The Language and Tone of the Recent U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation report“DEI Division. Extremism. Ideology. How the Biden-Harris NSF Politicized Science” is highly partisan, making the report less compelling than it otherwise would have been. Yet the report identifies and criticizes a growing lack of objectivity on the part of the National Science Foundation (NSF).
The committee analyzed keywords and phrases in NSF-funded proposals between January 2021 and April 2024. The report shows a more than 9,000% increase in the share of new NSF grants focused on “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI). initiative :
While only 0.29% of all grants starting in 2021 were focused on DEI initiatives, by 2024, more than a quarter (27%) of new grants favored far-left perspectives. Redirecting funding towards these subjective and ideological projects was deliberate. As of 2021, the White House and NSF have created scientific integrity policies to require that agencies “(integrate (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility) in all aspects of scientific planning, execution and communication.
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More than ten percent (3,483) of grants awarded during this period went to projects that the committee classified as focused on status, social justice, gender, race, environmental justice, or a combination of these axes. The “status” category, the largest, is defined by grants describing “individuals based on their membership in a population deemed underrepresented, underserved, socioeconomically disadvantaged, or excluded.” Status projects study the role of scientific research as a mechanism of oppression of identity groups.
The Senate Committee’s methodology for classifying these NSF awards was intended to produce powerful and meaningful results, keeping the likelihood of any misclassification low. The procedure is based on rules for analyzing keywords and expressions of project descriptions in order to avoid Type I errors in classifications, i.e. trying to prevent the classification of projects in one or more of the five DEI categories based on merely casual or incidental use of keyword language.
The Senate report includes several excerpts from grant summaries intended to promote skepticism about the merits of these projects. However, the committee does not claim to have examined the scientific quality of these studies. The committee’s principle is that the words used to describe the projects and justify their financing are likely to summarize the purpose of the projects.
Unfortunately, the report does not list the 3,483 grants classified by the committee as DEI-focused, making it impossible to verify the committee’s classification results. Based on an N-gram analysis of 32,198 NSF grants identifying the most frequent terms appearing in project descriptions, the committee identified 699 DEI-centric keywords and phrases. They mapped each to one of five DEI project categories. A research NSF projects that included the phrase “environmental governance,” perhaps the most value-neutral of the 38 DEI keywords and phrases associated with the committee’s environmental justice category, resulted in a project NSF Award Search: Award #1425883 – Collaborative Research: The Political Geography of Environmental Riskwhich appears to be a credible social science project.
It is unclear whether the NSF has a place in the social sciences sector. Consider a thought experiment. Extract from our lives the fruits of the last century of research in medical, physical, natural and technical sciences. Our existence would be very different, much less comfortable and relatively short. Instead, extract from our lives the last century of social science research. What would change? Something would, but it’s hard to say what.
Leaving aside the larger question of if Or not the NSF should fund the social sciences, including education and human resources projects, nothing in the project summary for award #1425883 positions it as the kind of DEI project that concerns the Senate committee. It is unclear how the committee classified this project, but based on the methodology summarized in the report, it may have been flagged and placed in the environmental justice category. If so, Type I errors are probably more common in the report than the committee assumes. Even so, Type II errors are likely very rare: the committee’s methodology would rarely miss projects that the committee intended to identify as DEI-focused.
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For most of my 35-year career as a full-time university research professor, the competition for NSF funding has established one of the academy’s gold standards for merit-based recognition of scientific research, with support provided by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). , Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Department of Energy (DEO), and Office of Naval Research (ONR). It is disheartening and troubling to learn that more than a quarter of the most recent grants awarded by the NSF are ideological awards.
In 1997, the NSF formalized broader impacts as an explicit criterion for reviewing proposals, but gave review committees latitude to define the relative weight that should be attached to broader impacts versus the intellectual value of a research proposal. “Broader impacts” was a euphemism for impacts on all identity groups, and when serving as an NSF adjudicator, I always set the weight of broader impacts at zero. I stopped accepting opportunities to serve on NSF review panels around 2013, when the agency made the broader impacts criterion a mandatory part of the review process. I also stopped submitting proposals to the NSF. What matters in science and engineering is the work, not who does it, or where the researcher does it, or what group, if any, is targeted to benefit from it. Going any other way to try to make the case for new research is an exercise in fiction writing, and fiction is not my genre.
Perhaps the 9,000 percent increase in the share of funded proposals incorporating the Senate Committee’s DEI keywords and phrases describes otherwise high-quality work that was cosmetically couched in preferred jargon terms of the NSF to make proposed research more competitive in the review process. Alternatively, the vision and insight embedded in the NSF’s latest social engineering priorities could have sparked new work from potential researchers that would not otherwise have been offered. I think, however, that the agency most likely instigates and rewards gibberish.
Cover by Jared Gould using image by fadi on Adobe Stock (Asset ID#: 918256019) and NSF logo by MichianaSTEM on Flickr
