USA: National Science Foundation embraces woke ideology

$2 billion for “diversity-equity-inclusion”...

By Jeanne SMITS for https://reinformation.tv/national-science-foundation-woke-smits/

“A recent report from the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee found that the National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded more than $2 billion in grants to promote the ideology of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Our own analysis found that the Biden administration has given out at least $827.3 million exclusively in NSF grants to shape STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education,” Max Eden of the American Enterprise Institute reported in late October —and his assessment of the NSF’s woke orientation is starting to circulate.

Congress created the National Science Foundation at the start of the Cold War, with the goal of staying ahead of the Soviet Union in the scientific arms race. The NSF’s mission, in its own words, is “to promote the progress of science; to advance the health, prosperity, and well-being of the nation; to secure the national defense; and to pursue other purposes.” But shortly after taking office, the Biden administration added a new goal: expanding the frontiers of diversity, equity, and inclusion in STEM education.

National Science Foundation in the service of affirmative action

The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) combed through grant announcements for keywords like “intersectional,” “privilege,” “Latinx ,” “activism,” and so on. When they checked grant by grant for actual left-leaning, the ideological nature of the money allocated in the name of intersectionality was almost systematically evident; for the word “equitable,” it was “once yes, once no.” Thus, grants intended to “lower merit standards to reduce minority achievement gaps” were deemed ideological.

Last year, the Biden administration awarded about $120 million in grants to ideologically charged, “equity” projects, about ten times more than the final year of the Trump administration.

Max Eden gives some examples: “The NSF has spent about $360 million to make STEM education ‘culturally relevant’ or ‘culturally responsive.’ These buzzwords were coined by Gloria Ladson-Billings, the professor who introduced critical race theory to K-12 education, and they almost invariably mean efforts to infuse the curriculum with a racialized Marxism. For example, the NSF spent $400,000 on a ‘culturally responsive’ project that aims to “design and refine … modules to build critical consciousness in schools.” critical-thinking awareness modules as part of undergraduate mathematics teacher training.” The project will engage “justice” experts to develop “critical pedagogies” that address “the politics … of mathematics education [and] identity.”

You have to be woke even when teaching biology

Gender ideology is not left out; the NSF has favored a "rewriting" of biology:

“The agency awarded $905,642 to fund a “qualitative investigation of sex/gender narratives in undergraduate biology courses and their impact on transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming students” to create a “more inclusive environment.” NSF awarded $119,520 for a conference titled “Re-imagining Biology Education Through Social Justice,” which included a presentation titled “Gender-Inclusive Adaptations to Biology Teaching.”

Equally comfortable grants have come under Biden to the aid of “Black Feminist Epistemologies: Building Sisterhood in Computing,” you couldn’t make this up.

In a continuation of the current fashion for elevating the "ancestral knowledge" of indigenous peoples , the NSF "has awarded $6.9 million to various projects that emphasize the scientific process in support of what it calls 'indigenous' or 'indigenous ways of knowing.' For example, $399,930 has been devoted to a project aimed at honoring 'indigenous knowledge' by 'integrating indigenous ways of knowing into engineering education,'" writes Max Eden.

National Science Foundation Praises Indigenous Knowledge

But let us reassure ourselves: as the author also reports, this was done, according to the NSF, without "the illicit appropriation of indigenous knowledge". We can breathe.

Of that $6.9 million, $1.29 million went to “youth as participatory designers of mixed-reality indigenous science exhibits” that address “the ongoing marginalization of indigenous communities in informal science learning spaces.”

Even aerospace engineering has not been spared the ideology of DEI. The NSF has lavishly spent $600,000 to sharpen “students’ critical awareness and sensitivity to injustices in social systems through the integration of macroethics (ethics of large-scale issues as opposed to individual ethics) into the aerospace engineering science curriculum.” That’s a steep moral lesson.

The NSF was criticized for its plan to allow the federal Department of Education, with $5 million in funding, to promote, among other things, a social studies curriculum that emphasized Ibram X. Kendi’s “antiracism” at the start of the Biden era, even though the department is supposedly barred from creating or influencing public school or college curricula. Under pressure from critics, the NSF backed down. But as the American Enterprise Institute notes, it spent more than 150 times as much to inject left-wing ideology into STEM education, without the public being informed.

The NSF was founded to make America stronger. Today, it is weakening it through the rhetoric of promoting minority rights in areas that are supposed to be scientific and objective knowledge.

But after all, these are as ideological as the others, we have just had further proof of this.

Jeanne Smits