The Peril of Politicizing Science

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The Peril of Politicizing Science
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It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.
Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow
the range of thought? In the end we shall make
thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no
words in which to express it.
−George Orwell, 1984
Igrew up in a city that in its short history (barely over 150
years) had its name changed three times.
2,3
Founded in
1869 around a steel plant and several coal mines built by the
Welsh industrialist John Hughes, the settlement was originally
called Hughesovka (or Yuzovka). When the Bolsheviks came
to power in the 1917 Revolution, the new government of the
working class, the Soviets, set out to purge the country of
ideologically impure influences in the name of the proletariat
and the worldwide struggle of the suppressed masses. Cities
and geographical landmarks were renamed,
4
statues were torn
down, books were burned, and many millions were jailed and
murdered.
5
In due course, the commissars got to Yuzovka, and
the city was stripped of the name of its founder, a
representative of the hostile class of oppressors and a
Westerner. In modern terms, Hughes was canceled. For a
few months, the city was called Trotsk (after Leon Trotsky),
until Trotsky lost in the power struggle inside the party and
was himself canceled (see Figure 1). In 1924 the city became
the namesake of the new supreme leader of the Communist
Party (Stalin), and a few years later renamed to Stalino. My
mother’s school certificates have Stalino on them. Following
Stalin’s death in 1953, the Communist party underwent some
reckoning and admitted that several decades of terror and
many millions of murdered citizens were somewhat excessive.
Stalin was canceled: his body was removed from the
Mausoleum at Red Square (where it had been displayed next
to Lenin’s); textbooks and encyclopedias were rewritten once
again; and the cities, institutions, and landmarks bearing his
name were promptly renamed. Stalino became Donetsk, after
the river Severskii Donets.
I came of age during a relatively mellow period of the Soviet
rule, post-Stalin. Still, the ideology permeated all aspects of life,
and survival required strict adherence to the party line and
enthusiastic displays of ideologically proper behavior. Not
joining a young communist organization (Komsomol) would
be career suicidenonmembers were barred from higher
education. Openly practicing religion could lead to more grim
consequences, up to imprisonment. So could reading the
wrong book (Orwell, Solzhenitsyn, etc.). Even a poetry book
that was not on the state-approved list could get one in trouble.
Mere compliance was not sufficientthe ideology commit-
tees were constantly on the lookout for individuals whose
support of the regime was not sufficiently enthusiastic. It was
not uncommon to get disciplined for being too quiet during
mandatory political assemblies (politinformation or komso-
molskoe sobranie) or for showing up late to mandatory mass-
celebrations (such as the May or November demonstrations).
Once I got a notice for promoting an imperialistic agenda by
showing up in jeans for an informal school event. A friend’s
dossier was permanently blemishedmaking him ineligible for
Ph.D. programsfor not fully participating in a trip required
of university students: an act of “voluntary”help to comrades
in collective farms (Figure 2).
Science was not spared from this strict ideological control.
6
Western influences were considered to be dangerous. Text-
books and scientific papers tirelessly emphasized the priority
and pre-eminence of Russian and Soviet science. Entire
disciplines were declared ideologically impure, reactionary,
and hostile to the cause of working-class dominance and the
World Revolution. Notable examples of “bourgeois pseudo-
science”included genetics and cybernetics. Quantum mechan-
ics and general relativity were also criticized for insufficient
alignment with dialectic materialism.
Most relevant to chemistry was the antiresonance campaign
(1949−1951).
7
The theory of resonating structures, which
brought Linus Pauling the Nobel prize in 1954, was deemed to
be bourgeois pseudoscience. Scientists who attempted to
defend the merits of the theory and its utility for understanding
chemical structures were accused of “cosmopolitism”(Western
sympathy) and servility to Western bourgeois science. Some
lost jobs. Two high-profile supporters of resonance theory,
Syrkin and Dyatkina, were eventually forced to confess their
ideological sins and to publicly denounce resonance. Mean-
while, other members of the community took this political
purge as an opportunity to advance at the expense of others.
7,8
As noted by many scholars,
7,8
including Pauling himself,
9
the
grassroots antiresonance campaign was driven by people who
were “displeased with the alignment of forces in their science”.
7
This is a recurring motif in all political campaigns within
science in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, and McCarthy’s
Americathose who are “on the right side”of the issue can
jump a few rungs and take the place of those who were
canceled. By the time I studied quantum chemistry at Moscow
Received: May 7, 2021
Accepted: May 10, 2021
Published: June 10, 2021
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State University, resonance theory had been rehabilitated. Yet,
the history of the campaign and the injustices it entailed were
not discussed in the openthe Party did not welcome
conversations about its past mistakes. I remember hearing parts
of the story, narrated under someone’s breath at a party after
copious amounts of alcohol had loosened a tongue.
Fast forward to 2021another century. The Cold War is a
distant memory and the country shown on my birth certificate
and school and university diplomas, the USSR, is no longer on
the map. But I find myself experiencing its legacy some
thousands of miles to the west, as if I am living in an Orwellian
twilight zone. I witness ever-increasing attempts to subject
science and education to ideological control and censorship.
Just as in Soviet times, the censorship is being justified by the
greater good. Whereas in 1950, the greater good was advancing
the World Revolution (in the USSR; in the USA the greater
good meant fighting Communism), in 2021 the greater good is
“Social Justice”(the capitalization is important: “Social Justice”
is a specific ideology, with goals that have little in common
with what lower-case “social justice”means in plain
English).
10−12
As in the USSR, the censorship is enthusiasti-
cally imposed also from the bottom, by members of the
scientific community, whose motives vary from naive idealism
to cynical power-grabbing.
Just as during the time of the Great Terror,
5,13
dangerous
conspiracies and plots against the World Revolution were seen
everywhere, from illustrations in children’s books to hairstyles
and fashions; today we are told that racism, patriarchy,
misogyny, and other reprehensible ideas are encoded in
scientific terms, names of equations, and in plain English
words. We are told that in order to build a better world and to
address societal inequalities, we need to purge our literature of
the names of people whose personal records are not up to the
high standards of the self-anointed bearers of the new truth,
the Elect.
11
We are told that we need to rewrite our syllabi and
change the way we teach and speak.
14,15
As an example of political censorship and cancel culture,
consider a recent viewpoint
16
discussing the centuries-old
tradition of attaching names to scientific concepts and
discoveries (Archimede’s Principle, Newton’s Laws of Motion,
Schrödinger equation, Curie Law, etc.). The authors call for
vigilance in naming discoveries and assert that “basing the
name with inclusive priorities may provide a path to a richer,
deeper, and more robust understanding of the science and its
advancement.”Really? On what empirical grounds is this
based? History teaches us the opposite: the outcomes of the
merit-based science of liberal, pluralistic societies are vastly
superior to those of the ideologically controlled science of the
USSR and other totalitarian regimes.
17
The authors call for
removing the names of people who “crossed the line”of moral
or ethical standards. Examples
16
include Fritz Haber, Peter
Debye, and William Shockley, but the list could have been
easily extended to include Stark (defended expulsion of Jews
from German institutions),
18
Heisenberg (led Germany’s
nuclear weapons program),
19
and Schrödinger (had romantic
relationships with under-age girls).
19
Indeed, learned societies
are now devoting considerable effort to such renaming
campaignsamong the most-recent cancellations is the
renaming of the Fisher Prize by the Evolution Society, despite
well-argued opposition by 10 past presidents and vice-
presidents of the society.
20
There is no doubt that many famous scientists had views or
engaged in behaviors that, by today’s standards, are not
acceptable.
21
Their scientific legacies are often mixed; for
example, Fritz Haber is both the father of modern chemical
warfare and the man whose development of nitrogen fixation is
feeding the planet.
22
Scientists are not saints.
21
They are
human beings born into places and times they did not choose.
Just as their fellow human beings do, each finds his or her way
though the circumstances of their lives, such as totalitarian
regimes, world wars, and revolutions. Sometimes they made
the right choices, sometimes they erred. Some paid dearly for
their mistakes. Haber
22
was an avid German patriot, to the
extent that he actively developed chemical weapons in order to
provide Germany with military advantage. Yet, his motherland
rejected him because he was a Jew. He was barely able to
escape Germany, and part of his extended family perished in
the concentration camps. As eloquently stated by Stern in his
essay,
22
are we really so morally superior that we can “judge a
Figure 1. Soviet history was constantly revised to keep up with the current party line. Historic photographs were routinely airbrushed and
textbooks rewritten to obliterate the canceled.
1
Left: Lenin speaking in Moscow to Red Army soldiers in 1920, with Leon Trotsky and Lev
Kamenev standing to his left side, on the steps to the right. Right: Same scene, with Trotsky and Kamenev airbrushed out, after they were canceled.
Once the heroes of the Revolution, they had become traitors and enemies of the people. (Photograph May 5, 1920, by G. P. Goldshtein. Part of the
David King Collection. Purchased from David King by Tate Archive 2016. Photo copyright Tate.)
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life by one disastrous deformation, which in some ways
epitomized his and his country’s worst faults?”
Soviet history is full of examples of patriotic scientists who
were imprisoned and murdered by the regime while
proclaiming their unconditional loyalty to the World
Revolutionone such tragic figure was Hans Hellmann, who
fled Germany in 1933 (because of his Jewish wife) and, despite
multiple warnings, came to Russia (because he believed in the
socialist ideals), only to be executed by the Soviet regime as an
enemy of the people in 1938.
23
Some famous scientists were brave dissidents, and some
were conformists and opportunists. Should we judge their
scientific contributions by their political standing, the extent to
which they collaborated with repressive regimes, or by how
wholesome their personal lives were? The authors of the
viewpoint
16
go as far as to suggest that we should use names of
scientific discoveries and institutions as a vehicle to promote
ideologythat is, as a propaganda toolas was done by the
Soviet, Nazi, and Maoist regimes.
The intersection of science, morality, and ideology has been
studied by many scholars and historians. History provides
ample evidence that totalitarian censorship of science is
harmful to the progress and well-being of societies. Merton’s
norms of science prescribe a clear separation between science
and morality.
24
Particularly relevant is Merton’s principle of
universality, which states that claims to truth are evaluated in
terms of universal or impersonal criteria, and not on the basis
of race, class, gender, religion, or nationality.
24
Simply put, we
should evaluate, reward, and acknowledge scientific contribu-
tions strictly on the basis of their intellectual merit and not on
the basis of personal traits of the scientists or a current political
agenda.
Conversations about the history of science and the
complexity of its social and ethical aspects can enrich our
lives and should be a welcome addition to science curricula.
The history of science can teach us to appreciate the
complexity of the world and humanity. It can also help us to
navigate urgent contemporary issues.
25
Censorship and
cancellation will not make us smarter, will not lead to better
science, and will not help the next generation of scientists to
make better choices.
Theauthorsoftheviewpoint
16
acknowledge historic
complexities and the fact that moral and ethical standards
change with time. They backed offDebye’s cancellation,
quoting the decisions of investigative committees that
concluded that Debye did not cross the line. However, they
demand that the “Shockley−Queisser limit”be renamed. They
call for Shockley’s cancellation as punishment for his abhorrent
views on issues far outside his domain of expertise, such as
race, gender, and IQ. If, for the sake of argument, we divorce
ourselves from the charged political content of Shockley’s
publications on these topics, we can compare his minimal
scholarly contribution in this domain to Pauling’s vitamin C
debacle.
26
Should we cancel Pauling for overstepping the
domain of his competence and making medically dangerous
claims? Which one is the greater misconductpublishing a
paper with eugenic content or promoting vitamin C as a cure
for cancer? Note that in the case of both Pauling and Shockley,
the Mertonian principle of organized skepticism
24
has already
taken care of effectively separating the wheat from the chaff:
while Shockley’s detailed balance paper (ref 11 in the
viewpoint) is cited almost 7000 times, his paper on race and
IQ (ref 12 in the viewpoint) has a grand total of 15 citations.
Digging deeper into the Shockley case, many of his
biographers attribute his well-documented antisocial traits
and behaviors (social withdrawal and paranoia) to a mental
disorder and describe him as a high-functioning autist. In his
book The Gene, Mukherjee uses Shockley to illustrate the
ethical conundrums of gene editing,
27
by pointing out that the
same combination of genes can be both “genius-enabling”and
“disease-enabling”. What if Shockley’s deplorable views were
the result of his mental disorder? Should we cancel him
anyway? I think we should discuss his mixed legacy and learn
from his complicated story, in the same way we can learn from
Fritz Haber’s and others’. These stories can teach us about the
complexity of the world and of human minds, the importance
of tolerance and empathy. And we should leave the Shockley−
Queisser limit (and other named discoveries and equations)
alone.
The issue of science moralization and censorship is older
than 20th century totalitarian regimes. For example, Giordano
Bruno was canceled (burned at the stake in 1600) because his
cosmological views were considered to be a threat to the
dominant ideology. The guardians of the truth, his prosecutors,
“had the desire to serve freedom and promote the common
good”.
28
A century later, Leeuwenhoek self-censored his
studies and reports for offensive content (observations of
spermatozoa in semen).
29,30
In 1911, Marie Curie was
ostracized for immoral behavioran affair with a married
man (Langevin) following the tragic death of her husband
Pierre Curie. The chair of the Nobel Prize committee, Svante
Arrhenius, wrote to her advising that she not attend the official
ceremony for her Nobel Prize in Chemistry in view of her
questionable moral standing. Curie replied that she would be
present at the ceremony, becase “the prize has been given to
her for her discovery of polonium and radium”and that “there
is no relation between her scientific work and the facts of her
private life”.
31
Today we regard this attempt to cancel Curie on
the grounds of her moral impurity as utterly absurd, yet we
continue to witness the intrusion of moral arguments into the
scientific domain.
31
Examples of past cancellations done in the name of
maintaining moral purity (as understood at the time) provide
a useful context for today’s struggle between free speech and
Figure 2. Fourth-year chemistry students from Moscow State
University (the author is on the right) enjoying a short break in the
potato fields during mandatory farm labor, ca. 1987. The sticks were
used as aids for separating potatoes from the mud.
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cancel culture. In 1952, Alan Turing was canceled for being
gay. After he was convicted for “gross indecency”and
subjected to chemical castration, he lost his consultancy job
for the British intelligence agency, despite his vital contribu-
tions to the war effort, and was denied entry to the United
States. About the same time, the University of Minnesota
revoked an offer from Michael McConnell for his intent to
marry another man.
32
McConnell sued, but lost, with the judge
decrying same-sex marriage a “socially repugnant concept,”
incompatible with holding a university position.
Today’s censorship does not stop at purging the scientific
vocabulary of the names of scientists who “crossed the line”or
fail the ideological litmus tests of the Elect.
11
In some
schools,
33,34
physics classes no longer teach “Newton’s Laws”,
but “the three fundamental laws of physics”. Why was Newton
canceled? Because he was white, and the new ideology
10,12,15
calls for “decentering whiteness”and “decolonizing”the
curriculum. A comment in Nature
35
calls for replacing the
accepted technical term “quantum supremacy”by “quantum
advantage”. The authors regard the English word “supremacy”
as “violent”and equate its usage with promoting racism and
colonialism. They also warn us about “damage”inflicted by
using such terms as “conquest”. I assume “divide-and-conquer”
will have to go too. Remarkably, this Soviet-style ghost-chasing
gains traction. In partnership with their Diversity, Equity, and
Inclusion taskforce, the Information and Technology Services
Department of the University of Michigan set out to purge the
language within the university and without (by imposing
restrictions on university vendors) from such hurtful and racist
terms as “picnic”,“brown bag lunch”,“black-and-white
thinking”,“master password”,“dummy variable”,“disabled
system”,“grandfathered account”,“strawman argument”, and
“long time no see”.
36
“The list is not exhaustive and will
continue to grow”, warns the memo. Indeed, new words are
canceled every dayI just learned that the word “normal”will
no longer be used on Dove soap packaging because “it makes
most people feel excluded”
37
(emphasis mine; see Figure 3).
Do words have life and power of their own? Can they really
cause injury? Do they carry hidden messages? The ideology
claims so and encourages us all to be on the constant lookout
for offenses. If you are not sure when you should be
offendedcheck out the list of microagressionsa quick
google search can deliver plenty of official documents from
serious institutions that, with a few exceptions, sound like a
sketch for the next Borat movie.
38
If nothing fits the bill, you
can always find malice in the sounds of a foreign language. At
the University of Southern California, a professor was recently
suspended because students claimed to have been offended by
the sounds of Chinese words used to illustrate the concept of
filler words in a communications class.
39,40
Why did I devote a considerable amount of my time to
writing this essay? After all, I am no fan of Shockley; his
eugenic views disgust me. Notwithstanding his monumental
contributions to one of the most pressing problems we face
harnessing solar energyI would not want to sit next to him at
a dinner party. Yet, the term “Shockley−Queisser limit”elicits
no emotional response in me. Neither does “Stark effect”,
“Haber−Bosch process”,or“Debye units”. To most scientists,
these are convenient labels, which remind us that the
cathedrals of science are built by mere mortals,
21
and not
some deeply meaningful symbols of reverence. So why should
we not humor those who claim to feel differently
16
and rename
everything in sight? After all, renaming equations is even easier
than renaming cities, buildings, or landmarks.
The answer is simple: our future is at stake. As a community,
we face an important choice. We can succumb to extreme left
ideology and spend the rest of our lives ghost-chasing and
witch-hunting, rewriting history, politicizing science, redefining
elements of language, and turning STEM (science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics) education into a farce.
41−44
Or
we can uphold a key principle of democratic societythe free
and uncensored exchange of ideasand continue our core
mission, the pursuit of truth, focusing attention on solving real,
important problems of humankind.
The lessons of history are numerous and unambiguous.
17
Despite vast natural and human resources, the USSR lost the
Cold War, crumbled, and collapsed. Interestingly, even the
leaders of the most repressive regimes were able to understand,
to some extent, the weakness of totalitarian science. For
example, in the midst of the Great Terror,
5,13
Kapitsa and Ioffe
were able to convince Stalin about the importance of physics to
military and technological advantage, to the extent that he
reversed some arrests; for example, Fock and Landau were set
free (however, an estimated ∼10% of physicists perished
during this time
17
). In the late forties, after nuclear physicists
explained that without relativity theory there will be no nuclear
bomb, Stalin rolled back the planned campaign against physics
and instructed Beria to give physicists some space; this led to
significant advances and accomplishments by Soviet scientists
in several domains. However, neither Stalin nor the subsequent
Soviet leaders were able to let go of the controls completely.
Government control over science turned out to be a grand
failure, and the attempts to patch the widening gap between
the West and the East by espionage did not help.
17
Today
Russia is hopelessly behind the West, in both technology and
quality of life. The book Totalitarian Science and Technology
provides many more examples of such failed experiments.
17
Today, STEM holds the key to solving problems far more
important than the nuclear arms race: reversing climate
change, fighting global hunger and poverty, controlling
pandemics, and harnessing the power of new technologies
(quantum computing, bioengineering, and renewable energy)
for the benefit of humanity.
Figure 3. Headline of the New York Times article
37
from 2021-03-13.
The word “normal”will be removed from more than 200 beauty
products. “The changes were long overdue and ‘completely
necessary’..., said Ateh Jewel, a beauty journalist and an advisory
board member of the British Beauty Council.”
37
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Normalizing ideological intrusion into science and abandon-
ing Mertonian principles
24
will cost us dearly. We cannot
afford it.
Anna I. Krylov orcid.org/0000-0001-6788-5016
■AUTHOR INFORMATION
Complete contact information is available at:
https://pubs.acs.org/10.1021/acs.jpclett.1c01475
Notes
Views expressed in this Viewpoint are those of the author and
not necessarily the views of the ACS.
The author declares no competing financial interest.
■REFERENCES
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made the truth disappear. The New Yorker; 2018; https://www.
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(3) Hughesovka and the new Russia: Gwin Alf Williams in Donetsk.
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(9) Pauling’s theory of resonance: A Soviet controversy. https://
paulingblog.wordpress.com/2009/03/26/paulings-theory-of-
resonance-a-soviet-controversy. The Pauling blog, 2009. As Pauling
wrote in his letter to Frank Aydelotte in 1951: “As to the Russian
scientists and the scientific controversies, I must say that I have great
difficulty in understanding what is happening. The most likely
explanation seems to be that some of the Russian scientists are taking
advantage of the political situation to advance themselves at the
expense of their colleagues. Others are then drawn into the
controversy, and required by practical considerations to align
themselves with those who say that they are supporting the correct
Marxist position. I have read the Russian articles carefully, and I must
say that I cannot understand the arguments.”
(10) Pluckrose, H.; Lindsay, J. A. Cynical Theories: How Activist
Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identityand
Why This Harms Everybody; Pitchstone Publishing: Durham, NC,
2020.
(11) McWhorter, J. The Elect: The threat to a progressive America
from anti-black anti-racists. Substack, 2021; https://johnmcwhorter.
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City Journal,2021.https://www.city-journal.org/fractures-of-
identity-politics
(13) Wikipedia article about the Great Terror. https://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/Great_Purge.
(14) Diversity & inclusion syllabus statements at Brown university.
https://www.brown.edu/sheridan/teaching-learning-resources/
inclusive-teaching/statements (accessed 2021-03-21). An example
DEI statement from a course syllabus: “In an ideal world, science
would be objective. However, much of science is subjective and is
historically built on a small subset of privileged voices. I acknowledge
that the readings for this course, including the course reader and BCP
were authored by white men. Furthermore, the course often focuses
on historically important neuroscience experiments which were
mostly conducted by white men.”
(15) Antiracist pedagogy: YALE Poorvu Center for teaching and
learning, https://poorvucenter.yale.edu/Antiracist-Pedagogy (ac-
cessed 2021-03-21). Recommendations include “decentering White-
ness in the course content”and “creating assessments that enable
students to demonstrate different knowledge and ways of knowing”.
Examples of good practices include “Yale Associate Professor of
Computer Science ... includes discussions about the discriminatory
racial history of computer science and mathematics as a way to help
students understand the politics and power of fields that are often
thought of as being objective.”
(16) Ehrler, B.; Hutter, E. M.; Berry, J. J. The complicated morality
of named inventions. ACS Energy Lett. 2021,6, 565.
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Books: Amherst, NY, 2005.
(18) Stark, J. The attitude of the German government towards
science. Nature 1934,133, 614.
(19) Jones, S. The Quantum Ten: A Story of Passion, Tragedy,
Ambition, and Science; Thomas Allen Publishers: Toronto, 2008.
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letter in response. https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/04/02/
evolution-society-renames-fisher-prize-a-letter-some-of-us-wrote-in-
response/ (Post on Jerry Coyne’s blog), 2021.
(21) Coffey, P. Cathedrals of Science: The Personalities and Rivalries
That Made Modern Chemistry; Oxford University Press, Inc., 2008.
(22) Stern, F. Fritz Haber: Flawed greatness of person and country.
Angew. Chem., Int. Ed. 2012,51, 50.
(23) Wikipedia article about Hans Hellmann. https://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/Hans_Hellmann.
(24) Wikipedia article about R. K. Merton. https://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/Robert_K._Merton. Merton defined a set of ideals that he
considered to be integral to the goals and methods of science and
binding to scientists. The Mertonian norms of science, which are
often referred to by the acronym “CUDOS”, include the following: (i)
Communism: the common ownership of scientific discoveries,
according to which scientists give up intellectual property in exchange
for recognition; (ii) Universalism: according to which claims to truth
are evaluated in terms of universal or impersonal criteria, and not on
the basis of race, class, gender, religion, or nationality; (iii)
Disinterestedness: according to which scientists are rewarded for
acting in ways that outwardly appear to be self-less; and (iv)
Organized Skepticism: all ideas must be tested and are subject to
rigorous, structured community scrutiny.
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following: “If your Lordship should consider that these observations
may disgust or scandalise the learned, I earnestly beg your Lordship to
regard them as private and to publish or destroy them as your
Lordship sees fit.”
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co.uk/news/2021/04/24/isaac-newton-latest-historical-figure-swept-
decolonisation-drive. A draft of “inclusive curriculum development”
at the Sheffield University (UK) states that Dirac, Laplace, Newton,
and Leibniz “could be considered as benefiting from colonial era
activity”and, therefore, should be removed from the engineering
curriculum. “Decolonising the curriculum is an ongoing process which
prompts us to incorporate historically marginalised or suppressed
knowledge into all disciplines...so all our students have the
opportunity to see themselves reflected in what they are being
taught,”said a spokesman of the University.
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(38) Examples of microagressions and recommendations on
inclusive language from University of California, University of
Colorado, University of Minnesota, and University of Michigan;
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(39) Soave, R. USC suspended a communications professor for
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offended-students.
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(41) A pathway to equitable math instruction: Resources and
guidance to support Black, LatinX, and Multilingual students to thrive
in grades 6−8. https://equitablemath.org. From the website: “A
Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction is an actionable toolkit
designed to support equitable access to math standards for Black,
Latinx, and multilingual students in grades 6−8. We invite school
leaders, educators, and advocates to join us at these virtual
opportunities to dive deeper into each of the toolkit strides.”The
program, which is supported by numerous educational boards and
foundations, including Los Angeles County Office of Education and
Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, calls to “dismantle white
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on getting the ‘right’answer”and asking students “to show their
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eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoyNzY2MDE2NiwicG9zdF9pZCI6MzYzODMzNjEsI
l8iOiJsVWgvMSIsImlhdCI6MTYyMTUyNDgzMywiZXhwIjoxNjIxN
TI4NDMzLCJpc3MiOiJwdWItNjE1NzkiLCJzdWIiOiJwb3N0LXJ
lYWN0aW9uIn0.xBFk_7Ul9yZ_-W7rCgB7E68G_
H3q1B61wN3ifIhYIlM
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