[notahacker]

Also, tickbox "I've considered this issue" questions which don't actually stop you from receiving grant funding with a team of middle aged, white male citizens from privileged educational backgrounds is not remotely the same as a clause enabling the administration to arbitrarily cancel your contract mid way through your project.

Especially not when said administration has a track record of cancelling things because they Ctrl-Fed outgroups they considered to be the enemy and discovered a completely irrelevant Latin prefix in someone's abstract.

[izacus]

Now that's double standard here, isn't it? Putting up questions on forms that require you to reveal your political pole and follow the politics of one party to answer isn't really kosher in any academic environment.

Trying to reframe them as "we didn't REALLY mean it!" (while also insulting a race and sex) doesn't help your case.

This is what the communist leads of universities did here in eastern europe and it was disgusting back then as well.

[notahacker]

Yeah, me pointing out the people exactly like me totally can and do fill in boxes like this and secure grants is totally "insulting a race and sex". I thought it was supposed to be the libs who were grievance mongers desperate to feel discriminated against...

Honestly, if filling in those boxes with anything other than a diatribe against the suitability of women and minorities and poor people to do research is "following the politics of one party" now, that says more about the conformance demanded by the other party than the science. Good to hear you're much happier now they're in charge and introducing formal komissar roles to ensure that any studies whose results contradict RFK Lysenko Jr or reference transgenic mice or Transjordan or employ too many research assistants with funny foreign names are liable to be defunded before publication.

[izacus]

If filling those boxes was so easy, you won't have issues filling up republican boxes with content they want to hear to get funding, right?

That's what happens when academia politicizes themselves - they become part of the game. And that means begging for scraps of who ever is currently on the top.

It's horrible... but you said yourself - you just need to fill some boxes correctly.

[notahacker]

Except, of course, that it isn't a matter of simply filling in checkboxes stating how research is going to contribute towards Americans' greatness. It's a matter of mass retrospective cancellation of research funding and the replacement of peer review with commissar review by the sort of people that can't tell the difference between transgenic and transgender and block the publication of studies if they don't align with the administration's position on vaccines

Nobody honestly believes the two are equivalent.

Ultimately an argument that an application question with option for researchers to state they have an equal opportunities policy is as much of an imposition as legislating for studies to be retrospectively defunded if the clinical outcomes don't align with the administrations' preferred pseudoscience says more about you than it does about past politicization of science...