A National Science Foundation program mandates that scientists adopt politicized research methods, making wokeness — instead of truth — the goal.
A National Science Foundation program mandates that scientists adopt politicized research methods, making wokeness — instead of truth — the goal.
Y our government is trying to replace the very idea of science itself with far-left ideology, and it’s asking you to pay for the privilege.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) openly admits that it has given $270 million since 2001 to introduce the intersectional framework of critical race theory into science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) via a program called NSF ADVANCE. According to a synopsis of the program on the NSF’s website:
The NSF ADVANCE program contributes to the National Science Foundation’s goal of a more diverse and capable science and engineering workforce. In this solicitation, the NSF ADVANCE program seeks to build on prior NSF ADVANCE work and other research and literature concerning gender, racial, and ethnic equity. The NSF ADVANCE program goal is to broaden the implementation of evidence-based systemic change strategies that promote equity for STEM faculty in academic workplaces and the academic profession. The NSF ADVANCE program provides grants to enhance the systemic factors that support equity and inclusion and to mitigate the systemic factors that create inequities in the academic profession and workplaces.
What this collection of buzzwords means is that NSF ADVANCE uses taxpayer money to promote wokeness in the sciences, ensuring that grant applicants adopt progressive, politicized research methods that make wokeness instead of truth the research goal. Given the incredible levels of competition for academic jobs and funding, this essentially dictates faculty members’ political views, and it has been supported directly by the Biden White House.
This isn’t science. It’s politics with a taxpayer-funded checkbook wearing science as a skin suit.
The program is notably open about its goal of “contributing to the development of a more diverse science and engineering workforce” by providing grants to “enhance the systemic factors that support equity and inclusion,” and it effectively bakes this into its decision-making rubric. It explicitly states: “All ADVANCE proposals are expected to take an intersectional perspective and consider the salient categories of social identity when appropriate. Specifically, proposers should recognize that gender, race and ethnicity do not exist in isolation from each other.”
In 2018, NSF ADVANCE gave Virginia Commonwealth University almost $3 million to “decrease structural and cultural barriers that prevent the diversification of the faculty and to increase the recruitment, retention and advancement of STEM women faculty at VCU.” The university’s description of how the money was used employs an almost laughable number of buzzwords to explain how it “serves as [a] national model to expand female STEM faculty recruitment and retention” but doesn’t bother to attempt to explain how the money has advanced scientific inquiry.
The wackiest woke part of NSF ADVANCE is its “Equity for Excellence in STEM” (EES) program, the “basic premise” of which is “that increasing the successful participation of individuals from historically underrepresented groups in STEM will result in a diverse, highly capable STEM workforce.” The EES program is staffed by Florida Atlantic University professor Sharon Homer-Drummond, who was elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2022 because of her “efforts in just and equitable STEM education.” She has gone on to take a variety of almost comically woke and downright unscientific positions.
On X, Homer-Drummond says she is located on “Cherokee/Miccosukee land.” She complained during the 2020 Covid pandemic that “white supremacy is a disease,” apologized on behalf of the scientific community for misgendering a self-styled “autistic disabled trans demi-aroace communist,” compared school choice to slavery, demanded reparations for slavery, and once requested that American scientific education be shut down pending a “transition to a lifelong commitment of actions to eradicate anti-Black racism in academia and STEM.”
In Homer-Drummond’s alternate universe, American principles are “the values of white supremacy” that “really should be destroyed,” while Christianity should be reorganized on ecological lines — which, according to her, one could oppose only because religious people “will give you power, they will give you money, they do what you’re saying with uncritical eyes, which can literally kill people.”
Again, one of the people tasked with distributing $270 million in taxpayer bucks explicitly to promote her own fringe ideology . . . is accusing others of being in it for the money. No wonder her own students rate her as “awful.”
And this taxpayer-funded woke purge of science is, sadly, working.
Major scientific journals such as Nature and Scientific American outright state that only evidence compatible with their worldview can be published, taking progressive dogma more seriously than they take even the most obvious scientific truths, such as biological sex differences between men and women. Heck, even saying that race-based affirmative action in college admissions is bad — which is the opinion of the overwhelming majority of Americans — can be grounds to intellectually exile scientists, according to Scientific American. More than 57 percent of voters in far-left California rejected affirmative action based on race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in a 2020 ballot referendum in the same election season during which more than 63 percent of the state voted for Joe Biden. California’s own state-run community-college system, meanwhile, directs its faculty to actively contribute “to DEI and anti-racism research and scholarship,” in violation of academic freedom and the U.S. Constitution.
Until recently, scientific publications at least aspired to be politically and ideologically neutral, to prevent editors’ views from impeding the quest for truth. But scientific quality controls have been replaced with woke political checkpoints, and writing true but insufficiently progressive statements in a scientific paper can now trigger potentially career-ending consequences. Such an environment is designed simply to generate an echo chamber of progressive groupthink. As a result, much scientific research isn’t trustworthy anymore. Findings that fit woke biases rise on a tidal wave of cash, and, after they fail to be replicated or are retracted, they are quietly ignored.
The ideology behind grievance-studies departments at universities is no longer limited to the humanities but has successfully demanded explicitly political and racially biased processes of tenure and federal-grant application in STEM fields. Your government is pressuring scientists to engage only in research that aims to confirm the priors of woke ideologues, systemically biasing the very canon of scientific knowledge.
As President Eisenhower warned in his farewell address, “the prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present — and is gravely to be regarded.”