Welcome back to the Ten Blocks Podcasts.

This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal. Joining me on the show

today is John D. Seiler. He's a senior fellow at the National Association of Scholars, and he's done

in-depth reporting on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and hiring practices in higher

education, medicine, scientific research, and the federal government.

He shared many of these findings and reports for NAS and in articles for City Journal,

the Wall Street Journal, and other publications.

He joins us today to talk about federal diversity equity inclusion programs, grant programs

in medicine and in science, and in

particular something called NIH First, a DEI-focused National Institutes of Health Initiative

that's aiming to influence hiring at universities and medical schools across the country.

So, John, thanks very much for joining us.

Thanks so much for having me.

So to start with, tell us about NIH first. I think most people aren't aware of the existence of this program. What is its intent? And what is your research uncovered about how it actually

operates? Yeah, so a lot of my research and writing has been aimed at answering the question.

Why have our universities seemingly gone insane?

Why have our universities created a culture that is in many ways at odds with a lot of the

values of those outside the university and that,

you know, promote ideologies that a lot of ordinary people would think are just really strange,

unusual that sometimes don't stand up very well to scrutiny, but they seem to to do that in the

context of academia because these, this narrow set of ideas to do that in the context of academia because this narrow set of

ideas are much more in vogue.

...