Next book: Higher Superstition by Gross and Levitt

My next reading is Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science, a 1994 book by biologist Paul Gross and mathematician Norman Levitt.  Their book was a response to the "Science Wars" of the 80's and 90's, when the zeitgeist of certain people in humanities (and to a lesser extent social science) was "Science is just, like, a Western patriarchal heteronormative yadda yadda construct of the people at the top of the power structure."  And, to be clear, their claim wasn't merely that the culture of researchers in the natural sciences was "just, like, a Western yadda yadda construct"; that claim is not entirely wrong, though surely the many non-Westerners who contribute quitie productively to the advancement of modern science would have a thing or two to say in response, as Arun Bala noted.  Some went further and claimed that the body of scientific knowledge is somehow a subjective thing that arises more from our own cultural biases than any sort of meaningful, objective engagement with something that has a reality independent of our understanding of it.

With the benefit of 23 years of hindsight, as well as two and a half years of reading and blogging about cultural factors that affect the modern academy, this book feels like it missed the point.  As I've said before, the modern academic left mostly does not question science.  Yeah, there are a few weirdos talking about "natural" medicine, and a lot of liberal academics deny research on the predictive validity of standardized tests, but those cases are remarkable for being unusual.  Most liberals, academic or otherwise, strongly support science.  They might not understand it as well as they think they do, and it's possible that if they understood certain results better they would reject them, but the "Science March" was very much a thing of the left.  Oh, there was probably some conservative somewhere in the audience, but it was understood as being primarily about liberal stances on environmental issues, health issues, etc., as well as opposition to the superstitions of religious conservatives (who are currently rallying around a twice-divorced casino owner and confessed sexual harasser or worse...).  So, outside the academy, science is widely regarded as a thing of the left.  This is probably to our detriment (I'd rather that my professional and intellectual passion be respected across the spectrum), but it is most definitely NOT what Gross and Levitt feared might come to pass.  The "post-modernist" critics of science did NOT win over the non-academic left to their cause.

On campus, I'm sure somebody somewhere is still banging on about Newtonian mechanics being an artefact of white male culture, but hardly anyone pays attention to them.  Administrators say "STEM!  STEM!  STEM!" all day long.  There are certainly some people in the humanities and social sciences who grumble about this STEM obsession, but they are, at worst, expressing a bit of (understandable)  jealousy, and more often are engaging in sincere defenses of things that are worth preserving.  They aren't questioning our knowledge claims.

What has happened is an obsession with inclusion in STEM, because STEM is on the pedestal, and some of this comes with demands to change the culture of how STEM professionals work, but not with insistence that our knowledge is some subjective product of an arbitrary and weird culture.  Nonetheless, some of the more damaging aspects of the push to transform STEM (mainly a demand that we reject meritocratic elitism in favor of getting every available warm body into The Pipeline) share roots with the Science Warriors of the 80's and 90's.  So it is worth studying this phenomenon of the past, in part to understand those roots, and in part to understand how those predictions failed. We can learn a lot about how we got to where we are if we understand how old predictions went astray.

A final note, before we get going:  As far as I can tell from examining the first two chapters and the index, Levitt and Gross missed/ignored the more technocratic rumblings of STEM reformers in the 90's.  Sheila Tobias wasn't in the index, though she wrote They're Not Dumb, They're Different in 1990.  I looked for some prominent education researchers but did not find them in the index.  The National Science Foundation is not mentioned.  This book really does seem to be focused, which is not a bad thing (all good books have a chosen scope) but does point to how they missed what actually happened.  Ultimately, I think they spent too much time thinking that the crazier ideas espoused by humanities professors would be able to take root in the wider public, and in exactly the form in which they were originally espoused.  But ideas don't work that way.

OK, let's go.