Leaked Presentation Reveals How NIH Forces DEI Agenda on Medical Institutions

The Cleveland Clinic is instructing faculty members to police their “microaggressions” in response to grant funding requirements from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

In a presentation obtained by Do No Harm titled “Building a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive culture: Addressing Microaggressions,” the Cleveland Clinic laid out how faculty should respond to microaggressions, which it defines as “everyday actions” that harm “marginalized groups.” The course instructs faculty to document ongoing microaggressions, an example of which is “a woman clutch[ing] her purse when a black man enters the elevator,” and to report such behavior to their supervisors.

As its title might suggest, the course is part of the clinic’s larger effort to promote diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) within its organizational culture.

But more telling is how the course instructs prospective applicants for NIH grant funding to navigate the agency’s woke mandates.

The course specifically outlines how to respond to the NIH’s Plan for Enhancing Diverse Perspectives (PEDP) requirement that mandates applicants for certain grants include a document outlining how their research will advance diversity and inclusivity, e.g. through including researchers from “historically underrepresented” backgrounds.

The course recommends grant applicants “enhance training and PEDP sections” of their grant applications, while also providing sample text to use that states applicants will participate in a “Microaggression Awareness Training.”

In other words, the NIH, by conditioning its grants on applicants’ submission to DEI, is incentivizing research institutions to implement these trainings.

The Cleveland Clinic’s presentation sheds light on how the Biden administration’s federal funding requirements encourage universities to push radical woke ideology on their faculty.

For instance, the NIH recommends grant applicants include members of “underrepresented racial and ethnic groups” in their projects, as well as engage with “minority-serving” institutions, to meet the PEDP requirement.

This sort of racial favoritism obviously unfairly disadvantages academics based on immutable characteristics, but also harms the field of science more broadly. Grant applicants should be considered for the merits of their research and ideas, not for their commitment to the Biden administration’s preferred ideology.

If the NIH wishes to mandate these requirements, it should provide evidence demonstrating why researchers who are black or of another minority group can perform their job better than other ethnic groups.

While the Cleveland Clinic’s course is perhaps a more anodyne example of this dynamic, it demonstrates how the NIH’s mandates encourage institutions to devote their resources to anti-scientific endeavors.

The Cleveland Clinic’s course is listed under a faculty development program that is administered through the clinic’s Lerner College of Medicine in conjunction with Case Western Reserve University, and is open to 900 faculty members; the aforementioned “Microaggression Awareness Training” is put on by the organization’s Lerner Research Institute.

The presentation also refers to several NIH grants and programs, including the BRAIN Initiative, that explicitly advance the DEI agenda.

“The BRAIN Initiative is firmly committed to fostering diversity, inclusivity, and accessibility in the research community,” the NIH’s description of the initiative reads. “BRAIN investigators should strive to compose teams richly diverse in perspectives, backgrounds, and academic disciplines, and provide full opportunity and participation to individuals and groups underrepresented in neuroscience.”

To cultivate quality research and advance the fields of science and medicine as best as possible, the NIH should ditch these grant requirements.

Setting up bureaucratic hoops that require grant applicants to pay homage to the DEI agenda may serve the Biden administration’s political purposes, but does nothing to advance humanity’s collective knowledge.