Hillsdale College Hosts an Evening with the Academy for Science & Freedom
HILLSDALE, Mich. — Hillsdale College hosted “An Evening with the Academy for Science & Freedom” on Sept. 1. More than 700 guests attended the evening’s events, which included dinner and a colloquium featuring the Academy for Science & Freedom’s three founding fellows: Scott Atlas, M.D.; Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., Ph.D.; and Martin Kulldorff, Ph.D.
“The Academy for Science and Freedom exists to educate the American people about the free exchange of scientific ideas and the proper relationship between freedom, science, and the pursuit of truth,” Patrick Whalen, who introduced the fellows, said. “The pursuit of truth, indeed, ought to be at the heart of every scientific endeavor.”
The colloquium began with remarks from Atlas, a senior fellow in Health Policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and former professor and chief of neuroradiology at Stanford’s medical center. He served as an advisor to President Trump and a member of the Trump administration’s White House Coronavirus Task Force. He gave a talk titled “Censorship & the Politicization of Science,” which argued that the demonization of those with differing views and overt denial of scientific facts by public health leaders threaten the free exchange of ideas and jeopardizes society’s trust in their institutions.
“No matter what happened directly about COVID-19, the lingering problem now is one of trust and a lack of trust in institutions that are critical to the success of this country and to any free society,” Atlas said.
Following Atlas’s talk, Bhattacharya, a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine in the Department of Health Policy, gave a talk titled “Bureaucracy & Science: A Dysfunctional Relationship.” Bhattacharya made the case that separating the funders of scientific research from the science itself will eliminate the existing conflict of interest and the dangerous illusion of false scientific consensus.
“One of the great opportunities to come out of the pandemic is the sense that we are in crisis as a society, that the way that science can be used to rule the lives of people is not right,” Bhattacharya said.
Kulldorff, a biostatistician and epidemiologist who serves as the scientific director of the Brownstone Institute, gave a talk titled “Peer Review is Broken: Why It Matters and How to Fix It.” The solution, he argued, is decentralization and independent funding agencies.
“Now we give grants to somebody who can come up with some ideas of what to do,” said Kulldorff. “But why not instead reward people who did … good research in the past because they’ll probably be good at research next time also? And that gives them more freedom to actually pursue what they want.”
Hillsdale College established the Academy for Science & Freedom to combat the recent and widespread abuses of individual and academic freedom made in the name of science. The Academy, which operates out of Hillsdale’s campus in Washington, D.C., educates the American people about the free exchange of scientific ideas and the proper relationship between freedom and science in the pursuit of truth.
To learn more about Hillsdale College’s Academy for Science & Freedom, click here.
For photos from the event, click here.
To watch a recording of the event, click here.
For a high-resolution copy of the Hillsdale College clocktower logo, click here.