Responding to a major threat to NIH-funded university research, Heterodox Academy sent a communication today to NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya asking him to rescind an order halting distribution of all promised NIH funds to institutions that have DEI programming.

Under the order, it appears that anything that smacks of “DEI programming” – for example, a celebration of women’s accomplishments to a university’s English department, or a study looking at race and intelligence – could result in the wiping out of all NIH-funded medical and scientific research at that university.

Inside Higher Ed reports, “The policy change is effective immediately and applies to all new and existing grants. If a college violates the new terms, NIH could terminate the grant and require the recipient to pay back the funds…Trump and other administration officials have argued that colleges’ DEI programs violate Title VI, though they haven’t been clear about what exactly they consider ‘illegal DEI.’”

In HxA’s letter to Bhattacharya, HxA Policy Director Joe Cohn and Policy Analyst Raheem Williams urge the NIH director to rescind the Notice of Civil Rights Term and Condition of Award issued Monday and “instead to simply remove any ideological conditions NIH previously required of recipients” (emphasis added).

HxA’s recommendation is to follow the lead of the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. Under the Biden administration, applicants to that agency were asked to submit Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research (PIER) plans. Under Trump, the DOE’s Office of Science has ordered grant reviewers not to read or take into account such plans. This effectively eliminated an ideological litmus test without imposing a new one.

HxA has strongly criticized the use of political litmus tests – including requirements for faculty job applicants to submit DEI statements – as Cohn and Williams indicate in their letter. They also note HxA shares the view “that federal agencies should award research grants solely on the merits of the proposed research and should stop conditioning those grants on ideological alignment with unrelated political goals.”

But a rule that bans all DEI programming under threat of a total defunding of existing NIH grants “ironically threatens the free speech and academic rights of institutions and researchers.”

It is also unconstitutional, because the Notice “seeks to require institutions to abandon activities that are protected by academic freedom pursuant to the First Amendment.”

Cohn and Williams write that, problematically, the Notice “prohibits all DEI and DEIA [Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility] activities and makes no effort to target only those practices which are actually unlawful.”

In the end, “broad bans that prohibit all efforts to promote the values of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility also seek to limit the acceptable views on campus. We hope you will agree that viewpoint-based censorship is wrong regardless of the view that is targeted.”

See the full letter here.