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The ethos of science requires many curious and creative people. Over the course of my academic career, I became convinced that making sure more people from different backgrounds could find success in research would be a more meaningful contribution to science than my own individual lab work in cell biology. I left academia in 2008 to direct the undergraduate science education programs at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). As I told Science magazine the same year, scientific discovery needs the "very best and the brightest, no matter what they look like and where they come from."
Early in my tenure at HHMI, I was what sociologist Marisela Martinez-Cola calls a "collector," believing that the problem of underrepresentation could be solved simply by cramming more students into a "pipeline" while disregarding the harm we cause when we treat students as an inert commodity. The "pipeline" approach has resulted in hundreds of programs primarily aimed at assimilating students into a science culture not of their making nor designed with them in mind. It has done little to address+ disparities.
Undergraduate students intending to study science and who identify as Black, Indigenous, or Latino are twice as likely as white and Asian students to leave an undergraduate degree in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Despite billions of dollars and more than three decades spent on interventions, the completion gap has not appreciably changed. It is revealing that other math-intensive fields, like business, have done a much better job at reducing racialized disparities. STEMs failure to close this gap-a gap which is an existential threat to science-suggests that the nations engine for innovative problem-solving has been incapable of solving one of its own biggest problems.
After much patient tutoring by grantees, scholars, and our team at HHMI, I came to understand that pursuing diversity without inclusion amounts to a form of exclusion. We must abandon a "fix the students" mentality to focus on fixing the way we teach science. Underlying this commitmentis a recognition that understanding how science works-the mix of curiosity and critical thinking that touches every facet of human life-is the right of every person, regardless of where they come from or where they are going. And, because science and technology affect so many aspects...