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This nonsense emerged with a vengeance in the '80s in the humanities and spread quickly to the qualitative social sciences. (Philosophy, econ, and the sciences held out for decades; philosophy has fallen, the sciences are falling. Dunno about econ.)

It is a mishmash of some of the most incoherent, anti-rationalist, and intellectually weakest "work" of the last 50 years. It's obsessed with Marx and Freud (both rejects from the social sciences), poststructuralism, postmodernism, Foucault, deconstruction, radical feminism, and the panoply of critical theories including critical race theory, queer theory and de-colonial theory. These disparate movements have many disagreements, but they come together around a few points of agreement. Radical left politics, for one. Leftist politics has been central to Continental philosophy since around the time of Sartre. Another point of overlap is weak, speculative, interpretive, quasi-literary method. This should be familiar to everyone now, as we see it all around us: aimless wandering among inscrutable, bombastic verbiage, dropping names and spewing neologisms. The conclusions are all predetermined by the politics, and the point is to wander about saying derogatory things about capitalism and the West until it's time to drop some outlandish, politically correct "conclusion"--women have penises, glaciers are sexist, dinosaurs are socially constructed by men...whatever. It is, for example, a foregone conclusion that all who disagree with them are racist (misogynist, x-phobic, etc.); the only question is how to string together some scholarly-sounding "arguments" to bamboozle people into thinking this conclusion is less preposterous than it seems on its face.

Some of us have been battling against this bullshit for decades, sounding the alarm about its spread in the academy. We were told that we were alarmist, and that it would remain isolated to campus. We explained that academia is the bottleneck through which the entire elite class passes, and that it was absurd to think that such pseudoscientific, anti-rationalist gobbledygook could pervade academia yet remained contained thereto.

Well, unfortunately, we were right.

How to defeat it is a separate question. But getting a clear view of the problem is, perhaps, a helpful first step.

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Repugnant.

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I think Trump is a narcissist and a con-man, but dammit, articles like these tempt me to vote for him. We need someone to come in and just blow all this garbage out of our government.

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That is funny. Do you think Biden and Harris are narcissists? And are they conning the public with the “mainstream” media?

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Will the left promise to use only DEI doctors and ride only DEI-engineers designed airplanes?

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I hope those DEI engineers aren't designing any bridges

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I searched for the comments of some of the people getting these NSF grants and all I see is virulent Jew-hate. "Shirin Vossoughi" is a paticularly evil person.

I will be shutting down for Yom Kippur soon. I'll will be praying for the death and destruction of all these evil people.

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Grant proposals know how to play the system.

Say you want to research parasites in crabs. No grant for this for that science. Instead the proposal seeks to research "the effect of parasites feminizing male crabs." Ok; you have a chance at a grant.

If you really want the grant then the same research is now "Struggles of trans-identifying crabs surviving climate change due to colonization from white communities." Bingo - grant approved.

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Oct 11·edited Oct 11

This is gross. I was bussed in the 1970's along with other white kids to an inner city school of mostly black and Korean kids for a state program called "integration." We learned about African culture. How to make masks out of palm tree leaves. My classmate crush drew black pictures for me, and before he gave them to me said, "my momma said that black is beautiful." My friends were just my friends, not my "black" friends and race was not mentioned once! Fifty years later, I still love African culture and have extensive African music and art collections. Learning that people are people, was the best way to integrate. DEI is bullshit.

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Great reporting. Wouldn’t the grant money be better served on research regarding actual diseases that affect minorities?

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Does anyone think this report is nonbiased and non-partisan?

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That’s me. But then, I’m often confused by facts. Would a DEI advocate report different titles and amounts for the same grants?

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founding

I had a friend who worked at Harvard Medical School as a biostatistics assistant professor. After 2020, if we ever talked, she always mentioned that she and her husband had “privileges” others didn’t have, then shared that she was working on some project, the name of which I no longer recall, but I do recall it had the word “equity” in the title. I remember thinking, “This nonsense gets into literally everything.” We’ve drifted apart.

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Thanks for this reporting. Sadly, this reads like a “mockumentary” or Saturday Night Live sketch. But sadly it’s real. Pathetic. I imagine so many truly worthy projects which might otherwise have received funding, but got crowded out by this nonsense. Whomever the people are approving this crap need to be terminated.

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This piece is a bit on the far right of the dial and seems to indicate that it is effecting all of science funding . But here's the main problem NSF doesn't fund hard science. NIS does . Also NSF has a long history of "Diversity" funding since the 1950's so what is difference here ? Just a web site search and you see what areas they fund. The hard sciences like medically/disease/genetic/biological etc is NSF . Yes is a soup of acronyms but they are very different organisations . Yet again the TFP needs to do better work before they publish . I've really been finding may pieces in TFP lacking in good research the last few weeks which is a real indication of just bad editors or no editors ?

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Oct 12·edited Oct 12

From the NSF website:

“What we fund

Broadly, we fund:

Basic research and education across all fields of fundamental science and engineering, except the medical sciences.”

Your comment is a bit on the far left.

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It's "affecting all of science funding."

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The article literally says NSF funding about a hundred times.

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Yes NSF, but it's implying all of science and thus NIS has be considered because it's a major funding for medically/disease/genetic/biological which is a big core of science. The other point is has DEI really changed these organisations much ? if you do any google search of lets say STEM funding you see it's always been on the left side of things so is DEI a big problem or is the administration of these organisations always been far left ? Which is the bigger problem ? So if you wanted to change things do you focus on DEI or the whole organisation ? TFP here is missing all of this and that it seems is just sloppy reporting which I've been seeing here and in other places of TFP . These points are easy to find so why is TFP being so sloppy ?

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Not only NSF has the whole slew of programs earmarked for DEI and CRT, as those mentioned in the article, but they also injects DEI criteria into funding decisions of technical proposals. All other agencies are doing it to, as we documented in a recent paper "Politicizing science funding undermines public trust in science, academic freedom, and the unbiased generation of knowledge" published in Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics. From the abstract of our paper: "This commentary documents how federal funding agencies are changing the criteria by which they distribute taxpayer money intended for scientific research. Increasingly, STEMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine) funding agencies are requiring applicants for funding to include a plan to advance DEI (“Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”) in their proposals and to dedicate a part of the research budget to its implementation. These mandates undermine the academic freedom of researchers and the unbiased generation of knowledge needed for a well-functioning democracy. Maintaining excellence in science is fundamental to the continuation of the U.S. as a global economic leader. Science provides a basis for solving important global challenges such as security, energy, climate, and health. Diverting funding from science into activities unrelated to the production of knowledge undermines science's ability to serve humankind. When funding agencies politicize science by using their power to further a particular ideological agenda, they contribute to public mistrust in science. Hijacking science funding to promote DEI is thus a threat to our society." We cite an example from NSF: in a grant proposal for NSF Centers for Chemical Innovation, the PIs are asked to provide an 8 page broader impact plan in which they should elaborate, among other things, how they will "broaden participation of historically underrepresented groups", and a 3 page DEI plan in which they are asked to elaborate how DEI will be implemented in all aspects of Center operation (including publication, governance, training etc).

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Here is link to the Frontiers paper:

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/research-metrics-and-analytics/articles/10.3389/frma.2024.1418065/full

It is long, but it has lots of examples of how exactly these things are done.

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The NSF grant process has always been an insider driven process. The people on the grant review boards are academics who ensure those that have supported them get grants and those that did not (or questioned their research activities in the pass) do not. There is as much academic collusion and nepotism for NSF Grants as there are being defense contractors and those in the military reviewing and approving contracts. The desire is not for scientific research as much as money and power.

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Can anyone say "dystopian"? So, we have Biden's Scientific Integrity Force (I mean, what?) representing the US government in granting over $200 million to researchers who focus at least as much attention on DEI concepts as they do on the actual SCIENCE they are being paid to research? And one, Shirin Vossoughi (of Iranian descent) believes that all American institutions are steeped in racism? While another, Marwa Elshakry (also of ME descent) was/is active in the anti-Israel campus protests? And this is happening because Biden's apparently unscientific SIF thinks that other "factors" should be taken into consideration beyond, say, actual science when doing scientific research. And, indeed, these other "factors" could actually "outweigh scientific factors alone". So, it's good to know that when some math teachers are being educated, actually learning how to teach mathematics itself may not be their top priority. And I guess the same can be said about engineering classrooms, where these kids and their families are paying high tuitions on the assumption that they will be learning ENGINEERING, they also could be getting in-class lectures on racial equity. I guess this leads us to wonder who are on the research teams of new cancer/Alzheimer's/heart disease treatments, and what do they prioritize? I honestly don't care what color, culture, nationality, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference or religion our scientific researchers are (who cares??), they just need to be smart, focused and dedicated to science above all else. IMO, that's how you make a difference and help people.

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