A project to understand the brain becomes a futile effort to make up for educational disparities.
The National Institutes of Health supports a multidisciplinary neuroscience initiative to expand understanding of the brain. Research applications include treatments for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, autism and depression. On June 10, NIH director Francis Collins announced a new requirement for participating in the brain initiative. Neurologists, molecular biologists and nanophysicists seeking NIH funding must now submit a plan showing how they will “enhance diverse perspectives” throughout their research. Scores on the “plan for enhancing diverse perspectives” will inform funding decisions.
This new requirement is part of Dr. Collins’s continuing effort to atone for what he calls biomedical science’s “stain” of “structural racism.” The NIH already supports more than 60 “diversity and inclusion initiatives,” but those have apparently failed to eradicate NIH’s own “systemic and structural racism.”
Each “plan for enhancing diverse perspectives” must show how the principal investigator will “empower” individuals from groups “traditionally underrepresented” in biomedical research, such as blacks, the disabled, women and the poor. Institutions are also covered by the diversity mandate. Researchers working on an NIH neuroscience grant should be drawn from institutions that are traditionally underrepresented in biomedical research, including “community-based” organizations.
Dr. Collins provided no evidence for “structural racism” other than demographic data on NIH’s grant applicants and recipients. Black applicants are “present in far fewer numbers compared with their representation in the US population, 13.4%,” according to Dr. Collins’s announcement. In 2020 black scientists made up 2.3% of the 30,061 funding applications the NIH received. Less than 2% of NIH grants go to black principal investigators.
To Dr. Collins and his academic peers, such disparities are virtually irrefutable evidence of discrimination, though grant reviewers don’t see an applicant’s race. But the use of population data as a benchmark for assessing institutional racism ignores racial disparities in academic skills, achievement and study practices that the NIH didn’t cause and couldn’t possibly do anything to remedy.
According to research by the Brookings Institution’s Michael Hansen and Diana Quintero, black high-school students spend a little more than a quarter of the time on homework that Asian students do, and half the time of white students. The average black math score on the SAT in 2020 was 454 on an 800-point scale, compared with 547 for whites and 632 for Asians. The College Board calculates an SAT score that predicts, with 75% certainty, that a college freshman will receive at least a C-plus in his first-year math and English courses. That benchmark SAT score for math is 530. Only 21% of black SAT takers met the math benchmark, and 54% of black SAT takers met neither the math nor the reading benchmark. Someone who can’t muster a C-plus in freshman calculus will be unlikely to graduate with a STEM degree.
By comparison, 80% of Asian SAT takers and 59% of white SAT takers met the math benchmark. One percent of black SAT takers scored in the 700 to 800 range in math (putting them in the pool from which most cutting-edge researchers will be drawn). Thirty-five percent of Asian SAT takers and 9% of whites scored in the 700 to 800 range on math.
Educational attainment, particularly in STEM fields, reflects this skills gap. In 2019, 20 blacks nationwide received a doctorate in a neuroscience field—1.9% of all such degrees awarded in the neurosciences. There were three newly minted black Ph.D.s in biophysics (1.7% of the total) and 21 in biochemistry (2.6% of the total). Genetics and genomics departments graduated three black Ph.D.s (2.3% of the total), and molecular-biology departments 14 (2.5% of the total). In electrical engineering, a feeder into nanotechnology, there were 18 black Ph.D.s (1% of the total).
NIH is determining research priorities to maximize the number of black grant recipients. Black researchers submit comparatively few pure science proposals to the NIH, instead favoring public-health projects. Accordingly, Dr. Collins also announced on June 10 an additional $30 million in grants for addressing the “impact of structural racism and discrimination on minority health” and another $60 million for projects “aimed at reducing health disparities.” Such a reallocation of resources is expected to boost NIH’s diversity numbers, whatever its scientific necessity.
Science isn’t a social-justice endeavor, despite NIH’s determination to “provide full opportunity and participation to individuals and groups underrepresented in neuroscience.” Those groups are underrepresented for reasons unrelated to discrimination by the academy. Science has one purpose: to advance knowledge about the fundamental workings of nature. Any agenda that imposes extraneous criteria will reduce the quality of the talent pool and divert attention away from the generation of new knowledge. China imposes no such deadweight on its cutthroat race for scientific dominance.
The diversity agenda subverts science in a more fundamental way. The standard argument for what is called “inclusive excellence” is that being black or female affects how one analyzes scientific problems. Skin color even influences the perception of scientific merit. The NIH intends to put more blacks on grant-review panels to increase the number of blacks getting grants.
But science is a universal language, one that unites its participants in a discourse of reason, transcending the particularities of today’s grievance-inspired identity categories. That universality is science’s beauty and its strength. NIH’s diversity obsession, now pervasive throughout the federal science bureaucracies and in academic STEM departments, is a betrayal of the Enlightenment ideals that have alleviated so much human suffering.
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Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor at City Journal, and the author of the bestselling War on Cops and The Diversity Delusion. Follow her on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal