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.
“In recent years, we have seen a sharp increase in actual scientists—that is, people with degrees in the hard sciences from major universities who regularly receive money to conduct actual scientific research—using their credentials to parrot the talking points of the woke neo-Marxist left,” Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the ranking minority member of the Senate committee, said in the report.
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.”
“Many policy decisions are ‘science-informed,’ meaning that factors in addition to science shape decision-making,” the Biden task force wrote. “These factors may include financial, budget, institutional, cultural, legal, or equity considerations that may outweigh scientific factors alone.” Going forward, the task force said, such “considerations” should play an important role in NSF grant decisions.
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.”
The GOP members’ report said it searched for grant applications that used a variety of terms associated with social justice, gender, race, environmental justice, and individuals belonging to underrepresented groups. Some of the grant applications that received funding showed up in more than one category.
The overall 10 percent figure identified by the GOP report masks how quickly the number of such grants have increased. In 2021, before the Biden task force report came out, they were less than 1 percent of the total number of grants. By 2022, that number had risen to more than 16 percent, and was at 27 percent between January and April 2024.
The Republicans’ report highlighted several specific grants that illustrate how DEI is changing the nature of NSF-funded research:
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.
Marwa Elshakry, an associate professor of history at Columbia University, together with Jamil Sbitan, a PhD student in history, received more than $15,000 in 2023 to identify how “hegemonic narratives have sought to obfuscate not only the contemporary existence of non-normative sexual experiences in certain national contexts, but also aimed to bury any historical traces of non-normative forms of gender and sexuality.” Vossoughi, Elshakry, and Sbitan were among several grant recipients that the report called out for their support of campus protests against Israel and its conduct of the war against Hamas. “The relationship between DEI NSF funding and the chaos on college campuses is not merely a matter of correlation,” the report notes. “. . . several NSF grant recipients awarded funding for a DEI grant either supported these encampments or joined anti semitic demonstrations.” Elshakry is on leave this semester and could not immediately be reached for comment. Sbitan also could not 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.”
This shift in emphasis of NSF grants is happening at the same time the American public says its faith in the scientific community is declining.
Pew Research Center data from 2023, for instance, found that 27 percent of Americans say that they have “not too much” or “no” confidence in scientists to act in the public interest, as compared to only 12 percent in April 2020 at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Republicans’ report argues that it’s not just the public’s trust that is at issue—it’s also the quality of the science that NSF grants produce.
“These [DEI] grants both crowd out other kinds of research that could advance understanding of the physical world and advance a deeply divisive philosophy antithetical to the tenets of empirical scientific research,” the report said.
Rupa Subramanya is a reporter for The Free Press. Follow her on X @rupasubramanya and read her piece “The Secret Service Failed. What’s That Have to Do with DEI?”
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As disheartening as this well-meaning, pernicious waste of human capital is in the sciences, it’s even more rampant in the arts. Within that, my field — classical music, the one made up predominantly of dead white guys — is the canary in the coal mine.
Grantmaking in the arts in my state, California, is being cannibalized by social justice/DEI initiatives. In recent months, I’ve seen this impact firsthand on both sides of the grant process: as a panelist reviewing others’ grant applications and as a writer seeking grant funds.
Last Spring, I served as a panelist for LA County arts grants. In doing so, I learned how applications are scored. As a stand-alone category, DEI was given almost equal weight to artistic quality — and even ranked higher than the competence of the organization's management. Worse still, DEI was also an implicit factor in every other category, including artistic quality itself. Beginning our panel review session with a 3-minute land acknowledgment — never mind that there were under 8 of us meeting on Zoom — was a farcically congruent way to set the stage for all that followed.
The arts are saturated with hyper-liberal empaths and evangelists desperate for relevance. This is not new. Before DEI, classical music's moral panic was about the age of its audience: "We won't matter if our audience is DEAD in ten years!!" For decades, the field desperately latched on to trying to woo "younger" audiences. This was ageist and misguided. It also failed spectacularly. I witnessed many pathetic attempts to reverse-engineer classical music programming to attract younger audiences. (It turns out that everyone ages eventually, and when they do, their tastes skew towards the timeless, and they have greater resources of time and money to attend concerts.)
But this current manifestation — an obsession with "decolonizing" the arts — is far more troubling. The field's latest histrionic, shallow, misguided appeal for relevance swapped banal, relatively harmless ageism for racism and cultural Marxism. Organizations and artists are tripping over themselves to prove their fealty to the "right" cause. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the audience just wants to hear Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, and Bach. Threading the needle between what the audience wants and what grantmakers and fellow artists expect is becoming increasingly difficult and logically inconsistent. As an artist, I can't help but feel like I'm watching the art form I love implode in slow motion.
I often think of Douglas Murray's concept of the social justice warrior as a contemporary "ronin:" people wandering aimlessly without a purpose. You'd think the arts and sciences would provide a powerful antidote to purposelessness. The fact that they're not immune to this crusading phenomenon is the saddest of all.
ALL of science has been bastardized. The magazine Scientific American just published an article that contained this line, apparently in support of trans rights:
"The inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports."
Good grief.