Dear National Science Foundation,
I am in the midst of preparing an NSF grant application and, as I am sure you can appreciate, I want to make sure that my proposal does not run afoul of new evaluation criteria inspired by our 47th and hopefully last president (long may he live before passing the royal spray-tan and comb-over kits to his worthy heir, Baron Barron von Trump).
As a member of the Graduate Faculty at Penn State (as a white male, I can assure you that DEI considerations played no role in my hiring), I recently received grant preparation guidance from the university that included a list of Words to Avoid in NSF/NIH proposals.
The list seems to have been lifted from Appendix B of a report of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation (ranking member Ted Cruz). Titled “DEI: Division. Extremism. Ideology,” the appendix lists 700 woke-sounding words and phrases, several of which, I hesitate to confess, could be viewed as pertaining to my research.
I therefore wish to clarify a number of points about the nature of my project, which will be a further installment in my longitudinal study of the lifeways of the Woo People.
The Woo are a semi-nomadic people who spend nine months of the year in Central Pennsylvania. Named for the shrill vocalizations that accompany their nocturnal revels, the Woo are not, I hasten to inform you, indigenous to the region (indigenous being one of the words on the list). Indeed, Move-in Day, the occasion in late summer when the Woo return to Wooland after a three-month sojourn in what they call the Real World, is among the rituals of Woo life worthy of further study.
The Woo do not, by and large, come from diverse communities, but neither their lack of diversity, their whiteness, their privilege, their socioeconomic status, their sense of belonging, their toxic masculinity, the fact that they are historically, primarily and predominately white, specifically white males, which is to say, white men, if we are to be precise about their sexual identity, will, I assure you, be a focus of this study.
Despite their complaints about elders such as myself who deliver droning lectures aimed at awakening the Woo to the possibility that there are more things in heaven and earth than sporting contests and drinking games, the Woo shall not, for the purposes of this study, be considered oppressed.
Indeed, those who fear that the Woo people are becoming woke as a result of their exposure to such soporific sermons have not heard the stertorous sounds emanating from the halls where said sermons are delivered.
Judging from the plethora of red plastic cups that the Woo strew about their grounds during their social gatherings, they do not appear to be all that environmentally conscious, so reviewers of my proposal need not be concerned on that score.
And though I will observe their rituals and elicit their reflections on their way of life, the Woo will not feel seen and heard as a result of my investigations or that their voices matter or even that their voices are acknowledged. They will not, however, feel underappreciated or undervalued.
Finally, I would like to assure the NSF per the Cruz committee’s concern that projects like mine “mask Marxist social ideology as rigorous and thoughtful investigation,” that I am not calling for “the dismantling of the current capitalist order through a revolutionary process.” Nor am I advocating the use of “‘revolutionary terror’ to bring about a ‘new society’ that would allow the oppressed class to rule.”
I realize that my project appears to be sociocultural in nature, but I would call the NSF reviewers’ attention to the fact that I have not taken a course in cultural anthropology in 40 years. I primarily consider myself a folklorist and a journalist, neither of which appears on the list.
On second thought, forget that I am a journalist.
To conclude, I am sensitive to the fact, reported by Sen. Cruz’s committee, that the American public’s confidence in science is plummeting due to the questionable priorities of America’s scientists (and not to any concerted efforts on the part of Sen. Cruz, his colleagues, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and, of course the Climate Change Denier-in-Chief, to undermine confidence in science).
Not only will my study of the Woo people not “parrot the talking points of the woke neo-Marxist left,” it will, on the contrary, celebrate all that is great about America and its institutions of higher learning, to wit, beer, football and, any day now, loyalty oaths.
Above all, my study will not, in any way shape or form, be socially relevant or, to again quote from the Cruz committee’s report, “drive division, dissent, and illegal discrimination.”
In light of the above, I hope the NSF will see fit to grant my request for funding.
