Thank you for a summary of your timely article! Certainly one can be proactive in escaping local taxes (e.g., move from New York to Florida) or school-wide DEI enforcement (again, NY to FL), but federal funding affects us all. A move from USSR to USA, as you mentioned, increased the freedom to pursue merit-based funding and it is hoped that there are still ways to return to merit-based (at a minimum, DEI-free) funding environment through governing party shifts in the near future.
The AFA issued a statement the day after this essay was posted on 2024.07.17. The AFA statement (last revised according to the PDF metadata Jul 17, 2024 at 1:53 PM - presumably EDT) cites the same paper and has some of the same people involved (and notes as much), so it's not surprising that it echoes this essay. The AFA statement concludes, "In fact, rather than advancing these goals, the requirement for DEI plans in grant proposals undermines them — by promoting dissembling and cynicism by applicants, reducing the quality of funded research, threatening academic freedom through compelled speech, and ultimately, increasing public mistrust of science that threatens the entire enterprise."
Whilst I fully agree with the forced political trend seen I science funding. I got some remarks here that I find somewhat naive. 1. Science is not unbiased and never was. 2. Science was never truly meritocretic. I have worked in an academic institution for a while now and which scientist gets what project and 2hat amount of money is in part based as much if not more so on how the scientist sells themselves. I. E. How they look and talk and what amount of asskissing to power they have done. Science should be meritocretic but is not at all because it is run by attention and status hungry humans, be it male or female (or other), and is run as much by ingriup favoritism like fallacious appeals to authority, cronyism, nepotism and the like, probably more so than by merit. As quantity of publications and appeals to popularity in topics of research decide a lot of what gets published. Which means that science institutions as they exist now are run not so much by merit and are not at all unbiased. There is a lot of meta-science out there that supports this notion. And this does not only account for so called "soft" sciences. And a lot of these problems, including all the fraud and scientific misconduct accounts already for a lot of the waning trust in science. But yes I do agree that political bias makes all the other problems even worse so it seems it is just a small drop in the ocean of problems that exist for how science is done.
Do you even know what communism is? There are few countries over the world that are communists. And china is the biggest one, and even a poor example of one. Don't confuse communism with socialism, they are not the same.
Having worked in STEM for upwards of 50 years, I agree that science was never "perfect". But there have been periods when things were slightly better, and periods when things were slightly worse.
I think that we need to revisit ways to encourage excellence. We should not be subscribing to ideologies that promise to make things even worse than they already are.
While we argue over how many BIPOC transvestites can dance on the head of a pin, the rest of the world are getting things done. DEI is a competence dissolving luxury practice the decadent and depraved West can no longer afford.
Admitting, hiring, funding, and granting awards based on race, sex, sexuality, disability, and ethnicity, and vetting everyone for correct think guarantees that the priority is no longer on sound and creative science but instead on social objectives. Science is in this way distorted and to a degree undermined.
This DEI corruption has entirely destroyed my discipline of anthropology, and the social "sciences" and humanities generally, as the substance of these diverse fields have been hijacked by "social justice" ideology. I am in deep mourning for anthropology, and sad for related fields. The practical importance of science offers a lever to insist on a merit basis. The public does case what happens to science, and should be mobilized on its behalf.
The title is "Politicizing Science Funding Undermines A) Public Trust in Science, B) Academic Freedom, and C) the Unbiased Generation of Knowledge" (where I added the A, B, and C). In particular the article states, "These requirements to incorporate DEI into each research proposal are alarming. They constitute compelled speech, they undermine B) the academic freedom of researchers, C) they dilute merit-based criteria for funding, D) they incentivize illegal discriminatory hiring practices, A) they erode public trust in science, and E) they contribute to administrative overload." (There I repeated A, B, and C as best I could and added D and E.)
The claim (A) about DEI requirements undermining or eroding of public trust is unsupported entirely in the paper. It is simply asserted. It might be correct, but it is unsupported by evidence or even much logical speculation. Indeed, one could argue quite reasonably that trust is undermined or eroded by DEI requirements in some members of the public while arguing that the trust is enhanced in other members of the public.
Note that my point is not about the reasonableness of any claim, but rather the rigor of the claim about trust in particular, i.e. whether it is scientifically supported in the paper. I don't find much of anything - it seems to be asserted or assumed, not supported.
Thanks for the reply Anna. Your paper cited the Kahan references in this sentence, "The politicization of science by DEI also erodes the trust in scientists and the scientific enterprise itself (Kahan, 2010, 2015) that is required for experts, the public, and legislators to effectively work together to solve pressing problems, such as climate, energy, and pandemics. Mistrust in science also provides..." I was disappointed just now when I searched for "trust" in both papers, but the word does not appear in either. So I searched for "belie" as in "believe" or "belief" and those appear a few times, along with a 'gut feeling' which might be synonymous with or similar to 'trust.'
Your paper clearly labeled itself as "commentary." It would be fair to say that a **commentary** need not be rigorously justified. I won't argue with that. My commentary (there's that word again) was only that your paper asserts the claim but doesn't provide much evidence for it.
To add some substance to my point, other than just a pedantic criticism, one might imagine a person with a minority skin color, who, in this construction, feels that efforts toward DEI could make a more fair science funding process, and hence their trust in science would increase. They might feel that way because they believe that unregulated peer review selects winners who look like the panel members, so they might believe that introducing something (call it "DEI") that regulates the peer review could be beneficial. My personal feeling is that D, E, and I are good goals, but that much of DEI implementation is misguided and counter productive. However, trust is a very complex and delicate quality.
Peer review is not unregulated. It is self-regulated.
And your argument that funding, hiring, ... should be dictated by some group of commissars in order to accommodate what a particular group might feel really doesn't hold water.
I didn't make it that argument. Here is a hypothetical scenario...
Peter: "Commissars should accommodate the feelings of particular groups in funding and hiring."
Alex: "your argument that funding, hiring, ... should be dictated by some group of commissars in order to accommodate what a particular group might feel really doesn't hold water" because ...
I was curious about this myself, and was just about to read the paper to look for this evidence. It's disappointing the empirical support isn't there, but the assertion itself is just obviously true. Public confidence in every institution, most especially including academia, has plummeted in recent years, and this is very obviously a direct consequence of DIE.
"The claim (A) about DEI requirements undermining or eroding of public trust is unsupported entirely in the paper."
Nonsense. No formal academic paper is needed to recognize that racial quotas in academic hiring - a frequent type of DEI - are harmful and clearly erode public trust.
My comment should've included "They F) constitute compelled speech...."
Also, it won't be the first time I've mentioned it, but government funding has had strings attached (e.g. spreading the money geographically, to larger institutions and smaller ones, etc). (cf. Science, The Endless Frontier (1945, by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush). This isn't to argue for DEI implementations, but simply to note that funding has never been and never will be entirely merit-based and that political considerations will hold sway (e.g. military interests, pork barrels, etc).
This is exactly how attacks on merit are justified. We commented on this in the merit paper: "Admittedly, meritocracy is imperfect. The best and brightest do not always win. But the idea that meritocracy is nothing but a myth is demonstrably false, indeed absurd."
Anna, I don't understand your comment here: what was the antecedent to "This"?
Does "This" refer to Alex's "Funding has never been 100% merit based, so allocating funding on the basis of race and gender and ... is ok. Great logic."? That you "liked" Alex's comment suggests that you support it.
If it was directed at my comment "...strings attached..." then my response is that 1) my comment parallels your quote, "...imperfect" and 2) that my citing Bush's Endless Frontier is quite different than invoking a myth.
Either interpretation is a straw man argument w.r.t. to my commentary about trust.
Dear Peter, I am getting lost in these comments threads -- it is not the best medium for a thoughtful discussion. My comment was in response to the falacious argument of the type that Alex highlighted. I see it invoked in many cases, not only in the discussion about merit. "X is not implemented in a perfect way, hence lets replace X by Y". The most recent example of this is attacks on peer review and on publishing system.
Dear Anna, Thanks for the reply and I agree with you (both that HeterodoxSTEM's comment section is not the best medium for thoughtful discussion (an understatement!) and that many times people present fallacious arguments, not just here.) It would be useful to understand what really affects the public's trust in science, in order to try to rehabilitate that trust. Often the public follows its leaders. The public hardly knows what goes on in NASA or NSF funding procedures. When you and your co-authors assert that DEI requirements in proposals for funding undermine public trust, your statement may become a self-fulfilling claim: you may be contributing to the erosion of trust. Of course that doesn't make your actions the cause ... one should look upstream, but still it is a concern.
I wonder if a more effective and palatable way (and simultaneously less onerous and counterproductive way) to handle the DEI-in-funding issue would be the approach of a decade or so ago when successful PIs could request of NASA a supplement for education and outreach, typically up to 10% of the value of the grant. (If you discuss this or other alternatives to the procedures that you don't like, please just say so and accept my apologies for not reading your article prior to commenting here). It's been an awful week, hasn't it?
Incidentally, you didn't mention it before, but for the readers of this thread, I'll note that your paper did cite a study of the declining trust in science (link below, but not specifically about relationship between DEI-in-funding and distrust). Those who self-identify as Ds report much less distrust in science than the Rs. (Readers: that's a paraphrase - read the following document for all the specific questions and demographic analysis). The most striking change I noticed is on page 1 of 7 of the study linked in your paper ("When federal funding agencies infuse political agendas into their function, they contribute to public mistrust in the process by which science is funded. When universities become complicit by subjugating their mission of truth seeking to ideologically driven DEI programs, they contribute to public mistrust in scientific institutions (Kennedy and Tyson, 2023).") and below: a plot shows the distrust in scientists by Rs went way up (the fraction went from ~20% to 36%) from before the end of 2020 to the end of 2021 and then held there. I interpret that as a good fraction of Rs being influenced by media (both mass media and social media) relentlessly telling them to distrust scientists (e.g. Fauci), which may also be a subset of, or ancillary effect of, distrust in "elites" or academics, which is a central talking point of one political party in particular. https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2023/11/14/americans-trust-in-scientists-positive-views-of-science-continue-to-decline/
Important update: Academic Freedom Alliance has issued a statement calling to end DEI in federal science funding:
https://academicfreedom.org/afa-calls-for-end-to-required-diversity-statements-in-federal-grant-funding/
Like
Thank you for a summary of your timely article! Certainly one can be proactive in escaping local taxes (e.g., move from New York to Florida) or school-wide DEI enforcement (again, NY to FL), but federal funding affects us all. A move from USSR to USA, as you mentioned, increased the freedom to pursue merit-based funding and it is hoped that there are still ways to return to merit-based (at a minimum, DEI-free) funding environment through governing party shifts in the near future.
The AFA issued a statement the day after this essay was posted on 2024.07.17. The AFA statement (last revised according to the PDF metadata Jul 17, 2024 at 1:53 PM - presumably EDT) cites the same paper and has some of the same people involved (and notes as much), so it's not surprising that it echoes this essay. The AFA statement concludes, "In fact, rather than advancing these goals, the requirement for DEI plans in grant proposals undermines them — by promoting dissembling and cynicism by applicants, reducing the quality of funded research, threatening academic freedom through compelled speech, and ultimately, increasing public mistrust of science that threatens the entire enterprise."
Good piece. Politicizing science always leads to disaster.
Make Sell Buyology Cell Biology again!
Whilst I fully agree with the forced political trend seen I science funding. I got some remarks here that I find somewhat naive. 1. Science is not unbiased and never was. 2. Science was never truly meritocretic. I have worked in an academic institution for a while now and which scientist gets what project and 2hat amount of money is in part based as much if not more so on how the scientist sells themselves. I. E. How they look and talk and what amount of asskissing to power they have done. Science should be meritocretic but is not at all because it is run by attention and status hungry humans, be it male or female (or other), and is run as much by ingriup favoritism like fallacious appeals to authority, cronyism, nepotism and the like, probably more so than by merit. As quantity of publications and appeals to popularity in topics of research decide a lot of what gets published. Which means that science institutions as they exist now are run not so much by merit and are not at all unbiased. There is a lot of meta-science out there that supports this notion. And this does not only account for so called "soft" sciences. And a lot of these problems, including all the fraud and scientific misconduct accounts already for a lot of the waning trust in science. But yes I do agree that political bias makes all the other problems even worse so it seems it is just a small drop in the ocean of problems that exist for how science is done.
Communism and science are antithetical.
Do you even know what communism is? There are few countries over the world that are communists. And china is the biggest one, and even a poor example of one. Don't confuse communism with socialism, they are not the same.
Having worked in STEM for upwards of 50 years, I agree that science was never "perfect". But there have been periods when things were slightly better, and periods when things were slightly worse.
I think that we need to revisit ways to encourage excellence. We should not be subscribing to ideologies that promise to make things even worse than they already are.
While we argue over how many BIPOC transvestites can dance on the head of a pin, the rest of the world are getting things done. DEI is a competence dissolving luxury practice the decadent and depraved West can no longer afford.
Admitting, hiring, funding, and granting awards based on race, sex, sexuality, disability, and ethnicity, and vetting everyone for correct think guarantees that the priority is no longer on sound and creative science but instead on social objectives. Science is in this way distorted and to a degree undermined.
This DEI corruption has entirely destroyed my discipline of anthropology, and the social "sciences" and humanities generally, as the substance of these diverse fields have been hijacked by "social justice" ideology. I am in deep mourning for anthropology, and sad for related fields. The practical importance of science offers a lever to insist on a merit basis. The public does case what happens to science, and should be mobilized on its behalf.
I thought routine lying was what undermined science. And it was government funding that incented the lying in the first place.
Ya know, follow the money and you'll find the Science.
The title is "Politicizing Science Funding Undermines A) Public Trust in Science, B) Academic Freedom, and C) the Unbiased Generation of Knowledge" (where I added the A, B, and C). In particular the article states, "These requirements to incorporate DEI into each research proposal are alarming. They constitute compelled speech, they undermine B) the academic freedom of researchers, C) they dilute merit-based criteria for funding, D) they incentivize illegal discriminatory hiring practices, A) they erode public trust in science, and E) they contribute to administrative overload." (There I repeated A, B, and C as best I could and added D and E.)
The claim (A) about DEI requirements undermining or eroding of public trust is unsupported entirely in the paper. It is simply asserted. It might be correct, but it is unsupported by evidence or even much logical speculation. Indeed, one could argue quite reasonably that trust is undermined or eroded by DEI requirements in some members of the public while arguing that the trust is enhanced in other members of the public.
Note that my point is not about the reasonableness of any claim, but rather the rigor of the claim about trust in particular, i.e. whether it is scientifically supported in the paper. I don't find much of anything - it seems to be asserted or assumed, not supported.
Regarding politicization of science leading to the mistrust in science -- these two references support this claim:
Kahan, D. M. (2010). Fixing the communications failure, Nature. 463, 296–97. doi: 10.1038/463296a
Kahan, D. M. (2015). What is the “Science of Science Communication”? J. Sci. Comm. 14(3), 1–10. doi: 10.2139/ssrn.2562025
Thanks for the reply Anna. Your paper cited the Kahan references in this sentence, "The politicization of science by DEI also erodes the trust in scientists and the scientific enterprise itself (Kahan, 2010, 2015) that is required for experts, the public, and legislators to effectively work together to solve pressing problems, such as climate, energy, and pandemics. Mistrust in science also provides..." I was disappointed just now when I searched for "trust" in both papers, but the word does not appear in either. So I searched for "belie" as in "believe" or "belief" and those appear a few times, along with a 'gut feeling' which might be synonymous with or similar to 'trust.'
Your paper clearly labeled itself as "commentary." It would be fair to say that a **commentary** need not be rigorously justified. I won't argue with that. My commentary (there's that word again) was only that your paper asserts the claim but doesn't provide much evidence for it.
To add some substance to my point, other than just a pedantic criticism, one might imagine a person with a minority skin color, who, in this construction, feels that efforts toward DEI could make a more fair science funding process, and hence their trust in science would increase. They might feel that way because they believe that unregulated peer review selects winners who look like the panel members, so they might believe that introducing something (call it "DEI") that regulates the peer review could be beneficial. My personal feeling is that D, E, and I are good goals, but that much of DEI implementation is misguided and counter productive. However, trust is a very complex and delicate quality.
Peer review is not unregulated. It is self-regulated.
And your argument that funding, hiring, ... should be dictated by some group of commissars in order to accommodate what a particular group might feel really doesn't hold water.
I didn't make it that argument. Here is a hypothetical scenario...
Peter: "Commissars should accommodate the feelings of particular groups in funding and hiring."
Alex: "your argument that funding, hiring, ... should be dictated by some group of commissars in order to accommodate what a particular group might feel really doesn't hold water" because ...
You certainly did make that argument.
I'll try to be patient a little longer. Please quote me verbatim and explain how you (mis)interpret what I have written in that manner.
Why do you think that practicing gay race communism in science is a good goal?
I was curious about this myself, and was just about to read the paper to look for this evidence. It's disappointing the empirical support isn't there, but the assertion itself is just obviously true. Public confidence in every institution, most especially including academia, has plummeted in recent years, and this is very obviously a direct consequence of DIE.
"The claim (A) about DEI requirements undermining or eroding of public trust is unsupported entirely in the paper."
Nonsense. No formal academic paper is needed to recognize that racial quotas in academic hiring - a frequent type of DEI - are harmful and clearly erode public trust.
My comment should've included "They F) constitute compelled speech...."
Also, it won't be the first time I've mentioned it, but government funding has had strings attached (e.g. spreading the money geographically, to larger institutions and smaller ones, etc). (cf. Science, The Endless Frontier (1945, by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush). This isn't to argue for DEI implementations, but simply to note that funding has never been and never will be entirely merit-based and that political considerations will hold sway (e.g. military interests, pork barrels, etc).
Funding has never been 100% merit based, so allocating funding on the basis of race and gender and ... is ok. Great logic.
This is exactly how attacks on merit are justified. We commented on this in the merit paper: "Admittedly, meritocracy is imperfect. The best and brightest do not always win. But the idea that meritocracy is nothing but a myth is demonstrably false, indeed absurd."
Yes indeed.
Anna, I don't understand your comment here: what was the antecedent to "This"?
Does "This" refer to Alex's "Funding has never been 100% merit based, so allocating funding on the basis of race and gender and ... is ok. Great logic."? That you "liked" Alex's comment suggests that you support it.
If it was directed at my comment "...strings attached..." then my response is that 1) my comment parallels your quote, "...imperfect" and 2) that my citing Bush's Endless Frontier is quite different than invoking a myth.
Either interpretation is a straw man argument w.r.t. to my commentary about trust.
Dear Peter, I am getting lost in these comments threads -- it is not the best medium for a thoughtful discussion. My comment was in response to the falacious argument of the type that Alex highlighted. I see it invoked in many cases, not only in the discussion about merit. "X is not implemented in a perfect way, hence lets replace X by Y". The most recent example of this is attacks on peer review and on publishing system.
Sorry about the ambiguity.
Anna.
Dear Anna, Thanks for the reply and I agree with you (both that HeterodoxSTEM's comment section is not the best medium for thoughtful discussion (an understatement!) and that many times people present fallacious arguments, not just here.) It would be useful to understand what really affects the public's trust in science, in order to try to rehabilitate that trust. Often the public follows its leaders. The public hardly knows what goes on in NASA or NSF funding procedures. When you and your co-authors assert that DEI requirements in proposals for funding undermine public trust, your statement may become a self-fulfilling claim: you may be contributing to the erosion of trust. Of course that doesn't make your actions the cause ... one should look upstream, but still it is a concern.
I wonder if a more effective and palatable way (and simultaneously less onerous and counterproductive way) to handle the DEI-in-funding issue would be the approach of a decade or so ago when successful PIs could request of NASA a supplement for education and outreach, typically up to 10% of the value of the grant. (If you discuss this or other alternatives to the procedures that you don't like, please just say so and accept my apologies for not reading your article prior to commenting here). It's been an awful week, hasn't it?
Incidentally, you didn't mention it before, but for the readers of this thread, I'll note that your paper did cite a study of the declining trust in science (link below, but not specifically about relationship between DEI-in-funding and distrust). Those who self-identify as Ds report much less distrust in science than the Rs. (Readers: that's a paraphrase - read the following document for all the specific questions and demographic analysis). The most striking change I noticed is on page 1 of 7 of the study linked in your paper ("When federal funding agencies infuse political agendas into their function, they contribute to public mistrust in the process by which science is funded. When universities become complicit by subjugating their mission of truth seeking to ideologically driven DEI programs, they contribute to public mistrust in scientific institutions (Kennedy and Tyson, 2023).") and below: a plot shows the distrust in scientists by Rs went way up (the fraction went from ~20% to 36%) from before the end of 2020 to the end of 2021 and then held there. I interpret that as a good fraction of Rs being influenced by media (both mass media and social media) relentlessly telling them to distrust scientists (e.g. Fauci), which may also be a subset of, or ancillary effect of, distrust in "elites" or academics, which is a central talking point of one political party in particular. https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2023/11/14/americans-trust-in-scientists-positive-views-of-science-continue-to-decline/
The Protocol Review and Monitoring Committee always exhibits "impeccable" logic.
Maybe you missed "This isn't to argue for DEI implementations"
lol - sure. Actually, no, nothing missed, at all.