Barriers to Scientific Progress – Part 6

How bureaucracy stifles innovation.

Continuing this essay series on modern barriers to scientific progress, using Michael Bhaskar’s book Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking, this essay will explore how the rise of bureaucracy has affected scientific progress.

As Bhaskar writes, regarding the scientific establishment following World War II:

[W]hole new layers of bureaucracy accumulated and continue to do so. We live not in a freewheeling and experimental age, but rather in a “utopia of rules” subject to an all-pervasive managerialism … [E]veryone I spoke to in academia, from feted professors to newly minted postdocs, felt something close to despair at the system. To them the notion that the ivory tower still exists as some last redoubt against the petty, frothy world outside seems comical. Over recent decades, the character of universities has changed. Even as elite institutions have become richer and more powerful, so they have aped the blue-chip corporations dominating the economy – with all their attendant vices. Driven by a cadre of well-remunerated professional administrators, they have lost sight of untethered ideas. Between 1975 and the twenty-first century those managers and administrators have proliferated. At public universities in the US their numbers are up 66 per cent. At private universities it is, incredibly, more than double that rate: a 135 per cent increase. Both figures are hugely in excess of faculty and student growth, leading to the creation of an “all-administrative university”. Indeed, administrators and “other professionals” outnumber actual faculty members. Since the 1970s spending at universities has tripled, but given the faculty–student ratio has stayed the same it's questionable where this money goes. In my conversations this was regarded as at best wasteful, at worst actively fostering a grim box-ticking atmosphere inimical to big thinking. No one outside the offices of presidents, vice-chancellors, provosts, senior vice presidents, deans, associates and assistants is quite sure how this supports the world of ideas. Instead spending on student services over a decade is up more than double against spending on teaching and research.  Investment is channelled into sports stadia, gyms and luxury leisure facilities rather than towards labs, experiments and researchers … [At] universities … researchers spend a vanishing portion of their time on their basic job: instead they write proposals for grant money, assess those proposals, sit on committees, write reports, fill in forms … [O]ne wrong move can finish a career. Researchers, and particularly early-career researchers, feel obliged to conform and play safe … The truth is, universities are anti-maverick. If you want to challenge norms, the academy, much like the wider world, is no longer welcoming … [A] Wellcome Trust investigation of research culture found that 75 per cent of participants felt creativity was stifled and 23 per cent felt pressured to deliver a particular result … [F]reedom of thought is valued on paper – but in reality departmental politics, promotional opportunities, over-specialisation, funding cuts, citation-chasing, intradisciplinary reputation, epistemic territory grabbing and the pressure to publish are omnipresent.

Regarding the business world generally, Bhaskar writes:

And all the while management wastes time: an estimated 60–80 per cent of it on writing reports and in pointless meetings. The Boston Consulting Group “index of complicatedness”, a measure of firms’ internal complexity, has grown 7 per cent annually for an extraordinary five decades. One survey of executives working on innovation found that their biggest barriers were not resources, but internal politics and culture. Once again, the appetite for original thinking is diminished … Repeated again and again, the process crushes space for manoeuvre and experiment … After years of decrease up to the early 2000s, we are in a period of increasing regulatory burden: one in four American jobs requires some kind of official occupational licence. It's no secret that the number of lawyers has been growing fast for decades, increasing nearly fourfold in the US since the early 1980s. Between 1997 and 2012 the US Code of Federal Regulations grew by 12,000 restrictions every year … All forms of transport are subject to extensive regulation and new forms often require new infrastructure, at eye-watering cost and inconvenience. Think about flying cars: even when the idea is plausible, do city residents want loud swarms of them buzzing overhead? Who will pay for their landing sites? What happens after the first crashes in which bystanders are killed? What price will insurers charge? Such barriers are not insuperable, but they are exacting and omnipresent compared with the early days of the car or the plane: Stephenson, Benz and the Wrights didn't worry (so much) about insurance, or licensing, or safety regulations … or infrastructure, or impatient venture capitalists, although they might have had to grapple with a sceptical public, protectionist governments or a hostile media. As J. Storrs Hall points out, if Henry Ford had been sued every time someone crashed their Model T, we likely wouldn't have cars and highways at all.

Highly restrictive regulations by their nature discourage innovation:

Over-zealous, over-complex regulation favours incumbents, inhibits innovation and creates hidden costs in the form of paths not taken … Building authority and claiming territory takes decades. No one enjoys seeing it come crashing down … For incumbents, incentives to come up with new ideas don't increase with time. Instead the reverse is true; they are incentivised to maintain what they know and what buttresses their status. The more any organisation or person has accrued sunk costs, the more they will want to preserve what they have … We have built a world where the fastest growing jobs are not in research or the arts but in regulatory functions: compliance not science … Some concepts and narratives are placed beyond discussion, and woe betide the individual who strays, even accidentally.

One particularly virulent bureaucracy that has expanded rapidly over the last decade has grown out of university cultures that promote what has come to be called “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives (“DEI”), which draw on the false premise (advocated most prominently by Ibram X. Kendi) that all disparities in outcome between people grouped by race are the result of racism or other structures motivated by the desire to subjugate others. DEI programs promote policies based on that false premise that give preferences to people based on race.  I’ve explored the fundamental flaws of those premises extensively in previous essays (largely compiled here and here).  The American College of Surgeons has even gone so far as to make Ibram X. Kendi a keynote speaker.  As Richard Bosshardt writes in the Wall Street Journal:

My membership in the American College of Surgeons goes back almost 30 years. The 84,000-member professional society’s sole focus should be improving the standard of surgical care, but in recent years the college has made a priority of promoting critical race theory and so-called antiracism … My concern deepened in 2020, when the college convened a “task force on racial issues.” It presented a series of recommendations on how the college can “confront racism in surgery” by creating a new office of diversity, advocating for policy reforms, and adding “anti-racism to existing ACS values.” The college later hosted a leadership retreat for all surgical societies promoting “DEI and anti-racism,” with keynote speaker Ibram X. Kendi, the most recognized advocate of the “antiracist” philosophy.

But however baseless the foundations of these programs, their reach has become extensive, including within medical schools, even as the Supreme Court has held that the race-based nature of such programs is unconstitutional (as explored in previous essays).

How these DEI programs actually work has been revealed through various document requests for public records at public medical schools, and it’s likely private medical school DEI programs operate the same way.

As John Sailer writes in the Wall Street Journal:

[T]here is evidence that many universities have engaged in outright racial preferences under the aegis of DEI. Hundreds of documents that I acquired through public-records requests provide a rare paper trail of universities closely scrutinizing the race of faculty job applicants. The practice not only appears widespread; it is encouraged and funded by the federal government. At Vanderbilt University Medical Center, a large hiring initiative targets specific racial groups—promising to hire 18 to 20 scientists “who are Black, Latinx, American Indian, and Pacific Islander.” Discussing a related University of New Mexico program, one professor quipped in an email, “I don’t want to hire white men for sure.” Both initiatives are supported by the National Institutes of Health through its Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation program, or First … The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and the University of Texas at Dallas jointly proposed hiring 10 scholars “from underrepresented groups,” noting that the NIH First program specifically identifies racial minorities and women as underrepresented … One job advertisement, for a First role at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine, notes: “Successful candidates will be early stage investigators who are Black, Latinx, or from a disadvantaged background (as defined by NIH).” Some grantees even admit such preferences in documents sent to and reviewed by the NIH. A joint proposal from the University of Maryland School of Medicine and the university’s Baltimore County campus states that all scientists hired through the program will meet the NIH’s definition of “underrepresented populations in science.” Drexel University’s program, which focuses on nursing and public health, provides its evaluation rubric in a progress report. Among its four criteria: “Candidate is a member of a group that is underrepresented in health research.” … Records repeatedly show NIH First grantees following through on their promises. In a letter of support for Florida State University’s project, that university’s associate vice president for human resources declared, “I firmly believe in and reaffirm this project’s mission to create an under-represented minority faculty cohort.”

Sailer reported again, this time on the results of his document request from Ohio State University’s medical school:

These examples come from more than 800 pages of “Diversity Faculty Recruitment Reports” at Ohio State University, which I obtained through a public-records request. Until recently, Ohio State’s College of Arts and Sciences required every search committee to create such a report, which had to be approved by various deans before finalists for a job were interviewed … In a search for a professor of chemistry, the report notes that one candidate’s “experiences as a queer, neurodivergent Latinx woman in STEM has provided her with an important motivation to expand DEI efforts beyond simply representation and instead toward social justice.” Another report concedes that “as a white male” one proposed finalist “does not outwardly present as a diversity candidate.” In his defense it notes that he recently published on critical race theory. The reports required search committees to describe how they evaluated diversity statements. The committees cited those statements as the sole reason for eliminating certain candidates in fields as varied as aquatic ecology, lighting design, military history and music theory. In some cases, committees evaluated diversity statements through an explicitly ideological lens. A committee searching for a professor of freshwater biology selected finalists “based upon a weighted rubric of 67% research and 33% contribution to DEI.” … Viewpoint discrimination aside, these assessments reveal an issue of basic priority. For a search in astrophysics, “the DEI statement was given equal weight to the research and teaching statements.” This would strike many as a poor metric for judging astrophysicists … Candidates’ demographics also appeared to play a significant role in faculty hiring decisions. Throughout the reports, references to the race and sex of candidates abound. Many of the job candidates’ diversity statements emphasized their own “intersectional” identities—“a person of color and a member of the LGBTQ+ community,” “a first generation, fat, queer scholar of color” and so on. This emphasis seemed to have an effect—sometimes a remarkable one—on the demographic makeup of the proposed finalists. For a role in communications, four of the 46 applicants were Hispanic—and so were two of the three finalists. One role in medical anthropology had 67 applicants. The four finalists include the only two black applicants and the only Native American applicant. “All four scholars on our shortlist are women of color,” the committee said. In his email, the Ohio State spokesman said that colleges in the system now use “standardized evaluation tools” to assess job candidates without regard to demographic categories like race, sex and ethnicity. That’s what the law requires, even more clearly since the Supreme Court decided Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard in June … The committee was adamant about its intended outcome. “In our deliberations to select finalists, the importance of bringing Black scholars to campus was deemed to be essential. We thus chose three Black candidates.” It added: “We decided as a committee that diversity was just as important as perceived merit as we made our selections.”

Ironically, a Supreme Court Justice who dissented from the majority’s opinion striking down racial preferences in university admissions as unconstitutional in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard ended up relying on a misunderstanding of a scientific study she cited.  As Ted Franks writes in the Wall Street Journal:

Even Supreme Court justices are known to be gullible. In a dissent from last week’s ruling against racial preferences in college admissions, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson enumerated purported benefits of “diversity” in education. “It saves lives,” she asserts. “For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live.” A moment’s thought should be enough to realize that this claim is wildly implausible. Imagine if 40% of black newborns died—thousands of dead infants every week. But even so, that’s a 60% survival rate, which is mathematically impossible to double. And the actual survival rate is over 99%. How could Justice Jackson make such an innumerate mistake? A footnote cites a friend-of-the-court brief by the Association of American Medical Colleges, which makes the same claim in almost identical language. It, in turn, refers to a 2020 study whose lead author is Brad Greenwood, a professor at the George Mason University School of Business. The study makes no such claims. It examines mortality rates in Florida newborns between 1992 and 2015 and shows a 0.13% to 0.2% improvement in survival rates for black newborns with black pediatricians (though no statistically significant improvement for black obstetricians). The AAMC brief either misunderstood the paper or invented the statistic. (It isn’t saved by the adjective “high-risk,” which doesn’t appear and isn’t measured in Greenwood’s paper.) Even the much more modest Greenwood result—which amounts to a difference of fewer than 10 Florida newborns a year—is flawed. It uses linear regression, appropriate for modeling continuous normally distributed variables like height or LSAT scores but not for categorical low-probability events like “newborn death.” The proper methodology would be a logistic model. The authors did one, hidden deep in an appendix rather than the body of the paper. There, the most highly specified model still shows an improvement in black newborn survival. But if you know how to read the numbers—the authors don’t say it—it also shows black doctors with a statistically significant higher mortality rate for white newborns, and a higher mortality rate overall, all else being equal. So we have a Supreme Court justice parroting a mathematically absurd claim coming from an interested party’s mischaracterization of a flawed study. Her opinion then urges “all of us” to “do what evidence and experts tell us is required to level the playing field and march forward together.” Instead we should watch where we’re going.

And as Andrew Sullivan points out:

Woke pseudoscience recently included the claim — widely disseminated in the MSM [mainstream media] — that black women have worse outcomes than white women in pregnancy because their doctors are white. As Ketanji Brown Jackson argued in defending race discrimination against whites, Jews, men and Asians in medical school: “For high-risk black newborns, having a black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live and not die.” But according to a new study, nothing in the original study controlled for the fact that black babies are more likely to have lower weight than white ones ... and the higher-risk ones were the ones directed mainly to white doctors. Control for that and the linkage collapses. So much for the “science” of “systemic racism.”

The behind-the-scenes machinations of DEI program administrators revealed by public document requests reflect the willingness of some medical schools to publicly display their abandonment of reasoned discourse.  The Washington Free Beacon obtained audio of a mandatory training session for medical students at the University of California, Los Angeles, in which the speaker was Lisa “Tiny” Gray-Garcia, who wore a scarf across her face during this, and had the medical students get on their knees, put their hands on the floor, and pray as she chanted “The crapitalist lie of scarcity, of private property, of money and ownership of Mama Earth—when Mama Earth was never meant to be bought or sold, pimped or played.” She also called medicine “white science,” and had the students chant “Free Palestine.” As the Free Beacon reported: “When one student remained seated, according to students in the class, a UCLA administrator, whom the Free Beacon could not identify, inquired about the student’s identity, implying that discipline could be on the table.”

The Washington Free Beacon also reports, regarding the UCLA medical school:

The University of California, Los Angeles's David Geffen School of Medicine was “Long considered one of the best medical schools in the world.”  But today “Race-based admissions have turned UCLA into a "failed medical school," said one former member of the admissions staff. " … Within three years of Lucero's hiring in 2020, UCLA dropped from 6th to 18th place in U.S. News & World Report's rankings for medical research. And in some of the cohorts she admitted, more than 50 percent of students failed standardized tests on emergency medicine, family medicine, internal medicine, and pediatrics.

Those tests, known as shelf exams, which are typically taken at the end of each clinical rotation, measure basic medical knowledge and play a pivotal role in residency applications. Though only 5 percent of students fail each test nationally, the rates are much higher at UCLA, having increased tenfold in some subjects since 2020, according to internal data obtained by the Free Beacon.

… One professor said that a student in the operating room could not identify a major artery when asked, then berated the professor for putting her on the spot.

Many of these race-based DEI programs, although instigated by Biden Administration official policy, have been the subject of investigations by the federal govrrnment’s own Department of Education, and they have been ended as a result.  As Stanlet Goldfarb writes in The Free Press:

For better or worse, I have had a front-row seat to the meltdown of twenty-first-century medicine. Many colleagues and I are alarmed at how the DEI agenda—which promotes people and policies based on race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and sexual orientation rather than merit—is undermining healthcare for all patients regardless of their status. Five years ago I was associate dean of curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, and prior to that, codirector of its highly regarded kidney division. Around that time, Penn’s vice dean for education started to advocate that we train medical students to be activists for “social justice.” The university also implemented a new “pipeline program,” allowing ten students a year from HBCUs (historically black colleges or universities) to attend its med school after maintaining a 3.6 GPA but no other academic requirement, including not taking the MCAT (Medical College Admission Test). And the university has also created a project called Penn Medicine and the Afterlives of Slavery Project (PMAS) in order to “reshape medical education. . . by creating social justice-informed medical curricula that use race critically and in an evidence-based way to train the next generation of race-conscious physicians.” Finally, twenty clinical departments at the medical school now have vice chairs for diversity and inclusion … [I] started a nonprofit called Do No Harm with some acquaintances to combat discriminatory practices in medicine. We began a program to inform the public and fight illegal discrimination. … Our argument is that medical schools are engaging in racial discrimination in service to diversity, equity, and inclusion. We have filed more than seventy complaints with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which exists in large part to investigate schools that discriminate based on race, color, ethnicity, sex, age, and disability. Surely the radical activists never expected anyone to turn the administrative state against them, but that’s what we did. And it worked—even under the Biden administration. Do No Harm has filed complaints through OCR over scholarships, fellowships, and programs with eligibility criteria that discriminate based on race/ethnicity (Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964) and/or sex/gender identity (Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972). Many of these are described as programs for students who are “underrepresented in medicine” (UIM). For example, we brought the OCR’s attention to a Diversity in Medicine Visiting Elective Scholars Program (archived page) at the University of Texas at San Antonio’s Long School of Medicine, which excluded white and Asian students. This is illegal under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which made all racial discrimination associated with government programs illegal. As a result of our action, the OCR opened an investigation. However, Long School of Medicine took down the program page and scrubbed all evidence of it from its website, prompting OCR to close the investigation as “corrected.” … Or consider the University of Florida College of Medicine, which offered a scholarship solely to those who were “African Americans and/or Black, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, Hispanic/Latinx, and Pacific Islander.” We asked the OCR to investigate, and the university eliminated the race requirement. Likewise, we filed a complaint against the Medical University of South Carolina over eight scholarships excluding applicants who did not qualify as “underrepresented in medicine.” The OCR opened an investigation, after which the school dropped the exclusionary policy. Do No Harm is also pushing back against the tide of race-based programs in the corporate world. In February, in the wake of a lawsuit we filed against Pfizer last September claiming a violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, the pharmaceutical company ended a requirement that college junior applicants to its Breakthrough Fellowship program—which offers guaranteed employment—be black, Hispanic, or Native American.

And as Goldfarb and Mark Perry reported in the Wall Street Journal:

The Biden administration is imposing a woke agenda on America using the vast power of the administrative state. Through a series of executive orders, the president has charged every federal agency with advancing “diversity, equity and inclusion,” a divisive ideology that justifies pervasive racial discrimination. Yet one corner of the federal bureaucracy is stifling the woke agenda simply by enforcing the law. The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights is no conservative bastion. Staffed mostly by liberal career attorneys, and situated within one of the government’s most aggressively woke departments, it is charged with upholding federal antidiscrimination laws in education, including Title VI and Title IX. OCR is required by law to investigate complaints of discrimination at educational institutions that receive federal financial assistance. The office is rejecting much of what higher education is attempting to do at the behest of woke ideologues … We’ve found similar success pushing back on racially discriminatory academic programs, which woke activists support in the name of increasing diversity. Hundreds of institutions have scholarships or fellowships that explicitly bar white and Asian applicants. The University of Florida College of Medicine offered a scholarship for applicants who were “African Americans and/or Black, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, Hispanic/Latinx, and Pacific Islander.” Applicants even had to submit a photograph to prove they were of the preferred hue. We submitted a formal complaint to the Office for Civil Rights, leading the university to eliminate the scholarship’s discriminatory restrictions. All told, we have submitted federal civil-rights complaints for race- and sex-based discrimination at more than 100 medical schools, leading the Office for Civil Rights to open at least 25 formal federal investigations so far. To date, almost a dozen medical schools have abandoned their racially discriminatory woke programs, most recently at the University of Minnesota Medical School, which removed illegal criteria for an award for graduating medical students. Why is the Office for Civil Rights standing strong against woke demands, especially when other federal agencies are doing activists’ bidding? We suspect that many if not most of the OCR staff are sympathetic to DEI. Yet the laws they uphold couldn’t be clearer that racial discrimination is illegal, and ignoring or slow-walking complaints could subject them to public criticism and legal challenges. It also helps that the Education Department allows any individual or organization to submit civil-rights complaints to OCR, not only victims of discrimination who would have legal standing to sue. That’s not the case at similar offices at agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In the context of medical schools and hospitals—our organization’s focus—these agencies require faculty or students who have encountered discrimination at their institutions to file complaints under their name. Such victims are understandably reluctant to open themselves up to withering criticism and retaliation from their mostly woke peers, faculty and administrators. (We’ve found they typically don’t know they can file lawsuits anonymously as a member of an organization like ours.)

In the next essay in this series, we’ll explore how “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” bureaucracies lower standards at medical schools.