Scientific research that can make our lives better, and in some cases even save our lives, is being hampered by political correctness that is enforced by government rules and institutions. And it's only getting worse. Dr. Patanjali Kampampati, a chemistry professor at McGill University joins us to talk about why.
00:07:09.340It's a privilege in the true sense of the word that we get to discover things.
00:07:13.400So in my field, what I do is to do the equivalent of building a better microscope or telescope.
00:07:19.480But rather than building a better microscope or telescope, my objective is to build a better clock from monitoring very fast things or making very fast movies of things moving.
00:07:30.620So, for example, if you wanted to watch a bullet burst through an apple, you'd have a very fast camera.
00:07:36.820What we do is use very fast, even faster cameras like laser pulses to measure the motion of electrons.
00:07:43.260We're interested in the motion of electrons because they're moving around in photovoltaic.
00:07:49.040They're moving around in displays and transistors.
00:07:52.100And those electrons are moving around at the speed of a trillionth of a second or a quadrillionth of a second.
00:07:58.520And so you have to have a very fast camera.
00:08:00.780So our objective is to create lasers, laser based clocks that can measure motions down to quadrillionths of a second.
00:08:08.280And in the aspect of doing so, we hope to understand the physics and chemistry of how to make materials for our energy future.
00:08:15.800Wow. So I know nothing about this, but I'm going to wager that the practical applications of this, should it prove successful, are pretty wide reaching and could be of benefit to a variety of sectors.
00:08:28.720The practical applications span from renewable energy to flat panel displays, to white lighting, to medical imaging, to telecommunications.
00:08:44.960There's many, many, many applications for the work that we do.
00:08:49.220And that's why we have been funded at a very nice level by the Canadian government.
00:08:54.780So the Canadian government has been very generous to us for 15 years, and I'm very grateful for their financial support.
00:09:00.860What I do take exception to is they're asking me to prove my merits as a social engineer to give selective empathy to some people over others.
00:09:12.360Is it fair to say that this EDI prism, which has excluded you from getting this recent round of funding, is somewhat slowing down the progress that you could make in these various sectors that you've just identified?
00:09:24.900It is absolutely slowing down the progress as a case in point, I and my colleagues in science now have to spend our time learning how to write an EDI section because the EDI questionnaires were written by government bureaucrats in gender studies and grievance studies and things like that.
00:09:42.880So these non-scientists who are social justice warriors are now tasking we scientists to be social justice warriors when we're not.
00:09:52.280That's literally the opposite of what we are. We're mostly driven by fairness, equality, classical liberal principles of treating people as individuals.
00:10:00.340And that just comes to us naturally. Well, the thing that we have to spend our time doing is doing science and writing proposals and learning how to do new science.
00:10:08.480We can't do that anymore because now we're spending our time learning how to write EDI proposals.
00:10:14.260I myself am wasting my time learning how to write EDI proposals.
00:10:17.960So some bureaucrat will say, now you can be judged for scientific merit.
00:10:22.760Dr. Kavambadi, when you wrote those EDI sections in the grant last year and this year, well, I guess I should ask, did you write them?
00:10:37.180And I've seen on Reddit, for example, especially university students will say, I must have tried to sabotage my own proposal.
00:10:43.660Or maybe a colleague would say, maybe I didn't even write anything at all.
00:10:47.780And why would I, after spending all my life, my young life trying to become a scientist, now my adult life is spent being a scientist.
00:10:58.100I spend, I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about how I can write proposals and write more papers and get better experiments going.
00:12:07.460If I don't do that, then somehow I am somehow responsible for creating a bigoted world where scientists are only a small subset of humanity.
00:12:15.640Were they looking for qualitative statements about how you're going to push, I don't know, you know, anti-colonialist sentiment in it?
00:12:23.060Were they looking for quantitative statements about quotas for research assistance?
00:12:29.680And I think what they were looking for is the irony of it is I personally could pass by all these so-called EDI requirements based upon my own externalities, but that doesn't matter.
00:12:41.900My own group is highly diverse, but that doesn't matter.
00:12:45.220Apparently, what you have to do is pledge allegiance to the instructions given to you of how you're supposed to enforce EDI.
00:12:52.040It is literally a pledge of allegiance, and if you do not restate their words and explain in detail how you will fulfill that pledge, then you will be cut.
00:13:04.280Because you seem to be a little bit, you know, surprised and kind of flummoxed about where it even came from.
00:13:09.440I know you've known it's been around for a year because you had to do it in the one a year ago, but it's like, who actually put this in place?
00:13:26.440And in fact, I have been monitoring these sort of tendencies since I was a freshman in college in the USA in 1988.
00:13:34.120In 1988, when I was 18 years old, I first saw a rise of the politically correct movement amongst my peers, and they started taking courses in gender studies and grievance studies that were very new in 1990.
00:13:46.340And now those people, 30 years later, are tenured professors and bureaucrats and writers for magazines.
00:13:53.220So my peers are 50 years old, and some of them majored in women's studies and African-American studies and anti-colonial studies and all these other things.
00:14:02.780They only know how to feel in terms of victimology and oppression and what they view, we scientists, as are colonial, heterosexual, patriarchal oppressors, in part.
00:14:18.040The best case scenario is we're just bigots who've kept other people away from science.
00:14:22.200When, in fact, science is an open club, if you can join in, you can join in, just like chess, just like violin.
00:14:29.120It's exclusive in the sense that it's hard to do, but it's not exclusive in that anyone who can do it is welcome.
00:14:35.660I also get the impression that the sciences don't particularly suffer from an equity, diversity, and inclusion deficit.
00:14:43.880Like, it seems like, is this a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist?
00:14:48.620I think it's a solution to a problem that doesn't exist, because people have perceived there's a problem that science is mostly done by men, and of the men, it's mostly Jews and Asians.
00:15:00.020I mean, I used to work in a fiber-optic startup company where I'd go to very large industrial conferences, and in those fiber-optic industrial conferences, where there were 10,000 people, enough to make a good average,
00:15:12.380it seemed like about a third were Asian, a third were Asian men, a third were Jewish men, a third were white men, and the 10% were everyone else from all over the world.
00:15:22.000I mean, of all walks of life, all gender, whatever it might be, but like basketball, it turns out physics and computer science and math are not equally distributed amongst all people.
00:15:33.880For whatever reason, I'm not even going to go and address that problem, because that's too much of a touchy subject,
00:15:40.340but the simple fact of the matter is, people have different interests.
00:15:43.920At the very least, and certainly maybe different abilities, we should be able to let people do what they want to do.
00:15:49.620As a case in point, I'm an Indian immigrant, and my father, I was born in India, but my father immigrated us,
00:15:57.620and most Indian immigrants go into electrical engineering, because that's a great way to immigrate to the first world.
00:16:03.220Chinese might go into physics, other people might go into medicine.
00:16:06.620If you're an African-American, maybe you'll go into business, but people, if you're poor, if you want to lift yourself up,
00:16:13.580you'll find a logical and reasonable way to do it within your skill set.
00:16:17.120No one needs to be helped by some social justice warriors with good intentions that are trying to take away human liberty, agency, and accountability.
00:16:25.780Now, Professor, I know you've said before in a National Post story on your situation that you're certainly not unsympathetic
00:16:32.160to people who have concerns with racism, and you have experienced racism yourself.
00:16:37.020Is this an issue that persists in your field right now?
00:16:40.080Would you say that there is racism in the sciences, such that there needs to be some sort of formal intervention right now?
00:16:47.960Absolutely not. I would say science is literally the least racist enterprise in all of human existence
00:16:54.780for a simple, other than possibly professional sports.
00:16:58.180And the reason is, in professional sports and science and chess, you can tell who's better and worse than the other person,
00:17:04.640and everyone wants the best person to succeed.
00:17:06.760And it's a highly meritocratic, individualistic culture, more so than any other culture,
00:17:13.740like politics, like business, like medicine, like car sales, like being a nurse.
00:17:18.720Whatever human enterprise, we scientists are the most driven by individual excellence and meritocracy.
00:17:25.820So it seems offensive and absurd that other people are trying to judge us.
00:18:44.940It is hard for me to speak up, but hopefully it's easier now, thanks to people like me saying I've had enough of this cultural revolution.
00:18:54.380So the responses on email have been uniformly positive.
00:18:58.860The responses from my colleagues have been positive.
00:19:01.460I have presented an EDI lecture at our most recent chemistry department staff meeting, faculty meeting, and that went positively last week.
00:19:11.820And I would say the only thing is the administration has not really replied to me at all,
00:19:16.620because the role of the university administration, like the government bureaucrats, is to maintain the status quo.
00:19:22.920They created the status quo, and we dissident scientists are questioning the status quo.
00:19:28.340Professor, do you have any redress to being rejected for this grant?
00:19:32.640I appreciate you've acknowledged that you win some, you lose some.
00:19:34.860I know you don't feel entitled to receiving these funds, but I know you're frustrated that this was the criteria for rejection.
00:19:42.100Is there a way that you can go back and say, you know, come on, guys, I think we're all acknowledging this is a bit silly.
00:19:49.660I am in the process of working with my university officers to help me write a better EDI section.
00:19:56.900So my second proposal can at least make it the scientific review and hopefully get funded.
00:20:02.080So that is the short-term goal, because I, as a scientist, need government research funds to live.
00:20:08.340Sure, there's corporate research funds, but that's very rare.
00:20:11.900Government research funds are the vast majority, and especially in my field.
00:20:14.920So I need them to live and continue to work and be a scientist.
00:20:18.540If I can continue to be a scientist, then I can also be outspoken about these issues.
00:20:22.600So in parallel, I will be outspoken with the general public about these issues of EDI in science, and hopefully they will not punish me as a result.
00:20:31.440I think if they tried to punish me as a result, that would look really bad.
00:20:35.900So you've said that the response has been very diverse in terms of the different people it's coming from, in terms of the positive response.
00:20:46.420Because I feel like professors who initially spoke out about things in the academy, there were attempts to sort of sideline them, shelve them, pigeonhole them into a certain category.
00:20:56.340Have you suffered anything such as that so far?
00:20:59.020I have received no negative response, but I have, and I was initially motivated to speak based upon a colleague at University of Chicago by the name of Dorian Abbott, who was canceled by MIT for his public lecture.
00:21:13.560And so I've been in contact with Professor Dorian Abbott, and I think he put me in touch with the National Post.
00:21:19.300And Dorian Abbott is a white man, and he gets a lot of flack saying that somehow he's not an ally.
00:21:24.960You would look silly if you did that to me.
00:21:27.820That's also why I wanted to come out guns a-blazing saying, look, I've experienced more racism than these kids could possibly comprehend with their microaggressions, but I'm not a victim, and I want to treat people like individuals, so I can get away with that.
00:21:39.740I have a thick skin, and I have an instant defense that others might not have, which is the reason why I'm speaking out.
00:21:47.800But having said that, the people who are most social justice warrior-y are the students and the professors of grievance studies who educate them.
00:21:56.480Some of the students on the McGill Reddit would say, oh, gee, why is this guy whining?
00:22:02.740Why doesn't he care about equity, diversity, and inclusion?
00:22:05.540Why doesn't he care about minorities failing to recognize that I've probably lived far worse than I can imagine?
00:22:10.420It's just I try to treat people like Mark Luther King taught me.
00:22:13.340Professor, I appreciate you're saying you don't want to be a victim, but I do want to ask you, you talk about these instances of racism that you have experienced.
00:22:21.340Do you mean in the academy, in your professional life, or in your personal life?
00:22:26.480I was a kid in Minnesota in the 1970s, and being an Indian, I could pass for Black, I could pass for Native American, I could pass for Mexican, I could pass back for Muslim, pass for Arab.
00:22:36.780So I experienced a lot of racism as a child in the playground, and that was quite traumatizing and taught me how to view people as individuals.
00:22:47.360Then later on, as an adult, I've been targeted, whether by the police or whether by the U.S. Border Patrol or whether I go to airports.
00:22:56.120But like I said, I have a thick skin, and I think most people mean well, and I think the vast majority in life, I've met people from all over the world.
00:23:02.900The vast majority of people are not racist.
00:23:06.740But I'm willing to view people as individuals.
00:23:11.420But certainly, I've experienced a lot, and I think that has enabled me to want to rise above this tendency to put people in boxes and bins.
00:23:21.200And I believe the woke social justice warriors are now doing the very same thing the racists did 100 years ago by putting people in boxes and bins.
00:23:30.080Do you think those problems are getting better and worse, the things you allude to?
00:23:33.420I take it referring to things like, you know, driving while black, as they call it, or driving while brown, or to your point of the airport, you know, post 9-11, okay, here's a brown gentleman, you know, maybe Al-Qaeda, better check his luggage.
00:24:02.020My kids are half Caucasian, half Indian, and the likelihood of them experiencing any form of racism to me is so ridiculous, so improbable, that my feeling is I want you to have thick skin and be tough and have agency and accountability and have a spine so you don't go around worrying about at least, frankly, trivial things that are not a big deal in 2020.
00:24:23.360Having said that, there do happen on occasion.
00:24:26.040We know the case, for example, the extreme cases of, say, George Floyd and those things, other things happen.
00:24:30.460I've experienced things myself, but those are highly statistically unlikely.
00:24:35.120We'll be back in just a moment after this message with more full comment.
00:24:38.380Do you think that this EDI push is something that is just here for a little blip in time?
00:24:49.460It's a year or two or three, and they've acknowledged, oh, okay, people like Dr. Kamampati, they have a point.
00:25:48.500I think that the culture of grievance studies in academia has given rise to how we fund STEM, as I've seen in my case, but also how we run universities from Hollywood to mainstream media to education.
00:26:04.320All of these cultural forces have been influenced by the grievance studies people of academia between 1990 and 2020.
00:26:41.400What would you recommend they do who are hearing what you're saying and going, well, I don't like the fact this EDI stuff is getting in the way of things like Dr.
00:26:49.920Kambadi's research that are holding us back from having this great laser science that can positively benefit society.
00:26:58.160Should they talk about it to their politicians?
00:26:59.620I mean, what do you think is the momentum required to make whoever, whichever bureaucrat is putting this rule in place to say, hey, guys, let's just roll this back?
00:27:12.740Because in the emails that I've received, a number of people said they will write to their government officials, their MPs, even Trudeau and so forth.
00:27:20.600And or if they're a university, they'll write to the heads of their university.
00:27:23.500I think the idea is we should be unafraid.
00:27:48.460I'm going to write my politicians and say, I'm not happy with this business because some politicians just took the ball and ran with it without telling anyone.
00:28:08.220And I can tell you outright that I've seen advertisements for tenure track positions at faculty, from faculty at universities, where you cannot apply if you're a straight white man.
00:28:29.640I have a lot of colleagues showing me how insane things are, and it is out of apartheid.
00:28:34.960Here's another example I'd like to get your thoughts on.
00:28:37.720From the Journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry, I guess an international journal, probably one of the top, it sounds like, in its field.
00:28:46.180A Brock University professor put forward one paper in that, which caused a bit of a turmoil.
00:28:51.740And then it led to the Royal Society of Chemistry journal revising its rules.
00:28:55.580They now have a new rule that says that, I guess, they cannot really include or must heavily edit any content that could reasonably offend someone on the basis of their age, gender, race, sexual orientation, religious or political beliefs, marital or parental status, physical features, national origin, social status, or disability.
00:29:18.700And I got this from a guest op-ed at National Post by scientist Lawrence Krauss.
00:29:24.820He goes on to say, you look at that description.
00:29:27.820I mean, that pretty much means you can't really talk about anything.
00:29:31.200And also, in science, sometimes you need to delve into issues that could reasonably offend someone based on this quite significant laundry list, including marital status.
00:29:43.060And I think you're referring to Professor Thomas Hudlicky at Brock, who was canceled by a bunch of social justice warriors.
00:29:51.440And I've written in support of Thomas Hudlicky.
00:29:53.060I think he was treated very, very barbarically in a vulgar and barbaric way.
00:29:58.260I support Thomas Hudlicky as well and Lawrence Krauss's writings as well.
00:30:02.980So that's an example of the cancellation.
00:30:05.260I think it's actually worse than what that RSC journal says, because when they say you cannot cause any verbal harm to people based upon race, gender, class, caste, whatever it might be, it's actually not true.
00:30:29.200When they say you cannot be offensive, you must monitor your feelings and the offenses registered based upon the offended party, not you.
00:30:36.520It's highly, highly, highly hypocritical and asymmetric.
00:30:40.220If you are a straight white man, you do not count.
00:30:42.800I'm not a straight white man, so I can tell you that.
00:30:46.500Professor, when you said that the responses you got were largely positive, you cited a number of older individuals.
00:30:51.580I know you've said that people within your faculty and you had a faculty meeting where there wasn't particularly big complaints about what you were saying, but you did allude to there being a Reddit chat where a couple people sort of said, oh, well, you know, what's the complaint about so forth?
00:31:05.600And it seemed like they were undergrads.
00:31:07.740And when you reference cultural revolution, the big thing around that decades ago in communist China was the young turning on the older.
00:31:14.740What's going on with undergrads right now?
00:31:18.440We see a lot of bizarre scenes from American universities where an undergrad feels they are entitled to completely cancel their own professor, to publicly go and throw invective at them because they haven't fulfilled whatever it is, what they determined to be EDI criteria.
00:31:34.600What do you see and what do you hear perhaps from other colleagues about the undergrad experience?
00:31:40.640I think that's a hundred percent true.
00:31:43.920I think the undergraduates started going crazy around 2010 with the social justice, politically correct movement.
00:31:50.480Like I said, it started in 1990 when I was an undergrad.
00:31:55.560It's people like my peers, children, my peers, students.
00:31:59.800Those are the ones who started going really woke in the year 2010.
00:32:03.400And the phrase I heard from students was this phrase, check your privilege.
00:32:08.680Now, that's a common phrase and privilege is a common phrase.
00:32:12.040But in 2010, privilege was first being used to deny the humanity of some people instead of saying, like the American Express commercial, privilege is something you earn.
00:32:21.100I'm a middle-aged man with a nice career.
00:32:35.240So what the social justice warrior students started to do in the year 2010 is to dehumanize people by saying, check your privilege, which is a very Marxist way of thinking about things.
00:32:44.880Like the Marxists were doing this to the wealthy farmers in the Soviet Union 100 years ago.
00:32:49.680So fast forward now 10 more years, it's the year 2020, the students have now created that prevailing culture and the professors and the administration are now afraid of students.
00:33:01.500But what's happened is students have changed because the students of 2014 were the ones who were throwing tantrums and throwing riots every time they felt triggered and they had their safe space broken.
00:33:12.580But by 2021, I think students are now hungry for reality again and sanity again and rigor and scholarship again and not having safe spaces.
00:33:22.320So I think what's actually happening is that I think the young people are finally having enough of this.
00:33:28.040And I think that there might be a swing away from this woke, politically correct culture that has been taking place for 30 years.
00:33:36.160I see it in my own kids who are teenage boys and they are anti-woke.
00:33:49.580Because when I see these videos of a professor or a dean apologizing in the public square to a mob of undergrads yelling at them, and those videos exist, there's a few of them from American universities.
00:34:01.040I think, well, you know, this is awful.
00:34:04.740Why do they think they can get away with this?
00:34:06.400But I also feel like that professor, that dean is failing them by not saying, kids, stop it, get in line, shut up, go back to class and study, that the professors and that the particularly administration are indulging them in this nonsense.
00:34:30.440And I think that what happened is that a lot of those professors who let the campus radicals take over, then those campus radicals became professors.
00:34:41.520So there's a lot of those people in academia, the leftover campus radicals and the former Marxists and the people like that.
00:34:49.780And they tend to run the administration because the people who don't run the administration are the people busy doing actual work, people busy doing actual science.
00:34:58.360So real scientists like me don't want to be part of administration because we'd rather be doing science and teaching.
00:35:05.240So the administrators are the ones who run out of things to do and they want to create a little fiefdom based upon their Marxist ideas.
00:35:12.900I'm always surprised by how large the administration is getting, how much empire building there is, how many random activities universities get up to that are really out of their traditional wheelhouse these days.
00:35:22.780And you go, what on earth are they doing?
00:35:24.520There just seems to be a lot of busybody shenanigans going on.
00:35:28.520And maybe this is just an extension of it.
00:35:32.360But it's far worse than the United States where you have private universities.
00:35:35.860And so there, for example, the number of professors used to be some fraction of the staff.
00:35:42.500And now that fraction has dropped off precipitously because they have many more EDI staff.
00:35:47.360And those EDI staff often make, you know, have offices that cost tens of millions of dollars a year.
00:35:51.900And there are people at American Enterprise Institute that quantify all these tendencies of how universities have been taken over by bureaucratic EDI offices at great cost.
00:36:02.140And they are now running the universities because it's a bit like an HR organization running a startup company.
00:36:10.180The startup company should run the HR organization, not the other way around.
00:36:13.760Well, right now, the human resource organization and the and those and equivalents at the university are saying, here's how the university should run.
00:36:21.120It should be a safe space, not for all people, but only for some people.
00:36:24.700Do you think there's a lot of people who just aren't aware of the extent of this and they're not aware of how bad it is?
00:36:31.440I think about how these days there are more and more sessions in schools and in corporations that we would call implicit bias training or anti-bias training.
00:36:41.000And one hears that at first and they go, well, isn't this just talking about, you know, how we shouldn't judge people based on the color of their skin and we should all get along.
00:36:47.060You go, well, this is very different than having an anti-racism workshop or sitting the kids down and saying, look, you know, some people have two moms, two dads.
00:36:54.080Once people come from here, they come from there.
00:36:59.600This is very different where it's fostering a lot of ideas that, yes, you have, you know, deep seated racism in you and we need to get out.
00:37:07.540And you go, what are you talking about?
00:37:08.340I mean, the anti-bias training, it's very different than I think a lot of people believe it to be.
00:37:14.480I was given an anti-bias training by our diversity dean and it was happening at a faculty meeting for hiring.
00:37:20.260And we were given the implicit association test to study implicit bias and identify the implicit biases that we might have against women and certain sexual minorities,
00:37:31.940but never the implicit biases that women that might have against men or Chinese might have against Japanese or Indians might have against blacks or blacks might have against Indians.
00:37:41.460Instead of judging human nature, it was very selective.
00:37:44.800And so then the dean started giving us these questions saying, raise your left hand or right hand if you agree or disagree with the statement.
00:37:55.520I sat there with my arms folded across my chest, glaring at the dean saying, on over my dead body, I refuse to raise my hand.
00:38:04.200And we know in Nazi Germany, people were forced to raise their hand and I'm going to make over there and make that analogy.
00:38:09.580And I will not raise my hand for someone asking me to go against my most deeply held beliefs and go against reason, logic and evidence and accept magical thought.
00:38:25.620But all of my very white progressive colleagues were raising and lowering their hands in an agreement as if they were going through training like in Marxism.
00:38:37.580You've said that this is deep rooted in the system and it's been decades in the making, but you also referenced how among the teens, things are a little different.
00:38:44.600There are some that are going along to get along, but there are some who are saying this isn't working for us anymore.
00:38:57.140And I hope that the place where we come to a head is in science because we scientists have largely been ignoring how the academic grievance studies have been coming for us.
00:39:07.980They're hunting us down like the poor proletariat in the Soviet Union hunted down the rich farmers in Ukraine who had the kulaks and had enough money to live off of.
00:39:17.840The social justice warriors are hunting us down in science because of jealousy and collectivism and victimology, which are the worst of human tendencies.
00:39:27.160But having said that, I think now we scientists know they're coming for us.
00:39:31.280And so we'll stand up and say, hey, look, we're the guys who make your lasers.
00:39:43.660Do you want us to continue doing that?
00:39:45.180Because we're our arms are tied behind our back and they're coming for us and they're coming for you soon.
00:39:50.940They're coming for you in your employment places.
00:39:52.660So the H.R. organizations will be giving you your implicit bias tests.
00:39:56.640I've heard my colleagues who work for financial companies, my colleagues who are civilians, already getting sensitivity training, racial bias in this training.
00:40:07.400That book by Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility, they're having Robin DiAngelo come in and give lectures at various finance companies in Montreal.
00:40:17.520Professor Kamibati, what would you say to those who say, well, the whole point of this is just to make sure we're all getting along, to make sure there's not tensions in society.
00:40:25.400Maybe Mr. DiAngelo's book overstates a few sentences here and there.
00:40:34.280I would say that in a corporation and in a university, in a professional environment, that is not the place to teach you what to think and how to behave as a human being.
00:40:47.420And where you should have learned that is from your parents, your church, or from your own self, or from your literature.
00:40:53.600You should have learned how to be a decent human being.
00:40:56.080But if I go work for Intel, Intel is not there to tell me how to be a decent human being.
00:41:01.100Intel is there to tell me, make sure to do your job and don't be a jerk.
00:41:04.820If you're a jerk, sure, we're going to call you out.
00:41:32.300You've outed yourself as the scum of the earth.
00:41:34.880And then people go, okay, well, I better not talk up about it, even though that's not my intention.
00:41:39.580What happened when I presented at my recent faculty meeting is one of my colleagues, who's a straight white male, said, of course you want to be for EDI.
00:41:50.260It sounds good to be for equity, diversity, and inclusion.
00:41:53.100I didn't want to overtake the conversation, but I can answer that question now.
00:42:09.140It was made up, and you can question it.
00:42:11.180My colleagues, Dorian Abbott and Ivan Marinovich, have already come up in Newsweek article with an alternative called Merit, Fairness, and Equality, MFE, Merit, Fairness, and Equality, which is probably more consistent with classical liberal principles of being egalitarian.
00:42:27.040I stand for merit, fairness, and equality.
00:42:29.360I do not stand for equity, diversity, and inclusion.
00:42:32.200Not only do I not stand for equity, diversity, and inclusion, I make a moral case that equity, diversity, and inclusion could be actually synonymous with ignorance, bigotry, and hate.
00:42:45.000Who's going to say I stand for ignorance, bigotry, and hate?
00:42:48.840But if I say to you, there's basically an indistinguishable characteristic between EDI and ignorance, bigotry, and hate, then you're going to say, uh-oh, let me start questioning myself.
00:43:08.320I'm for the principles of American and French democracy, not for this communistic EDI.
00:43:13.680Because, Professor, when you said the phrase jerk, that actually really stuck out to me.
00:43:18.420Because I would never think to tell someone who I've never really spoken to, I don't really know them, you're going to have to sit in this session that gets to your implicit biases and talks about how you're actually a racist, or sexist,
00:43:30.180or homophobic, or what have you, such that it's even going to get in the way of you doing your science.
00:43:33.800I mean, I would just never think of saying, you know, we've got to get that guy in this session here.
00:44:37.000Dr. Patanjali Kambambadi, you're a professor in the chemistry department at Montreal's McGill University.
00:44:41.720You have a lot of really fascinating things to say about this great research you're doing into laser science.
00:44:47.960And I wish people could hear more from you about the great breakthroughs that you're doing.
00:44:51.680Unfortunately, or fortunately, you're now having to come and tell this story because of these policies that are blocking you from being able to be as productive in this great research that you could be.
00:45:03.020I thank you so much for joining us today.
00:45:11.160This episode was produced by Andre Pru with theme music by Bryce Hall.
00:45:15.140Kevin Libin is the executive producer.
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00:45:25.460Full Comment is taking a short break for the holidays, but we'll be back at the beginning of January with some must-listen conversations with fascinating guests.
00:45:32.760It's been a great year, and we thank you for listening and wish you Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.