Diversity Policies Are Corrupting Study of the Sciences
“programs aim to set “inclusion and equity” at “the very core” of STEM science”
Academia’s religious devotion to diversity is beginning to eclipse real scholarship.
Minding the Campus reports:
Diversity Policies Are Corrupting the Sciences
Anyone who believes that the hard sciences could never capitulate to identity politics in the way the humanities and softer sciences have should not read Heather MacDonald’s report just posted at City Journal. It’s too infuriating, and the impacts could be devastating.
MacDonald surveys the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and accrediting organizations such as the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education and finds the quota police alive and well within them.
The NSF, for instance, “dumps millions of dollars into implicit-bias activism,” a pseudo-scientific effort to explain lack of proportionate numbers of women and certain minorities in STEM fields on the grounds of racism and sexism. It has other programs that “pressure actual science grantees to incorporate diversity considerations into their research.” Such programs aim to set “inclusion and equity” at “the very core” of STEM science.
The NIH puts similar burdens on the field. Its training grants for postdoctoral education for physicians are threatened with funding cuts if the programs don’t support “a sufficient number of ‘underrepresented minorities.’” It also wants to see proportionate representation in the sample of medical subjects, so that (in MacDonald’s example) the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota must reach out well beyond its surroundings to draw in different identities, a costly and time-consuming practice.
Read more from Heather Mac Donald here.
Hat tip to Instapundit.
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Comments
Sadly, it’s not a new development in the UC system. Most depressing is the air of defeat and resignation with which department chairs and leading faculty receive directives from this or that Assistant Vice-Provost of Inclusion.
Further proof that progressivism corrupts everything it touches.
Good to see that Lysenkoism is still alive and well.
I would say that Lysenkoism is present more in the global warming fantasy. This is more an issue of who does science, although, that can also direct what research efforts are pursued. I knew a neuroanatomist who spent nearly his entire career trying to locate areas of the brain that were different between gay and straight men.
I know that my evidence is likely anecdotal at best, but I am willing to go out on a limb and suggest that individuals recruited from the ghetto with the idea that they would take their medical skills back to the ghetto has likely been a huge failure. Any study looking at that would get suppressed right-quick were it found to be the case. The real danger here is not with the people doing science, but with the science itself being corrupted due to political concerns.
Alcoholics Anonymous got it right by having a tradition which specifically excludes outside interference and money. And I am pretty sure that it was a painful experience which lead to that tradition. As soon as something starts to work, the government shows up to claim it as their own.
Now if we could only get those global warming scientists to join hands on the big island and wish that gas effusing lava back to where it came from, because, after all, to them, man is in charge of the planet (snork).