Happy International Day of Women and Girls in Science. I celebrated by having a senior man attend a meeting with me to repeat everything I say and back me up on leadership decisions. 🫠

Rarely have I been less surprised than I am by the move of the American Chemical Society to delete its website on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Respect.

The organization that has never taken a stand on anything has continued that trend.

This is the text of the Montana bill banning mRNA vaccines.

Scientifically inaccurate. Conceptually incoherent. Fearmongering nonsense. So it will likely pass.

🚨We MUST work together to do more to counter this bunk. Rise up for reason!🚨

This framing is their framing, and NYT took the bait. The correct and accurate framing is: “Deep cuts to medical research threatens progress on cancer and heart disease research, costs the economy $80B, and threatens 300,000 jobs across red and blue states”

HHMI just cancelled our grant. We were in the second year of developing programs to retain students from all backgrounds in STEM. All that work, all that energy…..I am profoundly disappointed. Well-funded HHMI labs, what do you think of dismantling funding for these training programs?

Someone else posted a copy of the email, you can see it here: bsky.app/profile/viji...

Every PI at every institution was notified via email this morning. There is no record online, because there is also now no record on HHMI's website that the IE3 program ever existed: every webpage and news article on it has been scrubbed clean.

It's a good reminder for people that private foundations can pull your funding at any point for any reason. Anyone with HHMI funding (or who is applying for it) should keep that in mind moving forward.

I'm sure this is related to the EOs, but since HHMI is a private foundation they are not beholden to these EOs like they would be to the USSC decision on affirmative action. Linking all efforts to improve inclusivity in education to "affirmative action" is not a useful or correct framing.

Yup. It funded groups of schools to work collaboratively on things like building pathways for CC students to 4-year schools, improving introductory science pedagogy, and developing methods of measuring and improving inclusive pedagogy.

If you're not familiar with the program and what it does, why are you making fairly definitive statements about what "programs like this" do?

These programs have no tie at all to affirmative action, and HHMI even brought out some top-shelf education lawyers last summer to talk to the IE3 community about why the IE3 program was not impacted by the affirmative action ruling. These programs fund pedagogical and curricular development.

And I'm hopeful that as a group we can continue a lot of the work sans funding. Grateful to have been able to work with you, as well.

Not anymore: they've stripped all of the language around inclusivity from most parts of their website. But what this program did that others didn't was focus on undergraduate education: CC/University partnerships, introductory science education, and inclusive pedagogy.

They didn't. They chose to do it, they were not forced.

We haven't gotten a lot of guidance. We can use what we have left this year, but they fund 1 year at a time and no more funding will be coming.

Same. And... it makes me worried. Especially with how thoroughly they've scrubbed any mention of the program.

Came out by email to people with the grant this morning. The website is already gone, along with all of the announcements of institutions / PR / etc.

Yup. David Asai was such a leader in this field, and it's been culled almost as soon as he stepped down.

Extremely disappointed to see HHMI decide to kill their Inclusive Excellence program, including terminating the current IE3 awards to over a hundred institutions effective this year in the middle of a 6-year grant. I was hoping HHMI (and other private funders) would continue to lead the way.

Oh great… the same new PIs who were hit by a global pandemic just as they started are now trying to renew their grants and get tenure when the funding agencies are actively being destroyed. But sure.... that COVID tenure clock extension reeaaallly made a difference....