Madam Chair and committee members, thank you for inviting me.
The academy has become an echo chamber of progressive social justice ideas, and this is reflected in the federal research granting process. A previous witness noted a phenomenon described as group polarization. When ideologically uniform groups lack dissenting voices, the group often arrives at positions far more radical than those of most individuals in the group. Lack of viewpoint diversity diminishes research excellence.
For example, the Journal of Chemical Education published a paper titled “A Special Topic Class in Chemistry on Feminism and Science as a Tool to Disrupt the Dysconscious Racism in STEM”. This paper described “the development and interrelationship between quantum mechanics, Marxist materialism, Afro-futurism/pessimism, and post-colonial nationalism” and attempted to “problematize time as a linear social construct”.
Our government funded a research grant titled “Decolonizing Light: Tracing and countering colonialism in contemporary physics”, where the authors don't aim to find new or better explanations of light or to seek scientific truth, but rather plan to address the marginalization of women, Black people and indigenous peoples for social equity.
The journal Cogent Social Sciences published a paper titled “The conceptual penis as a social construct”, in which the authors used post-structuralist discursive criticism and the example of climate change to “argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a social construct isomorphic to performative toxic masculinity.”
Another paper, in the Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, titled “Loving the Brine Shrimp: Exploring Queer Feminist Blue Posthumanities to Reimagine the 'America's Dead Sea'”, described “hydrosexuality” as a “more-than-human sensuality and sexuality emphasizing fluidity and relationality” that “offers a cultural understanding of water as a non-binary substance”, and it suggested embracing “watery thinking”.
As it happens, one of these papers turned out to be a hoax and was later retracted by the journal. If you are not familiar with this story—and I am afraid that most people are not—you will doubtless have trouble discerning which one was the hoax, which tells us that a great deal of scholarship has been ideologically corrupted to the point of being, quite literally, beyond parody.
So, the question is this: Do the criteria used to award research funding contribute to this polarization? I believe that they do.
Many will assure us that we can trust committee chairs and rubrics like merit indicators to protect against radical ideology and politicization. I disagree because, in addition to ideological uniformity among academics, some of the merit indicators themselves are highly progressive. Chief among them are those involving equity, diversity and inclusion, or EDI.
Now, here I want to clarify what EDI means, its real-world consequences. These include barring people from faculty employment based on ethnicity or sex. When confronted with this reality of racial discrimination, EDI advocates often retreat to more defensible positions like research design, such as, for example, ensuring that seat belts are manufactured to account for the smaller frames of women or ensuring that both male and female mice are used in experiments.
However, examples like this have nothing to do with EDI as it is practised. These examples simply highlight poor experimental design. Sloppy science is not improved by disenfranchising white men. It's improved by inculcating a culture of high standards and open debate. EDI fails on both counts. It lowers standards by disqualifying applicants by race or sex. Moreover, many people with integrity will not go along with this and will self-select out of federally funded academic research.
With respect to open debate, I can personally attest to many examples of soft censorship. For example, tenured professors have told me that they are too scared to attend academic discussions challenging new ideas or directives involving EDI or indigenization.
I hope you agree that ideological conformity, restricted applicant pools and loss of open debate are all at odds with a thriving research culture. I urge you to remove EDI from all aspects of federal research funding.
Thank you for your time.