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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.

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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.  {snip}

The science agency is also financing a special project to determine if historical sites around the nation acknowledge white supremacy and racial injustice.  {snip}