Or it could be they found his hypothesis completely without merit.

Although I found his paper interesting, he handwaved Confucianism away as the explanation for East Asian personality traits.

No matter the origins of Confucianism, it was the Chinese state religion for almost two thousand years and heavily influenced Korea, Japan, Vietnam etc.

Sure, but that doesn't really modify the point. Those fields are "forbidden" (the publication of his paper demonstrates they are not; they are unpopular having generated significantly negative outcomes and no shortage of dead-ends) for a reason.

"The secret to my radiation-proof space suit was interspersing microscopic mercury-selenium pellets in the fabric of the suit with quantum properties that match the wavelength of ionizing radiation at a ~"

"Oh, you're using mercury. In fabric. That goes on human skin. Okay, now we really need to see a prototype. And your health trials."

> He was specifically told he was rejected for doing forbidden research.

Or, that's what he told us. Also, I've done my PhD and I don't think I've ever seen a graduate program telling a candidate why they were rejected. It is always the standard "There are more qualified candidates than we can accommodate and we could not accept everyone, I hope you understand."

...which makes me a little bit suspicious about the whole tale.

For me personally I require more evidence than a few quotes that do not appear to actually be direct quotations to accept his conclusion that the reason he was rejected was PhD programs were too "woke". It is possible, but it's also possible that he misunderstood what they were trying to tell him.

Many people who get into PhD programs have some level of undergraduate research (typically performed in a lab, alongside grad students and a professor). When a graduate acceptance committee is evaluating applications, signals like "I have worked with a professor", "wrote an undergrad thesis", and "was coauthor and published in a peer-reviewed journal" cause applicants to be ranked more highly than peers who lack those signals.

The only source we have for the contents of those rejection letters is excerpts from the individual rejected.

I don't think we can extrapolate from that data set alone.