Latest news with #DEI-specific
Yahoo
19-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The DEI Catch-22
When the Trump administration announced that it was canceling $400 million worth of grants to and contracts with Columbia University, ostensibly to punish the university for its handling of anti-Semitism amid pro-Palestinian campus protests, one important detail went unspecified: what type of funding, exactly, would be getting cut. In the weeks since, researchers at the university have found themselves moonlighting as detectives, trying to understand why some of them saw their life's work upended while others were spared. They believe they have found a pattern. As far as they can tell, nearly all of the canceled grants seem to have made some mention of diversity, equity, inclusion, or other disfavored topics, several med-school researchers told me. Making the cuts even more maddening is the fact that, at least until a few months ago, the federal government required researchers to include plans to 'enhance diversity' in many grant applications. And under a policy first implemented during the George H. W. Bush administration, the National Institutes of Health long offered supplemental funding for grants that employed someone from an underrepresented minority group. Now the same factors that helped researchers get their grants approved may have become liabilities. 'You can imagine how it feels to be terminated for following the government guidelines,' Domenico Accili, an endocrinology professor, told me. [Rose Horowitch: Colleges have no idea how to comply with Trump's orders] Beyond the capriciousness of punishing researchers for following the prior administration's rules, the grant cancellations demonstrate the impossible position that Columbia's researchers are in. If they didn't pursue DEI objectives before, they could have lost out on grants or even violated congressional mandates. If they did, they're at risk of ending up as collateral damage in the culture war. They'd prefer to just get back to the science. The cuts have already had significant effects. Because medical-research funding is such a large share of federal support for higher education, Columbia's med school has borne the brunt of the funding cuts. This makes the punishment seem even more arbitrary—the medical school is several miles away from the campus where the bulk of the pro-Palestinian protests occurred. Columbia's cancer center has stopped work on several clinical trials for disease treatment and symptom management, Dawn Hershman, an oncologist, told me. Hershman said that, unlike many of her colleagues, she isn't convinced that there is any DEI-specific pattern to the cuts thus far; even so, her lab has been modifying clinical research to comply with Trump's anti-DEI directives. 'This type of disruption costs money and time—time that people with cancer don't have,' she said. Accili, who leads the Diabetes and Endocrinology Research Center, had to stop work on a clinical trial that had tracked patients since the 1990s. Because he can't finish the study, all the data are unusable, he told me. If the Trump administration is in fact targeting these grants because of ideological factors, it's caught a lot of apolitical research in the crosshairs. According to an email from the director of the Columbia Stem Cell Initiative to colleagues, grants to train aspiring researchers were canceled because of their diversity component. Grants that mentioned climate, race, HIV, or COVID also appear to have been cut, as were grants that support centers to study cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer's. [Read: Inside the collapse at the NIH] Megan Sykes, the director of the Columbia Center for Translational Immunology, received supplemental funding to employ a Black graduate student on her research grant. But the grant itself studied better ways to transplant animal organs into humans. One of the grants canceled at Accili's lab included an effort to recruit transgender patients. But the study itself looked at the progression of bone disease in humans. (Accili told me that, when it came to grants to support early-career scientists, filling out the paperwork related to the NIH's diversity requirement was sometimes a burden. Some specialties already struggle to recruit enough young physicians; adding new demands, he said, only makes that more difficult.) One engineering-school professor whose graduate student lost the grant that paid his stipend said that the student didn't participate in the protests on either side. 'It's so disconnected from anything he does,' the professor, who requested anonymity for fear of more grant cuts, told me. 'He's ending up suffering consequences nominally for how Columbia's leadership handled the protest.' Some of the researchers feeling the biggest effects of the punishments are themselves Jewish. Columbia has an unusually high proportion of Jewish students and professors. (The Jewish campus organization Hillel estimates that Columbia's grad-student population is 16 percent Jewish.) Many are seeing their livelihood thrown into question in the name of fighting anti-Semitism. They're aware of the irony. Sykes, who's Jewish, told me that she's frightened by the rise of anti-Semitism. 'But I just don't understand the connection between that and NIH-funded biomedical research,' she said. Last week, Trump's anti-Semitism task force told Columbia that it would consider restoring the $400 million if the university takes a number of specific steps to crack down on pro-Palestinian protesters and address anti-Semitism, including changing its discipline policies and banning masks that protesters use to conceal their identities. But even if the money comes back, things won't return to the way they were before. Now that Trump has set the precedent of pulling scientific funding as a punishment for unrelated offenses, scientific research will always be at risk of being caught in the middle. Prior administrations, including Joe Biden's, have used university funding as a way to further certain priorities. But Trump's is the first to wield the threat of lost federal funding as a political cudgel. If obeying the dictates of one administration places scientists at risk of being persecuted by the next, what are they to do? Accili has warned faculty members not to use any terms related to diversity, equity, and inclusion in future grant proposals. He has even advised them to avoid technical phrases, such as 'gain of function,' that have become associated with pandemic-related controversies. 'We're in a phase in which we have to watch what we write or what we say for fear of offending the ongoing political sensitivities,' he told me. That has never been an ideal condition for scientific progress. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
19-03-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
The DEI Catch-22
When the Trump administration announced that it was canceling $400 million worth of grants to and contracts with Columbia University, ostensibly to punish the university for its handling of anti-Semitism amid pro-Palestinian campus protests, one important detail went unspecified: what type of funding, exactly, would be getting cut. In the weeks since, researchers at the university have found themselves moonlighting as detectives, trying to understand why some of them saw their life's work upended while others were spared. They believe they have found a pattern. As far as they can tell, nearly all of the canceled grants seem to have made some mention of diversity, equity, inclusion, or other disfavored topics, several med-school researchers told me. Making the cuts even more maddening is the fact that, at least until a few months ago, the federal government required researchers to include plans to 'enhance diversity' in many grant applications. And under a policy first implemented during the George H. W. Bush administration, the National Institutes of Health long offered supplemental funding for grants that employed someone from an underrepresented minority group. Now the same factors that helped researchers get their grants approved may have become liabilities. 'You can imagine how it feels to be terminated for following the government guidelines,' Domenico Accili, an endocrinology professor, told me. Beyond the capriciousness of punishing researchers for following the prior administration's rules, the grant cancellations demonstrate the impossible position that Columbia's researchers are in. If they didn't pursue DEI objectives before, they could have lost out on grants or even violated congressional mandates. If they did, they're at risk of ending up as collateral damage in the culture war. They'd prefer to just get back to the science. The cuts have already had significant effects. Because medical-research funding is such a large share of federal support for higher education, Columbia's med school has borne the brunt of the funding cuts. This makes the punishment seem even more arbitrary—the medical school is several miles away from the campus where the bulk of the pro-Palestinian protests occurred. Columbia's cancer center has stopped work on several clinical trials for disease treatment and symptom management, Dawn Hershman, an oncologist, told me. Hershman said that, unlike many of her colleagues, she isn't convinced that there is any DEI-specific pattern to the cuts thus far; even so, her lab has been modifying clinical research to comply with Trump's anti-DEI directives. 'This type of disruption costs money and time—time that people with cancer don't have,' she said. Accili, who leads the Diabetes and Endocrinology Research Center, had to stop work on a clinical trial that had tracked patients since the 1990s. Because he can't finish the study, all the data are unusable, he told me. If the Trump administration is in fact targeting these grants because of ideological factors, it's caught a lot of apolitical research in the crosshairs. According to an email from the director of the Columbia Stem Cell Initiative to colleagues, grants to train aspiring researchers were canceled because of their diversity component. Grants that mentioned climate, race, HIV, or COVID also appear to have been cut, as were grants that support centers to study cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer's. Megan Sykes, the director of the Columbia Center for Translational Immunology, received supplemental funding to employ a Black graduate student on her research grant. But the grant itself studied better ways to transplant animal organs into humans. One of the grants canceled at Accili's lab included an effort to recruit transgender patients. But the study itself looked at the progression of bone disease in humans. (Accili told me that, when it came to grants to support early-career scientists, filling out the paperwork related to the NIH's diversity requirement was sometimes a burden. Some specialties already struggle to recruit enough young physicians; adding new demands, he said, only makes that more difficult.) One engineering-school professor whose graduate student lost the grant that paid his stipend said that the student didn't participate in the protests on either side. 'It's so disconnected from anything he does,' the professor, who requested anonymity for fear of more grant cuts, told me. 'He's ending up suffering consequences nominally for how Columbia's leadership handled the protest.' Some of the researchers feeling the biggest effects of the punishments are themselves Jewish. Columbia has an unusually high proportion of Jewish students and professors. (The Jewish campus organization Hillel estimates that Columbia's grad-student population is 16 percent Jewish.) Many are seeing their livelihood thrown into question in the name of fighting anti-Semitism. They're aware of the irony. Sykes, who's Jewish, told me that she's frightened by the rise of anti-Semitism. 'But I just don't understand the connection between that and NIH-funded biomedical research,' she said. Last week, Trump's anti-Semitism task force told Columbia that it would consider restoring the $400 million if the university takes a number of specific steps to crack down on pro-Palestinian protesters and address anti-Semitism, including changing its discipline policies and banning masks that protesters use to conceal their identities. But even if the money comes back, things won't return to the way they were before. Now that Trump has set the precedent of pulling scientific funding as a punishment for unrelated offenses, scientific research will always be at risk of being caught in the middle. Prior administrations, including Joe Biden's, have used university funding as a way to further certain priorities. But Trump's is the first to wield the threat of lost federal funding as a political cudgel. If obeying the dictates of one administration places scientists at risk of being persecuted by the next, what are they to do? Accili has warned faculty members not to use any terms related to diversity, equity, and inclusion in future grant proposals. He has even advised them to avoid technical phrases, such as 'gain of function,' that have become associated with pandemic-related controversies. 'We're in a phase in which we have to watch what we write or what we say for fear of offending the ongoing political sensitivities,' he told me. That has never been an ideal condition for scientific progress.
Yahoo
10-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
DEI initiatives removed from federal agencies that fund science, but scientific research continues
As soon as President Donald Trump took office on Jan. 20, 2025, he signed an executive order titled 'Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.' This order called for the termination of all diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility – DEIA – mandates, policies and programs in the federal government. These included 'equity-related' grants or contracts, such as programs supporting underrepresented people in STEM, and all DEI or DEIA performance requirements for grant recipients – for example, requiring that grant recipients have a plan to address underrepresentation in their area of study. Agencies were given 60 days to implement the order. The following day, the president signed another executive order named 'Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.' This executive order expanded the language of the first to federal subcontrators and encouraged the private sector to follow suit. To comply with these two executive orders, federal agencies took immediate action. References to DEI disappeared from web pages, and major federal agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation sent out press releases about the order. Federally funded scientists received correspondence from funding agencies explaining that diversity components would no longer be required nor used as a metric in proposal evaluations. Some agencies suspended DEI-specific programs or terminated DEI-specific grants. All of this happened within days. The stream of communications and agency actions in response to these orders has many scientists at universities worried, some of my colleagues included. As a scientist myself, I've experienced this confusion firsthand. Even if the abrupt timeline may come as a surprise, the executive orders themselves do not. Conservatives have long been vocally against DEI measures, with a report last year calling for a ban on federal funding that supports such measures. Within academia, some scientists have questioned certain DEI initiatives. Unpopular DEI measures to some university professors are the creation of diversity offices at various levels of universities, diversity training and requiring DEI statements in hiring and review processes, created with the goal of engaging the academic community with the issues surrounding underrepresention and providing an open learning environment for all at universities. In the days since the orders were signed, scientists have expressed grave concern about these developments. This state of affairs has left many early career folks confused and scared, particularly with respect to their job security and their work environment, a fear that is more pronounced for those in minority communities. These communities face a strong DEI stigma, the belief that they got where they got due to DEI preference rather than their own merit. The implementation of these executive orders, which have been followed by many other executive orders aimed at reducing federal spending, will counteract progress toward better representation in the STEM field. While the DEI-related orders won't stop most research from continuing, the benefits of having the most competitive and diverse teams may be lost. University budgets are complex. While a large portion of the budget is from tuition, significant funds come from the state government, the federal government through financial aid and grants, and the private sector through endowments and gifts. Most of the federal grants for science at universities support specific areas of science, such as particle physics, organic chemistry, microbiology or others. Only a small fraction of science grants to universities are DEI-specific, although most agencies have not yet released an exact number for how many grants have been affected. Examples of affected programs are summer schools that attract students from minority populations or statistical analyses of DEI-specific data in a particular domain of science. Of the hundreds of thousands of scientists working at universities, the senior scientists who have not engaged in DEI work will not feel great direct effects of the DEI executive orders. It is those senior scientists who have gone beyond their domain-specific efforts and developed DEI-dedicated programs – or have their research intrinsically connected to DEI – who will likely see their research funding reduced. Federal grants in science support primarily early career scientists – the graduate students and the postdoctoral fellows who do the benchwork. These individuals, who are trained by senior scientists at the universities, represent the future of American innovation and scientific competitiveness. Understandably, these folks are nervous about their future. The small fraction of early career researchers who are currently supported on DEI-specific programs may end up having to pivot to new research directions. However, the vast majority of early career scientists are likely to continue to do their research undeterred. The scientific community came up with DEI programs because science has a tremendous and persistent underrepresentation problem. The science workforce does not reflect the larger American population. In some areas of science, the community is drawing from a pool of less than half of the U.S. population. This problem has been studied at length for well over a decade, focusing either on underrepresentation by race and ethnicity or on the underrepresentation of women in science. A variety of barriers keeps large groups from the U.S. population from contributing to science. These obstacles are tied to the science field's long history of discrimination and harassment. Obstacles include repeated demeaning remarks based on social stereotypes, exclusion from social spaces, unwanted sexual attention, and organizational tolerance for harassment. Because of these obstacles and disparities, lots of bright students opt out of science careers. The intent of DEI policies and programs across the country is to work against this long history. Consequently, in recent years some scientific fields have seen modest progress toward more representation of people from minority communities in STEM. The recent executive orders are likely to compromise this progress. Creativity and innovation are important for coming up with research questions and solving them. There is a large body of evidence showing that creative teams need diversity to prosper, and a diversity of backgrounds and experiences leads to a diversity of ideas. Similarly, equity and fairness are core values in the scientific enterprise. Scientists are trained to reduce biases in their experiments and their data analysis by averaging results from different datasets and by considering each source of error carefully. Reducing biases in hiring processes, performance reviews and mentoring is a scientific practice. Today, inclusive collaboration is key for excellence in science. The complexity of the problems the science community is tackling requires people with different expertise and backgrounds working together. When there is toxicity in a collaboration, research drags, projects fail and federal funds are wasted. A competitive scientific enterprise is more likely to succeed when it fosters a welcoming space for all involved. While policies and programs may change overnight, values do not. Research suggests that many generation Z scientists-to-be are committed to values of diversity, equity and inclusion. The backlash to many DEI programs provides an opportunity to rethink how to move forward while continuing to prioritize scientific excellence. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Filomena Nunes, Michigan State University Read more: You can count female physics Nobel laureates on one hand – recent winners have wisdom for young women in the field None of the 2021 science Nobel laureates are women – here's why men still dominate STEM award winning The backlash against diversity, equity and inclusion in business is in full force − but myths obscure the real value of DEI Filomena Nunes receives funding from NSF to conduct physics research, none of which supports DEI initiatives.
