Heather Mac Donald writes: The claim that the Trump administration might push the NSF [National Science Foundation] to fund research with an “ideological bent” was rich. The NSF has been supporting ideologically driven research for years, much of it through its Directorate for STEM Education. The directorate’s $1.15 billion budget in 2024—a full ninth of the foundation’s $9.2 billion budget and much higher than funding for biology, computer science, and engineering—is just a starting point for gauging how much the NSF spent on education projects. Other directorates, nominally focused on hard science, also distributed education grants.
The NSF’s education grant-making has been focused on racial victimhood. The education directorate plays a key role in boosting the NSF’s diversity metrics. Its program managers—who approve and oversee grants—are disproportionately minorities, especially minority women. Grant recipients also tend to be disproportionately minority. This imbalance may reflect the composition of the applicant pool for once, since America’s schools of education, the feeders for NSF education program managers and education awardees, are themselves disproportionately minority. This skew is even greater in STEM-related education specialties, and not just because those specialties are devoted to formulating racism-based explanations for the underrepresentation of minorities in STEM. These education fields serve as a safe harbor for STEM graduates who opt out of STEM careers, and this category, too, is disproportionately minority.
NSF grant recipient James Holly Jr. is a typical case. In 2023, Holly received nearly $600,000 from the NSF’s Division of Engineering Education and Centers—part of the Directorate for Engineering, illustrating how education-related spending extended beyond the NSF’s Directorate for Education. Holly earned an M.S. in mechanical engineering from Michigan State University in 2014 and then pivoted to education, completing a Ph.D. in engineering education at Purdue University in 2018. Whatever his strengths as a mechanical engineer, his command of antiracism discourse is impeccable.
The abstract of Holly’s NSF project, “Learning from Black Intellectualism: Broadening Epistemic Foundations in Engineering Education to Empower Black Students and Faculty,” deserves an extended excerpt, since it epitomizes what had been the NSF’s education portfolio:
“The current discourse around the minimal presence of Black people in engineering is framed in terms of underrepresentation—the disparity between Black people’s demographic representation in the general populace and within the discipline. However, this narrative preserves Whiteness by passively neglecting the culture of racism in engineering. A discourse centered on who can be physically included without engaging the implications of power in knowledge production neglects the ways Black people are forced to give meaning to their experiences through the lens of Whiteness. Recent scholarship within engineering education suggests a need for (1) a modern, reparatory framework for helping engineering faculty and students understand political implications of engineering knowledge; and (2) an equity-focused resource to foster constructive evaluation of teaching. . . .
This CAREER project will 1) examine the effects of recasting engineering knowledge through the legacy of Black intellectualism, and 2) advance educational justice by countering the epistemic violence within engineering and its sense-making practices. The anticipated outcomes of this study will equip engineering faculty with tools for equitable instruction, and more importantly, enhance Black students’ sense of belonging by bridging the gap between their engineering learning and social reality. Fugitive pedagogy will be used to investigate engineering faculty epistemic norms and explore ways to reconstruct disciplinary knowledge through Black intellectualism. The project will implement a social design experimentation methodology to study how engineering education can be transformed toward epistemic equity. Epistemic equity is operationalized through the idea of re-politicizing—grappling with cultural and political implications of technical systems—engineering courses and curriculum. The overarching question guiding the research plan is: How can Black intellectualism be used to re-politicize engineering pedagogy? Engineering faculty will develop a schema (Phase 1), engage in revising a course based on the schema (Phase 2), and develop a teaching evaluation tool to assess the outcomes (Phase 3). Phases 2 and 3 will be repeated in an iterative cycle three times, centering faculty and student voice is the hallmark of the integrated research and education plans.”
When Big Science proclaimed throughout spring 2025 that Trump’s budget cuts would devastate American scientific prowess, especially vis-à-vis China, “Learning from Black Intellectualism” was what the science establishment was referring to.
The following features of the Holly abstract were standard. It ignores blacks’ on average rock-bottom mathematical skills. It is this skills gap that causes black underrepresentation in engineering, not “Whiteness,” a “culture of racism,” or “epistemic violence.” (The number of black 12th-graders who are advanced in math nationwide is a statistical zero; 60 percent of black 12th-graders do not possess even basic 12th-grade math skills. The average black score on the math SAT in 2023 was 440 on an 800-point scale, compared with Asians’ average 629 math score.)
The abstract places all responsibility for increasing the representation of blacks in engineering on everyone and everything besides black students and their families. Engineering pedagogy must be “re-politicized” with “Black intellectualism.” Engineering education must be “transformed toward epistemic equity.” Not a word about cracking the books and completing problem sets.
Holly uses scientistic and hothouse rhetoric—“fugitive pedagogy,” “social design experimentation methodology,” “schema” and “phases” “repeated in an iterative cycle three times”—to create the illusion of exacting research protocols.
Multiply “Learning from Black Intellectualism” several hundredfold for a picture of the projects that the NSF had started to shed in the spring.
On April 18, the NSF announced that it would no longer fund projects that “give preference to some groups [based on] protected class or characteristics”—in other words, based on race and sex.
