12/26/2022
The collapse of Anglosphere academia into Wokeness is wrecking serious scholarship. But until recently, the non-English-speaking world hadn’t suffered as much. That is changing. When German psychologist Klaus Fiedler, editor of Perspectives on Psychological Science, recently subjected an American black psychologist’s work to normal critical review, he falsely accused Fiedler of “racism” and Fiedler was forced to resign. So now honest academics everywhere in the world face professional ruin if they challenge the “settled science” of organized Leftism.
The Wokeness problem began with the complete conquest of Anglosphere universities by leftists. As of August 2022, no less than 19 percent of American universities required job applicants to submit “Diversity Statements,” i.e., take a straight-up political test to gauge ideological conformity. Among larger universities, almost half require such statements for those applying for tenure [Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is Tearing Academia Apart, by John Sailer, Unherd, August 10, 2022].
In the U.S. only five percent of social scientists were “conservative” in 2015; 60 percent were leftists [Is Social Science Politically Biased?, by Michael Shermer, Scientific American, March 1, 2016]. In 2009, just nine percent of American scientists identified as “conservative,” a number that has presumably declined [Scientists, Politics and Religion, Pew Research Center, July 9, 2009].
Last year, Eric Kaufmann, a professor at Birkbeck College at the University of London, reported that 70 percent of conservative American social scientists, what few there are, self-censor:
[We Have the Data to Prove It: Universities Are Discriminating Against Conservatives, by Eric Kaufmann, Newsweek, March 3, 2021]
(Kaufmann, author of Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities, is an unusual academic — he once dared to debate fellow-professor Kevin MacDonald, whom John Derbyshire has called the “Marx of the anti-Semites,” on the pixels of VDARE.com!)
Kaufmann’s findings are truly frightening. A vast majority of Democrat professors think their conservative colleagues must, in the abbreviated patois of social media, STFU.
And at Canadian universities, “that revolution is all but complete,” law professor Bruce Pardy wrote in 2020. Thus Queen’s University Law School faculty voted to remove the name of Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, because he was… well, you know what he was.
As Pardy pointed out:
[Macdonald’s] demise has little to do with the man himself and everything to do with what he has come to represent. One of the tasks of any revolution is to tear down the narratives upon which the previous order was built.
Facts will not matter. Macdonald is accused, among other things, of forcing Indigenous children to go to residential schools and letting Aboriginal people on the Prairies starve when the buffalo disappeared. The historical record says otherwise… [But] Only monuments to the likes of Castro, Lenin and Mao have a shot at satisfying that criterion. [Links added.]
[In universities, the revolution is now complete, National Post, October 14, 2020]
British social scientist Noah Carl, himself fired by Cambridge University for wrong-think on race, genes, and IQ, has shown that scholars with conservative views are ten times more likely to be targeted for cancellation [Scholars are ten times more likely to be targeted for right-wing speech, Noah’s Newsletter, September 15, 2021].
So Anglosphere academia has gone; it’s fallen to the Woke Cult. But isn’t academia in the non-Anglophone World safe?
It’s true that, perhaps protected by speaking a different language, academia in mainland Europe is not quite as poisoned by Woke ideas as in the U.S. or Britain. But unhappily, in the last couple years, the Woke virus has been spreading in the non-English speaking world too.
Sweden is one of the Wokest countries in Europe [Sweden’s cultural revolution, by Malcolm Kyeyune, Unherd, September 22, 2021]. However, its universities have traditionally been more politically balanced than those in the United States. Indeed, a survey of Swedish social scientists in 2009 even showed a slight sympathy for conservative political parties [The Political Opinions of Swedish Social Scientists, by Niclas Berggren et al., Finnish Economic Papers, 2009].
However, that’s no longer the case, considering what happened to Prof. Germund Hesslow, a neurophysiology researcher at Sweden’s Lund University.
In 2018, Hesslow delivered his usual introductory lecture on the genetics of psychological sex differences, which he had given for 25 years. A student complained he was anti-feminist, and so a university Star Chamber demanded he apologize. He refused [Is political correctness eroding universities’ mission?, by Jan Peter Myklebust, University World News, September 26, 2018]. As Hesslow told me in an interview, he no longer gives the lecture.
Hesslow also informed me of the case of Prof. Kristina Sundquist, also of Lund University. Researching crime, she found that immigrants in Sweden were overrepresented in rapes and sex crimes. Because linking rape and immigration wasn’t the original purpose of her research, but became the subject of her report, down came the Hammer of Academic Orthodoxy. In November 2021, the Ministry of Education investigated her and her coauthor for “breaching ethics standards,” even though the data collection had been approved earlier. As of February 2022, a criminal prosecution was pending [Sweden: Charges Pending for Unapproved Research, by Sven Larsen, The European Conservative, February 16, 2022]. While the witch-hunters of the “Ethics Board” requested the actual police to prosecute, so far nothing has come of it.
Sweden is far from alone, which brings up Fiedler’s outrageous case.
His troubles began when he published neurophysiologist Bernhard Hommel’s critique of an article by Steven Othello Roberts, a black psychologist at Stanford University, which had argued that people should discriminate in favor of blacks.
As an editorial at Quillette explains:
…following on his oft-stated belief that the discipline of psychology is systemically racist, Roberts had argued that journal editors should track the race of their contributing authors with a view toward enforcing diversity targets, while authors should similarly track (and be made to justify) the racial composition of their research samples.
[A Rush to Judgement in Psychological Science, December 12, 2022]
Hommel disagreed, because he thinks focusing on race politicizes science.
Fiedler sent Hommel’s critique to three peer reviewers, who submitted such impressive work that he asked them to submit their reviews as stand-alone articles. He also invited Roberts to respond.
“Fiedler and Roberts then engaged in a lengthy and complicated exchange of emails that lasted for months,” Quillette explained:
We know this because Roberts, having lost trust in the process, decided to upload a manuscript describing the affair earlier this month, complete with a lengthy appendix that contains abundant excerpts from his correspondence with Fiedler. In the accompanying text, Roberts accuses not only Fiedler, but also Hommel, Jussim, Stanovich, and Stroebe, of militating against his work in a manner that is “unsound, unscientific, ad hominem, and racist.”
Yet nowhere does Roberts demonstrate that any of these men exhibited racial animus.
There’s more, and you don’t need a doctorate in the mysterious science of skull doctoring to reckon what happened.
An open letter signed by 1,375 leftists, almost all American, demanded that Fiedler be fired. They wrote:
The racism, general editorial incompetence, and abuse of power enacted against one of our colleagues (detailed here) is atrocious and completely at odds with APS’s stated commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion and ostensible commitment to “building an inclusive, connected, and meaningful global science. [Links in original]
The signatories also demanded
…an audit of Dr. Fiedler’s editorial decisions and correspondence (given that other marginalized scholars may have met with similar racism, incompetence, and/or abuse of power at his hands).
They got what they wanted, Quillette observed:
Within three days, the signatories had their primary demand fulfilled: Fiedler was forced to resign. The ex-editor reports that he never had a chance to present his side of things.
Now here’s an important coda: The global Association for Psychological Science publishes Perspectives. But the outfit began life as the American Psychological Association and is based in Washington, D.C. That explains why the overwhelming majority of signatories were Americans — and shows that they’re enforcing their deranged Wokery and punishment of Wrong Think across the planet.
Other extreme cases abound. The Free University of Brussels in Belgium fired Michael Woodley of Menie because Payton Gendron, the mass shooter who murdered 10 blacks and wounded three in Buffalo, NY, cited one of Woodley’s works in his “manifesto.” The New York Times proclaimed that the shooter had exposed a “racist,” and provided the customary imprecations from the usual leftist academic [A Racist Researcher, Exposed by a Mass Shooting, by Monika Pronczuk and Koba Ryckewaert, June 9, 2022]. (Gendron also cited the New York Times, but that didn’t seem to matter).
The Far East, according to my own research [Race Differences in Ethnocentrism, by Edward Dutton, 2019] is highly ethnocentric, so one would suspect that Wokery would not affect Asian academia. Wrong. Being high in social anxiety, Asians are imitating Americans because they want Americans to like them. American international students, and Korean academics educated in America, spread the Gospel of Wokeness. Nathan Cofnas, a philosopher at Cambridge University, is currently the target of a petition calling for his university to cancel him for his views on race [Student petition calls for sacking of controversial race researcher, by Sono Echaniz-Furuta, Varsity, November 11, 2022]. That is unsurprising. But a Korean university already Canceled him last year:
My talk at one of the top universities in Korea got canceled because “senior faculty members” object to my presence on campus.
Asia might not be a refuge for heterodox scholars. Many academics here got their PhDs in America and went woke.
My talk at one of the top universities in Korea got canceled because "senior faculty members" object to my presence on campus.
Asia might not be a refuge for heterodox scholars. Many academics here got their PhDs in America and went woke.
— Nathan Cofnas (@nathancofnas) March 27, 2021
As it happens, in May 2021, I myself gave a talk to a Korean university via Zoom. This was effectively done in secret, with only trusted Koreans being invited. Woke Korean-American academics (and, significantly, American international students) had found out about it and objected, so secrecy was the only way to avoid it being cancelled.
Similarly, I have effectively been cancelled by Oulu University in Finland, where I am “docent” (Adjunct Senior Lecturer is one translation) in a three-stage process.
In March 2016, a paper I helped write on group differences in intelligence [The intelligence and personality of Finland’s Swedish-speaking minority, by Edward Dutton, Edward Ver der Linden, et al., APA Psycnet] caused a media stir in Finland. Later the same year, Professor Richard Lynn and I were accused of plagiarism because a paper we wrote in 2013 fumbled a citation on the source of data relating to the Lynn-Flynn Effect [A negative Flynn effect in Finland, 1997–2009, Intelligence, May 2013]. Lynn took responsibility, but as coauthor I was convicted of plagiarism, too, as if to send me a message that it was “time to conform.”
In 2019, in a video at my Jolly Heretic YouTube channel, I critically reviewed Angela Saini’s science-denying Superior: The Return of Race Science. A Woke scientist called Jess Wade called on Oulu University to dismiss me from my position. The university’s tweeter condemned me as irresponsible, but said the school could not legally dismiss me. YouTube extirpated the video.
My video review of Saini’s book was ’manually confirmed’ to be ’suitable for all advertisers’ two days ago. Yet it has just been ’removed for violating hate speech guidelines’! pic.twitter.com/jZhohZQGBo
— Edward Dutton (@jollyheretic) June 27, 2019
Edward Dutton is not employed by University of Oulu, and his actions do not represent our values emphasizing equality and responsibility. With current legislation it is not possible to withdraw the title of Docent, but discussions on that are ongoing with Finnish Universities.
— University of Oulu (@UniOulu) June 28, 2019
Later in 2019, when my book on the rise of leftism in Finland The Silent Rape Epidemic: How the Finns Were Groomed to Love Their Abusers caused a Woke backlash, I was removed from the list of “docents” at Oulu University, a kind of cowardly, covert cancellation. [I discuss this in my foreword, Envy Wears the Mask of Love, to Kerry Bolton’s just-published The Tyranny of Human Rights].
Wokeness in academia might not yet be quite as influential outside the Anglophone World. But fanatical leftist crusaders are spreading it worldwide via the English language, Machiavellian collaboration and simple fear.
It’s all further evidence we’re all headed into a new Dark Age — and language barriers provide “no hiding place.”
Edward Dutton (email him | Tweet him) is Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at Asbiro University, Łódź, Poland. You can see him on his Jolly Heretic video channels on YouTube and Bitchute. His books are available on his home page here.
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