Full Comment - The professor fighting to stop woke warriors from destroying science

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00:01:12.740 Hello, I'm Anthony Fury.

00:01:17.460 Thank you for joining us for the latest episode of Full Comment.

00:01:20.480 Scientific research that can make our lives better, and in some cases even save our lives,

00:01:25.480 is being hampered by political correctness that is enforced by government rules and institutions.

00:01:31.940 And it's only getting worse.

00:01:34.640 That's not my opinion, though.

00:01:36.080 It's what an increasing number of scientists are stepping forward to say,

00:01:39.740 including our next guest, who has a story that you've got to hear.

00:01:43.880 Dr. Patanjali Kampampati, a professor in the chemistry department at Montreal's McGill University,

00:01:49.380 joins us now.

00:01:50.420 Hello, professor.

00:01:51.080 Welcome to the program.

00:01:52.440 Hello, Anthony.

00:01:53.160 Thank you for having me.

00:01:54.060 Yeah, thanks for joining us.

00:01:55.080 How are you doing?

00:01:56.760 I'm doing well, thank you.

00:01:58.000 It's been an interesting couple of weeks, or an interesting week or two, but it's a pleasure

00:02:02.060 to chat with you.

00:02:03.120 Yeah, no kidding.

00:02:03.980 And I really want to talk to you about those couple weeks.

00:02:07.100 Well, I want to talk to you about what happened before, leading up to all of this, but you

00:02:11.920 have had a scenario where you have twice now been rejected by grants.

00:02:16.640 The first time it happened, you didn't want to speak out about it.

00:02:19.560 Now it's happened a second time.

00:02:20.820 You've decided you needed to go public.

00:02:24.060 Tell us about these grants that you've been applying for.

00:02:27.200 Let's see.

00:02:27.720 About a year ago, I applied for a federal grant called the National Frontiers Research Fund,

00:02:34.980 and that was a new grant application.

00:02:36.820 And what they had done as a new grant application is make equity, diversity, and inclusion,

00:02:43.780 EDI, their primary mission statement, and science, a secondary mission statement, so

00:02:50.760 that if you did not fulfill their EDI mission statement requirements, they would not send

00:02:56.140 your proposal to scientific review.

00:02:57.860 So that's what happened to me about a year ago, and that was the first time that ever

00:03:02.400 happened to me in my life.

00:03:03.680 That was the first time I've ever had a proposal vetted based upon EDI as opposed to science.

00:03:09.600 So the primary prism, you're saying, this was basically the driving thing.

00:03:16.020 You're saying this comes before whatever it is the actual research project is?

00:03:20.520 Precisely.

00:03:21.240 So in a proposal, you might write 5, 10, 15, 50 pages on the science, and there's an ancillary

00:03:27.720 amount that you might write about all the benefits of society and industry.

00:03:30.760 That might be a page, but more recently, they've added, you might add a paragraph or a page

00:03:35.760 or however long you want to describe how you're going to make the world a more equitable,

00:03:40.220 inclusive, and diverse a place in science.

00:03:42.400 And if you don't do that, we won't even look at your science.

00:03:45.720 So that happened a year ago, and it happened a month ago in a second proposal that was sent

00:03:50.180 to NSERC, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

00:03:55.080 So that proposal was also rejected on EDI grounds.

00:03:59.660 Apparently, I can reapply if I rewrite my EDI section, but the key point is I was judged

00:04:06.060 and vetted only on EDI and not based upon science.

00:04:10.300 That had never happened to me in 15 years of my being a professional scientist in Canada.

00:04:15.200 And to the best of my knowledge, it has never happened in the Western Anglophone Society in

00:04:20.400 100 years of public funding of science.

00:04:23.980 So referring to these 10, 15 years you've been doing this work, I assume that you have been

00:04:27.460 applying for grants over the past 10 years, and you have successfully gotten them for

00:04:31.060 similar projects.

00:04:32.280 Precisely.

00:04:32.880 So I've been here since 2003, so a little over 15 years.

00:04:36.580 I have raised about $7 million in that time period.

00:04:40.340 Some proposals are funded, some proposals are not funded, but you keep on writing away.

00:04:44.840 And I've been quite successful.

00:04:46.440 I've been successful most recently with an internationally competitive corporate proposal.

00:04:51.040 And in that one, the corporate proposal, there was no asking for EDI.

00:04:57.220 They simply wanted to know what your science was and how your science would offer a value

00:05:02.080 proposition to the company that was funding us.

00:05:04.360 I was funded.

00:05:05.280 I'm the only person at McGill, the third person in Canada that was funded by this program by

00:05:10.720 Sony Corporation of Japan.

00:05:12.060 And that's very nice because they only asked for scientific and technical merits.

00:05:18.160 But in the Canadian funding agencies in the last one year, they have begun asking for EDI.

00:05:25.080 American agencies, too.

00:05:26.720 I don't know if they're as far ahead as we are in Canada, but right now we're quite far ahead

00:05:30.620 in Canada in requiring EDI.

00:05:33.500 And that's only increasing.

00:05:35.920 So two different grants a year apart.

00:05:37.420 The second one was NSERC.

00:05:39.020 The previous one was a different category.

00:05:41.180 Is it by chance that these two grants have the same EDI lens to them?

00:05:46.140 Or there is a governing body that oversees the instructions for both of these grants?

00:05:50.500 And then like a rule would have come down to include this.

00:05:53.020 Where did this come from?

00:05:54.740 Well, I am not sure the specific details of which organizations are coupled.

00:06:01.680 But I would suggest that probably there's science bureaucrats that are coupled with the government. 1.00

00:06:08.080 And they're deciding how we're going to distribute science funds.

00:06:12.460 The science funds have historically been distributed because we want to beat the Russians in Sputnik. 1.00

00:06:17.320 We want to cure cancer.

00:06:18.740 We want to build an Internet.

00:06:20.000 We want to make the economy a better place.

00:06:22.160 We want to educate people to be scientifically literate.

00:06:26.040 Those are the things that the scientific organizations would sell to the government and the taxpayers.

00:06:31.840 And then the scientific organizations would distribute money to scientists based upon science.

00:06:36.940 Only right now have they begun to do it in the last one year, maybe two years, where they ask for EDI.

00:06:43.460 And that's a highly new thing.

00:06:45.640 It's highly irregular.

00:06:47.120 It's highly anomalous.

00:06:49.180 Beating the Soviets, curing cancer, pretty cool things, pretty cutting-edge things.

00:06:53.140 I understand that your recent grant applications have been about some cutting-edge things as well to do with laser science.

00:06:58.640 In layman's terms, can you explain what the cool thing is you're working on right now?

00:07:02.400 I would be happy to.

00:07:04.700 This is, in fact, my great love is my ability to do science.

00:07:08.360 It's a great pleasure.

00:07:09.340 It's a privilege in the true sense of the word that we get to discover things.

00:07:13.400 So in my field, what I do is to do the equivalent of building a better microscope or telescope.

00:07:19.480 But 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.

00:07:30.620 So, for example, if you wanted to watch a bullet burst through an apple, you'd have a very fast camera.

00:07:36.820 What we do is use very fast, even faster cameras like laser pulses to measure the motion of electrons.

00:07:43.260 We're interested in the motion of electrons because they're moving around in photovoltaic.

00:07:49.040 They're moving around in displays and transistors.

00:07:52.100 And those electrons are moving around at the speed of a trillionth of a second or a quadrillionth of a second.

00:07:58.520 And so you have to have a very fast camera.

00:08:00.780 So our objective is to create lasers, laser based clocks that can measure motions down to quadrillionths of a second.

00:08:08.280 And in the aspect of doing so, we hope to understand the physics and chemistry of how to make materials for our energy future.

00:08:15.800 Wow. 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.

00:08:28.720 The practical applications span from renewable energy to flat panel displays, to white lighting, to medical imaging, to telecommunications.

00:08:44.960 There's many, many, many applications for the work that we do.

00:08:49.220 And that's why we have been funded at a very nice level by the Canadian government.

00:08:54.780 So the Canadian government has been very generous to us for 15 years, and I'm very grateful for their financial support.

00:09:00.860 What 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.

00:09:10.160 And I don't take kindly to that.

00:09:12.360 Is 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?

00:09:24.900 It 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.

00:09:42.880 So these non-scientists who are social justice warriors are now tasking we scientists to be social justice warriors when we're not.

00:09:52.280 That's literally the opposite of what we are. We're mostly driven by fairness, equality, classical liberal principles of treating people as individuals.

00:10:00.340 And 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.

00:10:08.480 We can't do that anymore because now we're spending our time learning how to write EDI proposals.

00:10:14.260 I myself am wasting my time learning how to write EDI proposals.

00:10:17.960 So some bureaucrat will say, now you can be judged for scientific merit.

00:10:22.760 Dr. 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?

00:10:29.060 Did you just leave them blank?

00:10:31.080 Did you write them to the best of your ability and it just wasn't deemed sufficient?

00:10:34.920 How did it work?

00:10:35.940 That's a great question.

00:10:37.180 And I've seen on Reddit, for example, especially university students will say, I must have tried to sabotage my own proposal.

00:10:43.660 Or maybe a colleague would say, maybe I didn't even write anything at all.

00:10:47.780 And 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.

00:10:58.100 I 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.

00:11:05.000 Why would I sabotage myself?

00:11:07.040 That would be absurd.

00:11:08.080 I tried to write the best EDI section I could that was ethically consistent with my values.

00:11:14.520 And my values are treating people as equals and basically distilling what Martin Luther King taught us in the 60s.

00:11:21.500 But apparently that wasn't good enough.

00:11:24.260 So I literally tried to say I was going to help anyone and everyone.

00:11:28.840 I've actually done so in the past.

00:11:31.160 I have a long history in my group of helping people and mentoring people of all walks of life.

00:11:36.140 And I will continue to do the same.

00:11:38.180 The only thing you have to do is have interest in the work that we do and want to work hard.

00:11:42.820 But apparently that was the kiss of death because I said I'm interested in people based upon their mutual interest and ability.

00:11:50.120 And if all you have is interest and ability, I will take you in.

00:11:54.240 But the key point is I'm not supposed to be interested in interest and ability.

00:11:58.140 I'm supposed to teach people who don't want to be scientists to be scientists.

00:12:05.560 Do you think they don't do that?

00:12:07.460 If 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.

00:12:15.640 Were they looking for qualitative statements about how you're going to push, I don't know, you know, anti-colonialist sentiment in it?

00:12:23.060 Were they looking for quantitative statements about quotas for research assistance?

00:12:27.060 What do you think?

00:12:27.840 What would give you a perfect grade?

00:12:29.680 And 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.

00:12:41.900 My own group is highly diverse, but that doesn't matter.

00:12:45.220 Apparently, what you have to do is pledge allegiance to the instructions given to you of how you're supposed to enforce EDI.

00:12:52.040 It 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.

00:13:02.980 How has this arisen?

00:13:04.280 Because you seem to be a little bit, you know, surprised and kind of flummoxed about where it even came from.

00:13:09.440 I 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?

00:13:15.560 What are the actual parameters?

00:13:16.920 What do they really want me to say?

00:13:18.160 I mean, it seems like it's this it's this very odd kind of amorphous thing that's going on right now.

00:13:24.280 Well, I would say I'm not surprised.

00:13:26.440 And in fact, I have been monitoring these sort of tendencies since I was a freshman in college in the USA in 1988.

00:13:34.120 In 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.

00:13:46.340 And now those people, 30 years later, are tenured professors and bureaucrats and writers for magazines.

00:13:53.220 So 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.

00:14:01.300 And they don't know how to think.

00:14:02.780 They 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.

00:14:16.660 That's the worst case scenario.

00:14:18.040 The best case scenario is we're just bigots who've kept other people away from science.

00:14:22.200 When, in fact, science is an open club, if you can join in, you can join in, just like chess, just like violin.

00:14:29.120 It'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.

00:14:35.660 I also get the impression that the sciences don't particularly suffer from an equity, diversity, and inclusion deficit.

00:14:43.880 Like, it seems like, is this a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist?

00:14:48.620 I 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.

00:15:00.020 I 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,

00:15:12.380 it 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.

00:15:22.000 I 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.

00:15:33.880 For whatever reason, I'm not even going to go and address that problem, because that's too much of a touchy subject,

00:15:40.340 but the simple fact of the matter is, people have different interests.

00:15:43.920 At the very least, and certainly maybe different abilities, we should be able to let people do what they want to do.

00:15:49.620 As a case in point, I'm an Indian immigrant, and my father, I was born in India, but my father immigrated us,

00:15:57.620 and most Indian immigrants go into electrical engineering, because that's a great way to immigrate to the first world.

00:16:03.220 Chinese might go into physics, other people might go into medicine.

00:16:06.620 If you're an African-American, maybe you'll go into business, but people, if you're poor, if you want to lift yourself up,

00:16:13.580 you'll find a logical and reasonable way to do it within your skill set.

00:16:17.120 No one needs to be helped by some social justice warriors with good intentions that are trying to take away human liberty, agency, and accountability.

00:16:25.780 Now, Professor, I know you've said before in a National Post story on your situation that you're certainly not unsympathetic

00:16:32.160 to people who have concerns with racism, and you have experienced racism yourself.

00:16:37.020 Is this an issue that persists in your field right now?

00:16:40.080 Would you say that there is racism in the sciences, such that there needs to be some sort of formal intervention right now?

00:16:47.960 Absolutely not. I would say science is literally the least racist enterprise in all of human existence

00:16:54.780 for a simple, other than possibly professional sports.

00:16:58.180 And the reason is, in professional sports and science and chess, you can tell who's better and worse than the other person,

00:17:04.640 and everyone wants the best person to succeed.

00:17:06.760 And it's a highly meritocratic, individualistic culture, more so than any other culture,

00:17:13.740 like politics, like business, like medicine, like car sales, like being a nurse.

00:17:18.720 Whatever human enterprise, we scientists are the most driven by individual excellence and meritocracy.

00:17:25.820 So it seems offensive and absurd that other people are trying to judge us.

00:17:31.220 Why shouldn't we judge them?

00:17:33.460 Professor, since you started speaking out on this issue,

00:17:36.080 what has been the reception and the feedback that you have received from others in your field?

00:17:41.300 The feedback I first received was from the National Post article.

00:17:45.400 I was getting like 100 emails in my inbox a day, and they were all uniformly glowingly positive.

00:17:54.200 But the more important point is the bandwidth of people responding was astronomical. 0.97

00:18:00.880 It's not just that I was only being written to by conservative, racist, old white men who are heterosexual, patriarchal, homophobes, 0.93

00:18:11.260 or God knows what, what the social justice warriors will complain about. 0.99

00:18:14.820 I received a voicemail from a little old black lady saying that I'm a little old black lady, 0.99

00:18:19.400 and I've, you know, tried to work hard and this, that, and the other, and I support you.

00:18:22.800 I thought, I didn't know who she was.

00:18:24.120 I could tell it was a little old lady, and she specified her race after that. 0.96

00:18:27.100 I received voicemails from a lot of old people, from young people.

00:18:30.980 I received emails from professors, from graduate students, from liberals, from conservatives,

00:18:35.580 from immigrants, from Canadians, from Americans, from Russians.

00:18:38.520 I received emails from all over the world, in fact, of people saying, I agree with you.

00:18:43.660 Thank you for speaking up.

00:18:44.940 It 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.

00:18:54.380 So the responses on email have been uniformly positive.

00:18:58.860 The responses from my colleagues have been positive.

00:19:01.460 I have presented an EDI lecture at our most recent chemistry department staff meeting, faculty meeting, and that went positively last week.

00:19:11.820 And I would say the only thing is the administration has not really replied to me at all,

00:19:16.620 because the role of the university administration, like the government bureaucrats, is to maintain the status quo.

00:19:22.920 They created the status quo, and we dissident scientists are questioning the status quo.

00:19:28.340 Professor, do you have any redress to being rejected for this grant?

00:19:32.640 I appreciate you've acknowledged that you win some, you lose some.

00:19:34.860 I know you don't feel entitled to receiving these funds, but I know you're frustrated that this was the criteria for rejection.

00:19:42.100 Is 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.

00:19:47.040 Can we work something out?

00:19:48.800 Yes and no.

00:19:49.660 I am in the process of working with my university officers to help me write a better EDI section.

00:19:56.900 So my second proposal can at least make it the scientific review and hopefully get funded.

00:20:02.080 So that is the short-term goal, because I, as a scientist, need government research funds to live.

00:20:08.340 Sure, there's corporate research funds, but that's very rare.

00:20:11.900 Government research funds are the vast majority, and especially in my field.

00:20:14.920 So I need them to live and continue to work and be a scientist.

00:20:18.540 If I can continue to be a scientist, then I can also be outspoken about these issues.

00:20:22.600 So 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.

00:20:31.440 I think if they tried to punish me as a result, that would look really bad.

00:20:34.660 The optics would look really bad.

00:20:35.900 So 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.

00:20:44.400 Has there been any negative response?

00:20:46.420 Because 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.

00:20:56.340 Have you suffered anything such as that so far?

00:20:59.020 I 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.

00:21:13.560 And so I've been in contact with Professor Dorian Abbott, and I think he put me in touch with the National Post.

00:21:19.300 And Dorian Abbott is a white man, and he gets a lot of flack saying that somehow he's not an ally. 0.97

00:21:24.960 You would look silly if you did that to me.

00:21:27.820 That'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. 0.97

00:21:39.740 I have a thick skin, and I have an instant defense that others might not have, which is the reason why I'm speaking out.

00:21:47.800 But having said that, the people who are most social justice warrior-y are the students and the professors of grievance studies who educate them.

00:21:56.480 Some of the students on the McGill Reddit would say, oh, gee, why is this guy whining?

00:22:00.800 Why is he sabotaging his career?

00:22:02.740 Why doesn't he care about equity, diversity, and inclusion?

00:22:05.540 Why doesn't he care about minorities failing to recognize that I've probably lived far worse than I can imagine?

00:22:10.420 It's just I try to treat people like Mark Luther King taught me.

00:22:13.340 Professor, 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.

00:22:21.340 Do you mean in the academy, in your professional life, or in your personal life?

00:22:25.300 No, mostly as a youth.

00:22:26.480 I 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.

00:22:36.780 So 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.

00:22:47.360 Then 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.

00:22:56.120 But 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.

00:23:02.900 The vast majority of people are not racist.

00:23:04.680 They treat people as equal.

00:23:05.680 Some people do.

00:23:06.740 But I'm willing to view people as individuals.

00:23:11.420 But 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.

00:23:21.200 And 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.

00:23:30.080 Do you think those problems are getting better and worse, the things you allude to?

00:23:33.420 I 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. 0.72

00:23:42.800 Like, you mean those sorts of things?

00:23:44.260 And are they still sort of the same?

00:23:46.080 I think they're getting a lot better, and I think anyone who doesn't think they're getting a lot better is absurd.

00:23:50.060 I was a kid in the 1970s, and I saw stuff as a kid.

00:23:53.660 I experienced stuff as a kid.

00:23:54.800 My dad and mom experienced racism in the 1970s.

00:23:57.280 It is nothing like in the 1970s in the year 2020.

00:24:00.480 I have multiracial kids.

00:24:02.020 My 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.

00:24:23.360 Having said that, there do happen on occasion.

00:24:26.040 We know the case, for example, the extreme cases of, say, George Floyd and those things, other things happen.

00:24:30.460 I've experienced things myself, but those are highly statistically unlikely.

00:24:35.120 We'll be back in just a moment after this message with more full comment.

00:24:38.380 Do you think that this EDI push is something that is just here for a little blip in time?

00:24:49.460 It's a year or two or three, and they've acknowledged, oh, okay, people like Dr. Kamampati, they have a point.

00:24:55.160 Maybe we should roll this back.

00:24:56.980 Or do you think this is something that if people don't oppose it, it'll be caked into the system and problematic for many years to come?

00:25:03.440 I think we are dealing with the rise of a cultural revolution that is equivalent to Marxism and communism.

00:25:09.700 I think it's that dangerous.

00:25:11.240 If you listen to the writings and the speakings of Jordan Peterson and Gad Saad, they will tell you the same story in great detail.

00:25:17.620 And I very much endorse them.

00:25:19.640 I agree with them.

00:25:20.500 I correspond with them.

00:25:21.520 And I think we're on the same page.

00:25:22.820 I think that what has happened is somewhere since 1990, the academics went loony with their grievance studies.

00:25:31.020 And since 1990, they have been indoctrinated a small subset of students and children to become woke social justice warriors.

00:25:39.980 Those are the millennials, the Gen Zs that we see at the university today that are causing cancel culture. 0.99

00:25:45.960 I think this is a very big affair.

00:25:48.500 I 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.

00:26:04.320 All of these cultural forces have been influenced by the grievance studies people of academia between 1990 and 2020.

00:26:14.040 So this was 30 years in the making.

00:26:16.000 This is not an accident.

00:26:17.520 And if you think that this EDI stuff or this woke stuff is just an accident that will come and go, no, no, no.

00:26:23.840 It's been building for 30 years.

00:26:25.720 And now these people have a lot of power and they're not going to want to get rid of it.

00:26:29.680 And they are not fair people.

00:26:31.400 They're not logical people.

00:26:32.580 They do not think ethically.

00:26:34.500 So we are in a cultural war.

00:26:38.320 What then should people do or say?

00:26:41.400 What 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.

00:26:49.920 Kambadi's research that are holding us back from having this great laser science that can positively benefit society.

00:26:56.100 Should they write letters?

00:26:58.160 Should they talk about it to their politicians?

00:26:59.620 I 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?

00:27:09.860 I think those are excellent ideas.

00:27:12.740 Because 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.

00:27:20.600 And or if they're a university, they'll write to the heads of their university.

00:27:23.500 I think the idea is we should be unafraid.

00:27:26.680 We should not be cowards.

00:27:28.260 We should stand up to these people and say, if you want to call me out, I will call you out.

00:27:32.920 It's a two way street.

00:27:34.040 I will not be judged by you.

00:27:35.800 That will not happen.

00:27:37.060 This is not judgment day.

00:27:38.400 And if it goes, it goes both ways.

00:27:40.360 So what I'm going to do as a civilian, as a taxpayer, is to write my congressman.

00:27:47.260 I'm going to write my MP.

00:27:48.460 I'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.

00:27:56.480 There was no debate.

00:27:57.460 No one actually discussed, do we want EDI in STEM?

00:28:00.640 No one actually just we were discussing affirmative action in the 1970s when I was a kid.

00:28:04.960 And now all of a sudden we have quotas.

00:28:06.700 We have outright quotas.

00:28:08.220 And 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.

00:28:19.800 You cannot apply.

00:28:21.280 And how do I know this?

00:28:22.500 One of my neighbors is a straight white man who constantly tells me this.

00:28:25.760 He says, here's another position I cannot apply for.

00:28:28.340 So people tell me these things.

00:28:29.640 I have a lot of colleagues showing me how insane things are, and it is out of apartheid.

00:28:34.960 Here's another example I'd like to get your thoughts on.

00:28:37.720 From the Journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry, I guess an international journal, probably one of the top, it sounds like, in its field.

00:28:46.180 A Brock University professor put forward one paper in that, which caused a bit of a turmoil.

00:28:51.740 And then it led to the Royal Society of Chemistry journal revising its rules.

00:28:55.580 They 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.

00:29:18.700 And I got this from a guest op-ed at National Post by scientist Lawrence Krauss.

00:29:23.160 He's talking about this story here.

00:29:24.820 He goes on to say, you look at that description.

00:29:27.820 I mean, that pretty much means you can't really talk about anything.

00:29:31.200 And 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.

00:29:41.280 That's exactly a case in point.

00:29:43.060 And I think you're referring to Professor Thomas Hudlicky at Brock, who was canceled by a bunch of social justice warriors.

00:29:51.440 And I've written in support of Thomas Hudlicky.

00:29:53.060 I think he was treated very, very barbarically in a vulgar and barbaric way.

00:29:58.260 I support Thomas Hudlicky as well and Lawrence Krauss's writings as well.

00:30:02.980 So that's an example of the cancellation.

00:30:05.260 I 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.

00:30:17.000 That's a lie.

00:30:18.100 You can be offensive to men and white people and heterosexuals.

00:30:21.000 You cannot be offensive to women.

00:30:22.400 You cannot be offensive to certain minorities.

00:30:24.520 You can be offensive to Jews and Asians, but you cannot.

00:30:27.260 So it's highly selective.

00:30:29.200 When they say you cannot be offensive, you must monitor your feelings and the offenses registered based upon the offended party, not you. 0.72

00:30:36.520 It's highly, highly, highly hypocritical and asymmetric. 0.93

00:30:40.220 If you are a straight white man, you do not count. 0.98

00:30:42.800 I'm not a straight white man, so I can tell you that.

00:30:46.500 Professor, when you said that the responses you got were largely positive, you cited a number of older individuals.

00:30:51.580 I 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?

00:31:05.600 And it seemed like they were undergrads.

00:31:07.740 And when you reference cultural revolution, the big thing around that decades ago in communist China was the young turning on the older.

00:31:14.740 What's going on with undergrads right now?

00:31:18.440 We 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.

00:31:34.600 What do you see and what do you hear perhaps from other colleagues about the undergrad experience?

00:31:40.640 I think that's a hundred percent true.

00:31:43.920 I think the undergraduates started going crazy around 2010 with the social justice, politically correct movement.

00:31:50.480 Like I said, it started in 1990 when I was an undergrad.

00:31:54.180 Fast forward 30 years.

00:31:55.560 It's people like my peers, children, my peers, students.

00:31:59.800 Those are the ones who started going really woke in the year 2010.

00:32:03.400 And the phrase I heard from students was this phrase, check your privilege.

00:32:08.680 Now, that's a common phrase and privilege is a common phrase.

00:32:12.040 But 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.

00:32:21.100 I'm a middle-aged man with a nice career.

00:32:22.800 I believe I've earned privileges.

00:32:24.280 That's what I think of as a privilege.

00:32:26.460 I think going to the first class lounge is a privilege.

00:32:28.860 That's a privilege.

00:32:29.500 Privilege is not being born white or male or not handicapped. 0.55

00:32:33.400 That's just being born human.

00:32:35.240 So 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.

00:32:44.880 Like the Marxists were doing this to the wealthy farmers in the Soviet Union 100 years ago.

00:32:49.680 So 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.

00:33:01.500 But 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.

00:33:12.580 But by 2021, I think students are now hungry for reality again and sanity again and rigor and scholarship again and not having safe spaces.

00:33:22.320 So I think what's actually happening is that I think the young people are finally having enough of this.

00:33:28.040 And I think that there might be a swing away from this woke, politically correct culture that has been taking place for 30 years.

00:33:36.160 I see it in my own kids who are teenage boys and they are anti-woke.

00:33:41.740 Their friends are anti-woke.

00:33:43.600 So to me, most teenage boys are anti-woke nowadays.

00:33:47.600 Have adults failed the young?

00:33:49.580 Because 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.

00:34:01.040 I think, well, you know, this is awful.

00:34:02.620 These kids are doing this.

00:34:03.520 Where are their parents?

00:34:04.740 Why do they think they can get away with this? 0.62

00:34:06.400 But 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.

00:34:21.460 I 100% agree with you.

00:34:24.100 And I wasn't alive in the 60s when apparently the campus radicals took over.

00:34:28.720 But now I hear about it.

00:34:30.440 And 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.

00:34:38.520 And so professors and administrators.

00:34:41.520 So there's a lot of those people in academia, the leftover campus radicals and the former Marxists and the people like that.

00:34:49.780 And 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.

00:34:58.360 So real scientists like me don't want to be part of administration because we'd rather be doing science and teaching.

00:35:04.360 And that's the end of it.

00:35:05.240 So 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.

00:35:12.900 I'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.

00:35:22.780 And you go, what on earth are they doing?

00:35:24.520 There just seems to be a lot of busybody shenanigans going on.

00:35:28.520 And maybe this is just an extension of it.

00:35:30.760 It is very much an extension of it.

00:35:32.360 But it's far worse than the United States where you have private universities.

00:35:35.860 And so there, for example, the number of professors used to be some fraction of the staff.

00:35:42.500 And now that fraction has dropped off precipitously because they have many more EDI staff.

00:35:47.360 And those EDI staff often make, you know, have offices that cost tens of millions of dollars a year.

00:35:51.900 And 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.

00:36:02.140 And they are now running the universities because it's a bit like an HR organization running a startup company.

00:36:10.180 The startup company should run the HR organization, not the other way around.

00:36:13.760 Well, right now, the human resource organization and the and those and equivalents at the university are saying, here's how the university should run.

00:36:21.120 It should be a safe space, not for all people, but only for some people.

00:36:24.700 Do 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?

00:36:31.440 I 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.

00:36:41.000 And 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.

00:36:47.060 You 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.

00:36:54.080 Once people come from here, they come from there. 0.99

00:36:55.500 It's all good.

00:36:56.080 We're all people.

00:36:57.020 Let's all get along.

00:36:57.820 OK, agreed.

00:36:58.460 Agreed.

00:36:58.780 All right.

00:36:59.000 Let's roll.

00:36:59.600 This 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.

00:37:07.540 And you go, what are you talking about?

00:37:08.340 I mean, the anti-bias training, it's very different than I think a lot of people believe it to be.

00:37:13.860 Very much so.

00:37:14.480 I was given an anti-bias training by our diversity dean and it was happening at a faculty meeting for hiring.

00:37:20.260 And 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,

00:37:31.940 but 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.

00:37:41.460 Instead of judging human nature, it was very selective.

00:37:44.800 And 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.

00:37:51.260 And then we're all laughing.

00:37:52.860 Look how our implicit bias is.

00:37:54.640 That's that and the other.

00:37:55.520 I 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.

00:38:04.200 And we know in Nazi Germany, people were forced to raise their hand and I'm going to make over there and make that analogy.

00:38:09.580 And 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.

00:38:20.300 I will not raise my hand.

00:38:22.540 And I did that.

00:38:23.440 And I was the only one who sat there.

00:38:25.620 But 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.

00:38:36.200 So where does it end?

00:38:37.580 You'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.

00:38:44.600 There are some that are going along to get along, but there are some who are saying this isn't working for us anymore.

00:38:50.620 And they're saying no to all of this.

00:38:52.280 So perhaps we're coming to a head?

00:38:55.000 I hope we're coming to a head.

00:38:57.140 And 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.

00:39:06.380 They're hunting us down.

00:39:07.980 They'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. 0.94

00:39:17.840 The social justice warriors are hunting us down in science because of jealousy and collectivism and victimology, which are the worst of human tendencies.

00:39:27.160 But having said that, I think now we scientists know they're coming for us.

00:39:31.280 And so we'll stand up and say, hey, look, we're the guys who make your lasers.

00:39:35.300 We're the guy who make your telecom.

00:39:36.840 We're the guy who make your or the woman who makes your cure for cancer. 0.81

00:39:39.760 We're the people who make your rockets.

00:39:42.100 And we can't do that anymore.

00:39:43.660 Do you want us to continue doing that?

00:39:45.180 Because we're our arms are tied behind our back and they're coming for us and they're coming for you soon.

00:39:50.940 They're coming for you in your employment places.

00:39:52.660 So the H.R. organizations will be giving you your implicit bias tests.

00:39:56.640 I've heard my colleagues who work for financial companies, my colleagues who are civilians, already getting sensitivity training, racial bias in this training.

00:40:07.400 That book by Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility, they're having Robin DiAngelo come in and give lectures at various finance companies in Montreal. 0.79

00:40:15.160 I mean, this is ridiculous. 0.92

00:40:16.340 It's offensive. 0.80

00:40:17.520 Professor 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.

00:40:25.400 Maybe Mr. DiAngelo's book overstates a few sentences here and there.

00:40:28.340 But, you know, come on.

00:40:29.180 What's the big deal?

00:40:30.120 Why can't we have a few of these sessions once a year in a corporation?

00:40:33.400 How would you respond to that?

00:40:34.280 I 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.

00:40:47.420 And where you should have learned that is from your parents, your church, or from your own self, or from your literature.

00:40:53.600 You should have learned how to be a decent human being.

00:40:56.080 But if I go work for Intel, Intel is not there to tell me how to be a decent human being. 1.00

00:41:01.100 Intel is there to tell me, make sure to do your job and don't be a jerk. 1.00

00:41:04.820 If you're a jerk, sure, we're going to call you out. 1.00

00:41:06.740 Don't harass other people. 1.00

00:41:07.840 But that's about it.

00:41:08.820 Intel is not there or CNN or whoever I work for is not there to tell me how to live my life and what my values should be.

00:41:15.880 So is there an opportunity to flip this back on these individuals then?

00:41:20.380 Because the problem with something called EDI, equity, diversity, inclusion, if you say, oh, I'm not so sure about this.

00:41:27.060 I don't know if this provision should be in here.

00:41:28.340 You're against diversity and inclusion.

00:41:30.800 I can't believe you said that. 1.00

00:41:32.300 You've outed yourself as the scum of the earth. 0.99

00:41:34.880 And then people go, okay, well, I better not talk up about it, even though that's not my intention. 0.99

00:41:39.580 What 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.

00:41:50.260 It sounds good to be for equity, diversity, and inclusion.

00:41:53.100 I didn't want to overtake the conversation, but I can answer that question now.

00:41:57.740 EDI was invented a few years ago.

00:41:59.940 It's an invention.

00:42:00.820 It did not happen in classical liberalism.

00:42:02.720 It did not happen in the Enlightenment.

00:42:04.800 It did not happen when the American democracy was created.

00:42:07.620 It's a very recent phenomenon.

00:42:09.140 It was made up, and you can question it.

00:42:11.180 My 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.

00:42:27.040 I stand for merit, fairness, and equality.

00:42:29.360 I do not stand for equity, diversity, and inclusion.

00:42:32.200 Not 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.

00:42:45.000 Who's going to say I stand for ignorance, bigotry, and hate?

00:42:47.740 No one's going to say that.

00:42:48.840 But 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.

00:42:57.900 So the key point is don't defend.

00:42:59.660 Attack back.

00:43:00.300 If someone says, how are you not for EDI, then you say, you know what I'm for?

00:43:04.320 I'm for democracy.

00:43:06.020 I'm for freedom.

00:43:07.120 I'm for human liberties.

00:43:08.320 I'm for the principles of American and French democracy, not for this communistic EDI. 0.98

00:43:13.680 Because, Professor, when you said the phrase jerk, that actually really stuck out to me. 0.98

00:43:18.420 Because 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, 0.98

00:43:30.180 or homophobic, or what have you, such that it's even going to get in the way of you doing your science.

00:43:33.800 I mean, I would just never think of saying, you know, we've got to get that guy in this session here.

00:43:37.660 We've got to sit him down. 0.99

00:43:38.780 Because that's kind of a jerk thing to do. 1.00

00:43:42.960 Bingo. 1.00

00:43:43.880 Bingo.

00:43:44.780 It is restraining human freedom, restraining human liberty, moralizing to other people.

00:43:51.580 And I get back to ancient things that you might have learned from the Ten Commandments.

00:43:56.400 I'm not even Christian, but I understand religions.

00:43:58.820 And one of these things is, let, you know, let he who was without sin throw the first stone.

00:44:04.320 Another one is, he and glass houses should not throw stones, both involving throwing stones.

00:44:09.440 And they both are the sort of things that we should remember now.

00:44:13.240 These EDI people, the woke people, are behaving like the religious moral majority did 100 years ago, trying to shame people into behavior.

00:44:23.680 And it used to happen from religion.

00:44:26.820 And in Islamic countries, it still happens from religion.

00:44:29.900 And we are having our own woke Taliban in the Anglophone West. 0.91

00:44:35.860 Wow.

00:44:37.000 Dr. Patanjali Kambambadi, you're a professor in the chemistry department at Montreal's McGill University.

00:44:41.720 You have a lot of really fascinating things to say about this great research you're doing into laser science.

00:44:47.960 And I wish people could hear more from you about the great breakthroughs that you're doing.

00:44:51.680 Unfortunately, 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.

00:45:03.020 I thank you so much for joining us today.

00:45:05.420 Thank you, Anthony.

00:45:06.200 All the best.

00:45:07.860 Full Comment is a post-media podcast.

00:45:10.040 I'm Anthony Fury.

00:45:11.160 This episode was produced by Andre Pru with theme music by Bryce Hall.

00:45:15.140 Kevin Libin is the executive producer.

00:45:16.900 You can subscribe to Full Comment on Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify, and Amazon Music.

00:45:22.660 You can listen through the app or your Alexa-enabled devices.

00:45:25.460 Full 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.

00:45:32.760 It's been a great year, and we thank you for listening and wish you Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.

00:45:37.080 We'll be right back.

Full Comment - December 20, 2021

The professor fighting to stop woke warriors from destroying science

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