The promoters of identity politics, the idea that we are primarily defined by our race and gender,

have taken over the humanities and social sciences. That's bad, but not as bad as this.

They're moving in on STEM, science, technology, engineering, and math.

All across the country, a UCLA scientist reports, the big question is, how can we promote more

women and minorities by changing i.e. lowering the requirements we had previously set for graduate level

study. The National Science Foundation NSF, a federal agency that funds university research,

exemplifies this approach. Progress in science, the NSF argues, requires a diverse STEM workforce.

Why this is the case they don't bother to say? Somehow NSF-backed scientists managed to rack up

more than 200 Nobel Prizes before the agency realized that scientific progress depends on diversity.

No matter, in July 2017 it awarded $1 million to the University of New Hampshire and two other

institutions to develop a bias awareness intervention tool. Another $2 million went to the

Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M to remediate microaggressions and implicit biases.

The science diversity charade, as I discuss in my book The Diversity Delusion,

waste extraordinary amounts of time and money that could be going into basic research

and its real world application. If that were, it's only consequence the cost would be high enough.

But identity politics is altering the standards for scientific competence and the way future

scientists are trained. Diversity is now an explicit job qualification in the STEM fields.

The Physics Department at UC San Diego advertised an assistant professor position with a specific

emphasis on contributions to diversity, such as the candidate's awareness of inequities

faced by underrepresented groups. Solving the mystery of dark energy apparently now takes a back seat

to social justice. Maybe it was a coincidence, but all five candidates on UC San Diego's short list

were females. If traditional standards are keeping women and minorities out of STEM fields,

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