Donald Trump’s move to screen funded research projects for their use of diversity-related keywords with a view to terminating grants have been denounced as “absurd”, “repugnant” and “immoral”.
The US National Science Foundation (NSF), which has a $10 billion (£8 billion) budget, is reviewing all its funded projects to ensure they do not breach a new slate of executive orders designed to end “radical and wasteful” spending on government diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes.
Under the controversial scheme, the NSF has begun checking all approved grant schemes against an extensive list of common terms related to DEI, such as “inequity”, “marginalized” and “LGBT”, to highlight which projects could get their funding suspended.
The terms are, however, so broad that huge numbers of projects are likely to be flagged. Words such as “advocacy”, “ethnicity”, “systemic”, “institutional” and “women” are apparently part of the checklist, scientists say.
Darby Saxbe, professor of psychology at University of Southern California, told Times Higher Education that the “keywords are so broad that they would apply to any research conducted with humans, including neuroscience, child development, economics, sociology, anthropology and psychology”.
Nonetheless the NSF flagging is a major concern to scientists, said Saxbe, who was unsure about whether she would receive the final instalment of a $2 million five-year National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant this month if America’s main science agency takes a similar anti-DEI approach.
“It is already having a chilling effect on the science community,” said Saxbe, adding: “It seems like the goal is to create chaos and undermine science and research entirely.”
The NSF’s attempts to comply with the anti-DEI directives were, Saxbe continued, “absolutely absurd”, given the funder was charged by Congress in 1980 to “broaden participation” in science by, for instance, “training a more diverse scientific workforce”, she continued.
“All NSF grants are required to have language about ‘broader impacts’ or how this work will benefit society, for example by providing opportunities to trainees from diverse backgrounds. In other words, anyone who follows directions in a grant proposal is going to get flagged for ‘DEI language’.”
The checks follow a de facto freeze on new grants at the NIH, a $49 billion-a-year funder, and the NSF, following a block on external communications and travel, which has led to the cancellation of grant approval panels.
Peter Gleick, senior fellow and co-founder of the Pacific Institute in Oakland, California, a non-profit research institute focused on water, climate and environmental security, said the NSF’s screening to detect “woke” science was deeply troubling.
“Any governmental effort to silence, censor, distort, or otherwise influence science in support of a particular ideology is repugnant to the very idea of science,” said Gleick, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, who said such actions “should be opposed by every possible voice, including those of scientists, scientific institutions, and academia”.
“That opposition can take many forms: speak out, refusing to obey illegal or immoral requests from political interests, using tools of social media, working with appropriate laws and legislatures, using the court system to fight illegal acts, and more, up to and including public protests,” continued Gleick.
That said, the explicit targeting of academics or officials seen as unfriendly to Donald Trump made protest much harder, he admitted.
“Not all scientists or academics are in a position that permits them to [protest],” said Gleick. “Sometimes there are constraints and concerns about funding, or employment, or retribution.
“Each of us has to decide what ‘red lines’ cannot be crossed without action; what actions we, as individuals, are willing and capable of taking; and what risks we’re willing to face or endure when taking them.
“My only hope is that enough action can be taken by those people and institutions able to act to slow, stop, and eventually reverse the growing assault on science, data, information, truth, and expertise that has recently been launched in the United States.”
