Woke grievance is eating expert inquiry from the inside out.
The parasite leucochloridium paradoxum, shown here infecting a snail, is a flatworm that takes over the brains of gastropods and forces them into self-destructive behaviors. As this essay demonstrates, woke social teaching has been known to do the same with academic departments.
It was Franz Kafka meets Jabba the Hutt. Instead of a seraglio on Tatooine, the location was a hotel ballroom in Arlington, Virginia, at a large gathering of scientists and engineers brought together by the National Science Foundation (NSF). We were there to compete for a very large sum of money.
At stake was funding for a “research center,” something akin to national laboratories like Brookhaven Labs or Livermore Labs. Research centers are built around a strategic theme, like nuclear physics, and are intended to provide a venue for scientists nationwide to come together to explore that theme. Research centers are high-stakes competitions, involving tens of millions of dollars doled out over a term of ten years or so. The prizes are big, and the prestige immense. They are intended to go to the best of the best.
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