The parasite leucochloridium paradoxum, shown here infecting a snail, is
a flatworm that takes over the brains of gastropods and forces them
into self-destructive behaviors. As this essay demonstrates, woke social
teaching has been known to do the same with academic departments.
It was Franz Kafka meets
Jabba the Hutt. Instead of a seraglio on Tatooine, the location was a
hotel ballroom in Arlington, Virginia, at a large gathering of
scientists and engineers brought together by the National Science
Foundation (NSF). We were there to compete for a very large sum of
money.
At stake was funding for a “research center,” something akin to
national laboratories like Brookhaven Labs or Livermore Labs. Research
centers are built around a strategic theme, like nuclear physics, and
are intended to provide a venue for scientists nationwide to come
together to explore that theme. Research centers are high-stakes
competitions, involving tens of millions of dollars doled out over a
term of ten years or so. The prizes are big, and the prestige immense.
They are intended to go to the best of the best.
The competition for research centers takes place in two stages. The
first stage winnows wheat from chaff. Hopeful teams of scientists apply
for a “planning grant,” which supports the work involved in crafting the
actual proposal for the center. If a team is awarded a planning grant,
the next step is a “planning meeting,” where the NSF gathers the
successful teams together to provide detailed guidance on what might
make for a successful proposal. I was on one of those teams, and that is
how I came to be in that hotel ballroom.
At the opening session, we were told that proposals would be judged
on four “foundational components,” or “pillars,” as they were styled in
the PowerPoints. A successful proposal would be strong on all four:
weakness in one would cast the proposal into the abyss, we were told, no
matter how strong the other pillars might be. At the planning meeting,
each pillar was to have a dedicated panel discussion, just to make clear
to us what the NSF’s expectations were. Three of the four pillars were
conventionally scientific and academic: innovation, training, etc. The
remaining pillar was “Diversity and Culture of Inclusion” (DCI).
That was where things took a bizarre turn.
The DCI panel consisted of bureaucrats from the NSF’s Office of
Diversity and Inclusion (ODI). Naturally, there were many questions from
the floor about what the criteria for a strong DCI pillar would be. We
are talking about engineers, remember, whose culture is: “give us ‘the
specs’ and we will solve any problem.” The assembled engineers were
looking for “the specs” they needed to build that DCI pillar.
I remember the scene. Each team was seated at its own round table on
the ballroom floor. The DCI panel was seated on a raised platform,
looking down on us, as from thrones on high. They were, collectively,
our Jabba.
One engineer at a neighboring table kept trying to pin the DCI panel
down on those DCI specs. Jabba kept deflecting the question. We’ll know
it when we see it, was the blithe answer, issued with the monotonous
imperiousness of the entitled ruler indulging inconvenient questioning
from the proles. Engineering is too white and too male, was one
panelist’s message to us, and that needed to be corrected. Irony alert:
the engineer pressing the point was not white, but an Indian immigrant.
Nor would Jabba provide the specs the engineers sought, and this is
where Franz entered the chat. It became clearer with every question that
the specs not only would not be laid out: they would in any event
change according to inscrutable whim of the ODI bureaucrats. Foolish
engineers, one might imagine Jabba chortling, the “specs” are not to
help you solve a problem: they are there to keep you off-balance,
uncertain, and in my power. It is enough for you to know you depend upon
my mercy for funding.
How Infection Spreads
Speaking of mercy, the coffee break by then intervened to terminate
the bizarre exchange—leaving me, Styrofoam cup and stale Danish in hand,
to contemplate the message that had just been delivered. We, the
diversicrats, not you, the scientists and engineers, will decide what
science and engineering is worthy of support. And you will be glad of it
when we do.
All are familiar with the Left’s “long march” through the
institutions. What might not be so well known is just how thorough the
conquest has been. Evidence of this sometimes pops up into prominent
public view, as in the recent exposure of “critical race theory”
training in federal agencies (including places like Sandia National
Labs, where one would expect such hokum to be laughed out the door).
Such incidents, though quite frequent,
are only the tips of a very large iceberg. In the academic sciences,
where I have spent my career, “diversity, inclusion, and equity” (DIE)
has become as pervasive as one might expect it to be in any grievance
studies department.
How did this happen? More to the point, how could it happen to the
supposedly sensible people that scientists are generally thought to be?
The concept of “zombie parasites” provides an apt metaphor for how
things got to this point. These are parasites that colonize the brains
and nervous systems of their hosts, taking the controls, so to speak,
over the host’s behavior. One striking example of a zombie parasite is a
worm that infects the brains of snails, which normally crawl around
stealthily at night. A snail infected with the parasite crawls out onto a
grass stalk during the day, where it is now visible to birds that
gobble them up. The parasite then breeds in the bird’s digestive tract
and deposits its eggs in the bird’s feces. When uninfected snails eat
the feces, the parasite’s life cycle is completed.
DIE has spread into the academic sciences as a kind of zombie
parasite. It is not a real worm at work, of course, but a metaphorical
“brainworm”—three of them, in fact, that together spread a kind of
altered cognitive reality through any institution that is infected by
them.
The route of infection usually starts with a “study” that identifies a
“problem” that no one knew existed: the overwhelming whiteness of, say,
fishery science. Once an unwitting host takes the bait, the next phase
of the infection kicks in: all are invited to contemplate with horror
the dark future that awaits should fishery scientists not take immediate
steps to correct the “problem.” In the final stage of the infection,
the brainworm plants its “diversity is our strength” meme in the host’s
nervous system. The infected now babble about solving the impending
crisis through a crash outreach program to “under-represented” or
“marginalized” groups, who, by virtue of their class membership, think
differently about fisheries, and so can save the field from stultifying
white maleness.
As in those parasitized snails, the DIE brainworm induces a cognitive
disconnect in the infected. None of the assertions planted by the DIE
zombie parasite have a sound basis in fact or reason. The accusation of
too much whiteness usually is based upon a simple observation that the
ethnic, gender, and sexual orientation mix in, say, fishery science,
departs from the statistical distributions found in the general
population. Why this should be, where it is considered at all, is
usually buried under a panoply of repetitive charts and diagrams of
dubious critical value.
Also lacking is any evidence of a future critical shortage of
scientists and engineers that would put, say, fishery science at risk.
Colleges and universities are turning out science graduates in far
greater numbers than there are jobs that can usefully employ them, and
they’ve been doing so for nearly 70 years.
The “diversity is our strength” mantra, for its part, rests on some
disturbingly racist presumptions. If “thinking differently” is an
inherent attribute of race (or gender, or sexual orientation), this
edges up very close to the forbidden argument that there might be
inherent racial (or gender, or sexual orientation) disparities in, say,
IQ. Both are cognitive attributes. Yet one is beyond the pale, and the
other is almost a compulsory point of doctrine. Both cannot
simultaneously be true.
Tearing Families Apart
What makes the DIE brainworm a zombie parasite is how it
hijacks the host’s behavior to facilitate its spread, to the host’s
ultimate detriment. Universities, where future scientists are trained,
are a common target. Incubating a future scientist has traditionally
involved a very close relationship between a professor and a student
(“mentor” and “mentee,” in today’s clumsy parlance). It is not uncommon
to speak of this relationship in familial terms: I am the academic “son”
of my Ph.D. supervisor, for example, and in turn the academic
“grandson” of his Ph.D. supervisor. I am thus the academic
“brother” to all the students who studied under my PhD supervisor. Once
the rite of Ph.D. passage is cleared, professors will use their
“familial” networks to launch the newly minted scientist offspring in
their new careers. I could go on, but you get the idea.
Like all families, academic families have their ups and downs, their
rifts and triumphs. Despite their imperfections, these familial networks
have, for many years, reliably ensured the scientific future, largely
because they are held together by a transcendent ideal. Not an ideal as
lofty as justice, mind you, but something more elemental and earthy.
Fishery scientists, to trot them out again, become fishery scientists
because, well, they love fish. They want to devote their lives to
getting to know fish better. The same may be said of nearly every
scientific endeavor in academia: at the vital core is a love that can
verge into obsession. The genius of the academy is that it provides a
place where that love can give value to the society that supports it.
Disrupt that elemental drive, and you degrade the real social value of
the sciences.
This almost primitive love provides a kind of immunity to the DIE
brainworm, which makes it a particular target. To spread, the parasite
must plant the idea that the familial network of relationships cloaks a
hostile and dangerous climate, propped up by cronyism, privilege,
racism, sexism, and hostility to the non-binary. The only way to make
science “safe” for the marginalized, or excluded, or under-represented,
is to disrupt the traditional mentoring family. Students and new faculty
who are members of “under-represented” or “marginalized” groups are
drawn from their intellectual families into self-referential bubbles of
grievance: support groups, safe spaces, counseling services, etc., where
the normal stresses of academic life can be transformed into evidence
of the hostile climate without.
At some point, earnest administrators, who know nothing about science
and understand even less how it works, are brought in to “listen” to
the newly aggrieved. At that point, discontent is turned into actionable
grievance: committees and study groups are appointed, action plans
formulated. Excluded from all this, of course, are the keepers of the
academic traditions which, inconveniently for them, have already been
condemned in absentia as the problem.
Pressure is brought on these erstwhile traditionalists to conform, to
“listen” to other voices, to “check your privilege,” to be “open” to
different “perspectives.” If the brainworm has spread far enough to
implant a DIE bureaucracy on campus, penalties for non-conformity will
be quietly placed in a corner of the room, a visible reminder of the
consequences of resistance to the brainworm. Once that happens, the path
is open for the entire academic institution to become infected,
triggering the next, and most dangerous, stage of the infection.
Follow the Money
Parasites do not simply invade a host: they require fertile ground
and food. For the DIE brainworm, the mother’s milk is money. And it is
the academic sciences, not the humanities, where the ground is lushest.
Compare two sources of federal funds that are often tied to woke
ideology on campuses: the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the
National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). These are NSF-style
agencies that fund academic work in the arts and humanities, and in
similar ways. Artists and scholars submit proposals, these are
scrutinized by peers, and funds are doled out to the successful
proposals.
How much money? The NEA presently enjoys an annual appropriation of
about $150 million. For the NEH, it is about $160 million. In contrast,
the federal money directed to academic science in 2017 stood at around
$40 billion: 250 times more. Over the course of the 50 years of its
existence, the NEH has funded a cumulative total of roughly $4.7 billion
dollars in grants. The cumulative tally of federal support of academic
research over the same time span has been nearly $900 billion: about 200
times more.
It is to the sciences, then, that the DIE brainworm has gone to feed,
and there it has spread as if it were an epidemic. Evidence for this
can be ferreted out from the NSF’s searchable databases of its grant
awards, by searching for keywords such as “under-represented,”
“minority,” or “marginalized” in the grant documents. Prior to 2010, no
award carried these keywords. The first to do so was in 2010, when the
NSF awarded a large research center grant to MIT, which contained within
it a significant program of outreach to marginalized groups.
Since that year, NSF expenditures on research grants containing the
“woke” keywords have risen exponentially, doubling at a rate of about
50% each year, just as a novel virus would when spreading through a new
population. In 2018, the last year for which a complete picture can be
discerned, the NSF funded nearly a thousand research grants devoted in
whole or part to DIE aims, to the tune of more than $1.3 billion. From
2010 to 2018, a total of more than $4 billion have been awarded to more
than 2,200 DIE-oriented grants.
Which is how we get to that scene in the Arlington hotel ballroom,
where DIE now holds the trump card in deciding what science is worthy of
funding. No matter how stellar the science, the message is clear:
gobble up the DIE brainworm, or your funding will dry up, and your
career along with it.
Reason’s Last Stand
Is there any hope? I’d like to offer another perspective. In my
40-year career in the academic sciences, I have spent significant time,
by my rough count, in ten academic institutions, including post-doctoral
fellowships, sabbatical leaves, and regular faculty appointments. The
institutions I have inhabited have included a small liberal arts
college, a medical school, two colleges in southern Africa, top-flight
research universities, and finally, the college where I spent the bulk
of my academic career. So, I have seen a pretty good cross-section of
campus climates. Here is my impression, for what it’s worth.
Academic family life can be a pretty rough affair, populated as it is
by imperfect and sometimes difficult people. The ticket for admission
to an academic family can be hard to win, the criteria inscrutable. One
vice I have never witnessed, however, is bigotry. Among my colleagues, I
have never seen the ticket for admission stamped for having the “right”
skin color, gender, or sexual orientation. Rather, admission to the
family has turned on whether there is a shared love and the commitment
to sustain it.
Where I have seen real bigotry, in contrast, is when the DIE
brainworm is challenged. For questioning the DIE orthodoxy, I once was
branded an “institutional terrorist” by a high-priced consultant brought
in to heal our supposedly sick and bigoted campus culture. It is no
surprise that the DIE brainworm has spread through the campuses to an
alarming extent, spread largely by acquiescence to the altered cognitive
states the worm wants us to accept. When the brainworm acquires the
power of the purse and the HR department, the infection has become
near-fatal.
Can the patient be cured? The prognosis, as a physician might say, is
clouded. “Chemotherapy” is a possibility, which in this instance means
cutting off the tens of billions of dollars of federal money the zombie
parasite feeds on. At this late stage, however, the infection is far
advanced, and the realistic prospects for a successful course of
treatment are slim. There is too much money and power at stake for the
zombie parasite to passively accept doom.
What hope remains emerges from the same dilemma that confronted those
last human survivors in the classic novel about zombie parasites, Jack
Finney’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The one thing that defeated that zombie
parasite in the end was a superhuman assertion of will against the
infection. The one ray of hope against the DIE zombie parasite streams
from the few and isolated pockets of the uninfected still lingering in
the academic ecosystem. It is there that the parasite will mount its
fiercest attack. Can the academic sciences resist and recover? The flame
is sputtering. If the wax rises high enough to extinguish the flame,
the zombie parasite’s takeover will be complete.
J Scott Turner is an emeritus professor of biology at the SUNY College of Environmental Science & Forestry.
