The real question is not whether educational institutions should be allowed to promote this sort of drivel. They can do that all they like. The real question is whether institutions promoting it should continue receiving public funding while doing so.
If a university wishes to finance itself on the private market, by all means, let it. Let donors, benefactors, corporations, foundations, and true believers empty their wallets in support of whatever intellectual adventure they deem worthwhile. That is their right. But the moment taxpayer money enters the picture, the standard must change. Public money should be reserved for disciplines that remain anchored to demonstrable reality rather than elaborate exercises in collective imagination.
Science, at its best, is brutally unforgiving. It does not care about fashions, status, credentials, social movements, hashtags, feelings, or political careers. It concerns itself with proof. Something either survives contact with reality or it does not.
That is why I have always been deeply suspicious of models.
Models are useful tools. They are not evidence. They are not reality. Most importantly, they are not substitutes for reality.
Many years ago, while working for a trading company, I watched an entire department whose sole purpose was to dismantle and challenge the models used by traders. Vast sums of money were at stake. Careers were made and destroyed by assumptions hidden deep inside spreadsheets and forecasting systems. The company understood a simple truth: given the opportunity, human beings will tweak, adjust, massage, reinterpret, and quietly optimize any model until it produces the answer they would like to see.
Not because they are evil.
Because they are human.
Bonuses have a remarkable effect on scientific objectivity.
Promotions do as well.
Political influence, media attention, prestige, research grants, speaking fees, consulting contracts, and public acclaim are no less powerful.
People often imagine corruption arriving in a black limousine carrying a suitcase full of cash. In reality, corruption usually arrives disguised as certainty. It whispers exactly what someone already wanted to hear.
The danger of modelling is that it creates an illusion of rigor. Numbers march neatly across a screen. Graphs rise and fall with impressive authority. Equations create the appearance of precision. To the untrained observer, the result looks indistinguishable from proof.
Yet a model remains only as good as its assumptions.
Change the assumptions and the outcome changes.
Adjust a variable here, a coefficient there, a boundary condition somewhere else, and suddenly catastrophe becomes prosperity, disaster becomes stability, and apocalypse becomes a sunny afternoon picnic.
The machine obediently delivers whatever future it has been instructed to imagine.
This is why extraordinary claims demand extraordinary scrutiny.
The more dramatic the prediction, the greater the burden of proof.
The more expensive the proposed solution, the more merciless the examination should become.
The more society is asked to sacrifice, the more evidence should be demanded before a single cent changes hands.
Instead, we often witness the exact opposite.
The most extravagant claims receive the least skepticism. The most alarmist scenarios receive the loudest applause. The most speculative assumptions are elevated to sacred doctrine. Questioning them becomes heresy rather than inquiry.
That is not science.
That is theology dressed up in a lab coat.
Any institution unwilling to subject its claims to relentless scrutiny is abandoning the very principle that justifies its existence. Universities were supposed to be places where ideas fought for survival. Places where assumptions were challenged. Places where cherished beliefs were dragged into daylight and interrogated without mercy.
If they no longer wish to perform that function, then perhaps they should stop presenting themselves as guardians of scientific inquiry.
And if they insist on promoting speculation while demanding public money, taxpayers have every right to ask a rather uncomfortable question:
Why should we continue funding institutions that refuse to apply the same skepticism to themselves that they demand from everyone else?
https://phys.org/news/2026-05-masculine-behavior-bad-planet.html