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In conversations with most college officials, many CEOs, many politicians and race hustlers, it's not long before the magical words "diversity" and "inclusiveness" drop from their lips. Racial minorities are the intended targets of this sociological largesse, but women are included, as well. This obsession with diversity and inclusion is in the process of leading the nation to decline in a number of areas. We're told how it's doing so in science, in an article by Heather Mac Donald, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, titled "How Identity Politics Is Harming the Sciences".

Mac Donald says that identity politics has already taken over the humanities and social sciences on American campuses. Waiting in the wings for a similar takeover are the STEM fields - science, technology, engineering and math. In the eyes of the diversity and inclusiveness czars, the STEM fields don't have a pleasing mixture of blacks, Hispanics and women. The effort to get this "pleasing mix" is doing great damage to how science is taught and evaluated, threatening innovation and American competitiveness.

Universities and other institutions have started watering down standards and requirements in order to attract more minorities and women. Some of the arguments for doing so border on insanity. A math education professor at the University of Illinois wrote that "mathematics itself operates as Whiteness." She says that the ability to solve algebra and geometry problems perpetuates "unearned privilege" among whites. A professor at Purdue University's School of Engineering Education published an article in a peer-reviewed journal positing that academic rigor is a "dirty deed" that upholds "white male heterosexual privilege," adding that "scientific knowledge itself is gendered, raced, and colonizing."

The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health are two federal agencies that fund university research and support postdoctoral education for physicians. Both agencies are consumed by diversity and inclusion ideology. The NSF and NIH can yank a grant when it comes up for renewal if the college has not supported a sufficient number of "underrepresented minorities." Mac Donald quotes a UCLA scientist who reports: "All across the country the big question now in STEM is: how can we promote more women and minorities by 'changing' (i.e., lowering) the requirements we had previously set for graduate level study?" Mac Donald observes, "Mathematical problem-solving is being deemphasized in favor of more qualitative group projects; the pace of undergraduate physics education is being slowed down so that no one gets left behind."

Focusing on mathematical problem-solving and academic rigor, at least for black students at the college level, is a day late and a dollar short. The 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress, aka The Nation's Report Card, reported that only 17 percent of black students tested proficient or better in reading, and just 7 percent reached at least a proficient level in math. In some predominantly black high schools, not a single black student scored proficient in math. The academic and federal STEM busybodies ought to focus on the academic destruction of black youngsters between kindergarten and 12th grade and the conferring of fraudulent high school diplomas. Black people should not allow themselves to be used at the college level to help white liberals feel better about themselves and keep their federal grant money.

Mac Donald answers the question of whether scientific progress depends on diversity. She says: "Somehow, NSF-backed scientists managed to rack up more than 200 Nobel Prizes before the agency realized that scientific progress depends on 'diversity.' Those 'un-diverse' scientists discovered the fundamental particles of matter and unlocked the genetics of viruses." She might have added that there wasn't even diversity among those white Nobel laureates. Jews constitute no more than 3 percent of the U.S. population but are 35 percent of American Nobel Prize winners. One wonders what diversity and inclusion czars might propose to promote ethnic diversity among Nobel Prize winners.

Part II
June 27, 2018

My column a fortnight ago, titled "Diversity and Inclusion Harm," focused on the dumbing down of science, technology, engineering and mathematics curricula to achieve a more pleasing mixture of participants in terms of race and sex. Heather Mac Donald, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, wrote about this in her article titled "How Identity Politics Is Harming the Sciences". Mac Donald quoted a UCLA scientist who said, "All across the country the big question now in STEM is: how can we promote more women and minorities by 'changing' (i.e., lowering) the requirements we had previously set for graduate level study?" The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health are two federal agencies that fund university research, are consumed by diversity and inclusion ideology, and have the power to yank funds from a college if it has not supported a sufficient number of "underrepresented minorities."

In recent years, the Federal Aviation Administration has also become consumed by diversity and inclusion. Prior to becoming so, the FAA worked with about 36 colleges to create the Air Traffic Collegiate Training Initiative. The colleges offered two- and four-year non-engineering aviation degrees requiring basic courses in air traffic control and aviation administration. Graduates of these programs became qualified candidates for training as air traffic control specialists. The FAA gave hiring preferences to veterans, those with AT-CTI program degrees, references from administrators and high test scores.

In 2013, President Obama-appointed FAA Administrator Michael Huerta deemed that these hiring standards had not produced a pleasing mix of air traffic controllers when it came to race and sex. He announced plans to "transform the (FAA) into a more diverse and inclusive workplace that reflects, understands, and relates to the diverse customers" it serves. The FAA discarded its longtime use of the difficult cognitive assessment test and implemented instead a new, unmonitored take-home personality test - a biographical questionnaire. Among the questions asked are: "The number of high school sports I participated in was..." "How would you describe your ideal job?" "What has been the major cause of your failures?" "More classmates would remember me as humble or dominant?"

In other words, the FAA opened air traffic control training to "off-the-street hires" - any English-speaking citizen with a high school diploma - despite the fact that most high school diplomas are fraudulent documents. All air traffic control applicants are required to complete the biographical questionnaire. Those who "pass" are deemed eligible. The questionnaire gives more points to an applicant who answers that he has not been employed in the previous three years than it does to an applicant who answers that he has been a pilot or is a veteran with an air traffic control-related military background.

Michael Pearson, an air traffic controller for 27 years who is suing the FAA, said, "A group within the FAA, including the human resources function within the FAA - the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees - determined that the workforce was too white." In an act of cowardice, a Republican-controlled Congress during President Obama's second term cut a deal allowing the FAA to hire half of new controllers based on race.

Led by its president, William Perry Pendley, the Mountain States Legal Foundation has brought a discrimination suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in behalf of Andrew J. Brigida against U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao - although, when this suit began, Anthony Foxx was the secretary of transportation. (When Chao became the secretary, she was automatically substituted as the defendant.)

All Americans should hope that the Mountain States Legal Foundation suit is successful in preventing the FAA from using race and sex as criteria for hiring. Passengers' lives, regardless of sex and race, depend upon there being proficient air traffic controllers.

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.