The College Fix

Students studying chemistry at a public university in Georgia were recently instructed that it is unnecessary to memorize the names of various laws named after deceased white, male scientists.

Lecturer Rebekah Cordeiro told her chemistry class Oct. 2 that, under her pedagogy, she does not prioritize learning the names of laws named after white men because it “doesn’t matter,” according to an audio clip of the comment provided exclusively to The College Fix this week.

“The last few minutes of class I am going to talk about a bunch of different laws,” Cordeiro said. “OK, um, here’s the thing about the way that I am going to teach this, it’s a little bit different from the slides and the textbooks, is that — I don’t care if you know the name of all of these different equations.”

“I am not going to ask you, ‘Which one is Boyle’s Law?’ ‘Which one is Charles’s law?’ Because I don’t think it’s very important for you to know all these dead white dudes’ names like that, it doesn’t matter,” she said. “What matters is the relationship between the variables, that you understand the relationship, and that you can use these laws in the math.”

LISTEN: No need to learn “‘dead white dudes’ names,” according to this chemistry lecture at Kennesaw State University

“I am not going to ask you, ‘Which one is Boyle’s Law?’ ‘Which one is Charles’s law?’ Because I don’t think it’s very important for you to know all these dead… pic.twitter.com/5jWThqRNrM

— The College Fix (@CollegeFix) October 25, 2024

Cordeiro, as well as Marina Koether, interim chair of the Department of Chemistry, did not respond to emails Wednesday and Thursday seeking comment. Tammy DeMel, the university’s spokesperson, also did not respond to The College Fix’s emails and a phone call.

The audio clip was provided to The Fix by Kennesaw State University finance Professor David Bray, an outspoken critic of diversity, equity and inclusion dogma. Bray said a student in the class trusted him with the audio clip because of his ongoing campaigns against DEI ideology.

Bray called the incident a “symptom of the current campus environment, where you can say just about anything you want to about a particular race-gender combination, i.e. white men, and no one bats an eye.”

He said the student told him there are several white students in the class but no one spoke up.

“I almost feel like the white male students in the class must feel vocally castrated,” he said in a telephone interview this week with The College Fix. “It’s like, ‘If it’s a white man involved, no one really cares, let’s just keep it moving.’”

“…If I were teaching a civics class and I was talking about Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a Dream’ speech, and I simply told the class, ‘You don’t have to know the name of the dead old black dude, just that he had a dream,’ there would be a full-on protest and cancelation underway.”

Bray is no stranger to controversy. Even though he is homosexual, a category perceived by some as marginalized, in recent years he has been investigated by administrators after criticizing DEI at his university.

Bray said while Cordeiro’s comment is free speech, it does not necessarily fall under academic freedom.

“It’s just the wrong thing to say and the wrong environment,” Bray said. “I do think she should have to apologize to her class for anyone ‘harmed’ by her words — that’s the language they use — because many of her students are related to old dead white dudes.”

Asked to weigh in on the comments, University of Southern California chemistry Professor Anna Krylov told The College Fix that although “the instructor is correct that the mathematics of these laws are more important than the names attached to them, she is doing her students a disservice.”

“First, having names attached to scientific laws makes it much easier to navigate the material and retain it — ‘Boyle’s Law’ is a more compact and vivid reference than ‘The Equation Describing the Relationship Between Volume and Pressure.’”

“Moreover,” said Krylov, a leading critic of the politicization of science in academia, “students need to know the names of these equations because that is how they are referred to in the scientific literature.”

Krylov said via email that by removing the names associated with these laws, “she is robbing her students of the opportunity to learn about the history of science.”

“The history of scientific discovery helps students better understand the scientific method. Knowing the names of the giants on whose shoulders modern science stands provides inspiration for future generations of scientists,” she told The Fix.

Moveover, “the disparaging remark ‘dead white dudes’ is racist and sexist,” Krylov said, adding the chemistry lecturer inappropriately politicized the lesson by injecting personal ideology into the classroom.

“From an academic freedom perspective, the instructor has a right to say all these silly things but, likewise, her colleagues and her students have the right to criticize — and even ridicule — her flawed pedagogy and unprofessional language,” Krylov said.

MORE: Feminist scholars berate female professor for writing ‘Three Cheers for White Men’

IMAGE: Robert Boyle / Science History Institute

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