China’s murky intentions regarding its Russian alliance and the Ukraine war are making headlines. Whatever the outcome, the next global conflict could well involve the deployment of Beijing’s growing technological prowess.
China has already surpassed America in several branches of quantum information science, which entails massive computations and nearly instantaneous communications — and in critical areas of artificial intelligence, all of which have military applications.
This would not seem to be an ideal time, therefore, for America to be directing its finite science, technology, engineering and mathematics resources towards racial-justice initiatives.
Yet legislation intended to increase our scientific competitiveness vis-à-vis China is shot through with mandates to “diversify” STEM faculty, student bodies and research labs.
Never mind that diversity in STEM can, at present, only be achieved at the expense of scientific standards. Rather than sharpening our technological edge, Congress would dull it.
The House passed the America COMPETES Act — a quarter-of-a-trillion-dollar, nearly 3,000-page behemoth — in February; the Senate passed similar legislation last year. Both put the federal government in the business of subsidizing applied research and commercialization in such areas as domestic semiconductor manufacturing and clean energy.
The bills are in conference committee for reconciliation. President Joe Biden will undoubtedly sign whatever comes out, having promoted the legislation during his State of the Union address.
Diversity is hardly a novel pursuit for the federal STEM bureaucracy and its academic partners, of course.
The National Institutes of Health’s neuroscience initiative, for example, requires grant applicants to show how they will “enhance diverse perspectives” and “empower” individuals from groups “traditionally underrepresented” in biomedical research.
The National Science Foundation doles out millions to academic STEM departments for “intersectional approaches” to achieving diversity.
Many universities require faculty applicants in physics, engineering and other STEM fields to explain how their work will improve diversity in science; diversity, equity and inclusion proposals deemed insufficiently enthusiastic mean a candidate’s automatic rejection regardless of his scientific qualifications. The surest way to ace the DEI statement requirement is to be diverse oneself.
But the America COMPETES Act and the Senate’s United States Innovation and Competition Act expand significantly on that obsession with identity and racial justice. The following provisions are found in one or both bills; none has anything to do with actual scientific accomplishment:
- A new grant program for research on race and ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender identity in STEM.
- A new grant program for research on harassment of “vulnerable groups,” defined as ethnic minorities, disabled individuals and “sexual and gender minority individuals.”
- A new directorate within the National Science Foundation to focus on “societal challenges” such as “inequality.”
- A requirement that the NSF fund historically black colleges and universities, tribal colleges and universities, and minority-serving institutions, regardless of whether they’re producing cutting-edge research. Funding decisions will also favor community colleges that enroll large numbers of underrepresented minorities, regardless of whether they’re producing cutting-edge research.
- Implicit-bias training for program officers in all federal science agencies.
- University submission of race and gender data on all aspects of faculty hiring and promotion in STEM, data that will inevitably determine future grant-making.
- The collection of the race and gender of patent applicants and awardees.
- Greatly increased funding for the NSF’s chief diversity officer.
- Workshops for academic-department chairs and federal science-laboratory managers on bias in hiring, tenure and promotion. Discussions will address the “unique challenges” underrepresented groups face in STEM.
- Subsidies for local school districts that prioritize “equitable access” to STEM for underrepresented minorities. School districts that partner with black colleges will receive a funding advantage.
US schools are eliminating gifted and talented programs in the name of racial equity and deemphasizing — if not eliminating — algebra instruction to conceal racially disparate performance in algebra classes.
China is taking the opposite course. It identifies its top math talent early on and gives mathematically gifted students accelerated instruction. Its rigorous university entrance exams reward effort and achievement, not identity. Undergraduate math competitions provide a pipeline to the best graduate programs in STEM.
These efforts are working. As of 2018 China ranked number one in the international tests of K-12 math, science and reading known as PISA; America ranked 25th. Chinese teams dominate Stanford’s challenge for machine-reading comprehension and the International Olympiad in Informatics. Highly trained STEM Ph.D.s are pouring out of its graduate schools.
Republican opposition to the House and Senate bills has focused on the federal government’s involvement in commercial research and development and on the huge no-strings-attached cost.
But an equal concern should be the bills’ continued promotion of the irrelevancies of race and sex in science. Scientific research is about one thing: advancing knowledge. Scientists are not in the business of closing the academic achievement gap; that task falls to families, cultural leaders and schools.
Diverting ever more US STEM resources from the pursuit of knowledge to the pursuit of alleged racial equity all but guarantees that a hard-charging, merit-driven China will win the war for scientific and technological dominance, giving it a formidable military advantage.
Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of “The Diversity Delusion.”