DEI “studies” displace scientific research at the National Science Foundation

45 thoughts on “DEI “studies” displace scientific research at the National Science Foundation”

1. No one would mistake your comments as an endorsement of Trump. Like so many of your readers, I’m thankful you do so much to inform us of dangerous trends.

   1. Well, nothing Jerry writes might be considered an “endorsement” of Trump but if he wants to see any real and effective pushback against the insanity on the cultural left he documents on these pages regularly he had better thank and appreciate the movement Trump is the figurehead of for galvanizing real, meaningful opposition at last. For once the possibility of real action against these left authoritarians is on the table, not just hand-ringing frustration. It’s long past time to really stand up to this institutional lunacy, not just write and complain about it online.

      1. At the risk of getting in trouble with Jerry…Bravo!

      2. In case of the NSF, it is a very real possibility that instead of redirecting the DEI money to real science, they will just slash the budget of the NSF, throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It is not like Trump and his allies care about science for itself. They do not act to save science, it would be just a side-effect if everything went well.

         1. Yes, and I have worried about that online. Trump and especially his health minions, including Dr. Oz and RFK Jr., might well change the direction of real science research, and not in a good way.

2. A principled take as usual, thanks.

   This small quibble though :

   “the language is from the Right (i.e., “neo-Marxist” and “radical perspectives”

   That is conservatives or the Right, yes — faithfully reproducing the language of Leftism.

   E.g. off the top of my head :

   of course there’s Rules for Radicals (Saul Alinsky), and post modern literature etc. regularly employ variations on “Marxist” in the development of thought. (Note to self : this might be useful to tabulate, but difficult/time-consuming.)

   Remember also, Leftism’s operating system of dialectic guarantees that when words incur penalties to Leftism, their forms or content are transformed towards perpetual sublation. E.g. I think that’s how Rules for Radicals developed into Beautiful Trouble – A Toolbox for Revolution.

3. Well, I think it’s pretty clear that the new Trump Administration will have DEI policies in its crosshairs.

4. “Shirin Vossoughi…associate professor of learning sciences at Northwestern University…$1,034,751…’Reimagining Educator Learning Pathways Through Storywork for Racial Equity in STEM.'”

   The camel’s nose here is the inclusion of science education ‘research’ under the STEM tent [edit – I wrote ‘umbrella’ and mixed my metaphors]. The schools of education are incubators for this kind of social justice activism and have spread the contagion widely among science orgs . Lots of education ‘researchers’ made their careers out of disrupting something without much evidence that the disruption leads to improvement. Thus “reimagining” for racial equity in STEM, and a million dollars spent to pay research assistants and contractors.

   1. Some STEM departments (Physics, Mathematics, Genetics, X, etc.) have a sort of antechamber labelled “Physics (or Math or X ) Education”, focused not on the subject itself but on its teaching. DEI-speak and denigration of the very idea of ability in subject X (e.g., Jo Boaler & Co.) are typically concentrated in these antechambers, and their faculty members are sometimes labelled “Professor of X” in the popular press. No surprise that grantsmanship is also practiced in them.

      Inexplicably, mandarins of Academia have so far overlooked the desperate need for programs to prepare students for careers in teaching outposts of this sort. Perhaps before long we will see new departments of “Science X Education Education”, to teach students how to teach in the subject X (fill it in) education sub-departments. And then, of course, we will need programs to teach the teachers of these teachers.

5. When life gives you lemons…. Defenestrating DEI and all of its tentacles from federal directives, offices, grants, and funding may be one of the first sips of lemonade we get when Trump takes office. I hope his team is writing his repeal of Biden’s DEI executive order as we speak. A turn to performance based merit in hiring and promotions and targeting federal science funding to STEM oriented, objective science would be course corrections worth toasting.

6. It would be good to have an analysis of the Cruz report by a reporter who is knowledgable in the ways of congressional appropriations and science funding.

7. … a hope that his admiinistration will fix the wrongly skewed direction of science funding.

   There is indeed hope! Elon Musk has just replied on Twitter to a Colin Wright Tweet about this, calling it “insane”.

   I, for one, am hopeful that the combination of Vance & Musk and people like Chris Rufo will do a lot of damage to CRT/DEI wokeness in American universities.

8. 27% is crazy. What a waste.

9. I loved Proxmire’s Golden Fleece Awards!

   Thank you Dr. Coyne for not falling into the partisan trap of ignoring information because of the source! Knowledge is knowledge.

   I look forward to the incoming administration axing this BS. However, when they do I can picture the headline: “Trump cuts $2 BILLION in NIH science funding” without context (“the administration claims that these cuts were to research that were not strict science-based research, but Experts Say these cuts have wide-ranging negative effects, especially to marginalized and diverse communities”)

   1. edit: Should be NSF, not NIH

   2. Your point about the headlines without context is paramount! Those types of headlines stir the pot and keep the “two sides” at war. It stops people from thinking.

10. Today I learned…
    …or rather in the past year or so I’ve noticed that the Biden admin was MUCH more woke than I’d previously thought. From genderwang insanity to the above story which is a total outrage.

    Woke is so deeply burnt into our civilization and institutions, AND a generation of young people that it will be extremely difficult to fix and destroy.
    I’m no Trump fan (few New Yorkers are) but if they can at least staunch the poison they’ll have my vote (for, say, a Nicky Hailey, Romney-ish non-MAGA type).
    D.A.
    NYC

11. Given the analysis is from T. Cruz, I would give it much validity. I would like to see someone examine his list of the grants, their abstracts, and the criteria used to make DEI judgements.

    1. I presume you meant “wouldn’t” give it much validity, not “would.” And if that’s the case, then you don’t really belong on this website, because you’re showing confirmation bias, judging things more carefully and harshly if they come from a part of the political spectrum you don’t like.

       Did you even read the beginning of my post? Don’t judge data by their political source.

       If you mean “would”, ignore the above.

12. This sure does look like hooey at a glance, and good riddance if the NSF stops funding such questionable political projects. Unfortunately I don’t have faith in the new administration’s dedication to “merit-based focus on legitimate science.” Look who he wants for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services: an anti-science conspiracy promoter. I fear we will swing from one extreme to the other.

    1. In my experience, government usually effects changes to unpopular programs by cutting their funding quickly and dramatically to stem the damage or more slowly to strangle them to death. And the programs’ advocates go into hyperbolic hyperdrive to get the threat reversed. Then, if initially unsuccessful, advocates will work on political levers to get funding and authority restored and enhanced. It can be the government “Cycle of Life”.

13. This is not a Senate committee report. It is a report put together by Cruz’s staffers. That should give pause.

    1. If you had talked to grant recipients from the NSF over the last five or six years, perhaps you wouldn’t have so much “pause.” What has happened to the federal granting system is nothing short of disastrous.

       1. Honestly not for me-a single small data point.

          I have had NSF funding steady from 2001 till now. Even then then there was an outreach component. The outreach section (basically one page) has demanded the same as it did then. I almost never talk about URMs at all. Mostly it is about other forms of outreach. In my last funded grant (ending this summer) I mostly talked about teaching a class at a well-known magnet high school (one that has produced 8 Nobels in physics IIRC), so not the usual. Nothing has changed (for me) and I have only once (in 2006) failed to get this grant-and the gap was only one year.

          Does this mean that Cruz’ report is false? No. But I do think 27% does not reflect anything I know, see or hear. I will look more carefully at the whole report.

14. Around 2018/19, I attended a grant-writing meeting at City of Hope, a cancer research center in Los Angeles. Three incidents occurred during that time that deeply appalled me:

    1. I was explicitly asked if I had any minority ancestry that could be leveraged for grants. When I said I didn’t believe so, I was pressed further: “Not even Native American?”

    2. The head of the department flew to Israel to recruit a Palestinian female graduate student—someone openly hostile toward homosexuality—and brought her into meetings with me and the department head, seemingly to address my supposed “unconscious bias.” This appeared to be because I had published an essay on left-wing antisemitism. The student sat through my grant proposal discussions, but no explanation was given for her presence, either to me or perhaps even to her. Later, I was told that I “wasn’t ready” and that I “sounded just like Trump.” This was wildly offensive to me at the time as I had voted against Trump. What did they even mean that I sounded just like him?

    3. In a later meeting, one of the other postdocs, a Black woman, was praised and encouraged to submit a DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) grant on systemic racism and its relation to cancer. While I was told it was “her choice,” I couldn’t help but feel it was anything but. As mentors, they had steered her—someone with clear potential—toward writing what I felt was an uninspired, lowest-common-denominator grant, something a high school kid could do. It struck me as a glaring insult to her intelligence, though she seemed unaware of it. What angered me most was that they could have encouraged her to explore a meaningful biological mechanism or pursue a more challenging and impactful research question. Instead, it seemed they were more interested in chasing the easiest, token grants to satisfy NIH and NSF priorities.


    I left City of Hope soon after for Harvard Chan, where I was for four years, and found myself in another hell pit of DEI. At Harvard Chan, I had the privilege of endearing email after email about Black Lives Matter and everything LBGTQ+ (alphabet soup). I was told that my punctuality and accomplishments reflected white supremacy and watched lab after lab fill with postdocs of token minority status. It was our graduate students who penned the odious letter saying October 7th was all Israel’s fault, even before Israel had responded and while bodies were still being counted.

    Then I tried going on the job market as an assistant faculty member and found myself writing disingenuous DEI statements and being asked to propose DEI grants. I wrote a DEI proposal for Rutgers. Thank god I didn’t get it. I’m thrilled about Trump’s willingness to kill DEI at the federal level and hope those he nominated get Senate approved to do so.

    1. “I…found myself writing disingenuous DEI statements and being asked to propose DEI grants.”

       Roz this all sounds awful.

       My redpill moment was similar (I may have told this story on this site back when I was anonymous):

       In the spring of 2020 (those halcyon days of lockdowns and BLM) I was denied the renewal of my main research grant because in the training section I had not spelled out a plan to increase diversity among my grad students. Never mind that I had never supervised a straight white guy as a grad student. Doh.

       So in the fall of 2020 I was rewriting the same grant application. In the new grant I added a lot of crap about implicit bias training and other DEI nonsense. I asked one of the associate deans (super woke and angry at the world) for help. In a workshop she told a group of grad students in my department about the contents of my new grant and my efforts to conform to DEI expectations (but later denied having leaked my grant details to the students). A couple days later I got an anonymous email from one of those students. He identified himself as a person of colour, and he implored me not to incorporate implicit bias training etc. in my grant. He encouraged me to avoid all DEI efforts, and to treat my students as individuals not as avatars of their ethnicity or sexuality etc. (all good advice). Of course I agreed but was trying to get grant money to (among other things) pay my grad students.

       When I complained to the grad student group that my grant contents had been leaked to them and that some of their members were sending me unsolicited advice, one of them (a white they-them enby) replied to say that it was awful this person was denigrating DEI efforts (ha ha little did this guy know). The best part was the white nonbinary dude telling me that the anon couldn’t possibly be POC because the anon was opposed to DEI. Like you can’t have those politics and still be black/brown/oppressed. That’s when I realized it really was all posturing bullshit by wealthy middle-class white people.

       1. Good gawd.

15. Lots of comments on Bluesky about this. No one looking at the facts, just maligning Republicans and Musk. With, of course, some Nazi references thrown in. The more time I spend on that site the more I’m turned off by the groupthink aspect of it. Of course, that also explains the popularity among those who don’t want their views challenged.

    1. That’s what I like about this site: not MAGA cheerleaders but realistic about problems on the left.

16. A couple of peripheral questions about the graph and table:
    1. In the graph, the percentages don’t add up to 100. Although not stated, I assume this means that most applications fell under more than one heading.
    2. In the table, apart from the meteoric rise of DEI nonsense, I noticed that the total budget fell from $5 billion in 2023 to just over $1 billion in 2024. What’s going on there? If it’s because there’s more of 2024 still to come, just bear in mind that the latest percentage (27%) doesn’t strictly compare with that for previous years, and we’d have to wait for a whole year’s data to get an accurate comparison. (I take it as read that the trend is objectionable.)

17. Since we are on science funding and policy and HHS has come up: I understand the concerns about RFK Jr.’s appointment, whether it be some of the rabbit holes he disappears into or his lack of significant executive experience. And I would never claim, without caveat, that he is, or would be, a “safe and effective” administrator. All things in life come with tradeoffs; reasonable adults have always recognized and debated over such. One man’s unacceptable risk might be reasonable to another—or not pose the latter any risk at all. Since RFK Jr.’s appointment is, indeed, novel, and we have never embarked on an experiment like this at such scale, I understand both the reticence and the opposition. Nevertheless, I think we have sample enough in the trials that were his environmental career and his presidential race to conclude that he could be strongly effective in tackling the corporate capture of the regulatory agencies. Thus, I do believe that the potential risks of having RFK Jr. in HHS are outweighed by the potential benefits.

    For those who disagree and would make a different decision if given the chance to do so, it is deeply unfortunate that your reasonable fears and concerns might be dismissed and that he might be thrust upon you by the decisions of others. My condolences. Truly. After all, some here might be at greater risk from his appointment than are others and stand to gain little to nothing at all; it is all potential downside. However, others stand to benefit substantially. Unfortunately, a once-size-fits-all “solution” is, unlike other areas in life, the only one available when appointing a cabinet member, and none of us get to choose what would be most favorable to our individual circumstances. Assuming he does get confirmed, what I pledge here is that I will not ignore the collateral damage or unintended consequences of my support for him. Nor will I substitute anecdote for evidence and exaggerate any successes. Finally, I will not tar his detractors as “anti-health,” nor will I label them shills for corporate greed. We will simply disagree. Any maybe some of us–including me–will eventually reassess, abandon our pride, and switch sides.

18. Heck, I’m sure the first who came up with DEI regret it. This is the sort of this that starts as one thing and then is made a monster by others.

    My conservative dad who’s the same age as you has no issue saying the enforced illusion of tranquility and morality of the 50s did the damage of today.

19. Thanks for calling the report to our attention. Given my media feed I would not have heard of it.
    I’m glad someone is standing up to the politicization of science in the name of “social justice” but the report is full of exaggerations and poor methods. One blaring example is the keywords used to identify DEI research proposals. In particular “Environmental Justice”. I find the concept of Environmental Justice infuriating because something that should bring us all together is being turned into another group identity moral narrative. But I don’t know if the 362 DEI NSF grants they said were Environmental Justice were really about that. The keywords used included “climate change”, “clean energy” and “NetZero” which are science based and accurate terms. Unfortunately, the fossil fuel funded right categorizes climate science as DEI ideology.

    1. That’s a valid point. Climate change denialism is starting to fade but there’s still some on the right.

    2. Good points. I have not analyzed this report. I’ve never considered Net Zero to be part of DEI. Cruz does represent Texas. Why should he want Texas’ economy to suffer due to anything that might endanger gas and oil use. I don’t think that is me hating the messenger, it is acknowledging whose interests he represents.

    3. NetZero is not science based, it was a catch-phrase (“Net Zero 2050”) invented by one of Boris Johnson’s wives. It presumes there is some way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere to net out whatever emissions cannot be done away with by eliminating fossil fuels in Western countries. There is no credible way to do this at scale, certainly not by 2050 and would itself require vast quantities of nearly free non-emitting energy. Activists also don’t like carbon capture and sequestration. They agitate to frustrate R & D in this area because they fear we will use it as an excuse to continue our sinful emitting ways. Which we will if we could ever make it work.

       Gross Zero is the goal, I’m afraid. Think about what a world where there is no fossil CO2 emitted by humans at all. Not just no fossil fuels for transportation and electricity but no fertilizer, no cement, no petrochemicals, no pharmaceuticals, no plastics, no steel. That is not based in scientific thought. It is activism.

       I would submit that “environmental justice” is indeed DEI under another name. It is conceived as wealth transfer from wealthy white countries to poor non-white countries (and from wealthy neighbourhoods to poor neighbourhoods within rich countries) under a rubric that treats their situations as due to climate/environmental oppression by the rich world. Reparations, in other words.
       It’s what COP29 just finished in Azerbaijan was all about (not that anyone notices COP anymore.) But it’s about cash transfers, not about windmills and electric airplanes.

       So Net Zero and Environmental Justice are fair game as keywords in what would, granted, be a partisan scoping analysis.

    4. I’ve read some “environmental justice” papers and no, it is not (at least what I’ve seen) something that is designed to help preserve the environment. Rather, all of the have been DEI initiatives.

       1. To be clear, I wasn’t saying that “Environmental Justice” isn’t a part of social justice ideology, but that the report used keywords that are not “justice” just environmental. In fact the most frequent keywords were about environment, not justice. Their sloppy methods raise the possibility that many of the projects they counted were not EJ. Maybe Leslie is right that “Net-Zero”, being a political goal, is not science, but climate change is.
          To me “environmental justice” shows the depravity of social justice ideology. Finding a solution to global environmental disaster isn’t the issue in their ideology, but rather what they care about is that some “groups” or identities suffer more than others. The Titanic is sinking and they’re concerned about equal identity representation on the deck chairs.

          1. The way I look at it, for the activists it was always about the deck chairs. Environmental justice is just Marxism carried on by other means when “Just Stop Oil” runs out of gas.

             I’ll grant you for the scientists it’s about the Titanic.

20. OK-I read carefully including the appendix of methodology the Cruz report. I am even more suspicious of it now. I might request the full data. If you read the methodology, the program they use flags a tremendous number of words and terms that one might associate with DEI (they are running only the public abstract and broader impacts through a program). Some of these would be incredibly common in generic outreach/broader impact sections. These are terms such as UNDER REPRESENTATION, UNDER REPRESENTED, UNDER SERVED. Then if you read carefully they acknowledge that even scientific proposals are included in their DEI-flagged examples if these terms come up. In the Columbia case study they give 2 explicit examples. The small money example clearly is a DEI-centered proposal (REVIEWER ZERO: CHANGING THE CULTURE OF PEER
    REVIEW TO INCREASE DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION (2022)). The large money one is most definitely not (Deciphering the Subantarctic South Pacific Ocean’s Role in Pleistocene Climate Evolution with IODP
    Expedition 383 Sediments). I went to the latter grant and the offending terms are all coming from the “broader impacts” section of the public abstract.

    What conclusions do I draw from this? Well, I’d need to see the whole database which I don’t have access to. But I would speculate:

    1.The 27% number is misleading. What the change in what they find from 2021 to 2024 probably reflects is mostly (not entirely) a change in what people write in the broader impact statements, presumably thinking it is advantageous. Having been a scientist who has had NSF funding for 2 decades, and has served on multiple NSF panels, this is generally not driven by the program or the program officers but by the PIs themselves.
    2.There probably has been an uptick in specific DEI funding calls-note that generally (like in the example I quote above) these grants are monetarily smaller. My guess is this is a much smaller chunk of change compared to simply PIs more and more spicing up their outreach/broader impacts with trendy DEI nonsense.

    If what I speculate is true then I don’t think most people will take the correct message from this, nor do I think the Cruz staffers who composed this know or care. What it more suggests to me is we should simply cut the broader impacts out all together and not imply to scientists that DEI needs any mention in a proposal. That is a good idea, but we should note that these sections have been in there since early George W. Bush at least. What has changed is the pandering of the PIs themselves. There probably isn’t much in the way of savings to be had for cutting the pure DEI NSF grants as I doubt that even now they constitute a sizable portion of the NDSF budget. Certainly nothing close to 27%.

    1. Ted, thank you for your deeper dive into the Cruz publication. Given what you’ve written here and in your earlier comment, I think it’s fair to at least be somewhat skeptical of Cruz’s staff’s claims about the extent of NSF funding for DEI-related efforts.

       I’m going to try to keep an open mind about this.

21. Gerry writes: “the pressure to change from pure science to Social Justice must have come from the top.”
    Here, Gerry makes an unsupported (at least by evidence) claim. If it were true (and it might be), Biden/Harris would have even more to lay at their door than the bad political outcomes they engendered by hubris, ego, and denial. But is it really true? Is the “woke mind virus” that has taken over academia really a top-down project engineered by Joe Biden and his appointees? Isn’t it far more likely that the adoption of mandatory, performative social justice gesturing in department after department is a cultural movement, driven by bottom-up zealotry (hope that’s a word) from staffers, grad students, administrators, and DEI “professionals”? True, Biden/Harris swallowed this bait hook, line and sinker- but I suspect they were afraid to do otherwise, just as senior NYT staff are afraid of their newsroom, Congresspeople are afraid of their junior staffers, etc.
    It may be that Gerry thinks (or knows) that internal NSF politics are qualitatively completely different than academia or mainstream media or corporate politics or Congress- maybe what people think and do in the NSF really is a top-down project directed from on high. If so, I bow to his more extensive and deeper understanding of Government.

    1. I think the ideas behind DEI long predate Biden, likely go back to the rebellious sixties.

       It seems to be closely related to “critical race theory,” described here, dates it to the eighties.

       https://www.nytimes.com/article/what-is-critical-race-theory.html

       Nor is DEI restricted to the US, as we have seen with the insanity in New Zealand and Canada.

    2. First of all, my name is Jerry, not Gerry. Second, did you read this bit:

       In its first week, the Biden-Harris administration mandated that all taxpayer-funded scientific research and development (R&D) must incorporate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) values.

       It is Biden’s last term, so your claim that they “were afraid to do otherwise” is equivalent to it coming from the top. Regardless of what pressure Biden was under, the order was issued in his name.

       Please read the posting Roolz; your last sentence is clearly sarcastic.

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