Diversity is harming sciences, says best-selling author

Heather Mac Donald, author of the New York Times bestseller The War on Cops and The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture, to be published in September, has argued that diversity is damaging hard sciences.

The STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and math—are under attack for lacking “diversity”.

“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,” says Mac Donald.

A scientist at UCLA also noted: “All across the country the big question now in STEM is: how can we promote more women and minorities by ‘changing’ [lowering] the requirements we had previously set for graduate level study?”

Mac Donald says mathematical problem-solving is being deemphasized and the pace of undergraduate physics education is being slowed down to include everyone.

“The National Science Foundation (NSF), a federal agency that funds university research, is consumed by diversity ideology,” she says. The NSF has continued to dump millions of dollars into implicit-bias activism. Last year the University of New Hampshire and two other institutions received millions to develop a “bias-awareness intervention tool”.

Another $2 million was awarded to the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University to “remediate microaggressions and implicit biases” in engineering classrooms.

While they claim to fund “fundamental research in the science of broadening participation”, there is actually no such “science”. The massive expenditure of resources is directed at masking basic skills and attitudes and academic achievement since the ultimate goal is “inclusion and equity”, both issues of morality, not science.

In the past, NSF-backed scientists had won more than 200 Nobel Prizes by focusing on merit. Now the agency believes scientific progress depends on “diversity” and academic victimology. In February 2018, when preliminary findings from the NSF “intersectionality” study at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting were presented, those results showed “systemic anti-LGBTQ bias within STEM industry and academia”.

The science diversity charade wastes extraordinary amounts of time and money that could be going into basic research and its real-world application, says Mac Donald.

“Lowering standards and diverting scientists’ energy into combating phantom sexism and racism is reckless in a highly competitive, ruthless, and unforgiving global marketplace. Driven by unapologetic meritocracy, China is catching up fast to the US in science and technology,” she noted.