GUEST COLUMN, John Richard Schrock, Education Frontlines
American legislators, governors and school boards are increasingly overriding the professional decision-making of medical doctors, scientists, faculty and librarians. By canceling research in many fields, limiting or prohibiting teaching of bona fide science, censoring select books, and in some cases promoting the teaching of non-science, the U.S. is now entering a new era of Lysenkoism.
Trofim Lysenko became Director of the Institute of Genetics in the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1940. With Stalin’s support, Lysenko demanded Russian researchers stop any genetic research and follow a doctrine of inheritance of acquired characteristics. He stopped genetic research and sent scientists critical of his ideas to the gulags. He maintained his position and influence for 25 years.
His basis for suppressing the new Mendelian genetics was political. In Czarist Russia, the rulers had been a hereditary line. But in the new communist Russia, a married couple who both worked hard and developed muscles should have more robust offspring. And along with Allies, Russia was fighting against Nazi eugenics and racial elitism. Lysenko placed wheat seedlings in a refrigerator for longer and longer times, a process of “vernalization,” that he claimed allowed it to then survive in colder regions.
But a brilliant Russian named Nicoli Vavilov was a major advocate of genetics. He traveled around the world to locate the origins of major world crops in order to locate and preserve the more diverse genetics that would provide resistance to future diseases. Today, these are called “Vavilov centers.” But because Vavilov did not agree with Lysenko’s political “biology,” he was sent to a gulag where he would die. And Russia would lag behind in agricultural genetics for a quarter of a century under Lysenko’s enforcement of politically-motivated fraudulent science.
The U.S. has had instances where politics ignored or suppressed science. During the McCarthy era “commie scare,” Robert Oppenheimer lost his security clearance after having led our atomic bomb research, government professionals unjustly lost their jobs due to political pressure and blacklisting resulted in widespread injustice.
In 1968, Epperson v. Arkansas found the Arkansas statute making teaching of evolution illegal violated the Establishment Clause. In Edwards v. Aguillard in 1987, the U.S. Supreme Court found the Louisiana statute requiring “equal treatment” of evolution and creation “science” to be unconstitutional. In the 2005 Dover, Pennsylvania case, Judge John E. Jones III ruled in favor of science, writing that intelligent design “cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents.” Nevertheless, the West Virginia legislature recently passed, and the Governor signed, a bill allowing this non-science back into public school science classroom.
Other attempts that are underway include state legislative bills that attempt to establish “academic gag orders” that define subjects that cannot be taught, ranging from racism in American history to the science behind gender identity.
In order to reduce K-12 teacher’s professional authority, three states currently have eliminated K-12 tenure and the Republican Party Platform clearly made a goal of eliminating K-12 teacher tenure in the remaining 47 states. To likewise reduce the academic freedom to teach recognized professional content and justify maintaining outdated cultural concepts, bills have been introduced in four states to eliminate tenure in higher education. In some universities, general education has been drastically cut under the belief that education is mere job training. Some legislation points to supposed university leftist indoctrination and proposes mandating curricula without faculty input. Some efforts also include altering the core curriculum to eliminate and/or add courses based on political perspectives. And some states have sought to mandate school choice of accreditors or force changes in accredition.
Across the states and at the federal level, we are now seeing a record number of executive actions as well as proposed and enacted state laws that dictate to scientists areas they cannot research, to medical doctors procedures they cannot apply, to teachers topics and curricula they cannot teach, and to professional librarians books they must remove.
Lysenkoism is again live and well in the United States.
EDITOR’S NOTE — All opinions are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Leader & Times or its staff.
