STEM spending on grants related to ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ grew by roughly 300 percent in just one year.
When 'diversity' and STEM collide, the price is measured in lives and billions of dollars.
D iversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and other “antiracist“ ideologies have metastasized in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) departments of major universities. Accreditation standards, hiring, tenure, the scope of research, and speech are being corrupted, while scientific inquiry, facts, capabilities, and achievements are debased.
“DEI has torn through barriers established to protect students and professors from ideological intrusion into their learning and research. By dismantling academic freedom and enforcing ideological uniformity among faculty and staff, DEI’s followers have established themselves as the preeminent ideologues on America’s college campuses today,” concludes Mason Goad, co-author of Ideological Intensification, an extensive National Association of Scholars (NAS) study on DEI in STEM published this month.
The study examined 100 college and university websites and Twitter feeds, the content of four major academic associations, major STEM databases, as well as the purpose and amount of grants awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health (NIH). It found that DEI-related language grew by 4,200 percent from 2010 to 2021 in scientific publications, and by 2,600 percent in college and university STEM websites, with similar trends in social media. At Ivy League universities, the rate of growth was nearly double the rate in other institutions. Spending on grants related to DEI grew by roughly 300 percent in just one year.
Commenting on the NAS study, activist physiologist J. Scott Turner observed that “the DEI assault on the natural sciences is a worrying trend not just for the few remaining heterodox scientists, but also for the quality of research that our government and experts from around the world rely upon.”
Embedding jargon in websites can be a precursor to action or its result. It can set or reflect priorities, or be mere virtue signaling. DEI in STEM is a reality. Universities are rapidly replacing merit, achievement, and research intended to benefit all of humanity with quotas and programs based on race, gender identity, and sexual orientation, intended to benefit just a few. In so doing, they are suppressing opposing views, and dismantling the phenomenon that made the United States a magnet for aspiring scientists, engineers, and physicians from around the world, and provides the U.S. an edge in commerce, space and the military.
Examples of DEI’s corrosive influence on STEM abound. I wrote here and here about how the American Medical Association, the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC), and medical schools are rapidly replacing merit with servility to progressive and even Marxist dogma. The problem is hardly limited to medicine, and it’s spreading beyond universities.
Last month, Do No Harm, which fights wokeness in health care and the sciences, filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education against twelve Oklahoma universities that participate in a STEM program which excludes white, Asian, and Middle Eastern students. After the complaint was filed, at least one university modified its website to rescind the exclusions.
In September, Do No Harm sued Pfizer over a fellowship that excludes whites and Asians. Other science and technology companies pursue similar strategies, including, among many others, Microsoft’s “racial equity initiative,” Google’s BOLD program for “historically underrepresented students,” and Apple’s rapid growth in “underrepresented minorities.”
Last year, the U.S. Department of Education opened an investigation into a University of Cincinnati policy that excluded males from an undergraduate science program. In June, the university modified its program to instead exclude whites and Asians.
To implement President Biden’s orders to impose DEI for black, Hispanic, and Native students, the NSF collects data on race and gender, and the two principal funders of scientific research, the NIH and the NSF, have greatly increased grants for DEI-related research, up roughly 300 percent from just 2020 to 2021, including: NIH grants not available to white males; NSF’s INCLUDES program, which allocates funds based on DEI; and NSF’s EAGER grants, which pressure recipients to incorporate DEI into their research. The Departments of Defense and Education both fund K–12 STEM students on “equitable” principles rather than merit or the potential to do the most good.
As a general proposition, it is unconstitutional and unlawful for the federal government, or universities that accept public funding, to make decisions based on race, regardless of the decision that will be reached by the Supreme Court in the Harvard and University of North Carolina affirmative-action cases. That is because DEI in STEM goes well beyond affirmative action in admissions, extending to every aspect of these programs.
“Equity” means quotas regardless of skills, experience, or achievements. Kamala Harris has tweeted that there is a “big difference between equality and equity” because “equitable treatment means we all end up in the same place.”
Among many similar examples, the American Geophysical Union, the world’s largest society devoted to the study of earth and space, declined to name a winner of its most prestigious award because the final nominees were white men. A Texas astronomer withdrew an article from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the publication of his book was stopped because of his work on a peer-reviewed model “to reduce the role of individual subjectivity in scientific hiring and tenure decisions.” MIT rescinded a speaking invitation to University of Chicago geophysics professor Dorian Abbot for writing a Newsweek essay that defended the importance of merit in academic evaluations.
Writing in the MIT faculty newsletter, lecturer Jared Berezin argued that MIT should include a DEI major in its STEM curriculum to “expand our conceptions of ‘success,’ ‘greatness,’ and ‘innovation’” beyond scientific achievement. A recent American Enterprise Institute study concluded that faculty pledges to support diversity are increasingly common, particularly in prestigious universities, and are as “prevalent in STEM fields as in the humanities and social sciences.”
An analysis of performance-assessment scores at six U.S. residency programs published in the September 2022 issue of Academic Medicine, the journal of the AAMC, concluded that minority residents performed below white residents in all metrics. The researchers considered only three possible explanations: a non-inclusive learning environment, racial bias in faculty assessment of residents, and structural inequities in assessment measures. When Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, chairman of Do No Harm and a professor and former associate dean of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, asked whether the divergence might exist because the minority residents were “less good at being residents,” he was pilloried on Twitter and in medical and academic forums. A petition sought his termination by the University of Pennsylvania for “explicit bias.”
With affirmative action and DEI skewing admissions in college, medical school, and residency, there is no basis on which to peremptorily dismiss Dr. Goldfarb’s question, or its significance for medical care, science, and the dignity of minority professionals who would excel without preferences.
In STEM, selecting projects and people for reasons other than their benefits and capabilities causes errors and stifles innovation, both of which can cost many lives and billions of dollars. There is widespread agreement that U.S. innovation is slowing. While there may be numerous reasons, allocating federal funds for research based on ideology rather than promise, and substituting race for achievement, can only hasten the decline.
To a large degree, those of us who adhere to the belief that America must strive to be a color-blind society, with equality of opportunity, not outcome, have already lost if we must take refuge in the Constitution or laws passed in a more egalitarian time. Nonetheless, these goals — once the raison d’être of the civil-rights movement, and the hope of immigrants and minorities alike — remain valid. What was right in 1954, when the Supreme Court struck down “separate but equal,” and in 1963, when Martin Luther King Jr. talked of a nation in which his children would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” is still right today. Equal opportunity, not equal outcome, is a core American value worth fighting for, particularly in STEM, where the alternative is not only amoral and unconstitutional, but also economically unsound and fatal.