Alice Sullivan, John Armstrong and Alan Sokal

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Sociologist and author of the Sullivan Review into data on sex and gender Professor Alice Sullivan, finance and mathematics expert John Armstrong and physicist Professor Alan Sokal discuss threats to academic freedom and scientific thought from a range of sources, including attacks on merit-based hiring, policing of language, and replacement of scholarship by ideological mantras.

All three are contributors to a book of essays by well-known scientists, The War on Science. Other contributors include evolutionary biologist Professor Richard Dawkins, cognitive psychologist and psycholinguist Professor Steven Pinker and historian Professor Sir Niall Ferguson. The contributors have joined together to warn that the future of free inquiry and scientific progress is at risk. Some of them have lost positions after speaking out about the threat.

Sullivan is professor of sociology at University College London and co-editor of Sex and Gender: A Contemporary Reader. She was commissioned by the UK government to produce an independent review of data, statistics and research on sex and gender. She recommended that data on biological sex and gender identity should be recorded as distinct categories. Sullivan recently threatened the University of Bristol with legal action for failing to protect her free speech after a talk she gave at the university was disrupted by trans rights activists.

Armstrong is a reader in financial mathematics at King’s College London. In his article in The War on Science he warns that acadcemia is facing a crisis in which political opionions are overriding research and teaching.

Sokal is professor of mathematics at University College London and professor emeritus of physics at New York University. Famous for his 1996 hoax, he is one of the most powerful voices in the continuing debate about the status of evidence-based knowledge. He is co-author (with Jean Bricmont) of Intellectual Impostures: Postmodernist Philosophers’ Abuse of Science, and author of Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture.