Well, I guess I was premature in announcing the death of DEI in academia. Although some DEI programs are being dismantled or reduced in universities, the ideology they espouse is just now filtering into federal science-granting agencies. The report below from the Free Press shows that the National Science Foundation (NSF) is using a lot of taxpayers’ money funding DEI-related projects infused not only with ideology, but with postmodernism and verbal contortion. They don’t seem to be projects designed to find out something about the real world, but to impose progressive ideology on the real world.
Click below to see the article, or find it archived here:
Some excerpts from the article, though a description of funded grants (also given) tells the tale:
If you thought the august National Science Foundation focused only on string theory or the origins of life, you haven’t spent much time in a university lab lately. Thanks to a major shift endorsed by the Biden administration, recent grants have gone to researchers seeking to identify “hegemonic narratives” and their effect on “non-normative forms of gender and sexuality,” plus “systematic racism” in the education of math teachers and “sex/gender narratives in undergraduate biology and their impacts on transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming students.”
A new report from Republican members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation made available to The Free Press says that DEI considerations now profoundly shape NSF grant decisions.
. . . The report, titled “DEI: Division. Extremism. Ideology,” analyzed all National Science Foundation grants from 2021 through April 2024. More than 10 percent of those grants, totaling over $2 billion, prioritized attributes of the grant proposals other than their scientific quality, according to the report.
What’s more, that’s a feature—not a bug—of the new grant-making process. Biden’s 2021 Scientific Integrity Task Force released a report in January 2022, stating that “activities counter to [DEIA] values are disruptive to the conduct of science.”
“DEIA” expands the concept of diversity, equity, and inclusion to include “accessibility.”
Yes, it’s Republicans, but you’re not going to find “progressive” Democrats combing through the list of NSF awards to find “studies” proposals. (The search was done using “terms associated with social justice, gender, race, and individuals belonging to underrepresented groups”.) And yes, the report has a political agenda, but have a look at the grants that were funded as well as the amount of money devoted to that funding. These things can be checked.
So, here are some projects funded by American taxpayers to the tune of $2 billion. The report also notes that while these Social Justice grants constituted less than 1% of NSF grants in 2021, ballooned to constitute 27% of all grants between January and April of this year. The first grant is for more than a million bucks!
- Shirin Vossoughi, an associate professor of learning sciences at Northwestern University, is co-principal investigator for a $1,034,751 2023 NSF grant for a project entitled “Reimagining Educator Learning Pathways Through Storywork for Racial Equity in STEM.” The project’s abstract says that current teaching practices reproduce “inequitable” structures in the teaching of STEM subjects and “perpetuate racial inequalities” within STEM contexts. Her public writing, such as in a co-authored 2020 op-ed, argues that all American institutions, including STEM education, are “permeated” by the “ideology of white supremacy.” Vossoughi could not immediately be reached for comment.
- A 2023 NSF grant for $323,684 to Stephen Secules, assistant professor in the College of Education & Computing at Florida International University, intends to “transform engineering classrooms towards racial equity.” Secules has also been critical of the fact that “engineering professors are not engaging as active change agents for racial equity.” Secules could not be reached for comment.
- The NSF provided a total of $569,851 split among Florida International University, Colorado State University, and University of Minnesota for a project to examine “sex/gender narratives in undergraduate biology and their impacts on transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming students.”
- And the University of Georgia received $644,642 to “identify systemic racism in mathematics teacher education.”
Asked for comment, the NSF said this:
An NSF spokesperson did not specifically address the committee’s report when I reached out. But they said the “NSF’s merit review process has two criteria—intellectual merit and broader impacts—and is the global gold standard for evaluating scientific proposals.” Their statement continued, “NSF will continue to emphasize the importance of the broader impacts criterion in the merit review process.”
And indeed, those “broader impacts,” which used to explain how one’s project would improve public understanding of science, have now been broadened to include “diversity” and “STEM engagement.” What has happened in all four grants above is that these two “broader impacts” have merged to become the main subject of the grant. What we have above is sociology mixed with ideology to advance (not simply to “investigate”) Social Justice. For example, the last project, apparently aimed at identifying “systemic racism in mathematics teacher education” will no doubt SNIFF OUT that systemic racism. It just wouldn’t do it, as is likely, if the results (and the PI’s report) said “we looked for systemic racism in this area and didn’t find much.”
Clearly, the NSF has expanded its mission from fostering public understanding and adoption of science to fostering Social Justice.
Let us remember that the Dispenser of Grants is called the National Science Foundation. What we have above could be construed as science education, but it’s education of a peculiar sort: designed to ensure that science education is forced into the Procrustean Be of “progressive” ideology. And that, I suspect, is two billion dollars that could have been used to do real science, or even to improve science education in a non-ideological way. But instead the money seems to have gone into the dumpster. Is it any surprise that three of the five awardees, when contacted by the Free Press, “could not be reached for comment”?
“transforming”
The magic spell of Hermetic alchemy.
Things change and develop. Every reasonable person acknowledges this.
But it takes a gnostic to claim a higher understanding whereby control is exerted to “transform” some thing into desired results as if using the thought-equivalent of The Philosopher’s Stone.
BTW for the spell of “progressive”, I recommend finding some of the writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Potent stuff. I too have to collect some, so I don’t have any good quotes ready.
Here you go. Starting with the first half-dozen lines: http://bactra.org/Medawar/phenomenon-of-man.html
As Medawar says, “the author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself.”
Wowwwww … great citation, I was wholly unaware of that.
Medawar also comments: ‘the spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought.’ Now, what does that remind us of?
Great quote!
Apologies but I just gotta :
Medawar :
“The Phenomenon of Man cannot be read without a feeling of suffocation, a gasping and flailing around for sense. ”
Indeed! The bit I read almost produces a deep swimming sensation in thought – like a modern day grimoire – as I’ve also heard it described! Crazy!
The worst thing to have happened to education over the past 40 years in America is Education.
I served on two Committees of Visitors in the 90’s and early 00’s which review five years of awards in an NSF division to see how they comported with the agency mission intent, ie technical or intellectual merit and broader impacts. In those days, as I recall our retrospective reviews of dozens of engineering grants, criterion 1 was at least 95% of the award decision with broader impacts (criterion 2) being sometimes considered as a nice addition. An excellent criterion 2 with even a mediocre criterion 1 would not be funded, while I think that I recall an excellent criterion 1 being funded with barely lip service paid to criterion 2. Things appear to have changed.
Though I just noticed Cransdale’s comment and it might be that the technical directorates still focus on the science, math, engineering and it is only the education folks who put a stronger emphasis on criterion 2. As one other commenter pointed out a few years ago on this site: educators apparently have a secret sauce that scientists, engineers, and mathemeaticians cannot understand….sshhh…it’s a secret.
But it is important to separate out what is being awarded in hard sciences and engineering from that in professional education.
Jim do you know if once awarded a grant the person receiving it must then show how they used the grant and what their outcomes were?
If it’s at like Canada, the majority of those recipients get to mark their own homework.
Three of the four listed grants are for projects run by people in schools of education. They are all in for DEI, and for treating the content of their courses as inseparable from social justice objectives.
Yes. The Faculties of Education at research universities have a lot to answer for.
Countering this horror will be many times harder than beating creationism a few decades ago.
I used to moan that Bush’s stem cell funding ban was damaging research, but this latest set of leftist nonsense threatens to eat science totally and turn it into cisshetronormative anticolonialist* drivel.
D.A.
NYC’
*For anticolonialism, see paragliders from Gaza last year. That is what it is.
”Countering this horror will be many times harder than beating creationism a few decades ago.”
I’m reminded of the saying, “When people don’t know what to do, they do what they know.” The same applies to most voters. There is one political party in the United States that pursues this progressive agenda. Not all its elected members are on board, but they allow it to happen anyway. As long as we keep sending Democrats to the White House, the Senate, the House, the governors’ mansions, and the state legislatures, then this and many other forms of progressive madness will continue. Once it is embedded into the federal and state bureaucracies—and it is well on its way—then only a political purging will root it out. That’s unfortunate. It would come with its own problems. But that’s where we are.
It would have been far better never to let things get to this point, but trying to get the attention of mainstream liberals ten years ago was nearly impossible, as they would wave off emerging concerns as right-wing; many of them still do. Now, the only apparent solution to the progressive ills is to vote for a party they abhor. Few long-time Democrats will do so—Trump or no Trump. Moreover, the leading liberal institutions have largely proven that they either cannot or will not police themselves. So, get ready to live with the horror, as it roots itself deeper into our K-12 system and in the ever-expanding volumes of federal and state regulation.
That’s why I’m NOT voting Democratic. If enough people followed suit they would/will eventually get the message. If they don’t, oh well. I can’t understand the zombie like habitual voting for a party that went mad and is growing madder by the day. Don’t anybody try shaming me with the abortion b.s. because it won’t effect me.
Waste of taxpayer money. Public distrust of science is already in the toilet. In funding this kind of nonsense, the NSF is validating that distrust.
One of the most perplexing things to me is that folks at NSF deciding which proposals to fund must surely have some knowledge and training about how science works. It’s right their in there institutes’ name, fercryinoutloud. But these grant proposals have pre-determined outcomes, the very antithesis of scientific inquiry. It is clear that the money is to be spent on confecting or fabricating evidence to support their claims.
I wonder if others think that NSF figured they could get away with it. I mean it took some sniffing to find out didn’t it? Despite this likely to become a political football full of nastiness and antipathy (is there any other kind?), this kind of waste needs the sunshine, even with the politics, as it’s the best disinfectant.
These NSF grants to over-credentialed but undereducated elites are another sign that Peter Turchin is onto something, namely that too many elites in a society are a harbinger of its collapse. https://peterturchin.com/
There are not enough positions in our society for the abundance of credentialed graduates who expect to work in well-paying jobs with appropriate recognition of their ‘special’ talents. At the same time, the meritocracy system that helps to ensure that airline pilots, physicians, engineers, etc., are qualified is disappearing.
Sorry Jack.
While Turchin has some great ideas, particularly about elite over production (which is in one’s face obvious now… talked to a “graduate” lately?) his consequent analysis of it destroying society based on earlier models ….. isn’t up to snuff.
He leans on an almost cyclical theory of history which is for the birds. Duncecap history like The Great Turning and other works of fantasy.
Given the multi-factorial analysis of any complex system (like…say.. the efficient continuation of society) it is not cyclical at all. Turchin doesn’t get that.
But as I say (and to be fair you don’t endorse the above) he’s 100% on elite overproduction. Like… B.A. graduate IQs descending to 100 over the last three decades.
D.A.
NYC
Looking at the timing a lot of this really took off, it was right after the 2020 “mostly peaceful” protests for social justice, and was a time where even our small town mayor and police chief publicly took a knee in front of a small group of Black community leaders.
Re: Edwardm’s comment that they surely must know how science works, remember that epidemiologists ignored their own expertise about how disease transmission works and publicly endorsed mass gatherings in the height of a pandemic, provided they were done in the name of social justice.
Maybe it’s political, but I think a major purpose of elections is error correction. Let the Republicans lead the house cleaning now, and then when they overstep, which they will, then bring in the Democrats again to error correct in the other direction. Wash, rinse, repeat
+1
Efforts are needed within the scientific profession to reverse these signs of DEI-Lysenkoism in the science infrastructure. Does NSF still have Committees of Visitors of the kind Jim Batterson refers to in comment #3 above? If so, it is clear what needs to be assessed closely; and if not, there should be agitation to resume assessment of NSF’s performance by such committees.
It would also be helpful to find out where the impetus for DEI-Lysenkoism comes from. Has it been imposed on NSF by directives from elsewhere in the
executive branch, and in that case from whom? Or does NSF now have an
internal source of the party line, such as a DEI office or committee? If so,
that is what needs Visiting by an assessment committee of science professionals. And if NSF does have an internal DEI bureaucracy, it would be worth investigating how it got established; and how its functionaries were recruited—for example, whether they had anything to do with science or are professional education administrators.
Leadership, Jon! “Educational Leadership”. This one is a classic in the genre.
https://www.fielding.edu/school-of-leadership-studies/edd-leadership-for-change/
Right, Mike, my former university has its own cadre of educrats with advanced
degrees in this arcane subject. It is apparently a new cottage industry, as
advertised, for example, at: https://www.ollusa.edu/blog/leadership-qualities.html. We can look forward to PhDs in Vision, Communication, Adaptability, Innovation, or Flexibility. And, of course, plenty of PhDs in
Diversity—no doubt topping them all.
“It would also be helpful to find out where the impetus for DEI-Lysenkoism comes from.”
It comes from the top, i.e., Biden.
During President Biden’s first days in office, he issued several executive orders related to gender and DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). For example,
1. Executive Order on Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation (January 20, 2021): This order directed federal agencies to enforce laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation.
2. Executive Order on Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government (January 20, 2021): It aimed to address systemic racism by requiring federal agencies to assess equity in policies and programs.
The Harris administration will accelerate the DEI-Lysenkoism downward spiral.
This is why I am so done with the Democratic Party.
And why I’m done with Trudeau in Canada!
+1!
Money not well spent.
What I would really get behind are funded programs that:
1. Explore different ways to increase interest in STEM field subjects among URM, and to increase accessibility into those fields from within marginalized communities.
2. Attempt to understand the biological basis for LGBTQ identities. Why do most brains identify as cis, but some identify as B T or Q? Why are some brains attracted to opposite sex bodies, but, others are attracted to same sex bodies? Or to both?
Mark, this is my favourite genomics study of the last five years. It helps account for *why* a genetic and biological basis for same-sex sexual attraction in LGB people might evolve and persist in human populations in spite of the fitness cost of the phenotype (but it doesn’t tell us about the neurological basis for the sexual preference differences).
doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01168-8
Other studies try to understand what’s going on in a TQ brain. This one by Kurth
doi.org/10.3390%2Fjcm11061582
is pretty typical: a tiny sample of trans women (males), but no trans men (females); uses MRI images to train an AI classifier to recognize male and female brains in a training sample of non-trans (not to say merely “normal”) men and women; then uses the classifier to give a sex score to brains of trans women. Finds trans women are slightly less male than men (p = 0.016), but much more male than women (duh).
The problem is that the training set of known men and women doesn’t distinguish gay men or lesbians from heterosexual people. The brains of same- and opposite-sex-attracted people might be expected to differ. That could be ok because the proportion of gay men and lesbians in the population as a whole is small (from the 1970s until a few minutes ago, <5% identified as lesbian, gay, or bisexual in the General Social Survey), so including a few gay men and lesbians in the training set would just introduce a little noise in the classifier. As long as the same noise is present in the sample of trans women no problem.
But in the Kurth study 33% (!) of the trans women said they were same-sex attracted to males. So the tiny shift in what Kurth called "brain sex" in the trans women in that study is probably just effects of including a lot of gay men among the trans women.
Mike, the Kurth study has been making the rounds on a listserv I follow, with the Critical Appraisal 101 criticism that they didn’t control for sex of sexual attraction. But your explanation is the graduate-level exposition so I am going to cite your post there (as Jerry’s website.)
Thanks!
Cheers! Except I got the proportion wrong: 25% gay men, not 33% in the Kurth study. My bad! Still about 5x the proportion in the general population.
The added flaw in the Kurth study is that Kurth and the other authors *stated* that 6 of the 24 trans women in the study were “androphiles” (gay men), but didn’t identify those individuals in the results or say how much those 6 data points contributed to the slight shift in mean “brain sex” score of the trans sample. One suspects that the mean “brain sex” for the other 18 trans women would be not significantly different from the male sample.
Interesting though, because that’s roughly the proportion of trans women who are not same-sex attracted and typically described as autogynephilic males (see Blanchard, R).
You may find this review from 2016 of interest:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4987404/
TLDR; big difference between homosexual and non-homosexual trans-identified people. The latter haven’t been studied much.
The activists don’t want #2 type of research done because it pathologizes the trans experience by suggesting there is something abnormal about it. It might, the other side of the same coin, also be used to question someone’s claim to be trans for the purpose of gate-keeping rights seekers. “Funny, your brain doesn’t looktrans. You must be faking it. Back to the men’s pool where you belong, Pervert.”
The activists want their subjective experience to be accepted as objectively real without any reductionist vetting. They have begun to organize to be put on IRBs to block research that doesn’t, prima facie, respect this view of trans reality.
Good points! From what used to be called Ryerson (name removed due to association of Mr Ryerson with residential schools):
From Toronto Metropolitan University’s medical school admissions page: “For the 2025 admissions cycle, a total of 94 seats are available. It is expected that 25 percent of students will be admitted through the General Admissions Stream and 75 percent collectively through the Indigenous, Black, and Equity-Deserving admissions pathways.”
https://www.torontomu.ca/school-of-medicine/programs/md/selection-process/#!accordion-1725045634886-selection-ranking
75% DEI admits to a medical school!
Think of what this will do to the credibility of any doctor in Canada who looks like an equity-demanding graduate now….even if she didn’t graduate from Rye High. Patients will think, Ryerson is admitting their grads are DEI but I bet all the other schools are doing it too. The medical education literature has a lot of articles now about “racist” patients who refuse to be looked after by equity students and what the schools can do about this. (Answer: nothing.)
Egerton Ryerson was the father of free public education in Ontario, from before Confederation, back when most children didn’t go to school at all and worked on the farm or in the family sweat shop. (We have no coal in Ontario. If we had, the kids would have gone down into the coal mines.)
He had only the most tangential connection with residential schools, something along the lines that it would be difficult to build his proposed schoolhouses in remote and nomadic Indian settlements in the North — Ontario is today* nearly twice as big as Texas and mostly cold and empty — and so the government should give some thought to creating boarding schools so the parents could do their hunting and trapping thing and the kids could still get educated. (After Confederation, the new federal government took over the responsibility for educating status Indians.) Ryerson had nothing to do with designing or running the actual schools that were eventually set up through the three churches, he being dead by then. For this, the head of his bronze statue at the school was cut off with an angle grinder during the orgy of vandalism over the Kamloops mass graves hoax. It turned up mounted atop a pole on the Six Nations Reserve near Brantford. Nobody out there admits to having the faintest clue about how it got there. (Must have been quite a party.) But they’re not giving it back. A war prize, I guess.
—————-
* At Confederation, the Ontario and Québec colonies extended only up to the watershed with Hudson and James Bay. Beyond that was the vast private property of the Hudson Bay (fur trading) Company. When Canada eventually acquired the HBC lands the existing provinces were augmented as they are today and the new provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta were created de novo. But Ontario was still a very large inaccessible wilderness in Ryerson’s day.
The native stuff has got way out of hand, helped along by Trudeau and the Liberal Party.