It has been over a month since the second Trump administration took office, and clearly the president is serious about reducing spending. DEI programs have been discontinued, and many grants to non-government organizations have been halted. Thousands of government employees have been laid off.
One target of the cutbacks has been grants for scientific research. Scientists now must strip keywords like “equity,” “diverse,” and “gender” from their applications if they want funding. The directive and the accompanying controversy reveal the underlying truth that having the government as a major funding source has distorted research priorities. He who pays the piper calls the tune, and so no one should be surprised that the amount of research on these issues skyrocketed in the 2010s and 2020s and now will stop under the current administration.
Concerns about ideology seeping into what the research the government supports are not new. From the 1940s through the 1960s, the American military was the largest funder of scientific research—a fact that drew criticism from campus radicals. However, before the Trump administration’s policy changes, the influence of ideology was mostly behind the scenes, with left-leaning scientists and like-minded bureaucrats quietly setting the agenda.
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Most of the research funded by the government was not explicitly ideological, but in the social sciences, it often supported leftist ideology. For example, social psychologists for years claimed that subtle changes to test instructions or an academic environment were responsible for some of the differences in test scores, a theory called “stereotype threat.” Over the years, the federal government spent over $67 million on research into stereotype threat—a phenomenon that even one leading scholar now says is not real. Much of the research like this is in support of the “Blank Slate.
The Blank Slate is the belief that humans are born fundamentally the same and that differences emerge through experience. The implication is that these differences can and must be remedied for an equal society to emerge—the philosophy behind government programs like Head Start. The Blank Slate is not unique to the political left but is a fundamental pillar of many left-leaning philosophies and policies.
The problem with the Blank Slate is simple: it is not true. Scholars on both the left and the right have written books discussing how inborn differences create unequal outcomes in every area of life. Behavioral geneticists, for example, have discovered that individual differences in almost every human trait and behavior are influenced by genes. Crucially, this does not mean that some groups are inherently superior to others; rather, it underscores that individuals have unique traits and abilities shaped by both nature and nurture. There is voluminous evidence that average sex differences are not solely due to socialization. And evolutionary psychologists are finding evidence that social hierarchies, bias favoring one’s group, and gendered divisions of labor—all bugaboos of the left—have roots far in humanity’s evolutionary past.
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At universities, the curriculum has yet to catch up to this state of knowledge. Blank Slate classes dominate the social sciences. Social psychology, for example, is a field dominated by Blank Slatism. But even though about three-quarters of the field’s findings do not replicate, 99 percent of psychology departments in the United States still offer a class in social psychology. In anthropology, cultural anthropology dominates the classroom, where students learn that differences in characteristics like individualism are due to the cultural influences people experience. And nearly all of sociology assumes that environmental forces—such as poverty—cause behaviors that the belief is even called “The Sociologist’s Fallacy.”
In contrast, classes in topics and fields that contradict the Blank Slate are rare. Sometimes, this blind spot is alarming. My discipline, intelligence research, is an excellent example. Genetic and biological characteristics influence IQ, and IQ differences are associated with educational outcomes, job productivity, mental and physical health, and even life outcomes like divorce or the likelihood of dying in a car accident. Despite these far-ranging effects, a dedicated course on human intelligence is rare in universities. There is a need, though, for this knowledge; the public discussion about IQ is at its highest level in decades, and intelligence tests, such as my Reasoning and Intelligence Online Test, are becoming more widely available. Other holes in the curriculum include evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics, and the biology of sex differences. In the research realm, the federal government grossly underfunds these topics—or even completely bans the use of government data to investigate them.
This is not an argument for infusing the curriculum with right-wing philosophy. Rather, it is a plea for universities to acknowledge that humans are the products of biology and evolution. Science should not be liberal or conservative; indeed, most findings can be used to support a variety of political views and policies. But the Blank Slate remains the dominant philosophy at most universities’ social science departments. Consequentially, research, teaching, and the public are short-changed by this hyperfocus on an idea whose time has long passed.
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Image of blank slate by Nancy White on Flickr
This article was originally published at www.mindingthecampus.org
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