“Entry requirements for graduate education are being revised. The American Astronomical Society has recommended that Ph.D. programs in astronomy eliminate the requirement that applicants take the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) in physics, since it has a disparate impact on females and URMs….” (These are “Underrepresented Minorities.”)
“Mathematical problem-solving is being deemphasized in favor of more qualitative group projects; the pace of undergraduate physics education is being slowed down so that no one gets left behind.”
“A typical INCLUDES grant from October 2017 directs $300,000 toward increasing Native American math involvement by incorporating “indigenous knowledge systems” into Navajo Nation Math Circles.”
“The National Institutes of Health are another diversity-obsessed federal science funder. Medical schools receive NIH training grants to support postdoctoral education for physicians pursuing a research career in such fields as oncology and cardiology. The NIH threatens to yank any training grant when it comes up for renewal if it has not supported a sufficient number of “underrepresented minorities” (URMs).”
“Medical school administrators urge admissions committees to overlook the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) scores of black and Hispanic student applicants and employ “holistic review” in order to engineer a diverse class. The result is a vast gap in entering qualifications.”
Mac Donald goes on to tell of school after school accepting diversity with credentials well below those of real students, of schools dropping the GRE requirement because it makes obvious that in STEM fields women and minorities are not performing as desired. (“Minorities” always means “poorly performing minorities.” Chinese, Japanese, Koreans and so on don’t count.)
The comparatively young may be so steeped in such corrupted pedagogy that they do not know how the sciences were formerly taught. A description:
I went to a small Southern school, Hampden-Sydney College, of respectable but not astonishing credentials. I believe the pre-dumbing-down SATs were a bit over 1100. This was before social justice had replaced competence as a reason for study. Freshmen were expected to be fully literate and know algebra cold. Remedial courses would have been thought crazy. If you needed them, you needed to be somewhere else. In any event, if you had graduated from high school without being able to read, you were unlikely to learn.
Freshman chemistry at H-S–much like freshman chemistry in other schools I suppose–was not a cooperative shared learning experience that avoided unnecessary facts. It did not exist to avoid disturbing heartwarming but dim-witted minorities. It was–boom!–s-p hybrid bonding orbitals, resonance in benzene rings, the wave equation del-squared psi and a bunch of constants, probability densities, quantum degeneracy, equilibrium constants, Pivnert the ideal gas equation, the mathematics of a mass spec, the Krebs cycle, and endless problems: 2.4 grams of phlogiston anhydride are dissolved in 2 liters of 2,4-diethyl-polywannacrackerine. What are the products and the weights and molarities of each at equilibrium?
It was real chemistry, sink or swim, and most of us swam because we were looking at med school or graduate work. If there had been affirmative-action students–”students”–most of the material would have had to be eliminated. Mathematical illiterates do not balance redox equations or interpolate four-place log tables which, in those slide-rule days, we did.
Pop quiz. Take out a sheet of paper. Question: Are Chinese students, there or here, studying de-mathematized semi-chemistry for reasons of identity proportionality? Or are they, at every high-end university or elite high school in America, eating the white kids alive?
The same madness appears below the level of college. Walter Williams writing of the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress in America: “Only 37 percent of 12th-graders tested proficient or better in reading, and only 25 percent did so in math. Among black students, only 17 percent tested proficient or better in reading, and just 7 percent reached at least a proficient level in math.”
What?
Affirmative action in the sciences needs to be scrapped. For everybody. The purpose of studying astrophysics should not be to make social-justice warriors feel good about themselves. If women do not do well at engineering mathematics, let them become neurosurgeons.
Diversity Policies Are Corrupting the Sciences.
Anyone who believes that the hard sciences could never capitulate to identity politics in the way the humanities and softer sciences have should not read Heather MacDonald’s report just posted at City Journal. It’s too infuriating, and the impacts could be devastating.
MacDonald surveys the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and accrediting organizations such as the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education and finds the quota police alive and well within them.
The NSF, for instance, “dumps millions of dollars into implicit-bias activism,” a pseudo-scientific effort to explain lack of proportionate numbers of women and certain minorities in STEM fields on the grounds of racism and sexism. It has other programs that “pressure actual science grantees to incorporate diversity considerations into their research.” Such programs aim to set “inclusion and equity” at “the very core” of STEM science.
The NIH puts similar burdens on the field. Its training grants for postdoctoral education for physicians are threatened with funding cuts if the programs don’t support “a sufficient number of ‘underrepresented minorities.’” It also wants to see proportionate representation in the sample of medical subjects, so that (in MacDonald’s example) the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota must reach out well beyond its surroundings to draw in different identities, a costly and time-consuming practice.
Accreditors play their part by criticizing academic departments if they don’t have enough underrepresented groups. They don’t bother, however, to consider the number of available job candidates in those groups. MacDonald doesn’t mention this, but the percentage of doctorates in STEM fields granted to African Americans each year is under four percent. The applicant pool isn’t nearly large enough for departments to reach proportionality in the demographic make-up of the professors (using the population of the surrounding geographic area as a base measure).
MacDonald summarizes the problem perfectly: The use of a school’s immediate surroundings as a demographic benchmark for its faculty is a significant escalation of the war between the diversicrats and academic standards.
Escalation is the right word. It’s as if the official bodies that monitor scientific research are searching for mechanisms that will ramp up the pressure on individuals and institutions to include underrepresented minorities in their work in one way or another.
These tactics are backed by funders who explicitly set aside money for “gender- and race-exclusive science training.” University departments and schools, too, are creating their own diversity enforcers.” Schools are adjusting the way they teach and evaluate minority students and job candidates, for instance, developing “culturally sensitive pedagogies” that downplay knowledge and skills and upgrade, in the words of one program, awareness of the “racialized and gendered construct of scientific brilliance.”
The results are already showing. From 2013 to 2016, MacDonald notes, “medical schools nationally admitted 57 percent of black applicants with a low MCAT of 24 to 26, but only 8 percent of whites and 6 percent of Asians with those same low scores.” Allegations of racism, sexism, microaggression, and bias continue, despite nearly everyone in STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) complying with diversity ambitions. As one practitioner quoted by MacDonald puts it:
The sheer effort that is expended in complete good faith at the graduate, post-graduate, and faculty level chasing after a declining population of minority applicants is astonishing. URMs [underrerpesented minorities] are encouraged to apply, indeed begged to apply, to medical school and post-graduate medical training programs. Everyone at this level is trying incredibly hard to be generous, fair, forgiving, thoughtful, kind, and encouraging to these applicants.
This is the general circumstance that coincides with the ceaseless talk of systemic and individual discrimination. The insertion of diversity criteria into the practice of science relies upon presumptions of bias, but one would have to search far and wide to find any scientists who wish to keep women, African Americans, and Hispanics out of their classrooms, departments, and research projects.
A few years ago, I was in a small meeting of college leaders and a few people who run organizations devoted to improving diversity in higher education. One person in the room raised the charge that professors prefer to hire people who are just like them, which was just a way for him to assert that white males want to hire white males. I asked him if he had ever served on a hiring committee. He hadn’t–he wasn’t a professor. I told him with a laugh about standard efforts and intentions of everyone in the room to favor any underrepresented minority candidates we could find. He wasn’t impressed, though. The fact that African Americans and Hispanics are still underrepresented in the departments makes our efforts and motives inadequate and perhaps suspect, too.
Those of us who believed that the empirical demand would preserve the sciences from progressivist coercion were naive. The diversity mandate is too strong. It has no scientific or intellectual rationale; the justifications that proponents offer are less than flimsy, but they don’t care. There used to be a lot of talk about the cognitive and disciplinary benefits of diversity (people with different backgrounds and experience will bring new ideas into the room), but even diversiphiles seem to have grown tired of those weak supports. They mutter truisms such as “Diversity is our strength” with a listless air. For them and for everyone else, diversity doesn’t mean anything anymore except more women and underrepresented minorities in the jobs–which is to say, less white and Asian men. It’s a crass ambition managed in a crass manner. But this is where we are.
Link: https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2018/05/30/how-threats-of-bias-are-corrupting-the-sciences/
Don’t let this distract you from the the fact that in 1966, Al Bundy scored four touchdowns in a single game while playing for the Polk High School Panthers in the 1966 city championship game versus Andrew Johnson High School, including the game-winning touchdown in the final seconds against his old nemesis, “Spare Tire” Dixon.