Over at the Heterodox STEM site, Anna Krylov (a Professor of Chemistry at USC) just posted a recent 40-minute lecture she gave about the ongoing erosion of the concept of merit in science (the alternative to merit, of course, is “equity”). Because the original video was poor, Anna went ahead and re-recorded the lecture slide for slide and word for word. You can see the new version of the lecture at the video below, and read transcript by clicking on the headline just below.
The video:
Her lecture begins by citing a paper that many of us collaborated on, “In Defense of Merit in Science,” finally published in Peter Singer’s Journal of Controversial Ideas. Let me just put down a short excerpt about the paper from Anna’s talk, referring to its rejection from the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science:
Ben Gibran writes: “It’s crazy enough that an article entitled “In Defense of Merit in Science” needs publishing; it’s mind-blowing that it’s published in the Journal of Controversial Ideas. What next, “In Defense of Not Drinking Battery Fluid”?
But PNAS editors had a different opinion.
Here is the feedback we received following our initial inquiry. The board was concerned with the word MERIT in the title of the paper. They wrote: “The problem is that the concept of merit, as the authors surely know, has been widely and legitimately attacked as implemented…” They finish with an advice: “If the authors could use a different term, I would encourage that.”
We considered to change the title to this: “In Defense of M**** in Science,” but ultimately we were not able to address all editorial concerns. So this is how we ended up in the Journal of Controversial Ideas.
And, in a bit of self-aggrandizement, but one that’s relevant, Anna and I wrote an editorial about this mishigass in the Wall Street Journal (click to read, or, if you don’t subscribe, find the article archived here):
Good to know – well said.
In this excellent talk we see numerous examples of where academics publish papers and even earn grants around these initiatives. Billions of dollars have been spent without evidence of much cause, and without evidence of benefits other than benefiting the careers of opportunists. It’s like 1/2 of academia has been chasing ghosts for 20 years.
Even Stalin respected talent.
Pretty discouraging. Thanks though!
Thank you Anna, as always, for putting this story together and making it widely available to a general audience. Through my experience having worked for a U.S. federal S&T agency for 32 years, retired in 2008, I know how a range of requirements can be inserted into the Federal Grant and Contract evaluation process. The entire idea that Federal agencies offer research dollars to universities is an ideological decision itself based in part on the post-WW2 publication of “Science: The Endless Frontier”. There is no inherent reason for tax dollars to flow to universities to carry out research, but it has been the government’s decision to support universities in this mannerfor many years. Scientific merit as determined by review panels of scientists (writ large to also include mathematicians and engineers for cerain research areas) was the evaluation process for many years until the late 80’s I seem to recall when in the NSF, a criterion 2, social impact, emerged. It was a small consideration (and having served on grant review panels and on a couple of NSF Committees of Visitors found it to often be VERY small to negligible in actual awarding) but was the government’s way of trying to assure that PI’s might move their findings out of the university silo and impact K12 education or science museums or communities in some way. I thought that trying to get uni researchers to think about a connection to our often staid and dated K12 curriculum was a good idea, particularly because the K12 educators themselves were so siloed away from the research of the day and had no incentive to engage with it or the researchers.
However some of the latest guidance that I have seen in OSTP writings over the past few years and the instantiation of that guidance that you have discussed in this talk are frightening. I did note in Project 2025 a proposal to zero out all DEI content in science research grants if I recall correctly. I will go look at my notes. But of course that is ideology also….just from the opposite political side! I wonder how all this became international?
Thanks again.
Completing my note from last evening, I looked up the direction to OSTP (Office of Science and Technology Policy – also referred to as The White House Science Office) given in the Project 2025 document (“Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise”). On pg 60 of this 900+ page document, we find the following:
“….Finally, the next Administration will face a significant challenge in unwinding policies and procedures that are used to advance radical gender, racial, and equity initiatives under the banner of science. Similarly, the Biden Administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding. As with other federal departments and agencies, the Biden Administration’s leveraging of the federal government’s resources to further the woke agenda should be reversed and scrubbed from all policy manuals, guidance documents, and agendas, and scientific excellence and innovation should be restored as the OSTP’s top priority.”
So there you have it in proposed specific policy guidance/advice to the Trump Administration from a conservative NGO Heritage Foundation.
Dr. Coyne, here is a related recent event that hasn’t yet received much coverage: https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/mass-resignations-at-the-journal
It seems evident that this soviet-style research justification, while cumbersome to those of you who want to focus on research rather than writing diversity statements, will be just normal operating procedure for the students who will know nothing else. To me, it looks very inefficient in terms of getting actual research done, but very efficient in ensuring that the humanities departments and administrators continue to have employment.
My question is this: we read on this site multiple examples of this. Is anyone actively pushing back against this system, or are researchers sitting on their hands complaining amongst themselves but fearful of making a bigger stink so their funding doesn’t get cutoff? Or any science society stating that they will no longer support having their members include DEI statements in their research grants?
It seems that the researchers and scientists who oppose this need to refuse to do what is asked for this to ever change. The SJWs have no problem telling physicists what to do – why don’t physicists start telling the SJWs in the humanities to pound sand?
Here’s one development. In New Zealand, the centre-right coalition government announced a week ago that it will no longer fund competitive research grants (ie, Marsden Grants administered through the RSNZ) in humanities or social sciences. The assessment panels in SOC and HUM have been disbanded. The govt is going to use Marsden Grants to fund science research, and a proportion of that science has to demonstrate some good beyond the academy. I don’t know whether DEI statements (in NZ, these are VM statements — Vision Matauranga) are getting cut from the application process.
Most of the public commentary on the funding cut to HUM and SOC has been negative, arguing that this is a travesty, a terrible backward step. But there is a lot of commentary from the other side, pointing out the garbage which the HUM and SOC panels had been funding in recent years. Any list of those titles and abstracts is pretty damning and enough to sway public support away from what are, here, substantially woke-captured HUM and SOC.