Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you all for being here. Your presentations are greatly appreciated as we start this new study to look at how we can improve excellence.
As you might have heard, in a previous study we did, we were looking at the capstone and aspects of how to take federal funding and delegate that. What I'm hearing around the table, in various ways, are concerns about political biases that might be made as we move forward. Instead, we should be looking at what a scholar's individual merit is and what the quality of the proposed research is. We now talk about issues like EDI or DEI, depending on how we look at it. These are some of the aspects.
I'll go to you, Dr. Dummitt, to start.
What do we do to stop that? What suggestions would you have? How do we resolve this with professors, whether they're applying for these at big universities—the U15—or smaller universities?