IN THE LAIR OF THE WOKE BEAST.

The College Fix list of contributors includes Daniel Nuccio, who is working on a doctorate in biological sciences at Northern Illinois University.  His latest column calls attention to wokism crowding out intellectual substance in technical disciplines.

Although academic departments related to science, technology, engineering, and math, collectively known as STEM, once operated largely unadulterated by the social and political ideologies that plague much of academia, many professors and students in those departments now find that espousing the proper views on a plethora of topics related to race, sex, and the broader Diversity, Equity and Inclusion philosophy has become prerequisite for a meaningful career.

Patanjali Kambhampati, a chemistry professor at McGill University, recalled when he was a student in the late 1980s and 1990s.

“Some of my friends and professors in science were saying, ‘Oh the people in sociology are trying to study us and judge us and tell us how to do better and be better people,’ and we were laughing at that seeing how silly that was because we’re the rational ones,” he said in a phone interview with The College Fix.

Now, Kambhampati said, it’s no longer a laughing matter.

You'd think there would still be some institutional memory of the damage "Marxist genetics" did to Soviet agriculture, or "Aryan physics" to German nuclear energy.

But when a Stalinist terror begins, nobody, not even the most loyal of loyalists, is safe.

For example, in the summer of 2020, the chair of Northern Illinois University’s Department of Biological Sciences at the time sent out an unnecessary but seemingly heartfelt email condemning Floyd’s death.

Ironically, this also got him publicly scolded via mass email by a graduate student because he failed to use this opportunity to call for more race-based hiring and mandatory in-person anti-racism training within NIU’s biology department.

And don't dare to be the first person to stop clapping.  "Many Americans working in academic STEM, however, have come to understand what they are expected to say, and, whether sincere or not, make a grand display of saying it as loudly as they can."  And, apparently, couch their grant applications in the proper way.  What have I been telling you about public funding of research being censorship per se?