President Trump has just fired all 24 members of the National Science Board (NSB), which oversees the National Science Foundation (NSF). My colleague Scott Turner has written about some of the failures of the NSB that justify this move. I would like to second his judgment, approaching the issue from a slightly different angle.
Until the emptying of the NSB, it favored institutional interests. Of the most recent members, eight are high ranking academic administrators: two are university presidents, one is a vice president, one is an Executive Vice President and Provost, one is a vice chancellor, one is a Vice Provost, one is an Executive Associate Chancellor, and one is an Associate Dean. (Two of these administrators followed careers at least partly in the DEI track.) The other members are more varied in their careers, but they generally are professional insiders with successful careers and substantial administrative experience. Those who have done well under the academic-industrial-governmental regime promoted by the NSF also oversee the NSF.
This is not an irrational way to approach matters. Expertise in a particular system is usually a reasonable prerequisite for leadership. It is only a problem when a system has become hidebound and sclerotic, and when “expertise” doubles as commitment to the system’s infirmities. And this very much is the case with the NSF. The NSB has overseen without effective demur a system that directs massive amounts of “indirect costs” to politicized and dysfunctional universities, that has done scarcely anything to inhibit the irreproducibility crisis of modern science, and that has imposed a politicized and immoral DEI agenda on American science. The mainstream American science funded by the NSF gives a general impression of diminishing returns, even stagnation. The NSF needs drastic reform to revive American science. Selecting a new NSB is necessary for that reform.
Identity politics considerations also appear to have influenced the NSB’s selection criteria. A majority of American scientists and engineers are white men (as per varying estimates), as are a substantially larger majority of senior American scientists and engineers. White men make up a minority of the NSB—and one should note that a majority of those five were nominated in the first Trump administration. If identity politics had so powerful an effect on the NSB, we must presume it had at least as powerful an effect on the ordinary operations of the NSF.
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