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URGE-ing Woke Totalitarianism In Science

How the National Science Foundation funds soft totalitarianism as 'anti-racism'
Screen Shot 2021-10-21 at 12.08.27 PM

An academic reader who requests anonymity to protect himself writes in response to this post of mine, and to this related post:

The rot goes much deeper than has been reported. My question is whether the National Science Foundation helped coordinate the organized movement against Dorian Abbot. Not through conspiracy, but as the unavoidable consequence of ideologically-driven bad decisions. I’ll explain.

The Williams chair you profiled, who was among the vocal anti-Abbot leaders online, is also part of the leadership of an organization called URGE, which materialized in 2020. https://urgeoscience.org/about/

The purpose of this organization is to “develop policies and programs” to “unlearn racism” in geoscience departments nationwide. This is effected through “pods”, which are groups of activists organized within individual departments. In the past 18 months, these “pods” have appeared in geoscience departments across the country, where they apply pressure from within. There are a lot of them:

https://urgeoscience.org/pods/

The pods have a curriculum, which you can read on the website. The quote from Dr. Cohen gives a sense of the overall ethos, and the treatment of Dorian Abbot gives a sense of the preferred policies. This Medium post describes current activities such as hosting segregated “BIPOC-only sessions”: https://urgeoscience.medium.com/the-future-of-unlearning-racism-in-geoscience-d961d9249f70

But here’s the crux of it. While it’s perfectly fine for individuals to organize as they see fit, and propose new policies however misguided they may be, this is a coordinated ideological push. And it is is federally funded by the National Science Foundation! At the bottom of their page you can read that “URGE is supported by the National Science Foundation under grant EAR#1714909 and by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.”

The public description for EAR#1714909 is available at the NSF website. It is an award to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution:
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1714909&HistoricalAwards=false

Absent from this public-facing description is anything about ‘unlearning racism’ or hosting segregated meetings. I cannot explain this discrepancy (and this is perhaps something a reporter could look into). But by appearances, NSF is funding a network of ideological activism under the guise of science. Activism that targets people like Dorian Abbot.

More recently, NSF has funded URGE explicitly:

https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2126109&HistoricalAwards=false

The money involved is small, but you’ll find it difficult to find any NSF-funded programs that address issues of representation from a perspective of individual dignity instead of group identity.

More broadly, there is an even bigger question of the degree to which NSF has been ideologically compromised. Every NSF grant proposal is evaluated by two merit review criteria: “intellectual merit” (the potential to advance knowledge) and “broader impacts” (the benefit to society). While NSF will deny it, it is now widely understood if only implicitly that the Broader Impacts section of every proposal must be something “woke” to be maximally competitive. Some of these projects are excellent, but many are ideological. At some point Congress will need to decide if this is what they intended. A specific policy could be aimed at addressing this.

NSF was founded in 1950 “To promote the progress of science, to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare, and to secure the national defense.” Is that what it’s doing now?

This is a critically important question, especially as we have just learned that the Chinese hypersonic missiles just tested have qualities that seem to defy physics. Seems to me pretty urgently important for national security reasons that Congress deal harshly and urgently with these totalitarians on science faculties and in universities, and remove them and their racist de facto loyalty oaths from having any influence at all over how we do science in this country.

Come on, Congressional Republicans (and anti-woke Democrats), this is serious. It could hardly be more serious.

UPDATE: A reader who asked me to withhold her name writes:

I’m an early-career professor at a research university that skews far left even for academia, in the sciences. I completely agree with your recent posts that academia is headed quickly in a very woke direction, but I don’t think things are quite as dire yet as you make them sound.
There are definitely a multitude of things that make it difficult to be a faithful Christian in academia (and woke ideology showing up in other ways is a huge part of that). I’m also worried that if we use too much outrage now on things that are marginally outrageous, everyone will tune us out when things get worse.
1. Yes, more and more universities are requiring applicants to faculty positions to write statements on their efforts toward diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). In my field, basically only the California system required a DEI statement 5 years ago, and a significant majority require it now.
I’m not all that surprised that the California system would use a DEI screening before faculty see the applications, but I strongly suspect that hasn’t spread much farther yet (though I’d be interested to hear if I’m wrong about that). In my department and many others, the DEI statement is something that’s there mostly because the university told us to require it.
From what I’ve seen from being on several faculty search committees, some people on the search committee will glance at the DEI statement, but it’s far down the priority list. So far, ~3/4 of the statements are a page of meaningless fluff that may spout a few buzzwords but don’t actually tell us anything about the candidate’s ideology or plans. I’m sure there are an increasing number of departments with vocally woke faculty who will try to veto anyone who doesn’t fully embrace woke ideology in their statement, but it’s also at this point not that hard to write a DEI statement that’s entirely acceptable to many departments that basically sidesteps the issue of woke ideology.
2. Yes, NSF requires “broader impacts” in all proposals and evaluates that as a  part of funding, and has for quite a while. A large portion of the “broader impacts” criterion is that the research has the potential to benefit society by learning the fundamental science that’s needed for new technology, medicine, national defense, etc.
From what I’ve seen in both recently receiving an NSF grant and serving on a review panel, it’s more or less expected that faculty will include something that can check the box of “cares about giving people from diverse backgrounds the opportunity to succeed in science”, but it doesn’t have to fit within a woke DEI framework. I’ve seen that box checked by working with students from poor rural backgrounds, interactions with K-12 students or teachers, etc. with little or no reference to race or gender, without any negative effects on funding.
3. For NSF grants like the one that originally supported the URGE project, it’s very standard for the public description to describe the science that ~80-100% of the actual grant money is going toward and not say much about the non-research broader impacts activities. I’m not at all surprised that it’s absent from the public description of the grant – my recent grant has one sentence in the public description saying that I’m participating in a couple outreach-type activities.
I’m disappointed but not at all surprised that NSF did extend continuing funding directly to the URGE project. I noticed that the second grant directly funding URGE is coming from funding that’s earmarked for “education and human resources”, so it’s coming from a different pot of money than what’s used to fund actual research. Of course, that raises the question of how that money got split up into those pots in the first place, but that’s a question that goes much higher up the chain.

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