Sergiu Klainerman is prestigious professor of mathematics at Princeton who recently guest-authored an article at Common Sense with Bari Weiss.
Who is it hurting to “deconstruct” math, deny its objectivity and claim that insisting on right and wrong math answers is racially biased? Klainerman has
witnessed the decline of universities and cultural institutions as they have embraced political ideology at the expense of rigorous scholarship. Until recently — this past summer, really — I had naively thought that the STEM disciplines would be spared from this ideological takeover.
Klainerman notes that Woke ideology that insists on the existence of “white” math has found effective means to spread widely to colleges, political institutions and businesses through social shaming, mob punishment, guilt by association and coerced speech. Ideology can thus flourish quite well even in the absence of the harsh methods he witnessed while growing up in Romania.
Equally important, the Woke declaration that tradition math is unfair to “racial” minorities is hurting students:
[T]he woke approach to mathematics is particularly poisonous to those it pretends to want to help. Let’s start with the reasonable assumption that mathematical talent is equally distributed at birth to children from all socio-economic backgrounds, independent of ethnicity, sex and race. Those born in poor, uneducated families have clear educational disadvantages relative to others. But mathematics can act as a powerful equalizer. Through its set of well-defined, culturally unbiased, unambiguous set of rules, mathematics gives smart kids the potential to be, at least in this respect, on equal footing with all others. They can stand out by simply finding the right answers to questions with objective results.
There is no such thing as “white” mathematics. There is no reason to assume, as the activists do, that minority kids are not capable of mathematics or of finding the “right answers.” And there can be no justification for, in the name of “equity” or anything else, depriving students of the rigorous education that they need to succeed. The real antiracists will stand up and oppose this nonsense.
See also, here, here, here and here.
