In conversations with most
college officials, many CEOs, many politicians and race hustlers, it’s not long
before the magical words “diversity” and “inclusiveness” drop from their lips.
Racial minorities are the intended targets of this sociological largesse, but
women are included, as well. This obsession with diversity and inclusion is in
the process of leading the nation to decline in a number of areas. We’re told
how it’s doing so in science, in an article by Heather Mac Donald, a senior
fellow at the Manhattan Institute, titled “How Identity Politics Is Harming the
Sciences” (http://tinyurl.com/y9g8k9ne).
Mac Donald says that identity
politics has already taken over the humanities and social sciences on American
campuses. Waiting in the wings for a similar takeover are the STEM fields —
science, technology, engineering and math. In the eyes of the diversity and
inclusiveness czars, the STEM fields don’t have a pleasing mixture of blacks,
Hispanics and women. The effort to get this “pleasing mix” is doing
great damage to how science is taught and evaluated, threatening innovation and
American competitiveness.
Universities and other
institutions have started watering down standards and requirements in order to
attract more minorities and women. Some of the arguments for doing so border on
insanity. A math education professor at the University of Illinois wrote that
“mathematics itself operates as Whiteness.” She says that the ability to solve
algebra and geometry problems perpetuates “unearned privilege” among whites. A
professor at Purdue University’s School of Engineering Education published an
article in a peer-reviewed journal positing that academic rigor is a “dirty
deed” that upholds “white male heterosexual privilege,” adding that “scientific
knowledge itself is gendered, raced, and colonizing.”
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The
National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health are two
federal agencies that fund university research and support postdoctoral
education for physicians. Both agencies are consumed by diversity and inclusion
ideology. The NSF and NIH can yank a grant when it comes up for renewal if the
college has not supported a sufficient number of “underrepresented minorities.”
Mac Donald quotes a UCLA scientist who reports: “All across the country the big
question now in STEM is: how can we promote more women and minorities by
‘changing’ (i.e., lowering) the requirements we had previously set for graduate
level study?” Mac Donald observes, “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.”
Focusing on mathematical
problem-solving and academic rigor, at least for black students at the college
level, is a day late and a dollar short. The 2017 National Assessment of
Educational Progress, aka The Nation’s Report Card, reported that only 17
percent of black students tested proficient or better in reading, and just 7
percent reached at least a proficient level in math. In some predominantly
black high schools, not a single black student scored proficient in math. The
academic and federal STEM busybodies ought to focus on the academic destruction
of black youngsters between kindergarten and 12th grade and the conferring of
fraudulent high school diplomas. Black people should not allow themselves to be
used at the college level to help white liberals feel better about themselves
and keep their federal grant money.
Mac
Donald answers the question of whether scientific progress depends on
diversity. She says: “Somehow, NSF-backed scientists managed to rack up more
than 200 Nobel Prizes before the agency realized that scientific progress
depends on ‘diversity.’ Those ‘un-diverse’ scientists discovered the
fundamental particles of matter and unlocked the genetics of viruses.” She
might have added that there wasn’t even diversity among those white Nobel
laureates. Jews constitute no more than 3 percent of the U.S. population but
are 35 percent of American Nobel Prize winners. One wonders what diversity and
inclusion czars might propose to promote ethnic diversity among Nobel Prize
winners.
Walter
E. Williams is the John M. Olin distinguished professor of economics at George
Mason University, and a nationally syndicated columnist. To find out more about
Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and
cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page.
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