My Takeaways from the "USC Censorship in the Sciences" Conference
On the weekend of January 10–12, 2025, coinciding with the Los Angeles fires, I attended a conference on Censorship in the Sciences at USC. Here, I will share my perspective.
Symptoms
At the conference, we learned about numerous harsh symptoms of censorship in the sciences. These included statistical comparisons to historical periods such as the McCarthy era. We heard from dissidents refusing the push to convert to woke ideology. They described ruthless tactics, including doxing family members. Such aggression is enabled by powerful cultural shifts, illustrating how deeply entrenched and damaging these dynamics have become.
We also saw concrete, field-specific examples. One particularly striking instance is the advancing ban on showing pictures of human bones in anthropology—tantamount to prohibiting force diagrams in physics, effectively crippling the field's ability to contribute to knowledge production.
Even more alarming was the retooling of medicine, particularly in transgender care. Unlike anthropology, medicine involves direct and consequential interactions with a trusting public. We observed violations of modern norms, such as informed consent, and foundational ethical principles like "do no harm," rooted in the Hippocratic Oath.
Three Levels of Analysis
I see three general levels of analysis for the woke phenomenon:
Individual: Wokeness can be seen as a manifestation of human weakness, with examples including succumbing to groupthink or mob mentality. Opportunists often exploit the erosion of standards caused by wokeness, leveraging weakened norms for their own unrelated interests. In doing so, they become allies of the woke, even if they do not necessarily share its underlying presuppositions..
Institutional: Wokeness as a manifestation of institutional decay. For example, if a majority of faculty members value ideological conformity over merit, they will hire new faculty members based on ideology—thus making the faculty ever more homogeneous.
Epistemological: This concerns the actual content of the so-called "woke ideology," which embodies a fundamentally distinct epistemology from scientific knowledge production.
If There is a Will, There is a Way
In an intra-epistemological debate within scientific epistemology, disagreements revolve around which theory aligns best with evidence. By contrast, an inter-epistemological conflict involves one side rejecting empirical data altogether.
This is exemplified by Henry Giroux, a Marxist who imported "critical pedagogy" from the Brazilian Marxist Paulo Freire into the U.S. and Canada. Giroux criticizes empirically based teacher training, describing it as a "dead zone of the imagination." This aligns with the Marxist definition of truth as presented in the largest Marxist archive, Marxists.org, which begins by rejecting the idea of truth as a correspondence between thought and the outside world.
For an inter-epistemological divide to be relevant, there must be mechanisms that allow it to affect the institutional level and the individual level.
We have the saying, "If there is a will, there is a way." With the Frankfurt School, there is definitely a will. These theorists openly aimed to make their ideas manifest on the institutional and individual levels.
We have the Gramscian idea coined by Rudi Dutschke of "the long march through the institutions," and Herbert Marcuse argued that man must be altered on a "biological level" to render him unable to function in the existing liberal society.
It seems that Giroux and his "critical pedagogy" were indeed successful in infiltrating the education system.
A Way
Most participants in the woke temperament and actions cannot coherently articulate the presuppositions informing their behavior; these patterns of thought and action are often adopted implicitly.
Consider how the meaning of “critical thinking” can be subtly subverted to mean “being antagonistic toward society.” This subversion can be achieved simply by exclusively presenting examples of "critical thinking" that embody an antagonistic approach to society. Similarly, morality can be redefined, shifting from an internal ethical examination to a framework focused on moral judgment of society at large.
Such shifts create an identity where individuals equate being a "critical thinker" or a "moral person" with a vague but increasingly passionate antagonism toward society at large. Rebellion becomes a self-sustaining narrative, distinct from a solution-oriented approach, careful analysis, or the consistent application of moral principles.
Once these presuppositions gain traction, they become self-reinforcing on individual and institutional levels, requiring little to no epistemological guidance. What emerges is a destructive force that may be entirely ignorant of the intellectual apparatus of thinkers such as Marx, Michel Foucault, or Judith Butler.
Overcoming the Natural Avoidance of Addressing the Inter-Epistemological Problem
Society is causally dense, presenting countless potential causal links. It’s natural to focus on patterns that are both relevant and within one’s capacity to elaborate. Grappling with alien epistemologies, by definition, is inherently incomprehensible and thus naturally avoided.
Nevertheless, if we aim to align our understanding and actions with reality, and if the epistemological divide is part of reality, we must engage with it and its significance.
This means that some of us must engage with the original works of Neo-Marxists, postmodernists, Marx, and Hegel—not because these works are necessarily coherent or true, but because they have already proven effective at bypassing cognitive safeguards, distorting liberal values into a caricature of themselves, and implanting implicit assumptions that are already having devastating effects on individuals and society.