Tuesday, August 5, 2008

"We have foregrounded the redistributional dreams of "social justice" over heroic aspirations to discover, invent, and thereby create new wealth..."

Peter Wood, of the National Association of Scholars, has a brilliant essay in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education connecting American high culture's obsession with identity and diversity to the drought of native-born scientists and engineers.

The science "problems" we now ask students to think about aren't really science problems at all...a society that worries itself about which chromosomes scientists have isn't a society that takes science education seriously.


This is bound to anger precisely those who deserve it. A defense of merit, achievement, and a call for culture to respect merit and achievement is long overdue.