Hillsdale should be more careful about Science Initiatives. Courtesy | rawpixel
When a science professor leaned out of a photograph to avoid being seen at the Academy for Science and Technology event on April 11, I knew the evening was off to a rough start.
The Academy for Science and Freedom hosted the Broken Science Initiative at a dinner packed with guests, faculty, and students. The speeches described the faults of “postmodern,” “university,” and ultimately “broken” science. A lot of it made sense, such as questioning researchers who confuse causation and correlation, and critiquing the Likert scale, a scaling method used in survey research.
Yet other aspects were less convincing. CrossFit founder Greg Glassman assured listeners that he wasn’t there to be overtly anti-science, but just to highlight the issues he coined as “broken science.” But that sentiment didn’t match the tone of his speech as a whole. Glassman even made a joke that he began much of his research on Wikipedia, despite “hating it more than anyone.”
Glassman spent a portion of his speech redefining well-supported definitions of scientific terms like hypothesis and law — walking the audience through how science “should work.” Glassman married the terms “measurements” and “facts” while also incorrectly defining a hypothesis as “a model that based on all of the data in a specified domain, contains no counterexamples, incorporating a prediction of an unrealized fact.”
His collaborator in the Broken Science Initiative William M. Briggs had a laundry list of qualifications in comparison: he was a former professor at Cornell Medical School, a statistician at the internet advertising company DoubleClick, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service, and an electronic cryptologist with the U.S. Air Force. Immediately, I was more inclined to take his ideas seriously.
That is until he referred to science as being “easy” and that we’ve “done too much of it.” Briggs even quoted German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer in his critique of how many scientists interpret p-values, calling it “a ritual,” as opposed to scientific thinking.
We must remember that science is a continuous process. Even when scientists seek to prove or support ideas, there are always models to adjust, more qualifications to make, and more replication needed.
We still need science. We still need research. It is justifiable and necessary to call attention to the pitfalls of contemporary science, but the college should consider how its public messaging regarding science affects students who are working toward careers in STEM.
It was difficult to find students or faculty who thought any part of the talk was convincing, effective, or helpful. Many students and faculty members who were in attendance said they found the whole evening to be gimmicky, going so far as to express worry about how it will affect perceptions of natural science degrees from Hillsdale.
Several students expressed worry about how Hillsdale’s reputation may affect their futures. If a graduate program is choosing between two students, one from a standard state school and one from Hillsdale, there is a chance that the sentiments of Hillsdale being “anti-science” may affect that student’s admission.
Hillsdale College should host speakers with a wide range of views. This is not a debate about free speech. Yet the college should be careful not to let its critics label it “anti-science,” as if we’re a bunch of flat-earthers. The Academy for Science and Freedom is a separate entity from the natural sciences faculty and students. To an outsider, however, the line between those things may not be so clear.
