{"id":528286,"date":"2025-07-05T15:27:26","date_gmt":"2025-07-05T13:27:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/leregardlibre.com\/?p=528286"},"modified":"2026-03-07T18:31:14","modified_gmt":"2026-03-07T17:31:14","slug":"science-activism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/leregardlibre.com\/en\/policy\/switzerland\/science-activism\/","title":{"rendered":"When science and activism go hand in hand"},"content":{"rendered":"

Under the guise of inclusion and social justice, universities too often sacrifice scientific rigor to ideology. According to historian Olivier Moos, this drift compromises its primary mission: to shed light on reality rather than to serve causes.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

There is an implicit contract between the university and society. In exchange for generous subsidies from the cantons and the Confederation, as well as broad institutional autonomy, the university commits itself to the intellectual and critical edification of our future elites, to the transmission of knowledge and the production of expertise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To fulfill this role, the institution must remain a space free from ideological or political constraints. Its members must be recruited on the basis of merit, free to explore and debate the most sensitive subjects, with research knowing no servitude other than that imposed by the scientific method. Admittedly, the reality is much murkier than the grand principles, but this is the horizon to be pursued if the institution is to retain its legitimacy and the public's trust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unfortunately, there is good reason to believe that a number of university faculties and institutes of higher education have denounced this contract without relinquishing their privileges. The demand for neutrality and objectivity all too often gives way to progressive militancy, where virtue-signalling tends to take precedence over the quest for knowledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read also | The politicization of the University of Geneva<\/a><\/h6>\n\n\n\n

\u00abBeing a committed historian in no way prevents us from seeking to write an objective and interpretatively grounded historical narrative, - let's not forget that any assertion of a neutral and \u201crational\u201d history is also ideology, and that conservatism is also militancy.\u00bb[1]<\/sup><\/a>, These are the words of four female researchers from the University of Geneva in an interview about their collaboration on the project to feminize street names in the city of Calvin. This is the sophism of the activist researcher: given that we all have political and moral preferences, impartiality is less a discipline to be cultivated than an illusion to be abandoned, and so research can legitimately espouse this or that social or ideological cause (provided, it goes without saying, that it remains firmly anchored on the left). Activism and science go hand in hand, historians tell us, because \u00abthe awareness of belonging to a progressive or minority current often obliges one to be more methodologically rigorous\u00bb. That's a relief. Incidentally, this feminist Genferei with which these academics are associated is an initiative of the\u2019association L'Escouade<\/a>, whose ambition is to destroy \u00abthe capitalist, patriarchal and racist system in which we live\u00bb.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Il ne s\u2019agit nullement d\u2019une anomalie genevoise. Ainsi qu\u2019en t\u00e9moigne le compte rendu du congr\u00e8s 2019 de la Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 suisse d\u2019Etudes genre, membre de l\u2019Acad\u00e9mie suisse des sciences humaines et sociales (ASSH), le m\u00e9pris du lib\u00e9ralisme, la d\u00e9testation du capitalisme ou encore le combat contre l\u2019infalsifiable patriarcat semble en effet faire consensus parmi nos rigoureux expert.e.x.s.[2]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read also | \u00abUnder certain conditions, intelligence predisposes to error\u00bb.\u00bb<\/a><\/h6>\n\n\n\n

As the university remains the main factory of elites, activism disguised as science inevitably spreads into the political arena, infiltrates legislation and colonizes bureaucratic niches. The magazine Tangram<\/em>, published by the Federal Commission against Racism (FCR), is an eloquent example. In 2020, for example, the num\u00e9ro 44<\/a> s\u2019articulait autour de \u00abla mort de l\u2019Afro-Am\u00e9ricain George Floyd, \u00e9touff\u00e9 \u00e0 Minneapolis sous le genou d\u2019un policier blanc\u00bb. Cette blanchit\u00e9 \u2013 concept h\u00e9rit\u00e9 des \u00abth\u00e9ories critiques de la race\u00bb d\u00e9velopp\u00e9es par leurs non moins rigoureux homologues nord-am\u00e9ricains \u2013 est au c\u0153ur des pr\u00e9occupations d\u2019une anthropologue de la Haute Ecole sp\u00e9cialis\u00e9e de Suisse occidentale (HES-SO), dont l\u2019article consacr\u00e9 au \u00abprivil\u00e8ge blanc\u00bb nous apprend que ce dernier est le cache-sexe du \u00abracisme syst\u00e9mique\u00bb dans notre pays. Dans ce m\u00eame num\u00e9ro, une professeure d\u2019Etudes genre de l\u2019Universit\u00e9 de Berne nous rappelle aussi que \u00abla repr\u00e9sentation probl\u00e9matique de la masculinit\u00e9 blanche n\u2019est pas seulement li\u00e9e \u00e0 la domination coloniale, mais aussi \u00e0 la domination patriarcale sur les femmes blanches, les autres sexes et les enfants\u00bb. Une autre contribution, sous les plumes d\u2019une p\u00e9dagogue et d\u2019une sociologue, nous encourage \u00e0 d\u00e9mocratiser plus encore notre oppressive soci\u00e9t\u00e9 par l\u2019extension des politiques de quotas au profit des personnes de couleur, des immigr\u00e9s ou encore des personnes queers<\/em>. All this, of course, in the name of fairness, inclusion, progress and so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To our dossier \u00abL'irresponsabilit\u00e9 des \u00e9lites\u00bb (The irresponsibility of elites)\u00bb<\/a><\/h6>\n\n\n\n

None of the contributors to this issue saw fit to challenge the stubborn myth that there is an epidemic of police killings of African-Americans, to explain to their readers that racism (or sexism) can coexist with inequalities between groups without necessarily being the cause, or to discuss the social and political costs that often emerge in the wake of preferential programs. This lack of critical distance is not accidental; it is an emerging property of the system. Our experts are produced by institutions where such nuances are politely disregarded, if not simply deemed immoral. It's true that empirically testing one's hypotheses can prove imprudent when one's salary and status depend on the persistence and gravity of the vice one has set out to combat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read also | Non-violent occupation or the militant oxymoron<\/a><\/h6>\n\n\n\n

The problem is probably not so much quantitative as qualitative. If surveys on the deconstruction of gender among Swiss farmers[3]<\/sup><\/a> or the efforts of \u00abdecolonization\u00bb of the Mus\u00e9e valaisan des Bisses<\/a> are not representative of academic production as a whole, the treatment of so-called \u00absocietal\u00bb subjects is all too often marked out by imposed premises and obligatory conclusions. Our institutions of learning still produce high-quality research, but what Boudicca in Etudes genre would venture to dispute the assertions of the academic manifesto of the \u00abWomen's Strike\u00bb<\/a> (2019)? To denounce the selection bias of the survey on \u00abThe cost of virility in Switzerland\u00bb.\u00bb<\/a> (2024)? What conquistador in the faculty of Social and Political Sciences would scuttle his career by deflating the hyperbole of the UN experts' report on racism in Switzerland<\/a> (2022), which attributes the country's economic success to colonialism and slavery? What maquis in the philosophy department would risk publishing a peer-reviewed article deconstructing the inconsistencies of gender theories?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read also | From \u00abus\u00bb to \u00abme\u00bb: the suicide of the American left<\/a><\/h6>\n\n\n\n

While these objects of study are perfectly legitimate in themselves, the ideological formatting of research generates partial diagnoses and biased conclusions that impoverish public debate, corrupt expertise and undermine the credibility of the \u00abscientific consensus\u00bb. The taxpayer, the first to fall for the joke, finds himself unwillingly funding various forms of militancy; many students leave university armed with certainties to recite rather than the tools to think; as for researchers, they see their room for manoeuvre shrinking under the combined effect of ideological fashions and the capture of funding by certain lobbies. When a student, at the end of a very rare debate devoted to alternative scientific approaches to the dominant paradigm of Gender Studies, expresses surprise at never having been exposed to such perspectives during her entire course, it testifies to a profound dysfunction in the system. Preferring ideological convictions to the discomfort of the scientific process betrays the mission of the university.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read also | Separating the researcher from the activist or drowning the researcher in the activist<\/a><\/h6>\n\n\n\n

Privately, a number of researchers share this regrettable observation, although they know that the objection can prove socially and professionally costly. Sometimes all it takes is a mobilized and intransigent minority to make its preferences prevail over a silent majority. There is, of course, no institutional censorship, and freedom of expression is celebrated with great fanfare. Taboos and intellectual norms are imposed through socialization in an environment where critical-minded students quickly realize that the seraglio is entrusted to eunuchs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No malice or conspiracy at work. Inertia is enough. The rhetorical hegemony of the progressive left is the natural result of growing endogamy in the social sciences and humanities - a long-term process, common to many Western countries, that has been unfolding for half a century. We prefer to recruit from our own tribe, and these marriages between cousins inevitably contribute to ideological consanguinity, encouraging liberals and the rare conservatives to censor themselves, or to opt for a different career. All diversity is good, except that of ideas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n