Harvard University’s 1920s policies restricting the number of Jews it admitted are an example of the ways that a school can harm scientific advances by distorting merit-based selection, according to Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

An “increasingly calcified system” is focusing on the wrong challenges and measuring success by the amount of funding distributed, Kratsios wrote in a 90-page report, titled “Science: A New Golden Age,” which was released this week.

“We have become dependent on a narrow set of legacy institutions,” and “our incentive structures reward conformity over bold inquiry,” the former business executive wrote.

The report states that the merit principle that once made American research the envy of the world has eroded. National Science Foundation grants focused on diversity, equity and inclusion soared during the Biden administration from 1% to 25% of the foundation’s allocations, it states.

NASA recently-shedded its requirement that research contain “inclusion goals,” which were subject to review by panels half-populated by “diversity, equity and inclusion professionals,” according to the report.

“In the 1920s, elite universities implemented quotas limiting Jewish enrollment,” Kratsios wrote. “Harvard’s president worried about a ‘Jewish problem’ as Jewish students grew from 6% to 22% of the student body.”

The methods are “strikingly familiar,” he wrote. “Subjective criteria for ‘character’ and ‘leadership,’ diversity requirements designed to recruit from regions with fewer Jewish residents and ‘holistic’ reviews that obscured the actual basis for decisions.”

The quotas “excluded some of the most talented minds in American science,” he wrote.

The United States “should learn from this history rather than repeat it,” Kratsios wrote. “When qualified candidates are passed over for reasons unrelated to their scientific ability, when they are judged for who they are rather than for their ideas, we injure the cause of progress, discovery and America’s scientific competitiveness.”

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