Many in America’s academic class betrayed the public trust during the pandemic. To sway the American people to accept lockdowns, professors with prestigious titles and affiliations denied scientific data about risks, effective mitigation and biological protection. They spouted politicized opinion as if it were objective truth and demonized views counter to their preferred narrative.
In February 2020, the Lancet published a letter from some of America’s most famous university virologists condemning as “conspiracy theories” any suggestions that Covid-19 didn’t have a natural origin. This is a question that remains unanswered today. Was there any purpose of that untruthful letter other than to intimidate the scientific debate at the pandemic’s start?
On Nov. 19, 2020, the Stanford Faculty Senate condemned my work as an adviser to President Trump, charging that I “promoted a view of COVID-19 that contradicts medical science.” Yet virtually every scientific point I made exactly matched those of
Jay Bhattacharya
and John Ioannidis, both Stanford professors of medicine, including the risk for children, spread from children, focused protection, postinfection immunity, masks, and the harm from school closures and lockdowns. The difference? I alone stood on the podium, speaking to the press and the public, serving my country next to a Republican president the Stanford faculty reviled.
Many American universities, particularly “elite” schools, now explicitly emphasize ideology even in the hard sciences. In a November report, the National Association of Scholars examined the proliferation of “diversity, equity and inclusion” language on the websites of Ivy League schools’ science, technology, engineering and mathematics departments. Stanford may now be the American university most hostile to free speech, with its recently exposed “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative”—a list of approved and disapproved words that exceeds anything anticipated by
George Orwell.
After being publicly ridiculed, the school moved quickly to hide the list behind a university login.
Colleges and universities are essential to a free society. We entrust them with the responsibility to teach the next generation of leaders to think critically—a process that by its very essence requires consideration and comparison of…
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