U.S. Funds Project to Boost Racial, Ethnic, Gender Diversity in Science at Private Women’s College

The government agency that gave a professor hundreds of thousands of dollars to study white supremacy and racial injustice in U.S. landmarks is giving a small Wisconsin liberal arts college half a million dollars to boost “racial/ethnic and gender diversity” in science fields and “broaden participation of underrepresented minorities.” The money is flowing through the National Science Foundation (NSF), which was created by Congress seven decades ago to promote the progress of science, advance national health and prosperity and secure the national defense. Lately, it seems the agency is focusing a lot more on racial justice endeavors that exclude large portions of the American population.

Judicial Watch has reported extensively on the government wide race and gender equity movement that often puts federal agencies at odds with their taxpayer-funded mission. Race-based initiatives have been well documented in recent years at a multitude of leading agencies, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Department of Labor (DOL) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), to name a few. The NSF seems to be leading the pack lately, though many other federal agencies are also dedicating considerable resources to the cause. With an annual budget of $8.5 billion, the NSF funds more than a quarter of research conducted at American colleges and universities, where it is worth mentioning that the theft of intellectual property by Communist China is pervasive.

In the last few weeks alone, the NSF gave away millions of dollars to race-based projects in secondary and post-secondary institutions. The first allotment, $271,594, went to a private liberal arts college in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania that will use the money to identify potential “systemic inequities” in science, technology, engineering, and math fields (STEM) at the campus with an enrollment of around 3,724. The goal, according to the NSF, is to uncover “any existence of systemic inequities and advancement barriers related to gender, race, and ethnicity in STEM faculty” at the school, Bucknell University. Weeks later the NSF doled out nearly $2 million to “address the historical and current racial and gender disparities in participation in high school computer science education.” The project is part of a broader program called Researching Equity and Antiracist Learning in Computer Science (REAL-CS) that focuses on expanding participation for black, indigenous, “Latinx” (the new, politically correct gender-neutral term for Latino or Latina) and Pacific Islander students by addressing systemic barriers in high school computer science education. REAL-CS is designed to sustain yet another publicly-funded, “equity-focused” initiative called Exploring Computer Science (ECS) dedicated to “democratizing” the field by increasing opportunities for “traditionally underrepresented” high school students after a study identified disparities along “race and socioeconomic lines.”

Now the NSF is giving Alverno College, a tiny women’s liberal arts school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, $499,983 to increase racial/ethnic and gender diversity in STEM. “As a women’s college serving primarily first-generation, low-income students, more than half women of color, Alverno College will use this project to broaden participation of underrepresented minorities and women in STEM, who lag in STEM degree attainment and STEM workforce participation,” according to the NSF grant announcement. “Increasing racial/ethnic and gender diversity in STEM is a recognized strategy to expand the STEM workforce.” The agency further writes that the project engages the external community in a cooperative relationship, recognizing the intersection between STEM and students’ social/community identities. “Ongoing faculty development in culturally responsive teaching and a formalized administrative support structure will expand project impact across the college,” the NSF grant document sates.

The science agency is also financing a special project to determine if historical sites around the nation acknowledge white supremacy and racial injustice. The NSF gave a University of Oregon ethnic studies professor $350,000 to research thousands of landmarks and, though the grant announcement uses more discreet language, a university article titled “Professor is finding that a racist past is often left off monuments” provides more details. The professor, Laura Pulido, who specializes in “Chicanx studies,” indicates that her NSF-financed research offers insights into bridging the gap to racial justice. “It examines historical commemoration and the degree to which white supremacy and racial injustice is acknowledged in more than 2,600 different landmarks around the United States,” the article reads. Though in the early stages of her research, Pulido says initial data confirms that racism is deeply ingrained in American historical commemoration and U.S. landmarks fail to acknowledge links to racial inequality. “Although white supremacy — the overt belief in the superiority of white people — was central to the creation of the U.S., the nation is deeply invested in denying its role,” Pulido says. “Historical sites are key to this systemic denial, as they denote places and events deemed worthy of remembrance.”

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