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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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Unfortunately not everyone takes this approach when grading submissions. NSF requires that you address the 'broader impacts' of your grant proposal, which means in essence what you are doing to promote diversity.

I took the approach you described and wrote about things that I was doing to improve stem outreach and training in general, as well initiatives I was involved in at a nearby hbcu. I got solid scores from two reviewers, which would be well in the range of an acceptance, and got absolutely hammered by the third reviewer, who insisted I wasn't doing enough for minorities.

Ultimately my proposal wasn't funded. Thankfully I've been having better luck with NIH, who don't have this requirement.

Congratulations on getting the NIH grant!

You are right to point out that a significant portion of gatekeepers in US Academia are very much into the DEI/woke ideology. I would guess that in some fields, they are the majority of gatekeepers. In other fields, they may yet be a minority. Since most fields in US are liberal/left, and DEI/woke ideology evolved specifically to spread in or dominate such spaces, I would expect to encounter such gatekeepers in pretty much any academic field. I would also expect to encounter gatekeepers who retain classical liberal ideals that are at odds with discriminatory aspects of the former.

Getting a specific job, getting a specific grant, those have always been a crap shoot and involved guessing the priorities of whoever comprised the hiring / grant committee. It also is, deliberately, a status game. We would like to think that academic status is about merit, but it's still status, and thus susceptible to status-affecting politics. DEI/woke has been quite effective in that game, in the milieu of liberal/left spaces. So I would expect their representation within the academic gatekeepers to increase.

To anyone who is personally worried about this trend, I recommend considering life outside of academia.