Canada and the U.S. are both diverting significant sums away from scientific research to support “social justice” instead

Lawrence Krauss, National Post, August 6, 2024

Lawrence M. Krauss, a theoretical physicist, has led research programs at major universities in the U.S. and elsewhere, and is currently the President of the Origins Project Foundation and is also a senior fellow of the Aristotle Foundation. His most recent book is The Edge of Knowledge.

For countries to compete economically in the 21st century, support for fundamental research in science and engineering needs to be an integral part of policymaking. China, India, Singapore, Korea and numerous other countries are devoting billions to building up their research enterprises, and in numerous cases are beginning to outstrip the West. One of the problems in North America is that major science funding agencies have become fixated on devoting resources to addressing perceived social justice issues, drawing key funding away from the science enterprise itself.

I have already written in these pages about the ridiculous quotas being imposed on the prestigious Canada Research Chairs Program, the appointments of which are now dominated by demographic and identity considerations and not merit. But such affirmative action policies are merely one side of the coin; an even more insidious effort is underway to steer science funding toward social engineering.

Other Canadian examples from recent years include the federal New Frontiers in Research Fund, which in 2018 sponsored an academic initiative entitled “Decolonizing Light” to study “the reproduction of colonialism in and through physics” and “how colonial scientific knowledge authority was and is still reproduced in the context of light.” As muddled as this is, the program’s research summary makes it clear that physics is fundamentally bad: “Physics is considered as ‘hard,’ objective and socially independent. This narrative both constitutes and reproduces inequality such as the underrepresentation of women, (people of colour) and Indigenous peoples in contemporary physics.”

To read the full column, click on the National Post website here.