John Sailer:

I’ve acquired a trove of documents created by members of the RISE UPP Alliance—a working group that includes professors and administrators from Maryland, California, North Carolina, and Texas. The records show how program administrators brainstormed “workarounds” to state policy, disguised the project’s true intentions, and used proxies to achieve their demographic goals.

These documents reveal NSF’s influence on diversity policies at universities across the country. They show how a racialist hiring scheme continues to operate at public universities in states that have banned DEI. And as more schools ditch diversity policies in response to federal pressure, the records detail how administrators are trying to maneuver around these reforms.

In May 2024, a team of RISE UPP administrators conducted a “reverse site visit,” a progress report meeting with the NSF, which involved a long presentation to an NSF-appointed panel of reviewers responsible for evaluating the program.

The panel, whose comments were documented in a report that I obtained, urged the RISE UPP team to use more overtly identitarian language in the way that they framed the program. “The panel noted that the Alliance did not discuss fundamental issues within the majority of STEM disciplines,” the report explained, “where ways of doing STEM are based on white, patriarchal, colonizing Western European norms.”

more.