Via Bluesky, the American Chemical Society worked on a very thorough style guide for inclusivity. The portions on “Gender and Sexuality” and on “Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality” were apparently recently taken down. Here is the response from Rajendrani Mukhopadhyay, the senior vice president for Inclusion and Belonging when Kelly Sheppard of Skidmore College wrote in:
Dear Dr. Sheppard,
Thank you for reaching out about the American Chemical Society's Inclusivity Style Guide.
As part of our work to develop a new strategic plan, ACS updated one of our core values to recognize inclusion and belonging for all people, as follows: "We create environments where people from diverse backgrounds, cultures, perspectives, and experiences thrive."
This core value is at the heart of all ACS resources, including the Inclusivity Style Guide.
The updated core value reflects the long and transformative work ACS has done to create an inclusive environment where everyone belongs and flourishes. It builds on ACS' past work and prioritizes the ongoing achievement of certain goals, including attainment of full, authentic participation and fair treatment across all identities and experiences.
ACS remains fully committed to inclusion and belonging. We have not abandoned our core value; rather, we are refining our resources to ensure they remain impactful in current times.
We want to ensure that the guide continues be a useful and accurate tool for creating inclusive content and communications. To protect the integrity of the guide, we have paused specific sections for review and refinement, so they remain effective. Once this review is completed, we will repost the updated sections.
We understand the frustration, concern and hurt this has caused. We welcome constructive dialogue and input to ensure that our inclusivity resources meet the needs of our community. This guide is one tool in ACS' broader effort to foster inclusion.
We truly value your membership in ACS. Please let me know if you'd like to discuss this matter.
Best regards, Rajendrani (Raj) Mukhopadhyay
Rajendrani Mukhopadhyay (she/her) Senior Vice President, Inclusion and Belonging
It is both very weird and very emblematic of ACS that they would make these changes without really answering any questions about it (and pretending that it isn't about our current political climate.) I guess we'll see what the new sections look like when they come out, and then we can make further judgments.
The politicizing of science has left our profession seriously vulnerable to attacks. We need to be saving our credibility for fights where there is strong evidence on our side (climate change, anyone!), rather than burning our credibility to advance political goals that are poorly supported and often self contradictory (for example, fretting over the lack of diversity in science while pushing policies that rob poor and middle-class kids of educational opportunities or that demand fealty to beliefs that are opposed by an overwhelming majority of people of color). I hope that this marks just one step of the ACS moving towards a neutral stance on controversial topics that lack an empirical foundation. Academic scientists can't simultaneously use their positions to be political activists AND expect to continue to receive taxpayer support.
ReplyDeleteACS may be playing ball to remain viable as a publisher. I work for a federal science agency and yesterday we got an email that a whole bunch of publisher contracts had been cancelled immediately and that we no longer have access to their journals. It included AAAS, AMA, ASM, The Royal Society, and parts of several for-profits (Elsevier, Taylor and Francis). ACS was not struck. The list made no sense from the standpoint of either prestige or cost. The only thing we could figure was government (DOGE) is striking those who are standing firm on the DEI stuff versus those that aren't. Pure speculation of course, I don't know what internal discussions are happening.
ReplyDeleteIf true, it is terrible that politics is coming after the scientific societies and publishers, but frankly they invited it by allowing all the humanities types to invade the societies with nonsense identity politics in the first place, so I'm not going cry about it too much. On the list of things the administration has done, I would be ok with that one. I'm likely going to be pissed off with all the hoops I have to go through to get access to new articles from important journals.