The War on Science sounds like a book designed to defend laboratories, universities, evidence-based medicine, and the occasionally heroic researcher who remembers where the control group went. Instead, the anthology edited by physicist Lawrence M. Krauss focuses overwhelmingly on a different enemy: ideological conformity inside Western academia.
Its 39 contributors examine cancel culture, diversity policies, gender, race, language, hiring standards, academic victimhood, and restrictions on open inquiry. Those are legitimate subjects. Universities are not enchanted castles where every administrator makes flawless decisions and every committee meeting ends before lunch.
Yet critics argue that the book made a serious strategic mistake. While its authors concentrated on threats associated with the political left, a far more powerful campaign was using similar anti-“woke” language to cancel grants, pressure universities, reshape health agencies, and restrict entire categories of research. The provocative claim that the contributors “enabled” a war on science does not mean they secretly designed government policy. It means their rhetoric may have supplied intellectual respectability, useful talking points, and convenient targets for political actors with much greater power.
What Is The War on Science About?
Published by Post Hill Press and distributed by Simon & Schuster in July 2025, The War on Science: Thirty-Nine Renowned Scientists and Scholars Speak Out About Current Threats to Free Speech, Open Inquiry, and the Scientific Process is a collection of essays edited by Krauss. The publisher lists 39 contributors, including Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Jordan Peterson, Niall Ferguson, Jerry Coyne, Nicholas Christakis, Gad Saad, Alan Sokal, Amy Wax, Carole Hooven, Anna Krylov, and Peter Boghossian.
The official description presents the volume as a defense of merit, academic freedom, disciplinary standards, and the scientific method. Its principal concerns include ideological restrictions, compelled language, DEI bureaucracies, the treatment of controversial scholars, and the replacement of evidence with political slogans. In other words, the book enters the culture war wearing safety goggles.
The contributors are not all making identical arguments. Some chapters address genuine disputes about hiring, speech, peer review, biological definitions, or administrative overreach. However, the collection’s overall framing leaves little doubt about where it locates the primary danger: inside institutions allegedly captured by progressive ideology.
Why Critics Say the Book Misidentified the Battlefield
It Focuses on Internal Academic Problems While Political Power Attacks From Outside
A university can certainly damage intellectual life through rigid policies, ideological litmus tests, unfair disciplinary procedures, or an atmosphere that encourages self-censorship. But there is an important difference between a poorly designed faculty workshop and a federal government deciding which research subjects may receive money.
That difference is power.
Critics such as physician Jonathan Howard argue that The War on Science treated disputes over DEI, gender, and campus speech as the defining crisis while giving insufficient attention to political forces capable of freezing grants, dismantling programs, intimidating institutions, and altering national science policy. His criticism is not merely that the contributors chose the wrong topic. It is that their preferred framing became part of the justification for actions much larger than the campus controversies they described.
Imagine researchers arguing over whether the laboratory mission statement contains too many fashionable buzzwords while someone outside is loading the microscopes into a truck. The mission statement may be annoying. The missing microscopes are still the bigger emergency.
Krauss Had Already Warned About the Political Threat
The book’s narrow focus appears especially surprising because Krauss himself had publicly recognized the danger years earlier. During the 2016 presidential campaign, he warned that Donald Trump’s positions on climate change, education, environmental regulation, public health, and scientific agencies represented a rejection of empirical reasoning in public policy.
That earlier analysis makes the anthology’s priorities more difficult to explain. The political movement Krauss once described as hostile to evidence did not disappear. It gained institutional power. Nevertheless, the book framed ideological activism within academia as the emerging emergency, while threats from the right were treated as secondary, external, or too recent to receive equal attention.
How Respected Scholars Can Unintentionally Enable a War on Science
1. By Setting the Public Agenda
Famous scientists and scholars influence which problems educated audiences consider urgent. When dozens of prominent figures repeatedly describe DEI programs, gender terminology, and progressive activism as existential threats to science, those issues begin to dominate the conversation.
Agenda setting does not require conspiracy. It works through repetition and prestige. A claim sounds more authoritative when delivered by a celebrated physicist, evolutionary biologist, psychologist, or historian. Eventually, politicians can cite the same language while pursuing policies that the original speaker may not have intended.
This is the first meaning of “enabled.” The contributors helped build a public narrative in which scientific institutions were portrayed as corrupted, wasteful, cowardly, and captured by activists. Once that story became familiar, aggressive intervention could be marketed as rescue rather than political control.
2. By Giving Culture-War Rhetoric a Scientific Finish
Phrases such as “restore merit,” “remove ideology,” and “return to biological reality” can describe reasonable goals. They can also function as wonderfully vague political packaging. Who could oppose merit? Who wakes up hoping for less reality before breakfast?
The difficult questions are hidden beneath the labels. What counts as merit? Which research is ideological? Who decides whether a study of health disparities is legitimate medicine or forbidden DEI? When broad political categories replace specific scientific evaluation, the language of objectivity can be used to impose ideological control while pretending to remove it.
New York Magazine’s review of the anthology argues that several contributors treated their own political assumptions as neutral science while portraying opposing views as mere activism. The review also connects the book’s emphasis on anti-progressive grievances with the larger Make America Healthy Again movement and its hostility toward established public-health expertise.
3. By Practicing Asymmetric Skepticism
Healthy skepticism should examine all major claims, especially those made by powerful allies. Yet some public intellectuals apply microscopic scrutiny to a questionable diversity seminar and remarkably little scrutiny to vaccine misinformation, climate denial, attacks on medical researchers, or politically motivated funding decisions.
This asymmetry turns skepticism into branding. The skeptic becomes a person who challenges one ideological tribe rather than someone who tests evidence consistently. When evidence standards change according to the political identity of the speaker, the scientific method has quietly left the building, possibly through a side door marked “Employees Only.”
4. By Transforming Grievance Into a Governing Mandate
For years, politicians and commentators claimed that conservative or heterodox academics were silenced by universities, social-media companies, journals, and public-health institutions. Some individual complaints were valid. However, grievance can acquire a second life when people who describe themselves as censorship victims obtain government authority.
Once in power, they may not establish a neutral marketplace of ideas. They may remove reviewers, prohibit terminology, cancel research, punish universities, or redirect funding toward preferred theories. The former critic of institutional censorship becomes an institutional censor with a larger office and better parking.
The Book Is Not Wrong About Everything
A fair analysis should not pretend that academic freedom problems are imaginary. Surveys by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression have found substantial levels of student self-censorship, discomfort discussing controversial subjects, and acceptance of shouting down speakers. Faculty surveys have also reported fear of professional or social consequences for expressing unpopular opinions.
These findings support concerns about campus speech climates. Researchers should be able to test hypotheses, criticize methods, publish unexpected results, and question institutional fashion without facing personal harassment. A scientific culture that cannot tolerate disagreement eventually becomes a public-relations department with lab equipment.
The American Association of University Professors likewise treats academic freedom as essential, while offering a more nuanced position on DEI. It rejects the assumption that every diversity criterion is automatically an ideological test, but it also recognizes that evaluation requirements must remain relevant to professional duties and must not force scholars to endorse prescribed political views.
The strongest response, therefore, is not that the anthology invented every problem. It is that it elevated one category of problem while neglecting larger and more immediate threats.
Where the Book’s Argument Becomes Scientifically Weak
Science Is a Method, Not a Political Costume
Several contributors defend the objectivity and universality of scientific truth. That defense is important. Gravity does not adjust itself after reading election results, and bacteria remain unmoved by motivational speeches.
However, defending scientific realism does not mean every social or political judgment can be settled by biology. Science can describe chromosomes, reproductive systems, disease patterns, environmental effects, and statistical differences. It cannot independently determine how a society should organize rights, language, privacy, education, or dignity. Those questions require ethics, law, history, philosophy, and democratic debate.
When a scientist presents a policy preference as the only possible conclusion of biology, that is not pure science. It is a political argument borrowing a lab coat.
DEI Is Treated as a Single Giant Creature
The phrase “DEI” can refer to many different activities: mandatory statements, recruitment programs, disability access, clinical-trial representation, anti-discrimination policies, mentoring, demographic data collection, community health studies, or bureaucratic training sessions of highly variable quality.
Treating all these activities as one ideology prevents meaningful evaluation. Some programs may be ineffective or coercive. Others may improve research by expanding participation, reducing sampling bias, or ensuring that clinical findings apply to more than a narrow patient population.
Reports from the National Academies have emphasized that diverse research teams and review panels can reduce groupthink, widen the questions being investigated, and improve representation in clinical research. That does not prove every diversity initiative works. It demonstrates why eliminating programs by label rather than evaluating outcomes is itself unscientific.
The Real-World Science Policies the Book Barely Anticipated
During 2025, federal agencies canceled or reviewed research associated with DEI, transgender health, health disparities, vaccine communication, misinformation, and participation by underrepresented groups. NIH grant terminations affected active biomedical projects, while researchers reported uncertainty about whether ordinary words or study populations could cause applications to be flagged.
At the National Science Foundation, grants involving public participation, misinformation, artificial-intelligence literacy, and efforts to broaden scientific participation were among those targeted. The administration described many canceled projects as wasteful or ideological, while affected researchers argued that political labels were replacing peer review.
Universities also faced threats to federal funding tied to disputes involving DEI, campus governance, protests, and institutional policy. The Associated Press described the use of research funding as an unprecedented instrument for pressuring major universities, raising concerns about whether grants were being evaluated according to scientific value or political compliance.
In August 2025, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it was winding down 22 mRNA vaccine-development investments. HHS said the platforms did not provide sufficient protection against upper-respiratory infections and that funding would move toward other technologies. Many scientists and public-health commentators disputed the department’s broad conclusions and warned that abandoning the platform could weaken preparedness for future outbreaks.
These actions demonstrate why critics object to the anthology’s priorities. The book worried that activists might pressure scientists to use preferred language. Government agencies were determining whether entire lines of investigation could continue.
What a More Complete Book About the War on Science Would Examine
A genuinely comprehensive volume would investigate threats from every ideological direction. It would examine campus censorship, administrative bloat, replication failures, publication bias, harassment of dissenting researchers, political manipulation of grants, corporate influence, climate denial, vaccine misinformation, attacks on public-health agencies, restrictions on government data, and laws that dictate conclusions before research begins.
It would distinguish criticism from coercion. A researcher receiving harsh objections on social media is not experiencing the same thing as a researcher losing federal funding because officials dislike the study’s subject. Both situations can be unpleasant, but only one involves the direct power of the state.
It would also apply the same evidentiary standards to friends and opponents. If a progressive claim lacks evidence, challenge it. If a conservative claim lacks evidence, challenge that too. Scientific integrity cannot operate on a loyalty program where every tenth partisan argument earns a free conclusion.
Experiences and Practical Lessons From Reading This Debate
Start by Separating the Book From Its Title
A useful reading experience begins by asking whether the title accurately describes the contents. Someone opening The War on Science might reasonably expect balanced coverage of climate misinformation, pandemic disinformation, political control of health agencies, research funding, corporate interference, and university ideology.
Instead, the collection is primarily about progressive influence within academia. Once that mismatch becomes clear, the book is easier to evaluate. It is not a complete map of threats to science. It is a collection about a particular set of institutional and cultural disputes.
Ask Who Has the Power to Enforce a Claim
Science controversies often arrive wrapped in dramatic language. One professor says a department has become intolerant. An activist says a paper causes harm. A politician says a research program is corrupt. The practical question is not merely who sounds most offended. It is who can impose consequences.
A graduate student can criticize a famous scientist online. A federal agency can terminate the scientist’s grant. A campus group can protest a lecture. A government can threaten billions of dollars in university funding. Comparing these events without considering differences in power produces a distorted picture.
Follow the Evidence Beyond the Anecdote
Many arguments in culture-war books begin with a memorable case: a canceled lecture, a disputed paper, a controversial hiring decision, or a professor punished for a statement. Such cases matter, but anecdotes cannot tell readers how common a problem is, whether it is increasing, or what caused it.
The better habit is to consult surveys, legal records, grant databases, policy documents, and peer-reviewed research. Ask how the evidence was collected. Check whether examples were selected because they represent a pattern or because they generate excellent podcast thumbnails.
Do Not Confuse Criticism With Censorship
Open inquiry gives scholars the right to advance controversial ideas. It does not guarantee applause, invitations, positive reviews, or immunity from rebuttal. Calling a claim inaccurate is not censorship. Asking for stronger evidence is not cancellation. Publishing a devastating review is part of the same free intellectual exchange the original author claims to defend.
Actual censorship involves suppression through coercive authority: banning research, punishing protected expression, manipulating peer review, removing lawful material, or conditioning funding on ideological obedience. Maintaining this distinction prevents every bruised ego from becoming Galileo.
Watch for Selective Definitions of Science
Public intellectuals sometimes define science broadly when its prestige supports their argument and narrowly when inconvenient research challenges it. Biology may be treated as decisive in debates over gender, while epidemiology, sociology, or health-disparity research is dismissed as ideological. Psychology is celebrated when it appears to explain political opponents and distrusted when it complicates a favored narrative.
A consistent reader asks whether methods are sound, evidence is reproducible, conclusions match the data, and uncertainty is acknowledged. The academic department printed on the letterhead should not decide the verdict in advance.
Read Across Political Lines Without Pretending All Threats Are Equal
Balanced analysis does not require declaring every side equally dangerous at every moment. It requires using consistent criteria. Campus conformity can harm scholarship. So can government censorship. A bad DEI policy and the cancellation of hundreds of research grants can both deserve criticism without being treated as equivalent in scale.
The lesson from The War on Science is therefore broader than the book itself. Scholars must consider not only whether their arguments are technically defensible, but how those arguments function in the political world. Ideas travel. Metaphors migrate. Complaints about institutional capture can become official excuses for capturing institutions.
Conclusion: The War on Science Requires Better Target Recognition
The War on Science contains concerns worth discussing. Academic freedom matters. Ideological conformity can weaken research. Hiring standards should be defensible, scholars should be allowed to disagree, and scientific claims should survive by evidence rather than social popularity.
But a defense of science that concentrates on one political faction risks becoming another culture-war weapon. By depicting universities and scientific agencies as corrupted primarily by progressive ideology, the anthology’s contributors helped normalize a story later used to justify political intervention, funding cuts, and restrictions on research.
That is the strongest interpretation of the word “enabled.” It is not an accusation that 39 scholars coordinated an attack. It is a warning that prestigious voices can prepare the rhetorical ground for policies they may later oppose.
Science needs open inquiry, but open inquiry needs independence from political punishment. It needs methodological rigor without ideological double standards. Most importantly, it needs defenders capable of recognizing a burning building even when the fire was started by people who promised to remove the unpopular wallpaper.
Note: This article presents a critical analysis of the book and the public debate surrounding it. The term “enabled” refers to alleged rhetorical and political influence, not evidence that every contributor supported, planned, or approved later government actions. The research synthesis draws on publisher information and reporting or analysis from Simon & Schuster, Science-Based Medicine, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, Nature, Science, the Associated Press, STAT, HHS, NIH, FIRE, AAUP, Heterodox Academy, and the National Academies.
