Religion is a Mental Illness

Report: DEI Is Transforming the National Science Foundation

Government-funded grants favor research exploring ‘white supremacy’ and ‘non-normative forms of gender and sexuality' according to new analy

https://www.thefp.com/

Government-funded grants favor research exploring ‘white supremacy’ and ‘non-normative forms of gender and sexuality' according to new analysis.

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.

New Hate Speech Laws Threaten Freedom Across the West

Those fighting censorship in Canada, or Britain, or Ireland, wish they had a First Amendment to fall back on.

https://www.thefp.com/

One of the first things you learn—or should learn—in Civics 101 is that there is no freedom at all without freedom of expression. Free speech is the essential freedom from which our other rights flow. It’s a right that we have taken for granted in the West. 

But a new wave of hate speech laws has changed that. In English-speaking countries with long traditions of free expression—countries like Canada, Britain, and Ireland—this most basic freedom is under attack. 

Take Canada. Civil liberties groups north of the border are warning a new bill put forward by Justin Trudeau’s government will introduce “draconian penalties” that risk chilling free speech. How draconian? The law would allow authorities to place a Canadian citizen under house arrest if that person is suspected to commit a future hate crime—even if they have not already done so. The legislation also increases the maximum penalty for advocating genocide from five years to life.

These punishments depend on a hazy definition of hate that Noa Mendelsohn Aviv, executive director and general counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, has warned could blur the line between “political activism, passionate debate, and offensive speech.” 

The proposed law is in keeping with the Trudeau government’s broader hostility to free expression. I’ve reported before for The Free Press on this censorious turn in my country, from the crackdown on the trucker protesters to the backdoor regulation of online speech. And, testifying before the U.S. Congress in November, I urged Americans to treat Canada’s war on free expression as a cautionary tale. Increasingly, though, what’s true of Canada is true across the English-speaking world. 

In Ireland, the government is pressing ahead with controversial new restrictions of online speech that, if passed, would be among the most stringent in the Western world. 

The proposed legislation would criminalize the act of “inciting hatred” against individuals or groups based on specified “protected characteristics” like race, nationality, religion, and sexual orientation. The definition of incitement is so broad as to include “recklessly encouraging” other people to hate or cause harm “because of your views” or opinions. In other words, intent doesn’t matter. Nor would it matter if you actually posted the “reckless” content. Merely being in possession of that content—say, in a text message, or in a meme stored on your iPhone—could land you a fine of as much as €5,000 ($5,422) or up to 12 months in prison, or both. 

As with Canada’s proposed law, the Irish legislation rests on a murky definition of hate. But Ireland’s Justice Minister Helen McEntee sees this lack of clarity as a strength. “On the strong advice of the Office of the Attorney General, we have not sought to limit the definition of the widely understood concept of ‘hatred’ beyond its ordinary and everyday meaning,” she explained. “I am advised that defining it further at this juncture could risk prosecutions collapsing and victims being denied justice.” 

In Britain, existing online harm legislation means that tweeting “transwomen are men” can lead to a knock on the door from the cops. Now the governing Conservative Party is under pressure to adopt a broad definition of Islamophobia as a “type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.” 

Other parties have adopted this definition, and free-speech advocates in Britain worry that it is only a matter of time until a Labour-run government codifies the definition into legislation. To do so, they argue, would mean the introduction of a de facto blasphemy law in Britain. 

These growing restrictions on speech across the Anglosphere are making the United States, with its robust First Amendment protection of speech, an outlier—though not for the Biden administration’s lack of trying. 

In April 2022, the Department of Homeland Security announced the creation of a “Disinformation Governance Board” to “coordinate countering misinformation related to homeland security.” There was an immediate pushback from free-speech advocates, who pointed to the obvious fact that this new body would necessarily impinge on protected First Amendment rights. The administration dropped the idea a few months later. 

Then, in September 2023, a federal court ruled that the Biden administration violated the First Amendment when they “coerced or significantly encouraged social media platforms to moderate content” during the pandemic. 

Jay Bhattacharya was one of the scientists on the winning side of that case. Writing in The Free Press after the ruling, he recalled being grilled on the First Amendment during his citizenship test when he was nineteen. “The American civic religion has the right to free speech as the core of its liturgy,” he wrote. “I never imagined that there would come a time when an American government would think of violating this right, or that I would be its target.” 

The trouble isn’t just the Biden administration. 

Listen to Barbara McQuade, an MSNBC legal analyst and professor at the University of Michigan Law School. Her new book, Attack from Within, details “how disinformation is sabotaging America.” America’s “deep commitment to free speech in our First Amendment. . . makes us vulnerable to claims [that] anything we want to do related to speech is censorship,” said McQuade in an interview with Rachel Maddow last week. 

A worrying number of Americans appear to be sympathetic to McQuade’s argument. A 2023 Pew survey found that just 42 percent of voters agreed that “freedom of information should be protected, even if it means false information can be published.” 

McQuade has it backward. The First Amendment is a feature, not a bug; a strength, not a vulnerability; and the bedrock of American freedom and flourishing. 

Across the English-speaking world, we once took our civil liberties for granted. Freedom of speech was understood as a blessing of democracy, not something that needed to be fought for every day. We thought that opaque and vague laws were used by those in power to punish their political or ideological opponents only in illiberal autocracies such as Russia or China. But we were wrong. And those now fighting censorship in Canada, or Britain, or Ireland, wish they had a First Amendment of their own to fall back on.