Want NIH Funding? Eliminate DEI Protocols that Harm Scientific Inquiry
We should never see a journal article in "Nature" again about “Anti-Racism.”
At the height of the “Great Awokening” in 2021, Nature—which along with Science is widely considered one of the top two or three scientific journals in the enterprise—published an article called “Anti-racist interventions to transform ecology, evolution and conservation biology departments.” The article, which starts from the premise that “racial and ethnic discrimination persist” in the sciences, suggests numerous policies to defeat racism, including “representation of BIPOC students” in the sciences, “fostering anti-racism through actions at different scales,” and “incorporating anti-racist pedagogy into course content and delivery.”
Yes, it is woke and radical. But here’s the bigger problem: It’s not science.
Scientific inquiry, as per its definition, is about generating a hypothesis and then testing it before drawing conclusions. Nature’s article on anti-racism assumes a conclusion: “That racial and ethnic discrimination persists” and that it is systemic, and then runs an entire article inveighing on scientists to combat it. This is not science; this is anti-science. Anti-science is coming with your assumptions on like blinders that harm any thought of questioning your premises or initial conditions.
There’s a rule on scientific research funding that I think all Americans would embrace—science shouldn’t fund anti-science.
Plain and simple, articles that come with a pre-packaged conclusion should not be labeled “science” and gain access to scientific establishment resources, much less find their ways onto the pages of supposedly leading scientific journals such as Nature.
The field of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is unfortunately one of the biggest exploiters of the scientific institution, and is now infamous for its unscientific inaccuracy, having failed numerous studies on its effectiveness in corporate governance and becoming an early target of the Trump administration’s programs to end “waste, fraud, and abuse” of the governmental system.
The Trump administration is now cracking down on the colleges and universities that treat DEI as science by denying it federal funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Congress is responding in agreement. As U.S. Rep. Greg Murphy (R-NC), who sits on the House Higher Education an Workforce Investment subcommittee, told me in an interview, “Plain and simple, if you want NIH funding, you have to get rid of DEI practices.”
The new NIH guidance submitted by the Trump administration is a negotiation tactic with universities for the purpose of securing a brighter future for science. It runs as follows: If you want future NIH funding, you better dismantle DEI on your own campuses. And, you better eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse that is unfortunately regular in the industry.
A simple exchange that all taxpayers should support is now taking place. If you want scientific funding, do real science. A study released by my higher-ed nonprofit, Davidsonians for Freedom of Discourse, shows that although DEI is in retreat, most colleges and universities have not yet, as of this article publishing, eliminated what I call “the Big 5” DEI policies that have plagued our nation for too long now. These Big 5 policies are:
- Eliminate DEI Offices
- Ban racial preferences in admissions and hiring
- Eliminate mandatory DEI statements in faculty hiring
- Sign a statement of institutional neutrality
- Ban mandatory diversity training
What do you notice about these 5 DEI policies? None of them progress our scientific climate. After all, free speech is the fundamental element of all scientific inquiry, and forcing professors to write DEI statements (a.k.a. “political loyalty tests”) prevents a climate of free speech from truly flourishing. And admitting students and faculty on anything other than merit harms the acceptance of the most brilliant researchers for a limited number of funded scientific positions.
The Trump administration is also targeting a provision in scientific grantmaking called “indirect funding,” which is a similarly wasteful element of federal spending that, frankly, forms the majority of NIH funds towards universities like Harvard and Yale.
What is indirect funding? It’s extra money ladled on top of research grant asks that goes directly to the school, rather than to the research for his or her own research. Think of it as a “tax” that universities levy on researchers for “housing” their research. In many cases, this tax costs 50–60 percent of a scientist’s research funding.
At Davidson College, a premier private, liberal-arts research college that I graduated from, 27 professors currently accept federal funding for their research grants. Yet those professors only ever see as little as 39.9 percent of that funding— the rest goes to Davidson College as an “indirect cost” for their research.
That “indirect cost” is a number the Trump administration’s NIH has vowed to cut down to 15 percent of NIH funding. Davidson professors such as Biology Professor Dr. Karen Bernd describe the “indirect funding,” which goes directly to Davidson College rather than to apportioned to her research activities, for doing things like “keeping the lights on.” The way that Dr. Bernd describes it to the popular student-magazine the Davidsonian, she makes out the indirect funding to Davidson College to seem essential. Yet in the same article, Dr. Bernd refers to how the indirect funding covers the cost of the “people who manage the grants,” meaning that some portion of the indirect funding of Davidson research goes to the very people who make the grant requests!
This is the very definition of a dog wagging its own tail—the kind of frivolous government exercise that is supposed to be cut under DOGE and its new focus on governmental efficiency.
Why are scientific researchers even defending this practice? After all, if indirect funding is eliminated, then more of the government NIH funding goes directly to the researcher— as opposed to the school that takes a portion of the funding for themselves.
DEI and indirect funding are two elements of “waste, fraud, and abuse” that the Trump administration is right to tackle. Lowering indirect funding to 15 percent of total funding and conditioning NIH funding on elimination of DEI protocols is the right start towards reviving a scientific establishment that needs to get back on track to its central mission: Pursuing open-minded scientific inquiry.
(READ MORE: The Fauci Pardon Proves He's a Monster)
