March for Science coverage reveals excitement, resolve, and misgivings
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8212
A protester at the 21 January Women’s March on Washington expresses her support for science.
Near the top of the March for Science home page , march organizers declare that their 22 April planetwide event “demonstrates our passion for science and sounds a call to support and safeguard the scientific community.” In the media, much ink and many electrons are being expended not only in reporting march-inspired enthusiasm, but in examining march-defining questions like this one: How exactly should participants conduct—and not conduct—their supporting and safeguarding?
Answers to science-march questions are unsettled, and apparently so is the planning. The online publication STAT, affiliated with the Boston Globe, focuses on health, medicine, and science. On 22 March, in an article that has attracted attention , STAT characterized some march organizers as new to activism, noted their occasional hesitancy to involve communications professionals, and observed that “keeping a unified message is even harder when each city’s sister march has its own Twitter account and planning committee.” The article described preparations plagued by turmoil, infighting, tensions, resignations, and message splintering.
Verbosity likely explains the splintered-message concern. The March for Science website offers nearly 2400 words of position-stating on four interlinked webpages. The four start with a mission page (460 words), which links to a second page (1200 words) detailing six principles and five goals, all with a link to a third page (600 words) covering diversity and inclusion, which in turn points to an anti-harassment policy (120 words).
More than once the site does proclaim, though not quite succinctly, an intention “to champion robustly funded and publicly communicated science as a pillar of human freedom and prosperity. We unite as a diverse, non-partisan group to call for science that upholds the common good, and for political leaders and policymakers to enact evidence-based policies in the public interest.” But the FAQ page cites an intention “to highlight the valuable public service role science plays in society and policy and demonstrate the deep public support for science.” And then there’s the “Marcher Pledge ": “to work together to share and highlight the contributions of science, to work to make the practice of science more inclusive, accessible and welcoming so it can serve all of our communities, and to ensure that scientific evidence plays a pivotal role in setting policy in the future.”
Whew.
The verbosity got boosted after complaints that the march organizers weren’t addressing the issues of immigration and gender and racial diversity in science. In a late-March blog posting , the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Gretchen Goldman wrote that the organizers “claimed that the event wasn’t ‘political’ and that it was about the science, not scientists. Several twitter fumbles later, it is clear that the organization has been struggling with how to handle diversity.” Her blog headline shows how that struggle has trended: “When I march for science, I’ll march for equity, inclusion, and access.” Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, on the other hand, charged on 29 January that the march plan “compromises its goals with anti-science PC/identity politics/hard-left rhetoric.” Microbiologist Alex Berezow, who blogs for the American Council on Science and Health, reacted to the diversity issue by condemning the march as hijacked by political partisanship.
Drumming up support
Whatever is to be said about messaging, the March for Science is plainly headed to become a Big Deal. As of 3 April, the organizers could claim the support of more than 120 partner organizations , including the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and the Public Library of Science. The planners’ map shows locations of satellite marches on every inhabited continent, with markers as far north as Tromsø, Norway, above the Arctic Circle, and as far south as Dunedin, Otago, New Zealand. The US and Europe are solidly blanketed, but not a single marker appears inside the 11-time-zones width of Russia.
Headlines like “Thousands planning to attend Cleveland’s ‘March for Science!’ in April ” convey the growing enthusiasm. The Huffington Post announced , “Thousands of clergy members endorse the March for Science.” Rousing headlines often also spotlight the central public figure in all of this, as at the Chicago Tribune: “Local science community rallies around opposition to Trump, plans march .”
Within days of President Trump’s inauguration—but weeks before the White House proposed extensive slashing of federal science funding, inciting a media uproar—a general understanding had taken hold. The New York Times put it this way : “Within a week of its creation, the March for Science campaign had attracted more than 1.3 million supporters across Facebook and Twitter, cementing itself as a voice for people who are concerned about the future of science under President Trump.”
By 9 February, the Washington Post‘s Joel Achenbach was reporting that the campaign was “gaining mainstream momentum.” He quoted American Geophysical Union chief executive Christine McEntee, who was “pleased to see the growing support for the value of science and scientific integrity.” She said her organization had begun discussions with march organizers. She emphasized the importance of active participation in democracy and declared, “We fully support the efforts of scientists to speak out on these important issues.” Achenbach also called attention to a Science magazine commentary by physicist and AAAS chief executive Rush Holt. Though Holt didn’t address the march, Achenbach wrote, he urged researchers to “get involved in the political fray"—which, to Achenbach, shows that “even relatively stodgy organizations that make up the scientific establishment are lining up behind the April 22 effort.”
More harm than good?
At about the same time, though, the Atlantic was publishing “Scientists for Trump: Some are skipping the protest and sticking by the president, ‘alternative facts’ and all.” Staff writer Olga Khazan talked to seven Trump-supporting, “right-leaning” scientists, all of whom see the march as a bad idea, politicizing science. Khazan quoted Princeton physicist and former Energy Department research official Will Happer: “Scientists are viewed as pretty privileged already, so to have people out there who are already so well-provided for, out there protesting, it can leave a sour taste in the mouths of many fellow citizens.” She also quoted Judith Curry, the former Georgia Tech climatologist known for blogging her disagreements with scientists’ climate consensus: “I have seen a lot of whining and hysteria coming from scientists about Trump’s election. They need to get over it, their side lost.”
A month later, Curry posted blog thoughts under the headlined question “Exactly what are scientists marching ‘for’?” Atop her text she placed this answering epigraph from science observer Roger Pielke Jr: “The smartest people on the planet want to oppose Trump & the best they can come up with is a march in support of themselves?” Curry asserted, “To me, Trump’s team looks like it has a healthier attitude to science than did Obama’s team, who sought to scientize policy debates and politicize science debates.” She called the march “sort of a ‘we don’t like Trump’ tantrum” and predicted that the “impression that this will have on policy makers and the public will be to cement scientists as a politicized special interest group, just like any other lobbying group.” She added, “In short, I very much fear that this march will do more harm than good.”
That worry pervades much of the media discussion, as the framing of New York Times online survey questions illustrates. The Times, which shares none of Curry’s climate views, asked students if the march will “be a good thing for scientists, or ultimately politicize scientific research and trivialize it in some way.” It asked scientists and science-minded citizens to say why they support or oppose it.
Bloomberg View reported about the more-harm-than-good worry too:
University of Maryland physics professor Sylvester James Gates has … thought about the march and its potential consequences, and he has decided not to participate. He warned that such a politically charged event might send a message to the public that scientists are driven by ideology more than by evidence. Representing science as a political faction or interest group is extraordinarily dangerous, he told a small group of reporters…. He added, “I don’t want to see a march that sets science against the president.”
Coastal geologist Robert S. Young also shares the worry. In a New York Times op-ed , he called the March for Science a “terrible idea.” What’s needed, he emphasizes, is science storytellers, not mass marchers cementing a political divide.
Young himself told a story, for him a sort of touchstone anecdote. He coauthored a 2010 North Carolina report that, by projecting a rise in sea level, inspired a famous display of official ostrichism : his state’s 2012 law banning use of such scientific information to formulate policies. He recalled TV satirist Stephen Colbert’s quip: “If your science gives you a result you don’t like, pass a law saying the result is illegal. Problem solved.”
Young recalled that what he learned from the experience “was that most of those attacking our sea-level-rise projections had never met me, nor my co-authors.” He continued:
Not only that, most of the public had never met anyone they considered a scientist. They didn’t understand the careful, painstaking process we followed to reach our peer-reviewed conclusions. We were unknowns, “scientists” delivering bad news. We were easy marks for those who felt threatened by our findings.
A march by scientists, while well intentioned, will serve only to trivialize and politicize the science we care so much about, turn scientists into another group caught up in the culture wars and further drive the wedge between scientists and a certain segment of the American electorate.
Rather than marching on Washington and in other locations around the country, I suggest that my fellow scientists march into local civic groups, churches, schools, county fairs and, privately, into the offices of elected officials. Make contact with that part of America that doesn’t know any scientists. Put a face on the debate. Help them understand what we do, and how we do it. Give them your email, or better yet, your phone number.
A similar storytelling prescription served in late March as the take-away message for another commentary . In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Sherry Pagoto of the University of Massachusetts Medical School warned against generating “photo ops that will be instantaneously converted into propaganda,” leading the public to dismiss scientists as elitists resembling “an irate Facebook friend.” It’s true that marchers “can hold up signs attacking ‘alternative facts,’ climate denialism, and anti-vaxxers,” she wrote, or even “go straight for the jugular with ad hominem attacks” on Trump administration officials. Much better, she argued, would be to “shine a spotlight on the amazing things science has done for the country.” She urged scientists to tell science’s stories through social media and by engaging with the press, working with university public-affairs offices, blogging, and submitting op-eds.
So what’s to be made of this unprecedented science-and-society phenomenon arriving in three weeks? Splintered-message concerns and other worries notwithstanding, for most participants the headline on Pagoto’s article defines the dominant spirit: “March for Science can inform and inspire.”
Steven T. Corneliussen is Physics Today‘s media analyst. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.