What Does Diversity Have to Do with Science?

Too bad more Americans do not hear facts like the following about so-called diversity — here is a video from Prager University:

Do you care about the race of your doctor, or the gender of the person who built the bridge you drive across? The latest trend across STEM fields claims you should. Heather Mac Donald, Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of The Diversity Delusion, explains where these destructive ideas are coming from.

From the transcript:

The promoters of identity politics—the idea that we are primarily defined by our race and gender—have taken over the humanities and social sciences.

That’s bad.

But not as bad as this: They are moving in on “STEM” – science, technology, engineering and math.

“All across the country,” a UCLA scientist reports, “the big question is: how can we promote more women and minorities by ‘changing’ (i.e., lowering) the requirements we had previously set for graduate level study?”

The National Science Foundation (NSF), a federal agency that funds university research, exemplifies this approach. Progress in science, the NSF argues, requires a “diverse STEM workforce.” Why this is the case they don’t bother to say. Somehow, NSF-backed scientists managed to rack up more than 200 Nobel Prizes before the agency realized that scientific progress depends on “diversity.”

No matter: in July 2017, it awarded $1 million to the University of New Hampshire and two other institutions to develop a “bias-awareness intervention tool.” Another $2 million went to the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M to “remediate microaggressions and implicit biases.”

The science diversity charade, as I discuss in my book The Diversity Delusion, 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 is altering the standards for scientific competence and the way future scientists are trained.

Read more: PragerU