How the NIH Pushes DEI on Scientists

The institutes are spending $241 million to push ideological litmus tests for faculty hiring

By John Sailer. He is senior fellow and director of university policy at the National Association of Scholars.. Excerpts:

"In 2020 the National Institutes of Health created the Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation program “to enhance and maintain cultures of inclusive excellence in the biomedical research community.” The program will give 12 institutions a total of $241 million over nine years for diversity-focused faculty hiring. Under the terms of the grants, only candidates who demonstrate “a strong commitment to promoting diversity and inclusive excellence” can be hired through the program. To apply, candidates must submit a diversity statement."

"The University of South Carolina’s program currently seeks faculty in public health and nursing. The University of New Mexico’s program seeks faculty studying neuroscience and data science. Both programs use virtually identical rubrics for assessing candidates’ contributions to diversity, equity and inclusion.

The South Carolina and New Mexico rubrics call for punishing candidates who espouse race neutrality, dictating a low score for anyone who states an “intention to ignore the varying backgrounds of their students and ‘treat everyone the same.’ ” Applicants who are skeptical of DEI programming might choose to describe their commitment to viewpoint diversity. This too runs afoul of the rubrics, which mandate a low score for any candidate who defines diversity “only in terms of different areas of study or different nationalities but doesn’t mention gender or ethnicity/race.”

"The rubrics likewise punish candidates for failing to embrace controversial diversity practices. They recommend low scores for candidates who “state that it’s better not to have outreach or affinity groups aimed at underrepresented individuals because it keeps them separate from everyone else, or will make them feel less valued.” These affinity groups exemplify a new kind of segregation, but expressing that view could imperil an applicant’s career.

More broadly, the rubrics reward candidates who describe diversity, equity and inclusion as “core values”—something not all prospective faculty members can do in good faith. After all, standard diversity training sessions describe “equity” as the attainment of equal outcomes through policy, not equality of opportunity. The University of South Carolina’s program seeks experts to study health disparities—that is to say, inequalities. The scholar most capable of doing such research could be disqualified for simply saying he strives to treat students equally."