The NIH is Spending $241M to Push Ideology and Diversity Over Science

Defund the NIH.

And you thought the NIH was just bad during the pandemic. Post-pandemic, it’s aiming to wreck medical research for generations by spending $241 million to mandate ideological conformity and diversity over science.

In 2020 the National Institutes of Health created the Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation program “to enhance and maintain cultures of inclusive excellence in the biomedical research community.” The program will give 12 institutions a total of $241 million over nine years for diversity-focused faculty hiring. Under the terms of the grants, only candidates who demonstrate “a strong commitment to promoting diversity and inclusive excellence” can be hired through the program. To apply, candidates must submit a diversity statement.

Diversity statements play the same role as expecting Chinese research to quote from Mao’s Little Red Book or Soviet scientists to explain how they incorporate Marxism-Leninism into their work. It’s the bastard child of anti-racism and at its core, it mandates ideological conformity, punishes dissent and original thinking, and treats research as just another organizing point for its extremist creed.

The South Carolina and New Mexico rubrics call for punishing candidates who espouse race neutrality, dictating a low score for anyone who states an “intention to ignore the varying backgrounds of their students and ‘treat everyone the same.’ ” Applicants who are skeptical of DEI programming might choose to describe their commitment to viewpoint diversity. This too runs afoul of the rubrics, which mandate a low score for any candidate who defines diversity “only in terms of different areas of study or different nationalities but doesn’t mention gender or ethnicity/race.”

The rubrics likewise punish candidates for failing to embrace controversial diversity practices. They recommend low scores for candidates who “state that it’s better not to have outreach or affinity groups aimed at underrepresented individuals because it keeps them separate from everyone else, or will make them feel less valued.” These affinity groups exemplify a new kind of segregation, but expressing that view could imperil an applicant’s career.

This is typical of diversity statements whose express goal is to get candidates to disavow any notions of neutrality or equality, and to commit to viewing everything through the leftist lens of...

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