NSF grants LSU $4.5 million for ‘equity center’ to study alleged bias against minority faculty members
The money from the NSF grant could have paid tuition and other costs for more than 100 students.
The funds will support research into understanding ‘mechanisms that drive bias, along with policy and training interventions to mitigate it.’
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Louisiana State University millions of dollars to create a “Center for Equity in Faculty Advancement” to reduce alleged bias against minority faculty members in academia.
LSU announced on Friday the $4.5 million grant from the NSF that will fund the new “equity center” and “work to understand mechanisms that drive bias, along with policy and training interventions to mitigate it.”
According to LSU, the estimated yearly cost for a Louisiana resident is $26,650, and $43,327 for non-Louisiana students. That means that the $4.5 million grant for the equity center could have paid for between 103 and 168 students to attend the university.
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The LSU announcement claims that “[b]lack and Hispanic faculty who seek promotion at research universities face career-damaging biases in the evaluation process, with their level of scholarly production judged more harshly than their peers, according to a far-reaching research program co-led by UC Merced, the University of Houston, and LSU.”
LSU claimed that black and hispanic Americans are supposedly underrepresented as professors on American college and university campuses, and that this allegedly has a negative impact on minority students.
The research cited by LSU concludes that “gatekeeping processes and implicit bias in promotion and tenure decisions” contribute to this supposed lack of diversity in American academia.
Besides the $4.5 million grant, LSU also has another $2 million grant that “focuses on identifying bias, validity, and fairness in promotion.”
The NSF has previously given millions of dollars to other universities to promote principles related to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or to gender ideology instead of promoting scientific research.
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On June 12, Molloy University in New York announced that the NSF granted it $3.5 million to encourage DEI in STEM.
The NSF also previously gave nearly $1 million to several universities in order to impose gender ideology on biology classes. The project is meant to “create a more inclusive environment for transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming (TNG) students in undergraduate biology courses,” among other things.
Campus Reform has contacted Louisiana State University for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
