Get out of my lab

In a series of interviews and public statements dating back to 2018, Eric Weinstein has warned that the infiltration of activist ideologies into academic biology and other STEM fields poses a serious threat to the integrity of scientific research. He argues that when scholarship becomes driven by activism rather than pure inquiry, it undermines the foundational principles of merit and rigor that have historically defined the sciences. Weinstein is particularly concerned about the impact of identity politics on evolutionary biology, noting that its principles—diversity, differential success, and heritability—are fundamentally at odds with the goals of social justice movements.

Eric emphasizes that the integration of DEI initiatives into STEM not only dilutes academic standards but also risks compromising the U.S.’s global competitiveness in science and technology. He argues that the scientific community must defend its rigorous standards against ideological pressures to preserve the field’s objectivity and ensure continued innovation. In Weinstein’s view, safeguarding the future of science requires a renewed commitment to merit and the rejection of activist-driven agendas within academia.

Make sure that you have a uniform standard of scholarship, and not a form of scholarship that is friendly to activism. You have to make sure that activist scholarship is recognized as something other than pure inquiry. I mean, are you capable of disseminating a finding that you're very upset to find? That's a prerequisite for having professorial privileges, in terms of tenure and academic freedom. I suspect there's very little of that these days. People that truly go in without— In the sciences, there's tons of it! Yeah? Yeah. And, you know, this is my basic take on universities, is that the heart and soul of a great research university is its hard core disciplines. We've done much more in those disciplines than anybody else. And so “who are you and get out of my lab”, is an important principle. And as long as we have something that keeps bad scholarship from getting in from, you know, bringing the principle of explosion, as we talked about before, into the sciences, we should start exporting scientific notions of rigor. And we should be holding debates between disciplines to make sure that everything is of a piece, rather than saying, okay, well, you have no wage gap and you have a wage gap. We don't even know if it's the same word. So I think that it's a bad move. Instead, what we should do is we should make sure that all of these—and by the way, if gender studies has figured out some things that the biologists don't know, we have to take our lumps in biology. It's not it's not a there's no fix in that game.

- Eric Weinstein on The Rubin Report on September 25, 2018

Related Concepts

• Institutional Evergreening
• Interoperability and Exclusion
• Intersectional Shakedown