Columbia University is expected to pay more than US$220-million, to restore research funding, in a settlement with the Trump administration.Ted Shaffrey/The Associated Press
Lawrence M. Krauss, a theoretical physicist, is President of the Origins Project Foundation, and Chair of the Board of the Free Speech Union of Canada. His most recent book is The War On Science: Thirty-Nine Renowned Scientists and Scholars Speak Out About Current Threats to Free Speech, Open Inquiry, and the Scientific Process.
Canadians are, by now, hearing daily of new attacks by the Trump administration on universities, the rescinding of science funding to scores of first-rate researchers, and the cancellation of major cutting-edge science programs in space and on earth. We may be feeling smug, but we shouldn’t be.
While this external war on science needs to be fought at the ballot box, in legislatures and by public protests, there is a more insidious war on science happening in universities, scientific agencies and even within governments. It has been going on for longer, and threatens the very culture of free exploration and inquiry that is at the heart of scientific discovery in particular, and scholarship more generally. And that war has been taking place in Canada as much as, or more than, in the United States.
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I am referring to a culture war, where free speech and open inquiry are viewed as threats, where careers are lost for speaking out, where talented individuals are excluded on the basis of their gender or colour, where scientific nonsense is adopted as sacrosanct, and where the existence of objective knowledge itself is questioned.
Social justice, as it has become known, began in response to an earnest desire to right past social wrongs, including sexism and racism. But it quickly turned into a new kind of secular religion in which claims need not be rooted in actual evidence, and any potential questioning is viewed as heresy, punishable by public shaming in some cases or career termination in others.
This situation has so concerned many of us, that, along with 38 leading scientists and scholars from around the world, across many disciplines, and different political persuasions, I have edited a book on the subject. The fact that eight of us are Canadian, and six of us have worked in Canadian universities, demonstrates that concerns about the current situation in the United States, while warranted, do not absolve Canada of the responsibility to break free from a trend that began in the social sciences, and has leaked into the hard sciences over the past decade.
The Canadian examples described in our books are numerous. For instance, the claim that our current understanding of electromagnetism, and with it, the nature of light, is inherently colonizing and white supremacist. In 2021, the New Frontiers in Research Fund, a project of the Government of Canada sponsored an academic initiative at Concordia University entitled Decolonizing Light. It purports to study “how colonial scientific knowledge authority was, and is still, reproduced in the context of light.” The program statement further argued that “physics is considered ‘hard’ and objective science disconnected from social life and geopolitical history.” This was stated as if it is a bad thing, but the important point is that the laws of physics – especially the theory of electromagnetism and light, perhaps the best understood aspect of modern physics – are disconnected from social life and geopolitical history. This is their strength, not their weakness.
Here’s another: The Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada’s medical education project CanMEDS 2025 sought to “propose a vision for the practice of medicine which is rooted in social justice, anti-racism, anti-oppression, and cultural safety” and “seek to centre values such as anti-oppression, anti-racism and social justice, rather than medical expertise.” I suspect most Canadians would lean more toward the medical expertise aspect when choosing a doctor.
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Restoring free and open inquiry at Canadian universities and scientific institutions requires changing the culture from within. It will be necessary for faculty to speak out – easier said than done when numerous faculty from around the country have been censured, or have lost their jobs, for simply questioning the rationale for various social-justice initiatives.
A majority of faculty have not bought into the various draconian measures imposed by social-justice advocates within university administrations. They keep their heads down and go about their work. But to get university administrators and government officials – who thus far have shown no backbone in standing up to online mobs and defend scientific integrity and free speech – to act, faculty and the public at large needs to first be made aware of the current situation and then speak out against it.
More generally, we need to lobby the government and universities to stop discrimination in hiring, which was enacted to somehow make up for discrimination against various groups that ended, in some cases, generations ago, as if two wrongs somehow now make a right. Only by ending the shackling of open inquiry in academia and recruiting the best and brightest to Canada will the country be able to compete in the 21st century in a world economy driven by science and technology.