This article is adapted from a talk delivered at the 2025 National Conservatism Conference.
Let the laser guys play with lasers, let the chip guys build chips, and let the math guys do math. Give the nerds enough funding to make exciting discoveries, and then leave us alone. This is the overarching perspective that STEM reform needs to take to ensure our peace, prosperity, and dominance over strategic rivals such as China in an increasingly technological world.
I have five suggestions for how STEM reform should be approached. First, as long as STEM is embedded in universities, fixing it requires fixing the humanities. STEM is not in isolation. What happens in the humanities is important and central in a university. Wokeism came out of the humanities and is fundamentally a bad metaphysics. We need humanists who can sustain true metaphysics and a correct anthropology, otherwise the environment in universities will continue to be hostile to STEM. To be a bit more concrete, STEM isn’t going to work if we have so-called “other ways of knowing”—such as “feminist geology” or “post-colonial physics”—elbowing their way into academia. You cannot do biology or medicine if you’re confused about the concept of male and female.
Second, we need the right people at the top. Leadership across STEM needs to be replaced with people committed to reform. Unless the directors of agencies, editors of top scientific journals, and presidents of major universities believe that truth exists and that we should pursue it, we’re not going to get anywhere. The corollary of this is that anyone in a leadership position who tacitly or actively supported wokeness needs to go. This includes leaders who imposed discriminatory hiring, issued woke statements on social and political issues, and punished anyone who disagreed. Real consequences are needed to discourage this from ever happening again. The Christopher Eisgrubers (president of Princeton) and Holden Thorps (editor in chief of Science magazine) of the world need to be shown the door. This isn’t about revenge. There’s no way forward without ensuring that leaders in STEM are committed to excellence. The best reform plans won’t work if the people who made the mess are still in charge.
Third, we need to get rid of DEI and anything that smells of it. The Trump administration has made incredible progress in removing wokeism from higher education, and this needs to continue. Wokeism is toxic for science. Scientific progress requires a striving, competitive atmosphere that allows the smartest people to advance the best ideas and be rewarded for doing so. Wokeism stifles this atmosphere by denying merit and promoting skepticism of excellence. It tries to control and manage everything to enforce group-based outcomes. It tries to ensure that only approved narratives are published and promoted, whether they are consistent with the evidence or not. Wokeism imposes a false and unscientific orthodoxy that kills creativity and free thinking—all, ironically, under the slogan “Trust the Science.”
Just as managed economies produce collapse and starvation, managed “woke science” produces idiocy. The biggest source of wokeism in STEM is DEI. The Trump administration is right to have targeted it. All DEI offices and efforts need to be closed permanently, and it’s crucial that they not be allowed to reemerge under different names.
Fourth, we need to support blue-sky, curiosity-driven scientific research. Ultimately, the biggest reason to do science (or anything else) is to glorify God. Fundamental research that marvels at and celebrates the creativity of the Creator is therefore inherently valuable. Even if you view science as merely instrumental—with an increase in human wealth or quality of life as the ultimate goal—it is important to support blue-sky research. An excessive focus on current applications risks preventing the innovation that produces future applications. Almost all of the technological gadgets that underlie American prosperity and security originated in scientific advances based on curiosity-driven research. Basic research on quantum mechanics eventually led to lasers, and basic research on artificial neural networks eventually led to large language models like ChatGPT and Grok. It took decades for these technologies to develop from scientific discoveries, and the original researchers had no idea what the technological applications would be. Putting the nation on a strong scientific and technological footing in the long term therefore requires robust funding for basic science.
Lastly, strengthening the nation requires welcoming top STEM talent from around the world. Part of reforming STEM needs to be maintaining the conditions that encourage top global scientific talent to join and contribute to our nation. Nearly half of American Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants. Three-quarters of the patents from America’s top 10 patent-producing universities had an immigrant inventor. Nearly half of Nobel Prizes awarded to Americans since 2000 have gone to immigrants. Competition with China requires that we continue to draw top scientific talent. If we don’t, China will, to the detriment of our economy and national security.
