The Diversity Delusion

by Heather Mac Donald

  Even UC’s much-lamented rise in tuition masks a more complicated picture than is usually acknowledged. Tuition has trebled over the last decade and a half, to $12,630 in 2017. But contrary to received wisdom, tuition increases have not reduced “access.” The number of students attending UC whose family income is $50,000 or less rose 61 percent from 1999 to 2009; such students made up 40 percent of enrollment in 2014.15 Students whose families earn up to $80,000 pay no tuition at all, a tuition break that extends to qualifying undocumented students.16

  If the university doesn’t engage in internal reform, the primary victim will be UC One, that historically powerful engine of learning and progress. The most necessary reform: axing the diversity infrastructure. UC Two has yet to produce a scintilla of proof that faculty or administrator bias is holding professors or students back. Accordingly, every vice chancellor, assistant dean, and associate provost for equity, inclusion, and multicultural awareness should be fired and his staff sent home. Faculty committees dedicated to ameliorating the effects of phantom racism, sexism, and homophobia should be disbanded and the time previously wasted on such senseless pursuits redirected to the classroom. Campus climate checks, sensitivity training, annual diversity sub-reports—all should go. Hiring committees should be liberated from the thrall of diversity mandates and implicit-bias training; UC’s administrators should notify department chairs that they will henceforth be treated like adults and trusted to choose the very best candidates they can find. Federal and state regulators, unfortunately, will still require the compiling of “diversity” data, but staff time dedicated to such mandates should be kept to a minimum.

  UC should also start honoring California’s constitution and eliminate race and gender preferences in faculty appointments and student admissions. The evidence is clear: Admitting students on the basis of skin color rather than skills hurts their chances for academic success. And by jettisoning double standards in student selection, UC can significantly shrink its support-services bureaucracy.

  Unfortunately, as the next chapter will show, the diversity juggernaut is levelling not only UC One but also the teaching of the hard sciences at universities across the country.

  * * *

  THE IDENTITY BUREAUCRACY

  * * *

  In 2018, the diversity bureaucracy finally swallowed an entire college. San Diego State University named to its presidency a vice chancellor of student affairs and campus diversity, hired from the University of California, Davis. The president, Adela de la Torre, is a peerless example of the intersection of identity politics and the ballooning student-services bureaucracy. De la Torre received a PhD in agricultural and resource economics from UC Berkeley and soon began specializing in Chicano studies. Before her diversity and student affairs vice chancellorship, she chaired the UC Davis Department of Chicana/Chicano Studies.

  As vice chancellor of student affairs and campus diversity at UC Davis, De la Torre had presided over a division made up of a whopping twenty-eight departments—not academic departments, but bureaucratic and identity-based ones, such as the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual Resource Center; the Center for African Diaspora Student Success; the Center for Chicanx and Latinx Student Success; the Native American Academic Student Success Center; the Middle Eastern/South Asian Student Affairs Office; the Women’s Resources and Research Center; the Undocumented Student Center; Retention Initiatives; the Office of Educational Opportunity and Enrichment Services; and the Center for First-Generation Student Scholars. This gallimaufry of identity-based fiefdoms illustrates the symbiosis between an artificially segmented, identity-obsessed student body and the campus bureaucracy: The more that students carve themselves into micro-groups claiming oppressed status, the more pretext there is for new cadres of administrators to shield them from oppression. (The causation runs in the opposite direction as well: The very existence of such identity-based bureaucracies encourages students to see themselves as belonging to separate tribes.)

  * * *

  11

  HOW IDENTITY POLITICS IS HARMING THE SCIENCES

  Identity politics has engulfed the humanities and social sciences on American campuses; now it is taking over the hard sciences. The STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and math—are under attack for being insufficiently “diverse.” The pressure to increase the representation of females, blacks, and Hispanics comes from the federal government, university administrators, and scientific societies themselves. That pressure is changing how science is taught and how scientific qualifications are evaluated. The results will be disastrous for scientific innovation and for American competitiveness.

  A UCLA scientist reports: “All across the country the big question now in STEM is: how can we promote more women and minorities by ‘changing’ (i.e., lowering) the requirements we had previously set for graduate level study?”1 Mathematical problem-solving is being deemphasized in favor of more qualitative group projects; the pace of undergraduate physics education is being slowed down so that no one gets left behind.

  The National Science Foundation (NSF), a federal agency that funds university research, is consumed by diversity ideology. Progress in science, it argues, requires a “diverse STEM workforce.” Programs to boost diversity in STEM pour forth from its coffers in wild abundance. As we saw in chapter 5, the NSF jump-started the implicit-bias racket by underwriting the development of the Implicit Association Test. It has continued to dump millions into implicit-bias activism. In July 2017, it awarded $1 million to the University of New Hampshire and two other institutions to develop an implicit “bias awareness intervention tool.” Another $2 million that same month went to the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University to “remediate microaggressions and implicit biases” in engineering classrooms.2

  The tortuously named “Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science” (INCLUDES) bankrolls “fundamental research in the science of broadening participation.” There is no such “science,” just an enormous expenditure of resources that ducks the fundamental problems of basic skills and attitudes toward academic achievement. A typical INCLUDES grant from October 2017 directs $300,000 toward increasing Native American math involvement by incorporating “indigenous knowledge systems” into Navajo Nation Math Circles.

  The INCLUDES initiative has already generated its own parasitic endeavor, Early-concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER). The purpose of EAGER funding is to evaluate INCLUDES grants and to pressure actual science grantees to incorporate diversity considerations into their research. The ultimate goal of such programs is to change the culture of STEM so that “inclusion and equity” are at its very core.

  Somehow, NSF-backed scientists managed to rack up more than two hundred Nobel Prizes before the agency realized that scientific progress depends on “diversity.” Those “un-diverse” scientists discovered the fundamental particles of matter and unlocked the genetics of viruses. Now that academic victimology has established a beachhead at the agency, however, it remains to be seen whether the pace of such breakthroughs will continue. The NSF is conducting a half-million-dollar study of “intersectionality” in the STEM fields. “Intersectionality” refers to the increased oppression allegedly experienced by individuals who can check off several categories of victimhood—being female, black, and trans, say. The NSF study’s theory is that such intersectionality lies behind the lack of diversity in STEM. Two sociologists are polling more than ten thousand scientists and engineers in nine professional organizations about the “social and cultural variables” that produce “disadvantage and marginalization” in STEM workplaces.

  One of the study’s directors is a University of Michigan sociologist specializing in gender and sexuality. Erin Cech has received multiple NSF grants; her latest publication is “Rugged Meritocrats: The Role of Overt Bias and the Meritocratic Ideology in Trump Supporters’ Opposition to Social Justice Efforts.” The o
ther lead researcher, Tom Waidzunas, is a sociologist at Temple University; he studies the “dynamics of gender and sexuality” within STEM, as well as how “scientists come to know, and hence constitute, sexuality and sexual desire.” Such politically constituted social-justice research was not likely envisioned by Congress in 1950 when it created the NSF to “promote the progress of science.”

  The National Institutes of Health are another diversity-obsessed federal science funder. Medical schools receive NIH training grants to support postdoctoral education for physicians pursuing a research career in such fields as oncology and cardiology. The NIH threatens to yank any training grant when it comes up for renewal if it has not supported a sufficient number of “underrepresented minorities” (URMs). One problem: There is often no black or Hispanic MDs to evaluate for inclusion in the training grant. If there is a potential URM candidate, the principal investigators will pore over his file multiple times in the hope of persuading themselves that he is adequately qualified. Meantime, the patently qualified Indian doctor goes to the bottom of the candidate pile. For now, medical schools can claim Argentinians and the sons of Ghanaian plantation owners as underrepresented minorities, but if NIH bean counters become more scrupulous in their “diversity metrics,” this aspect of biomedical research will reach an impasse.

  The diversity mania also determines the way medical research is carried out. The NIH has onerous requirements that government-sponsored clinical trials include the same proportion of female and minority patients as is found in the medical school’s “catchment area” (its geographic zone of study). If some of these populations drop out of medical trials at disproportionate rates or are difficult to recruit, too bad. If these URM and female-enrollment quotas are not met, the medical school must “invest the appropriate effort to correct under-accrual,” in the words of the NIH guidelines.

  The “appropriate effort” can cost a fortune. Schools such as the Mayo Clinic, located in overwhelmingly white areas, must still meet a diversity quota, which they can fulfill by partnering with a medical school in Tennessee, say. Lung cancer and coronary-artery disease afflict adults. If a particular immigrant group in a research trial’s catchment area contains a disproportionate share of young people compared with the aging white population, that immigrant group will be less susceptible to those adult diseases. Nevertheless, cancer and heart disease drug researchers must recruit from that community in numbers proportionate to its share of the overall population.

  Accrediting bodies reinforce the diversity compulsion. The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education requires that medical schools maintain detailed diversity metrics on their efforts to interview and hire URM faculty. Medical school search committees go through lengthy implicit-bias training sessions and expend enormous amounts of effort looking for something that they often know a priori doesn’t exist: qualified URM faculty candidates. The very definition of diversity used by academic review panels is becoming ever more exacting. A 2015 panel assessing the academic strength of San Diego State University’s biology department complained that the faculty, though relatively representative of traditional “underserved groups,” nevertheless failed to mirror the “diversity of peoples in Southern California.”3 The use of a school’s immediate surroundings as a demographic benchmark for its faculty is a significant escalation of the war between the diversocrats and academic standards. Naturally, the accrediting panel made no effort to ascertain whether those Southern California peoples—including Hmong, Salvadorans, and Somalis—are netting PhDs in biology and are applying to SDSU’s biology department in numbers proportional to their Southern California population.

  Many private foundations fund only gender- and race-exclusive science training; others that do fund basic research, such as the Howard Hughes Medical Initiative, nevertheless divert considerable resources to diversity. The major scientific societies push the idea that implicit bias is impeding the careers of otherwise competitive scientists. In February 2018, Erin Cech presented preliminary findings from the NSF intersectionality study at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting; naturally, those results showed “systemic anti-LGBTQ bias within STEM industry and academia.” Another AAAS session addressed how the “hierarchical nature” of science exacerbates gender bias and stereotypes, and called for the “equal representation of women” across STEM.

  STEM departments are creating their own internal diversity enforcers. The engineering school at the University of California, Los Angeles, minted its first associate dean of diversity and inclusion in 2017, despite already being subject to enormous pressures from the vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion and other deans. “One of my jobs,” the new engineering diversocrat, Scott Brandenberg, told UCLA’s student newspaper, is “to avoid implicit bias in the hiring process.”4

  The science-diversity charade wastes extraordinary amounts of time and money that could be going into basic research and its real-world application. If that were its only consequence, the cost would be high enough. But identity politics are now altering the standards for scientific competence and the way future scientists are trained. “Diversity” is now often an explicit job qualification in the STEM fields. A current job listing for a lecturer in biology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, announces that because diversity is “critical to the university’s goals of achieving excellence in all areas,” the biology department “holistically” assesses applicants and “favorably considers experiences overcoming barriers”—experiences assumed to be universal among underrepresented minorities. The University of Georgia is seeking a lecturer in biochemistry and molecular biology who will be expected to support the college’s goals of “creating and sustaining a diverse and inclusive learning environment.”

  Entry requirements for graduate education are being revised. The American Astronomical Society has recommended that PhD programs in astronomy eliminate the requirement that applicants take the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) in physics, since it has a disparate impact on females and underrepresented minorities and allegedly does not predict future research output. Harvard and other departments have complied, even though an objective test like the GRE can spotlight talent from less prestigious schools. The National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program has dropped all science GREs for applicants in all fields.

  Expectations are changing at the undergraduate level, as well. Oxford University extended the time on its undergraduate math and computer science exams last year, hoping to increase the number of female high-scorers; results were modest. Expect test-time extensions nevertheless to spread to the United States.

  Medical school administrators urge admissions committees to look beyond the Medical College Admission Test scores of black and Hispanic student applicants and employ “holistic review” in order to engineer a diverse class. The result is a vast gap in entering qualifications, as we saw in chapter 5. This achievement gap does not close over the course of medical school, but the URM students who do complete their medical training will be fanatically sought after anyway. Adding to medical schools’ diversity woes is the fact that the number of male URM student applicants has been declining in recent years, making it even harder to find qualified candidates.

  Racial preferences in medical school programs are sometimes justified on the basis that minorities want doctors who “look like them.” Arguably, however, minority patients with serious illnesses want the same thing as anyone else: subject mastery.

  The push for gender proportionality in medical education and research is not quite as quixotic as the crusade for URM proportionality, but it, too, distorts decision-making. Two-thirds of the applicants for oncology fellowships at a prestigious medical school are male. Half of the oncology department’s fellowship picks are female, however, even though females do not cluster at the top of the applicant pool.

  A network of so-called teaching and learning centers at universities across the country is seeking
to make science classrooms more “inclusive” by changing pedagogy and expectations for student learning. The STEM faculty is too white, male, and heteronormative, according to these centers, making it hard for females, blacks, Hispanics, and the LGBTQ population to learn. STEM professors should adopt “culturally sensitive pedagogies”5 that are more “open- than closed-ended,” and more “reflective than prescriptive,” recommends the Association of American Colleges and Universities. At the University of Michigan, the Women in Science and Engineering program (WISE) collaborates with the Center for Learning and Teaching to develop “deliberately inclusive and equitable approaches to syllabus design, writing assignments, grading, and discussion.” Yale has created a special undergraduate laboratory course, with funding from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, that aims to enhance URM students’ “feelings of identifying as a scientist.” It does so by being “non-prescriptive” in what students research; they develop their own research questions. But “feelings” are only going to get you so far without mastery of the building blocks of scientific knowledge.

  Mastering those building blocks involves the memorization of facts, among other skills. Assessing student knowledge of those facts can produce disparate results. The solution is to change the test, or, ideally, eliminate it. Medical school professors have been encouraged to write student exams that are less “fact-based,” even though knowledge of pathophysiology and the working of drugs, say, entails knowing facts.