(2025-02-13) Alexander Only About 40% Of The Cruz Woke Science Database Is Woke Science

Scott Alexander: Only About 40% Of The Ted Cruz "Woke Science" Database Is Woke Science. U.S. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz (R-Texas) released a database identifying over 3,400 grants, totaling more than $2.05 billion in federal funding awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) during the Biden-Harris administration. This funding was diverted toward questionable projects that promoted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda.

I saw many scientists complain that the projects from their universities that made Cruz’s list were unrelated to wokeness. This seemed like a surprising failure mode, so I decided to investigate. The Commerce Department provided a link to their database, so I downloaded it, chose a random 100 grants, read the abstracts, and rated them either woke, not woke, or borderline.

Of the hundred:
40% were woke
20% were borderline
40% weren’t woke

This is obviously in some sense a subjective determination, but most cases weren’t close - I think any good-faith examination would turn up similar numbers.

Why would a list of woke grants have so many non-woke grants in it? After reading the hundred abstracts, I found a clear answer: people inserted a meaningless sentence saying “this could help women and minorities” into unrelated grants, probably in the hopes of getting points with some automated filter.

For example, from Grant 1731: New Security Exploit in Energy Harvesting Systems and Its Countermeasures: An Energy Harvesting System (EHS) has emerged as an alternative to battery-operated Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

Did you catch the last sentence?: The project also aims to integrate research findings into undergraduate teaching and promote equitable outcomes for women in computer science through K-12 outreach program.

Some version of this sentence was in most of the nonwoke grants that made it into Cruz’s database. They promised to investigate some totally normal scientific topic, and then at the end they said somehow it would cause equity for women and minorities. I assume somebody told them that if they didn’t include this sentence, the Biden NSF would ding them for not having enough equity impact. (2022-10-12) Now Even Science Grants Must Bow to Equity and Inclusion

Typical examples include:
We will do outreach, and probably some of it will inspire underrepresented minorities to go into STEM.
We will employ undergraduates or PhD students, and probably some of them will be underrepresented minorities.
People will benefit from our work, and probably some of the beneficiaries will be underrepresented minorities.
This was probably 90% of the false positives.

"However, STEM-based identities can clash with personal identities, especially for students from marginalized communities. This project will add understanding in how to develop integrated identities that incorporate STEM identities and personal/cultural identities."
I couldn’t in good conscience call this non-woke, with its discussion of Native Americans from marginalized communities and their integrated identities and so on. But the overall plan (try to get Native Americans to go into STEM) isn’t “neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda”. It’s just cringe and overdone.

A small percent of the grants involved, maybe 10% - 20%, did strike me as extremely dumb, in exactly the way I imagine that Ted Cruz expects woke science to be extremely dumb. Here’s one of the worst offenders (2756):
Examining Blackness in Postsecondary STEM Education Through a Multidimensional-Multiplicative Lens. Despite well-intentioned university efforts to support Black undergraduate STEM students, policy and practice reforms run the risk of not appropriately benefiting all Black people due to pervasive, deficit-based assumptions about Black racial identities and the types of structural engagement needed to advance holistic, racial well-being in transformative and sustainable ways.

I agree with Cruz that the government has funded a lot of woke garbage. Getting rid of it ought to be an easy win. But this just makes it even worse that the administration has bungled it so badly that they make the DEI establishment look like paragons of competence in comparison.

EDIT: Some people are saying “Well it still seems bad that 40% of Biden-era science was woke.” No! This post just finds that 40% of the science that Ted Cruz flagged as woke was actually woke. I think this works out to 2-3% of all Biden-era science.