6/13/2018 - Walter E. Williams Townhall.com
In conversations with
most college officials, many CEOs, many politicians and race hustlers, it's not
long before the magical words "diversity" and
"inclusiveness" drop from their lips. Racial minorities are the
intended targets of this sociological largesse, but women are included, as
well. This obsession with diversity and inclusion is in the process of leading
the nation to decline in a number of areas. We're told how it's doing so in
science, in an article by Heather Mac Donald, a senior fellow at the Manhattan
Institute, titled "How Identity Politics Is Harming the Sciences".
Mac Donald says that
identity politics has already taken over the humanities and social sciences on
American campuses. Waiting in the wings for a similar takeover are the STEM
fields -- science, technology, engineering and math. In the eyes of the
diversity and inclusiveness czars, the STEM fields don't have a pleasing
mixture of blacks, Hispanics and women. The effort to get this "pleasing
mix" is doing great damage to how science is taught and evaluated, threatening
innovation and American competitiveness.
Universities and other
institutions have started watering down standards and requirements in order to
attract more minorities and women. Some of the arguments for doing so border on
insanity. A math education professor at the University of Illinois wrote that
"mathematics itself operates as Whiteness." She says that the ability
to solve algebra and geometry problems perpetuates "unearned
privilege" among whites. A professor at Purdue University's School of
Engineering Education published an article in a peer-reviewed journal positing
that academic rigor is a "dirty deed" that upholds "white male
heterosexual privilege," adding that "scientific knowledge itself is
gendered, raced, and colonizing."
The National Science Foundation
and the National Institutes of Health are two federal agencies that fund
university research and support postdoctoral education for physicians. Both
agencies are consumed by diversity and inclusion ideology. The NSF and NIH can
yank a grant when it comes up for renewal if the college has not supported a
sufficient number of "underrepresented minorities." Mac Donald quotes
a UCLA scientist who 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?" Mac Donald observes, "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."
Focusing on
mathematical problem-solving and academic rigor, at least for black students at
the college level, is a day late and a dollar short. The 2017 National
Assessment of Educational Progress, aka The Nation's Report Card, reported that
only 17 percent of black students tested proficient or better in reading, and
just 7 percent reached at least a proficient level in math. In some
predominantly black high schools, not a single black student scored proficient
in math. The academic and federal STEM busybodies ought to focus on the
academic destruction of black youngsters between kindergarten and 12th grade
and the conferring of fraudulent high school diplomas. Black people should not
allow themselves to be used at the college level to help white liberals feel
better about themselves and keep their federal grant money.
Mac Donald answers the
question of whether scientific progress depends on diversity. She says:
"Somehow, NSF-backed scientists managed to rack up more than 200 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." She might have added that
there wasn't even diversity among those white Nobel laureates. Jews constitute
no more than 3 percent of the U.S. population but are 35 percent of American
Nobel Prize winners. One wonders what diversity and inclusion czars might
propose to promote ethnic diversity among Nobel Prize winners.
No comments:
Post a Comment