What a ridiculous waste of time and money. Don’t we have more important issues to deal with?

Minding The Campus reports.

Feds Fund Search for Microaggressions

Earlier this month, The Washington Free Beacon, the conservative online newspaper, reported that the National Science Foundation was spending over half a million federal dollars “to videotape male engineering students while they work in labs” to see if they are committing “microaggressions” against women. The Daily Caller was more openly sarcastic, with a headline that read, “Feds Blow $548,459 To Study ‘MICROAGGRESSIONS’ Toward Female Engineering Students.”

But was the derision deserved? The description on the NSF site made me wonder if the University of Michigan-based study might have some potential merit, despite being titled “Microaggressions in Engineering Student Teams.” Granted, the term “microaggressions”—coined in the 1970s to denote subtle unintentional slights based on race, gender, and other group characteristics—often refers to absurd “offenses” such as calling America a melting pot or getting ethnic names mixed up. But the University of Michigan study ostensibly focused on real biases, conscious or not—such as female engineering students in coed teams being relegated to less important tasks or having their input ignored. Is this worth studying? Certainly, if there is evidence that such a pattern exists. Without further details, dismissing the study as a waste of tax dollars seemed somewhat harsh.

After an email exchange with the principal investigator, University of Michigan psychology professor Denise Sekaquaptewa, I found out that the press reports had some inaccuracies: for one, the study does not focus solely on men’s microaggressions toward women but also tracks offenses by women, toward other women and sometimes toward men. Yet, in a more basic sense, the critics were on point. Whatever valuable data this study may yield, it is primarily an exercise in trivial pursuit coupled with speech policing—directed at a problem that may not exist.


 
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