U.S. Senate flags $9 million of Rice research grants as ‘neo-Marxist,’ ‘woke nonsense’
$9 million of Rice’s funding from the National Science Foundation has been identified by the U.S. Senate as “woke DEI grants” that promote “neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda.”
The Senate Commerce Committee, chaired by Texas Senator Ted Cruz, released a database Feb. 11 that identified some $2 billion in “woke DEI” funding — over 3,400 grants — from research institutions and universities across the country. In a press release, the committee characterized these grants as “radical left woke nonsense” that has “poisoned research efforts, eroded confidence in the scientific community, and fueled division among Americans.”
Rice accounts for 17 of those NSF grants, spanning research in chemical bioengineering, behavioral sciences, materials research and civil manufacturing. The NSF is an independent federal agency that supports non-medical research in science, engineering and technology.
The NSF disburses millions of dollars in grant money to Rice every year, funding initiatives like the Rice Emerging Scholars Program, a mentorship program for first-generation, low-income students studying science, technology, engineering and mathematics. RESP received a five-year, $2.5 million NSF grant in 2024, and is included in Cruz’s database of “woke nonsense.”
“I don’t agree with the rhetoric at all,” said Mikeal Graham, who was a RESP Fellow in 2022. “They use those words to scare people who don’t know what they mean.”
Graham, a McMurtry College sophomore, said RESP extended a support system, offered programming for higher-level STEM classes and provided a stipend that allowed him to purchase a laptop.
“I don’t think I would be able to stay at Rice if I hadn’t gone through RESP,” Graham said. “RESP was one of the ways in which we were able to really level the playing field.”
Gabrielle Mellor, a senior at Louisiana State University, participated in a psychology research fellowship at Rice last summer — a program that’s also on Cruz’s list of grants. Mellor, who plans to pursue a Ph.D., said Rice’s program also offered help planning graduate school applications.
“It was a really pivotal time for my undergraduate research career,” Mellor said. “I find it really disappointing that these kinds of opportunities are potentially going to be defunded for students … I think it’s pretty uninformed.”
One project, which received $168,000 from the NSF, researches spin dynamics in two-dimensional magnets. Cruz’s list flagged the grant for “social justice.”
Of Rice’s 17 research grants on Cruz’s list, 11 contained language about recruiting traditionally under-represented minorities. One flagged project researches patterns in stochastic, or random, systems — common in machine learning fields — and included support for “outreach activities that aim at increasing interest in science among under-represented groups.”
“Since women, people of color and students from low-income and/or rural areas factually compose the majority of the United States population, we have to understand this [database] as an intervention staged on behalf of a minority population,” Dominic Boyer, an anthropology professor at Rice, wrote in an email to the Thresher. Two of Boyer’s grants were included in Cruz’s database.
“Why this minority population feels that they are justified in diminishing the relevance of the majority interests of U.S. society is a question all of us should be asking,” he continued.
Boyer’s two projects both research the environment, focusing on energy politics and flood infrastructure in coastal urban areas.
“We’ve come to the point where grounding research in climate science is being demonized by some in the Republican party as [a] form of propaganda,” Boyer said. “It seems to me this list is intended as an intimidation and perhaps blacklisting tactic, designed to scare researchers away from working on problems that Cruz and his colleagues find insignificant. If anything, what I think this list suggests is an effort to politicize research that did not seek to politicize itself.”
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