Rice University Climbs Woke Mountain

Considered one of the USA’s Tier 1 schools, along with the Ivies, top public universities such as Michigan, Texas, California, UCLA, Virginia and North Carolina, and prestigious private ones like Stanford, MIT, Cal Tech, Chicago, Northwestern, Vanderbilt and Duke, Rice is arguably the finest institution of higher learning in Texas. It ain’t cheap, costing undergraduates $73,000 per year.  

But that status is not enhanced by the inclusion of CHEM 125 001 in the Rice Course Schedule and Catalog, spring semester 2024. “Afrochemistry” has been the subject of widespread mockery and ridicule ever since it was announced. The teacher (excuse me, “preceptor”) of this ill-conceived class is Brooke Johnson, a Houston native. A middle-distance runner on the Rice track team in the mid-2010s, she got a Ph.D. in chemistry at Princeton last year. I cannot help wondering how many “affirmative action” boosts she got along the way. Obviously a new member of the faculty—the DEI Department, not the Chemistry Department—Johnson proposed this course and must have been amazed when it won approval. Her university bio says that she is “passionate about the intersection of science and social justice and using her unique experiences to teach, support and inspire diverse students.”

According to the RU website, students taking Afrochemistry will “apply chemical tools and analysis to understand black life in the US” and “implement black sensibilities to analyze chemistry…. Diverse historical and contemporary scientists, intellectuals and chemical discoveries will inform personal reflections and proposals for addressing inequities in chemistry and chemical education.”

Students taking this course may learn little about thermodynamics, kinetics, molecular structure, polypeptide sequences or stoichiometric reaction equations, but they are sure to get a thorough grounding in systemic racism, equity, multiculturalism and other such nonsense.

There are many ways to devalue a great university, and this is one of them. Rice has historically had very strong STEM programs in which the hard sciences are just that: hard. The Chemistry Department has two Nobel laureates and four members of the National Academy of Sciences. Anatoly Kolomeisky, Peter Rossky and John Hutchinson all work in the RU Chemistry Department. Wanting to know their view of this matter, I sent each an e-mail. I have yet to get a reply. I also contacted President Reginald DesRoches (a native of Haiti who has been on the job since the summer of 2022). No answer. With little to lose, I wrote to Johnson and am still waiting to hear from her. Like DesRoches, Johnson is black.

The Rice administration’s decision to add “Afrochemistry” to its curriculum has prompted some amusing quips on the blogosphere. Here are a few: “This professor must be on loan from the University of Wakanda”; “What’s next, Afro-Differential Equations? Afro-Rocket Science?”; “I’m sorry, but I don’t remember what element racism is on the periodic table”; “The first class discusses how the patriarchy tells marginalized people not to mix ammonia and bleach”; “If a quark and a nucleus ever mated, what color would their offspring be?”; and “Soon you’ll be able to purchase a chemistry degree in the back of Rolling Stone magazine!”

It is of a piece with a canard pushed by the left over the last several years wherein math is viewed as “racist.” If 2 plus 2 does not really equal 4, or if adding an acid to a base does not really yield salt and water, heaven help us. Who will design our bridges, buildings and airplanes in the future or develop new medicines and vaccines? It will not be young people coming out of an educational system that fancies itself progressive. No, it will be, for example, bright German, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Indian grads who rose to the top by sheer academic and intellectual competition.

“Afrochemistry” is a filler course, no more and no less. Most universities have them, and I am sure it is true of those New England stalwarts, Harvard and Yale. But what makes this one different is its politicization of science, contributing to a further erosion in Americans’ trust in science as well as higher education. RU’s leaders should have nixed Johnson’s initial request to start a course blending chemistry with feel-good identity politics. It serves to legitimize the kind of left-wing political and cultural indoctrination that has accelerated America’s devolution.

Tangentially related to all this is the recent removal of the statue of William Marsh Rice that had sat in the center of the campus’ Academic Quadrangle for the last 90 years. (Since the school’s opening in 1912, its racial restriction [Whites only] was not a secret; it was overturned in 1964. Further scrutiny of the founder’s background showed that he had owned 15 slaves and been part of a slave patrol in Houston during the Civil War.)

I have a friend who in the late 1970s earned two degrees from Rice—and one from Cambridge in England. A proud alumnus, he is dismayed at the turn his alma mater has taken. Rice, with its $8 billion endowment, would not seem to need donations, but when asked, he gave. These days, in light of a variety of DEI initiatives, most egregiously Brooke Johnson’s “Afrochemistry” course, he declines to write any more checks.

Dr. Brooke Johnson…

A flyer advertising Johnson’s course…

The statue of William Marsh Rice is removed from campus…