When judges in the US Supreme Court openly questioned the value of boosting the participation of black and other minority students in physics, working scientists quickly disagreed.
They spoke out not just for the sake of inclusiveness, but because encouraging diversity might be our best chance to crack the biggest questions in the cosmos.
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The judicial remarks came in the latest stage of a long-running legal challenge to affirmative action at the University of Texas, which arose after a white student was denied a place there in 2008. Such action, in which race is considered as a factor in admissions to increase diversity, is used at many US institutions.
Chief Justice John Roberts stoked controversy during the hearing on 9 December, when he asked: “What unique perspective does a minority student bring to a physics class? I’m just wondering what the benefits of diversity are in that situation.”
His colleague, Justice Antonin Scalia, added fuel to the fire by suggesting that many black students might do better at less prestigious universities. “Most of the black scientists in this country don’t come from schools like the University of Texas,” he said. “They come from lesser schools where they do not feel that they’re being pushed ahead in classes that are too fast for them.”
Difference of opinion
, and beg to differ – and they have research that backs them up.
On the same day as these comments were made, Meg Urry, president of the American Astronomical Society, released an questioning the use of the GRE – a standardised test for those seeking to pursue an astronomy PhD. Racial minorities and women tend to perform less strongly in such tests. She says the test does not correlate well with later success and that if it is used, she wants applicant background to also be taken into account.
Urry cited a of prizewinning postdoctoral fellows in astrophysics, which showed a mismatch between GRE score and later career success. The conclusion is that using these scores alone to decide who does an astrophysics PhD fails to gauge talent but does reduce diversity.
Other astronomers, responding directly to Roberts and Scalia, rejected the line of questioning from the justices altogether. “Black students’ responsibility in the classroom is not to serve as ‘seasoning’ to the academic soup,” wrote astrophysicist Jedidah Isler in . This perspective was supported in an signed by nearly 2500 US physicists and astrophysicists and sent to the Supreme Court.
In rebutting the judges, Isler and others say that minority students, who are present in the classroom despite any pernicious racism they may have faced, already show grit. But there might be more to it.
“I care who is in my class because I’m training revolutionaries,” of the University of Washington in Seattle, arguing that great advances in thinking in physics come from the kind of creativity engendered by diverse backgrounds.
The universe doesn’t concern itself with race and gender, but those who study it don’t have the same luxury. If we want our understanding of the universe to be free from petty human bias, we need to see whether people from different backgrounds reach the same answers – or whether they overturn our understanding altogether.
Image credit: Ariel Skelley/Getty
