The Biden administration has a message for scientists: Get woke or go broke.
At issue is a new policy by the Department of Energy (DoE), America’s chief physical sciences’ funder, that demands grant applicants demonstrate adherence to social-justice orthodoxy. Per the Daily Caller:
The new policy, which began in October 2022, requires grant proposals that are submitted to the department’s Office of Science to include a “Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research” (PIER) plan in addition to information regarding their scientific project, according to the office. Researchers who want to receive funding must explain how they are working to “promote fairness and inclusiveness” while carrying out their studies because doing so is “an intrinsic element to achieving scientific excellence.”
The quality of PIER plans will be one of the criteria used to evaluate grant applications and will be used to inform “funding decisions.”
The plan can outline methods undertaken by the research body to recruit researchers and students from “diverse backgrounds” or groups that are “historically underrepresented in the research community,” according to the Office of Science. Scientists may also present PIER plans that outline strategies to create an “inclusive” and “safe” research environment that “fosters a sense of belonging among all research personnel.”
…“The complexity and detail of a PIER is expected to increase with the size of the research team and the number of personnel to be supported.”
For the record, the term “equity” has become a euphemism for officially sanctioned discrimination designed to, ostensibly, achieve equal outcomes. This isn’t the first time the DoE has banged this drum, either. In an October 3 announcement titled, “Everyone Has a Role to Play in Making Science More Equitable and Inclusive,” the agency issued a new funding requirement for professional science conferences.
Applicants must submit a PIER Plan “along with their research proposals,” related the AdvanceGeo Partnership at the time. “In addition, proposals requesting funding to support a conference will require that the host organization has an established code of conduct or policy in place that addresses discrimination, harassment, bullying, and other exclusionary practices.”
Of course, government involvement in science has frequently yielded bizarre and sometimes dangerous outcomes. There was Lysenkoism in the USSR, officially supported by the Soviets till 1964, which preached the heritability of acquired traits; biologists disputing it were persecuted. And in Nazi Germany, many “scientists tailored their research programs to the regime’s policies to get funding,” wrote BioEdge in 2005.
Then there’s the example I provided in the 2014 essay “Blinding Me With Science: Fraud and Folly for Fame and Funding.” “As British science writer Nigel Calder pointed out in the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, if he wanted a grant to study squirrels, he wouldn’t ask for just that,” I related. “Rather, he’d say he wanted ‘to investigate the nut-gathering behavior of squirrels with special reference to the effects of global warming.’ ‘And that way I get my money,’ said Calder. ‘If I forget to mention global warming, I might not get the money.’”
As for the DoE’s woke aspirations, ironically, though not surprisingly, it’s not following the science. There is no example anywhere, in all of history, of groups being equally represented across all endeavors. This is for a simple reason: Different groups have different characteristic talents, strengths, and inclinations.
For example, the NBA and NFL are, respectively, 74.2 percent and 57.5 percent black, while the NHL is 93 percent white; these leagues are also zero percent female. Do they require Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (DIE) programs?
Jews are less than one percent of the world’s population, but constitute 20 percent of its Nobel Prize winners. In Malaysia, where “anti-Chinese discrimination is written into the Constitution, is embodied in preferential quotas for Malays in government and private industry alike, and extends to admissions and scholarships at the universities, the average Chinese continues to earn twice the income of the average Malay,” pointed out economics professor Thomas Sowell. Apropos to this, Asian-descent Americans are our country’s highest-earning racial group. Again, is DIE in order?
Then, “Male geniuses outnumber female geniuses 7-to-1,” wrote Sowell’s great friend, the late Professor Walter E. Williams, in 2013. “Female intelligence is packed much closer to the middle of the bell curve, whereas men’s intelligence has far greater variability.” Add to this men’s greater inclination toward science, and it’s understandable why most scientists are male.
None of this is opinion. Regarding the sexes, for instance, experts long ago determined that women are actually more likely to pursue traditionally masculine endeavors (e.g., STEM) in more patriarchal countries such as India than in highly egalitarian ones such as Norway. Why? Because in poorer places such as India, women must enter lucrative fields to survive, like it or not; in richer countries such as Norway, they can afford to follow their hearts.
And their hearts take them toward things feminine.
But the DIE social engineers have their story and they’re stickin’ to it. The Obama administration had already applied a version of DIE to our air-traffic-control corps and school punishment (because “too many” blacks and Hispanics were being suspended and expelled). And United Airlines announced in 2021 that it would be choosing pilots based on racial and sex-oriented quota.
But the DoE’s wokeness (and our other insanity) no doubt makes the Chinese, who aim for world domination, very happy. Why, already producing 10 times as many scientists as we do, we can almost hear them counsel: Just DIE.
