempts by many on the Left to cast him as a right-wing pundit, Krauss is, fundamentally, just a scientist who wants to get back to work.
But he can’t do that until academic institutions are pried away from left-wing activists.
COLORADO’S ‘CONVERSION THERAPY’ LAW WILL ‘TRANS THE GAY AWAY’
“The diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies are staffed by people who think equity means equal outcomes, inclusion means exclusion, and diversity means discrimination,” Krauss recently told the Washington Examiner. “Once their dogma became accepted without evidence and questioning things became problematic, that’s when things really began to fall apart.”
Krauss recently edited The War on Science, a collection of essays by an intellectually diverse cast of scientists and scholars, including Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, and Niall Ferguson, that exposes the pervasive, continuing threat science faces from left-wing activists in academia.
Speaking over the phone from his Prince Edward Island home, his voice strained with frustration, Krauss raced from one point to the next — cowardly administrators, DEI litmus tests for prospective faculty, and scientific bodies making sweeping pronouncements without evidence. Krauss is more than annoyed by the damage ideological takeover has done to scientific progress. He is pained by it. And that’s because, in his view, the stakes are unimaginably high — for science and for the nation.
“The progress of science is essential, not only for the health and welfare of the world, but of the nation,” Krauss said. “GDP growth depends on curiosity-driven research, largely scientific. For the U.S. to remain an economic power, it needs to remain at the forefront of research in science and technology. The world may not suffer from a U.S. clampdown on science because science will move somewhere else. But the nation will suffer.”
Ideology over inquiry
Krauss emphasized that the process of science demands free inquiry and the willingness to challenge every assumption. This foundational requirement makes woke ideology uniquely corrosive, as it begins with fixed, unquestionable dogmas. The result is an atmosphere of fear and recrimination within scientific institutions, effectively suppressing the difficult questions and inconvenient truths that naturally arise.
In the book’s introduction, Krauss describes numerous examples of scientific suppression, including a directive sent out last year from the Royal Society of Chemistry to its magazine editors, instructing them to avoid publishing “offensive” material — specifically, “any content that could reasonably offend someone on the basis of their age, gender, race, sexual orientation, religious or political belief, marital or parental status, physical features, national origin, social status or disability.”
For Krauss, such edicts trap science in a claustrophobic cell where it can no longer pursue truth that conflicts with approved narratives.
“When you write a scientific paper, you expect it to be attacked or at least examined. That’s the only way good ideas will survive,” Krauss said. “But the fact that certain things can’t even be discussed is not just a tragedy, but it’s dangerous. We rely on science so much, and it just can’t function without free inquiry.”
The institutional shift of 2020
The left-wing takeover of the sciences has been brewing for decades, in Krauss’s view, but it accelerated in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd. In the days after, numerous scientific bodies, including every major U.S. federal funding source for science and technology, committed themselves to the tenets of anti-racism and gender equity.
A watershed moment came when then-Director of the National Institutes of Health Francis Collins, whom Krauss considers a friend, apologized for the “structural racism in biomedical research” without offering any evidence to support its existence.
“He came out and said that biomedical science is systemically racist. Which is ridiculous since he made the statement without any evidence,” Krauss said. “If he really believed that, he should have resigned. He should have said, ‘I’ve been the head of this organization for a decade and it’s racist.’ So obviously, he didn’t believe it. It’s just virtue signaling. It’s just pandering.”
In physics, Krauss’s field, the American Physical Society endorsed a “strike for black lives” with the intention to “shut down STEM” out of a commitment to eradicating “systemic racism and discrimination, especially in academia and science.” Without providing any evidence regarding systemic racism in physics, the APS proceeded to implement an affirmative action program, expanding identity-based criteria for its awards, leadership positions, and graduate student programs.
Floyd’s death also emboldened and empowered the DEI bureaucracies at universities by restricting hiring to ideological allies of the movement, forcing professors to spend time integrating woke ideology into coursework at the expense of teaching and practicing science, and stifling the free exchange of ideas. As a result, the balance of power in academia shifted from the faculty to these bureaucracies, and administrators, cowed by social media mobs, declined to defend the principles of academic freedom and meritocracy.
“Their power enhanced tremendously after George Floyd,” Krauss said. “They were beginning to enforce rules that on the surface sounded good. But they began to enforce these litmus tests and bypass the faculty. The governance of academic issues moved from the faculty to individuals who weren’t involved in education, but were professional DEI people who had already bought into a certain view.”
Taking back academia
While Krauss lauds moves by the Trump administration to require funding agencies to remove DEI-related programs and requirements for grant proposals, he warns against the administration starting its own war on science.
“Some things were necessary,” he said. “Harvard had rampant antisemitism. There was discrimination against Asians. But you don’t solve that by killing the whole institution. Harvard is still one of the best places in the world for scientific research. Instead of fixing the problem, they’re just saying, ‘All science is corrupt.’ That’s tremendously disruptive. Most scientists are not woke. They just want to get on with their work.”
A counterrevolutionary zeal pervades The War On Science and animates Krauss’s pro-science advocacy. Krauss, who serves as chairman of the board of the Free Speech Union in Canada, initiated the book project because of his reverence for what universities should be and once were: bastions of free speech and open inquiry.
TRUMP’S GAZA PLAN IS GREAT. THERE’S JUST ONE BIG PROBLEM
“At first, I thought of writing this book myself, but then I decided it would be more powerful if I got a group of people,” he said. “So I chose a group of excellent scholars across many disciplines who are incredibly diverse, and by that I mean diverse across disciplines and have different political leanings. There are a lot of people criticizing academia from the outside. I wanted to feature people from the inside.”
He added, “Faculty have been afraid, or in many cases, they’ve just put their heads down and tried to ignore it and get on with their work. But we need them to speak out and take back their universities.”