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Feb 26, 2024 | 
tabletmag.com | Sergiu Klainerman
In the wake of Harvard, Penn, and MIT’s congressional testimony debacle, followed by the plagiarizing travails of Harvard’s President Claudine Gay and her reluctant and ungracious resignation, it is broadly recognized that America’s elite universities are afflicted by a rapidly metastasizing cancer. Harvard, our oldest and most admired university, is now the poster child for this terrible affliction.
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May 8, 2023 | 
hxstem.substack.com | Sergiu Klainerman
IntroductionThe scientific enterprise in United States is being seriously challenged by powerful anti-scientific trends. Postmodern relativism, under the pretense of anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-colonialism, anti-ableism... is undermining the very foundations of science as a search for truth. Radical egalitarianism, disguised under the name of equity is undermining the critically important criteria of selection and rewards based on merit.
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Apr 19, 2023 | 
quillette.com | Aidan Harte |Percy Deift |Svetlana Jitomirskaya |Sergiu Klainerman
Artificial Intelligence, the Holy Grail of Computing, has received a good deal of advance hype in recent months, and the Extremely Online are extremely perturbed. In particular, ChatGPT, a programme which answers questions in coherent sentences, has the digital literati looking more pasty than usual. The Terminator is coming for tech jobs. Silicon Valley’s worker bees, who were sanguine about automation making redneck truckers redundant, are starting to panic.
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Apr 5, 2023 | 
quillette.com | Joshua Kurlantzick |Percy Deift |Svetlana Jitomirskaya |Sergiu Klainerman
In many parts of the world, China is increasing its efforts to control groups and individuals connected to civil society, politics, and universities.
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Mar 28, 2023 | 
quillette.com | Oliver Traldi |Percy Deift |Svetlana Jitomirskaya |Sergiu Klainerman
Should science be political? It is often imagined that debates around this sort of question turn on abstruse theoretical matters. What does it mean to be political? And is it even possible to avoid it? Aren’t scientists’ choices about what to study and research ineluctably political? And wouldn’t it require a kind of intentional naivety to pretend that scientific results aren’t employed in public discourse in distinctly political ways?
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Mar 23, 2023 | 
mindingthecampus.org | Sergiu Klainerman
The higher education reform movement, as pursued by Governor Ron DeSantis and the Florida Legislature, has run into a heavy barrage of criticism from both the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and Keith Whittington, who, though writing in his individual capacity, is chairman of the governing committee of the Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA). Normally, both organizations side with those of us who think reform is imperative.
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Mar 17, 2023 | 
quillette.com | Stephen Akey |Percy Deift |Svetlana Jitomirskaya |Sergiu Klainerman
Gary Brodsky taught philosophy at the University of Connecticut from 1963 to 1997. In the spring semester of 1976, I enrolled in his Problems of Philosophy survey course. By his lights, I was probably just another ignorant, unwashed American plebe, whose cultural consciousness (to the extent that I had any) had been formed by the twin vapidities of television and rock and roll music. Which was pretty much true.
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Mar 13, 2023 | 
quillette.com | Anthony F Jorm |Percy Deift |Svetlana Jitomirskaya |Sergiu Klainerman
In Australia, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) is the major source of funding for health and medical research. In a previous article for Quillette, I have described how the current CEO of the organization, Anne Kelso, has pursued a policy of gender equity in the allocation of research grants, with the aim of increasing the number of successful female applicants through the use of quotas.
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Mar 5, 2023 | 
quillette.com | Steven Grant |Percy Deift |Svetlana Jitomirskaya |Sergiu Klainerman
Last summer, Theodore Ruger, Dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s Carey Law School, sent a letter to the chair of Penn’s Faculty Senate requesting a “full review” of the conduct of tenured law professor Amy Wax, and recommending the Senate “impose a major sanction against her.” This was the culmination of a long, five-year struggle with Wax, who has found herself at the center of one firestorm after another.
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Feb 21, 2023 | 
quillette.com | Lawrence Krauss |Percy Deift |Svetlana Jitomirskaya |Sergiu Klainerman
There is an old saying in computational science: garbage in, garbage out. Computers can carry out billions of complex calculations in a second, but that processing power is otherwise unfiltered and shouldn’t be confused with intelligence.
