Thursday, July 27, 2023
die takes the nih
Dear Friend,
Well, MTC readers, we're in the true dog days of summer. Muggy Philadelphia, where I live, has gotten so bad that I swear I saw a few swamp creatures climb out of the Schuylkill River during my last run. But what's really heating up is the pressure on American colleges and universities to end legacy admissions, a practice under heavy fire from some of the media's heaviest hitters. (The New York Times, for example, has published six articles on the subject since Tuesday.) At least two institutions—Wesleyan University and the University of Minnesota—have already pulled the plug.
The basic anti-legacy argument, at least from NYT-adjacent publications, has been fairly predictable. Legacy admissions allegedly favors wealthy, white applicants (i.e., Public Enemy No. 1), so if we're going to ban racial preferences, then we better ban all racial preferences, not just the ones that benefit blacks, Latinos, etc. The Department of Education, meanwhile, has made its stance quite clear, announcing on Monday that it has launched an investigation into Harvard's legacy admissions practices. The Crimson really can't catch a break.
Others dispute both the racial and the financial claims surrounding legacy admissions and argue that the practice will benefit all races as discrimination in academic admissions declines. The National Association of Scholars doesn't have an official "take" on legacy admissions, so we've launched a symposium to discuss the subject in greater detail. The first two articles are already live, one by Bruce Gilley and another by Joshua T. Katz.
In other news, a "great resignation" of sorts continues to sweep through academic leadership, as the presidents of Seton Hall University and the Berklee College of Music have resigned, just after those of Stanford and Texas A&M did the same. The circumstances behind these resignations are all different, of course, but the trend is still notable. And McPherson College—a private institution with a modest 800 undergraduates—has received an anonymous $1 billion gift, instantly making its endowment the largest of any small liberal arts college in the nation. It's nice to see the little guy win sometimes.
Now, on to this week's articles.
Article of the Week
"Minding the Sciences — DEI Takes the NIH" – John Staddon, 7/25/23
As our government's response to the COVID-19 pandemic made crystal clear, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is immensely influential. This is true even when there isn't a public health catastrophe rocking the nation. While NIH does, of course, finance its own work, it directs the vast majority of its funding toward extramural research. This year, that extramural funding was to the tune of $40 billion. So, where NIH goes, much of the scientific community follows.
Unfortunately, the institutes have been sprinting headlong down the dark road of DEI. As John Staddon writes in today's Article of the Week—the latest piece in our new Minding the Sciences column—"DEI is likely to sideline scientific merit as the most important criterion for the awarding of research money at NIH." And just how might this happen? There are many reasons, to be sure, but Staddon points to NIH's forthcoming "bias awareness trainings" (read: struggle sessions), which will be required for all peer reviewers starting in May 2024. If that doesn't sound the alarm about the future of science, then you might be deaf. Click below to read the full article.
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