The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the nation’s largest private funder of biomedical research, this week abruptly ended a $60 million program aimed at improving the retention of a diverse student body in undergraduate science and engineering programs.
The decision came as a shock to the 104 institutions receiving funding through the program, called Inclusive Excellence, or IE3, especially because HHMI has vocally heralded moves to increase diversity in science in the past. In 2021, it announced it was committing $2 billion over 10 years to accelerate inclusion and equity throughout the academic science pipeline.
And it is dashing hopes that deep-pocketed philanthropies might help fill in gaps created by President Trump’s executive orders banning federal support for DEI programs and instructing recipients of government grants and contracts to end such initiatives. Since then, the federal agencies that fund scientific research, including the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation, have begun reevaluating and halting projects that mention diversity.
“Frankly, I’m really stunned,” said Mark Peifer, a developmental biologist at the University of North Carolina who has pushed the institution to diversify the awardees of its grants. “HHMI’s leadership in diversifying the face of science has been phenomenal, not perfect, but phenomenal. They created many programs and invested a lot of money over the last two decades.”
Program participants, who were notified on Wednesday, were particularly disappointed this was coming from HHMI. “HHMI specifically says they try to fund work that NIH and NSF wouldn’t fund. To me, it felt like philanthropic organizations like HHMI would be exactly suited to support this kind of work,” said one principal investigator of an IE3 grant who asked to not be named out of fear of professional reprisal. In announcing the 2021 initiative, HHMI president Erin O’Shea had said, “We wanted to do something that would have an impact nationally and serve as a model for others to follow.”
A spokesperson for HHMI confirmed the decision to end the program, but declined to respond to questions regarding the rationale. The spokesperson wouldn’t say whether the political atmosphere, or fear of repercussions from the new administration played a role. All mention of the program was immediately removed from HHMI’s website.
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Another private organization, the American Society for Microbiology, has taken down web pages promoting the work of Black, female, and LGBTQ+ scientists, saying it is reviewing content in response to the executive orders. But ASM receives some federal funding, making it vulnerable to administration pressure to end diversity and inclusion programs. HHMI does not, but most of the participants in the IE3 program likely receive federal grants.
The HHMI spokesperson said it doesn’t anticipate changes to other diversity programs, among them the Freeman Hrabowski Scholars, Hanna Gray Fellows, and Gilliam Fellows programs. But the online descriptions of these programs have been changed. The Hrabowski Scholars program page previously read: “Supporting outstanding early career faculty committed to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion in science.” and the Gray program was portrayed as an effort to “increase diversity in the professoriate” by supporting exceptional early career researchers with “the potential to build and contribute to an equitable and inclusive scientific culture.” That language has been scrubbed from the web pages, which was first reported by Science.
The IE3 program, announced in 2019, was hailed as an innovative move. Rather than focus on having institutions compete for awards to create programs at their own campuses, it created seven groups, called learning community clusters, that would work together toward one of three goals to help improve the retention of undergraduate STEM students from all backgrounds. Groups were tasked with making introductory science courses more inclusive, figuring out how to evaluate effective teaching, or how to create partnerships between two- and four-year colleges and universities.
The learning community clusters represented a wide range of institutions that were geographically diverse, different sizes, and a mix of public and private. Several IE3 investigators told STAT that they have formed tight-knit collaborations since being accepted into the program.
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“We all collectively spent between 2019 and 2022 getting our proposals written individually and then collaboratively. We’ve all been working on this now for six years. That’s six years of team building and program building that is just coming to a screeching halt. It’s pretty devastating,” said Alison Roark, a biologist at Furman University, who directed the IE3 program at the university.
Colleges and universities used the funds for a variety of activities. Some ran focus groups to understand how to improve introductory science courses, others hired students to work in labs so they would be able to get experience, and others created resources to help instructors teach more effectively. The program was supposed to last for six years, with the institutions just receiving their third year of funding. Most investigators will have funding to operate until around November, when they would’ve expected the next, yearly payment.
“There is a chance for layoffs to occur at the end of this calendar year. If the university can’t find some cash to support staff members, that’s a concern,” said Grant Hartzog, a molecular biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He noted that he is relatively shielded from the worst of the impacts of this decision, because he is at a well-funded institution in a blue state. But at an emergency meeting his learning community cluster hosted Wednesday, other investigators were “on the verge of tears,” he said. Those in Republican-leaning states don’t feel supported in their work to increase diversity by their state government, and some have been inundated with public records requests.
In the grand scheme of research budgets, the money from IE3 was not monumental for individual labs. But, having a grant from such a prestigious institution often served as a stamp of approval for scholars who otherwise may not have been rewarded or recognized for work centering equity and teaching in considerations for tenure or other professional opportunities.
“The money wasn’t very much from HHMI, but it provided some legitimacy and prestige,” said another researcher who is the principal investigator for their school’s IE3 program and did not want to be named out of fear of reprisals. “What really hurts, is figuring out how do we continue to incentivize this work more broadly and really make progress on these issues if universities, and groups like HHMI, aren’t standing up and saying, ‘No, this is important.’”
David Asai, who as former senior director for science education at HHMI helped build IE3, told STAT he “hopes that we can think about all the good things that the grantees are doing, and I hope that they continue it. They at least got something started, and hope they will continue these good activities, because it’s really going to change the way we teach and learn science.”
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But academics who spoke to STAT struck a somber tone, not knowing where to turn for funding or support for work that even mentions “diversity.” Hartzog feels this change is but a “drop in a vast ocean of trouble,” he said. “I think there’s a good chance that all of the grants I have, have some diversity theme or inclusion focus. I think I’m going to lose all of my funding.”
The learning clusters have begun to meet to figure out how to make the most of the funding they do have left, with a focus of trying to avoid laying off staff that were hired as part of the grant. Coincidentally, one cluster had planned a conference starting on Thursday, to discuss the upcoming year. Many landed in Albuquerque, N.M., on Wednesday to the email letting them know the program would be coming to a close.
“My colleagues will keep doing this work, but it will be harder because we will not have the funding to do it,” said Pamela Cheek, who leads the IE3 program at the University of New Mexico, and was hosting the conference. She said she expects much of this diversity work will be shunted to late nights, as there won’t be funding to do it during the work day.
“At a certain point, faculty and staff cannot sustain that, even when they believe strongly in the importance of educating and empowering students. So at a certain point, you exhaust people, because they’re having to do everything after work.”
