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This inability to focus on anything immediately newsworthy marked the conference as a whole. Reviews by Jeffrey Shallit in SKEPTIC, by evolutionary geneticist Richard C. Lewontin in Configurations vol. 3, #2, published this spring by the Society for Literature and Science, and even Michael Ruse's in the Academy's own journal all agreed on the book's main failing. They each criticized the tendency of Gross and Levitt to rely on examples so egregious "they require only quotation and not analysis," to quote Lewontin.
Conference organizers seemed not to have taken this criticism to heart. While their agenda aimed squarely at the most extreme members of "the anti-science brigade," speeches and discussions nonetheless leaned towards more general issues of the state and future of university research. Meanwhile, the complaint most often heard from attendees remarked on how much time had been wasted by those who could not resist debunking, caricaturing religion or leftist politics, or telling just one more of their favorite "nutty professor" stories.
The three day schedule included six speeches and ten panels, plus a press luncheon.
The press event was particularly disappointing to organizers, since most of the questions involved philosophical and moral issues prompted by the conference title. Langdon Gilkey, a theologian formerly at the University of Chicago, had been invited on the strength of his opposition to creationist science. He wound up expounding on Stephen Hawking's use of the word "God" for the gathered press members. "Cosmology is philosophy as much as science," he cautioned. While he expressed the greatest admiration for Hawking, Gilkey demurred, "Is he a good theologian? I cannot say!" Organizers changed the subject. Levitt announced that the NIH office on alternative medicine was attacked by those who had lobbied for its creation, once double blind tests had proven fruitless. However, that got him embroiled in an argument with a representative of a holistic AIDS referral service, which took up the rest of the time.
Individual presenters ran the gamut from stern to playful. Mary Lefkowitz of Wellesley College argued against Afrocentric extremism in terms familiar to readers of skeptics' publications. When asked about the past misrepresentation of Greco-Roman slavery to excuse enslavement of Africans, and the currently unremarked Anti-Semitism of writers like the aphorist Juvenal, she answered that these were interesting points she had not had time to address. James Trefil outlined his curriculum for teaching science at George Mason University, claiming you can explain basic principles without using math. Dudley Herschbach, a Nobel laureate who teaches undergraduate chemistry at Harvard, considered one writer's definition of poetry as "imaginary gardens with real toads in them" to apply to science as well. He espoused the creative use of case histories, such as Jefferson's invention of the moldboard plow or the ignominious fate of the aluminum Royal Danish Crown, to entertain and inform. Robin Fox of Rutgers, New Brunswick, told cautionary tales about behaviorist models of social anthropology. Felix Browder, a former head of the American Mathematical Society, was adamant about the realities of shrinking university budgets. He later added that the average startup cost for a single assistant chemistry position is now $500,000. "The rate of change has turned against us," he admitted, regarding the high technology payoffs that had come more rapidly in previous decades. Frederick Crews of UC Berkeley toured the fantasy world of Sigmund Freud without contextualizing On Aphasia, written by Freud before he invented psychoanalysis. Crews later addressed a question about therapy by noting that recruitment literature for "repressed memory" psychologists contains a lot of the postmodern rhetoric so unpopular with Gross and Levitt.
The panels contained a wide enough spectrum of disciplines to foster some self-correction. In "Reason and Politics," political scientist Simon Jackman pointed out that liberalism has been under attack longer than science, and some of the arguments in favor of classical liberalism work as well for scientists. David L. Goodstein came from Caltech "to represent fraud" in "Reason, Belief, Truth, Fraud" because he had drawn up scientific misconduct standards for that institute. Sociologist Stephen Cole demonstrated in the third panel that the social constructivism school often presents two competing views of a scientific phenomenon, without being able to attribute the resolution of their conflict to anything other than experimental data. During the fourth panel Bogdan Denitch, on his way from CUNY to the former Yugoslavia, complained about some Italian politicians rather than Afrocentrists. These officials had "held the budget hostage" at CUNY, he claimed, for a program in Italian studies at the graduate level.
The dapper Gerald Weissmann, MD. served on the next two panels, during the second day of the conference. He had sharp but throwaway comments about those who get their Evian "straight from its polypropylene screw-top." On the other hand, he corrected a questioner from the New York Area Skeptics on the subject of Linus Pauling's theory of oxidants, characterizing it as a lucky guess with an unsound foundation. The panel on mathematics allowed Dr. Levitt, an algebraic topologist, to counter Professor Trefil's notion of the dispensability of the discipline. "Science, Reason and Education" found Bernard Ortiz de Montellano ignoring his own intriguing work on Pre-Columbian Aztec medicine in favor of old Skeptical Inquirer articles on Egyptomania.
Philosopher Janet Radcliffe-Richards retracted some of her earlier thoughts in the next to last panel, on Friday morning. Since the traditional excuses for denying women equal access were illogical fantasies rendered against the laws of inference, she argued gracefully, there is no need to invoke any higher order epistemology in order to deal with them. Those who enforce a "feminist epistemology," as she once had, only succeed in restricting hard-won academic freedom to an intellectual ghetto. This left a trio of literature professors with the unhappy task of explaining Bruno Latour in the final program. Indiana University's Oscar Kenshur placed the question of whether or not humanists have to justify tackling issues in science aside, but insisted that the Latour style "text/discourse" model of constructivism is nonetheless absurd.
The final open discussion late Friday afternoon was dominated by comments on the perceived stumbling block for both Gross and Levitt's book and their conference, and on scientists' public relations skills in general. One man charged that he had heard nothing over the three days that he "couldn't have heard at a CSICOP meeting ten years ago." Another woman, who felt personally offended by some of the diatribes, reminded the organizers that Francis Collins, current head of the Human Genome Project, is a fundamentalist Christian. The National Center for Science Education's Eugenie C. Scott sympathized with the frustrations felt by scientists engaged in emotionally charged public debates, since "we don't expect French cooking to address spiritual values." However, she noted, scientists come across as authoritarian too easily. "We don't know how to talk to the general public," Scott explained.
Privately, one of the few students to attend the conference put it more bluntly. The young man had come from upstate New York, but came away disappointed. After joking that they would have snagged more college kids by offering free pizza and beer, he lamented that they will not win any new constituents by sounding like "old farts," either However, he did offer Scott as an example of someone who could make her points without being self-alienating or insulting anyone's intelligence.
Since the final discussion was geared towards practical solutions to immediate problems, one possible trend and a way to counter it did surface. Levitt pointed out that so-called "Science Studies" programs are now being deliberately organized out of the reach of scientific scrutiny. By contrast a Literature program without any English teachers would at least strike people as odd, if it did not actually have tuition-paying parents and students up in arms. If accredited programs without qualified staff are indeed on the rise, there may be a hard news story in the making. In the meantime, English professor Paul Cantor of the University of Virginia suggested a defensive strategy. When a sciences professor is on a panel to review humanities faculty candidates, Cantor insisted, he or she needs to challenge any candidate's claim that there is no objective truth, so all opinions of scientific fact thereby carry equal weight.
Ironically the Academy's own art gallery, situated forty blocks south of the conference site, may have struck more at the heart of the matter. Curator Lynn Gamwell's brochure characterized works in the concurrent show, "A Century of Silence," not as examples of a flight from science into some other, more supernatural realm. They are instead, she wrote, part of a complete cultural withdrawal from any form of symbolic representation.
Why do people feel that knowledge of the symbols of higher math, and their manipulation in theoretical research and computer programming, is either beyond their grasp or outrightly dispensable? This rejection was nonverbally echoed by Gamwell's collection of ripped and indecipherably interwoven newspapers, virtually blank canvases and noiseless chalkboard erasers. However, this "why" question is not the sort placed above the fold by your local Times, Dispatch or Ledger.