Banking and Universities: Sectors Serving the System
You might have thought that the banking and university sectors were worlds apart but both are in engulfed in existential turmoil. Banks exist, according to the UK’s Bank of England, to ‘work with money: looking after it, lending it, and helping you pay for things’; while universities, according to the seventh President of Chicago University, George Beadle, are there to ‘search for truth’. Unfortunately, these objectives are severely compromised in today’s banks and universities.
Banks Now Serving the Woke Agenda
The existential problems facing banks made the headlines on both sides of the Atlantic in July 2023. For in the US, Dr Mercola, the CFO, Mercola employees and their families have all been debanked by Chase, based it appears on Dr Mercola’s anti-woke status. In the UK, meanwhile, Nigel Farage, the enfant terrible behind Brexit, had his account with Coutts shut down because of his anti-EU and anti-immigration stance. In the course of calling out the bank’s parent, National Westminster bank, Farage disclosed the complicity of the bank’s CEO, Dame Alison Rose, in transferring personal information, much of it misinformation, to the BBC, thereby breaching the standard rules of integrity and confidentiality. Both Alison Rose and the chairman of Coutts were forced to resign.
These examples show two major institutions de-banking clients on account of their views, with both acting in an underhand, indeed dishonest way. Neither actions concern the purposes set down by the Bank of England and so banks are now operating in an irregular manner that serves not only the Woke Agenda but also a Social Credit system.
You might be thinking that the world of retail banking is tawdry as it gets. However, if you take a sneak look at recent events in the world of universities, you will find the same twin elements of censorship and lack of integrity, affecting this time knowledge and information. It is to that world that we now turn.
Universities
The purpose of universities? The seventh President of the University of Chicago, George Beadle, spoke of the quest for the truth, and for many people this is the object of university education and university research. Beadle was a high-flying geneticist who shared a Nobel prize for research into the role of genes in regulating biochemical events within cells so we have good reason to attend to his words:
“One cannot search for truth with a closed mind, or without the right to question or doubt at every step. Any injunction to close the mind, to restrict one’s beliefs arbitrarily, or to accept on authority without doubt, violates the concept of freedom of the mind.”
With his strong views as to the importance of Critical Thinking one wonders what he would make of recent events in four ‘top’ universities – Stanford, Harvard, Thomas Jefferson University and King’s College London. Like the de-banking scandal, all involve an apparent lack of integrity as well as the falsification of information. We will begin with the case of Stanford and then move to Harvard, Thomas Jefferson University and King’s College London.
Stanford University
In 2022, Stanford University appeared in stellar second place on the Wall Street Journal/ Times Higher Ed league table of US universities. Stanford presents itself as a university with a difference whose mission is to “Extend the frontiers of knowledge, to stimulate creativity and to solve real-world problems; to prepare students to think broadly, deeply and critically, and to contribute to the world”. Its allegedly unique vision is summed up in its motto “Die Luft der Freiheit weht” – “The wind of freedom blows”.
So, imagine the shock to discover that the President of this elite institution, Dr Tessier-Lavigne – a former President of Rockefeller University and one-time Chief Scientific Officer at Greentech – failed to correct mistakes in co-authored papers. The student newsletter, The Stanford Daily, did not mince its words: “At various times when concerns with Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s papers emerged—in 2001, the early 2010s, 2015-2016, and March 2021—Dr. Tessier-Lavigne failed to decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes in the scientific record.”
It went on to quote a report that identified both manipulations in Tessier-Lavigne’s neuroscientific research and also a culture in which Tessier Lavigne “tended to reward the ‘winners’ [that is, postdocs who could generate favourable results] and marginalize or diminish the ‘losers’ [that is, postdocs who were unable or struggled to generate such data].”
None of this is particularly savoury, but then neither is the fact that Stanford is a member of the Global Universities Leaders Forum (GULF), a grouping of universities under the aegis of the World Economic Forum (WEF). Given the WEF’s aspirations to achieve a Great Reset – a Fourth Industrial Revolution in which people own nothing and are happy – we can only ask where this leaves Stanford’s aspirations to be a force for freedom? A similar question applies to fellow GULF members including:
- UK: Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College
- Italy: Bocconi University
- US and Canada: Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Berkeley, Colombia, Chicago and McGill Universities
Are these top GULF universities irreversibly compromised?
We ask this given the views expressed by a senior member from one of these institutions, Oxford University, in an article written in 2020 for the WEF: Great Reset: What university entrepreneurship can bring to the post-COVID world. Writing with a professor from Queensland University, he states that: “Through their engagement, teaching and research, universities must redouble their effort to work alongside corporations, governments and NGOs as they search for new business models and policies to assist the ‘Great Reset’”.
Do we really expect that the raison d’être of universities is to serve the Great Reset? And what does the WEF have to say about education? You can read the WEF’s vision of education in the Fourth Industrial Revolution in this 2023 WEF document ‘Education 4.0’ (from this WEF page Defining Education 4.0: A Taxonomy for the Future of Learning).
You will quickly perceive that the role assigned to education is limited to ensuring that “skills acquired during early childhood, primary and secondary education continue to be developed and defined in the workplace”. Indeed, the document goes on to state, all too brazenly, that: “Most education taxonomies that pertain to childhood through secondary education identify three primary groups of aptitudes:
- abilities and skills, (2) attitudes and values, and (3) knowledge and information [see Figure 2 in ‘Education 4.0’]. The Education 4.0 Taxonomy places particular focus on the former two categories, as experts and employers indicate that these learning areas will require additional emphasis in future education systems relative to the emphasis they get today”.
Having the so-called ‘top’ universities of the world limited by this narrow perspective on education as a handmaiden to the workplace is concerning indeed. Is this the future that we want for our children, where learning is focused on skills relevant to the workplace? Or would we sooner provide people with an education that puts evidence-based Critical Thinking at the centre of inquiry?
Talk of ‘evidence-based inquiry’ links us to our next cause célèbre, namely the scandal rocking the institution that heads up the Wall Street Journal/ Times Higher Education league table of US universities: Harvard.
Harvard University
If you can’t trust research on dishonesty, what can you trust? Harvard, the oldest university in the US, dating back to 1636 and in second position in the Times Higher Education league table (following Oxford University), has put a leading scholar, Professor Francesca Gino, on administrative leave, after accusations that she falsified data over an extended period.
This led to the retraction of three papers that she co-authored, and doubt is now cast on the entire field of behavioural science, the field in which she worked. We say this since it was the unlikely hypotheses presented in these papers, all backed up by spectacularly good statistics, that led a team of three outside academics to call them into question.
Of course, the allegations of falsified data raise the all-important question as to the motivation behind this. Interestingly, nine years ago, Professor Gino states that people can get sidetracked because of external pressures (see the first minute of this video Ethical Behavior). So, it is conceivable that the relentless pressures on academics to publish in an increasingly small number of journals and to bring in substantial research-related funding are unsustainable. What is more, Gino’s 2019 tax filings show her pay from Harvard and ‘related organisations’ as running to around $1 million, and she may have, Faust-like, doctored her data in order to preserve this income.
This is in no way to condone her action but merely to explain some of the factors that may have played a part. And if these are correct, then the falsification of data highlighted here may be widespread in academia. This in turn raises the question as to whether Professor Gino was alone in manipulating the data.
Did she act on her own? According to the three Professors who started their investigation in 2021 – the trio consisted of Uri Simonsohn of ESADE Business School in Barcelona, Leif Nelson of the University of California and Berkeley and Joseph Simmons of the University of Pennsylvania – none of Gino’s co-authors are implicated. However, it is hard to grasp since how such a conclusion could have been reached since it is only very recently that an investigation has been launched into the data held by different parties.
As part of this, Simonsohn and five of Gino’s co-authors are gathering information from nearly 150 collaborators as to who collected and handled the data for the journal articles; which files are available for analysis; and whether they still consider the published work to be credible.
It will be extremely interesting to see the outcome of this investigation since a large number of institutions collaborated with Gino’s research. If we take the case of two of the most prominent papers co-authored by Gino (one from 2012 and one from 2015), other authors included academics from Northwestern, Duke, South California and Toronto Universities, as well as a colleague from Harvard, and in the now notorious paper from 2012, she was shown as the third of five authors and so, by definition, did not have the leading role.
Were academic journals to blame too? Moreover, since the articles in question were published in top journals, for example, the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and the journal Psychological Science, one might also ask what share of the responsibility they should take. After all, if Simonsohn, Nelson and Simmons had suspicions concerning the findings, why did these so-called ‘top’ journals not also ask questions?
This is to enter the world of academic journals and concerns regarding the lack of reliability of Peer Review, issues exposed in Truth University Press’s publication The Dark Side of Academia – How Truth is Suppressed by the Secret Professor. So, we can see that the falsification of data at Harvard puts the cat amongst the pigeons and calling into question the value of much academic research. Perhaps the ultimate irony lies in Harvard’s logo, one emblazoned by the word ‘Veritas’ since truth is a casualty in this tale of dodgy data.
The irony present in this tale is apparent also in the scandal concerning the toppling of the President of Thomas Jefferson University, Mark Tykocinski.
Thomas Jefferson University
The irony? Well, Mark Tykocinski, a molecular immunologist and Dean of the University’s medical school, resigned after liking a number of tweets that questioned the Covid treatments, Big Pharma and also gender reassignment involving children. Now, many readers might empathise with Tykocinski’s sentiments and ask why his action of liking tweets that questioned mainstream narratives, should have forced his removal from the position of President, particularly since he had only been in the post for one year. To ask this question is particularly apt when you consider that the man after whom the University is named, Thomas Jefferson (1743-1846), the third President of the United States author of the Declaration of Independence, diplomat, lawyer, architect and philosopher, placed a premium on the importance of information, writing that: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be – the People cannot be safe without information.”
So here in 2023, we find a University President, Tykocinski, prepared to prioritise accurate information on important topics in the spirit of Jefferson’s words, and then being pressured into resigning because of this. If Jefferson’s spirit is looking down at the University, he must surely be writhing in distress as we see the marginalisation of a man capable of questioning mainstream, often glib, narratives.
The suppression of mainstream truths is a pervasive theme throughout academia and we offer a final example before drawing our conclusions.
King’s College, London
This tale, from March 2023, concerns a Reader in Financial Mathematics, Probability and Statistics Dr John Armstrong at King’s College London (KCL). He submitted a proposal for ethics approval for a project investigating the views of elite athletes regarding trans participation in athletics. He did this having been approached in January 2023 by members of UK Athletics who were aware that World Athletics was planning a new policy on trans inclusion, and knew also that UK Athletics had refused to survey either its grassroots membership or its elite athletes on the question.
Ethics approval is needed for any study involving human subjects and so obtaining ethics approval was an essential first step. The ethics review form required that a summary of the project’s aims be provided in easily understandable language and so his proposal stated that the aim of the research was “to find the views of athletes and volunteers on the question of when males should be allowed to compete in the female category in athletics”.
The outcome? The proposal was rejected by the ethics committee on the grounds that using the terms “male” and “female” in this sentence constituted “misgendering”. Dr Armstrong subsequently wrote that the effect was to prevent him from using the concept of sex at all. He was also required to seek input from the Equality Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) team at KCL on the “wording used in the survey” and the “presentation of the research”. As he writes, the EDI team is part of the university’s human resources function and has no particular research expertise and, in a course aimed at senior managers, presented the view that sex was a spectrum from male to female with “intersex” somewhere in between. This flies in the face of biological fact, as stated in an earlier article by the author published on Principia Scientific.
In fact, the misrepresentation of biological sex is all pervasive. Dr Armstrong quotes comments from Peer Review to the effect that it is transphobic to talk about biological sex and another opining that her binary understanding of sex was exclusive to “white liberal feminism” and part of the neo-colonialism of the global south. We also find that the social science funder ESRC is committed to “embedding EDI principles, commitments and ambitions in all we do”, with the Quality Assurance Association for Higher Education (QAA) stating that “Values of EDI should permeate the [mathematics] curriculum and every aspect of the [mathematics] learning experience.”
Banking and Universities: Handmaidens to the Woke System
We have reached a Rubicon where financial and educational bodies are serving the needs of the system rather than the people using them. The way forward lies in creating new systems, driven by the very principles lacking in the mainstream, namely truth, integrity and Critical Thinking. The book that I co-authored with Katherine Armitage ‘Light Bulb Moments and the Power of Critical Thinking’ points the way ahead, with Truth University, its publisher, shining a light on what a better university looks like. We await pioneers to lead the way in creating financial institutions that are freed from the shackles of the Woke Agenda.
Gloria Moss PhD FCIPD is a Professor of Management and Marketing and author of 8 books and over 80 peer reviewed journal articles and conference papers. You can visit Truth University www.truthuniversity.co.uk and sign up to its Newsletter and find out more about its research courses, books and conferences. The next conference, ‘Questioning Science’ is taking place on 18-20 August in the Peak District, UK and more information can be obtained from [email protected]
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