Easy come, Easy go. DEI buzzwords helped you get a grant and now they will cost you one.

Next time, divisive fads should be avoided

When DEI first infected the academy, I, like most of my colleagues, rolled my eyes. Everyone knows that poor people have worse health and do worse in healthcare than rich people. And everyone knows that minority groups which are poorer do worse. It's always been unclear if minorities do particularly worse when you fully adjust for wealth, because wealth is a variable that nobody accurately measures. But don't let that stop people from saying it does.

But nearly no one in the academy was doing anything meaningful about it. They like to talk about it. Say the same things, as they fly to conferences and stay at swanky hotels and fluff themselves (thanks indirects!).

I often wondered if you would do more good taking an airplane full of cash and dumping it out over an impoverished region than letting these scientists waste our time with low credibility and redundant papers.

But the brain rot took hold. DEI was everywhere. A medical student could have four lectures in emergency medicine and one would be on dei and the other would be on the impact of global warming on heat stroke. How to work up chest pain might just be a footnote. It was insane how much of the curriculum became dei. It was also astonishing that you could not question things. If you said anything against the prevailing narrative you would be labeled as “dangerous” and be removed from teaching duties and the like. In fact, if you didn't pledge allegiance to the dogma in mandatory training, you wouldn't be allowed to teach in the first place!

Then, as the study sections deteriorated, filled with mediocre scientists, dei took over grant applications. You had to put underserved minorities or persons of color or some abbreviation soup in there to justify your grant. It doesn't matter if it was completely unrelated to these topics. If you painted your grant with the lens of DEI, you were more likely to be funded.

Just for the record. The work from my team has always interested in helping the poor, and I have worked for 5 years in a safety net county hospital. Providing good care to the less fortunate matters to me. But what I hate more than anything is empty rhetoric. (And downright dishonest research… such as claims that white doctors have twice the death rate for black babies and other such ludicrous ideas based on bad science)

Then, like all faddish movements, the pendulum swings back. A growing number of people in America are sick of this rhetoric. And they vote in Trump. Columbia University likely did a poor job of balancing protests, preserving safety, and navigating a difficult situation with diverse views.

The Trump administration wishes to punish Columbia. So they start to cancel grants. But they don't cancel all the grants to Columbia. My guess is they only cancel about 1 in 3 NIH grants. But they don't do it at random. This is the kind of vocabulary in your grant that would get you canceled.

From skimming this grant, my guess is that it's methods are inadequate and poor. It won't be able to give us any information that is accurate or novel. The analytic flexibility is greater than the signal. It certainly won't be able to help these women. And of course they paint the grant with the DEI rhetoric to help them get funded. This was one of the grants that was terminated per Nature.

One Columbia faculty member tells me this, “Lots of PIs in Columbia whose grants did not get cancelled are thankful that they did not use DEI buzzwords in their application”

Once a buzzword, now a liability.

Easy come, easy go.

What's the take home lesson?

The real lesson is we shouldn't be funding grants based on buzzwords. Whatever is in fashion today, will not be in fashion in 5 years. Dei was a powerful dogma. Perhaps the majority of Americans disagreed with its core philosophy. But it was rammed down the throat of faculty, even those in biomedicine, within universities. My guess is many deans felt powerless to stop it. You could be the president of the University and worry about your own job. So they allowed it to infect the system. And now there's the correction.

Going forward, I would suggest not to include these buzzwords in your Grant. I would also not rebrand this. Words like inclusion and belonging are also not going to do well in the future. Write your grant's very matter-of-factly. Just state what you're going to do and stop using this kind of politicized rhetoric.

I also think that we need randomized control trials of NIH funding. Because the only reason the system was allowed to be so co-opted is because the study sections bought into it. But we have no idea if study sections is the best way to give out money. My guess is even lottery would out perform the incompetence, fickleness and capriciousness of study sections.

If grants were given by modified lottery, we never would have fallen down this dei rabbit hole.

Nature claims that the grants that are canceled are disproportionately training grants. But they do not provide evidence of this claim. Yet, I would not be surprised if that is the case because I would guess younger people are more likely to use these buzzwords.

Funding buzzword science was always a dangerous game. Now it appears it has backfired tremendously.

There is an irony here.