The nation’s largest private source of funding in higher ed for women in STEM fields is under attack by critics claiming reverse discrimination, and hardly anyone wants to talk about it.
Not the colleges that have changed how they award grants from the Clare Boothe Luce Program. Not the institution that returned a $300,000 grant earlier this year. Not the former director of the program, or members of its selection committee. And least of all the Henry Luce Foundation, which issued a statement defending the program’s mission to support female scientists but declined to comment on the string of civil-rights complaints being lobbed against its grantees.
The only person eager to talk about the complaints, it seems, is the man behind most of them, Mark Perry, a retired professor of economics and finance on a “one man mission” to end sex-based scholarships and programming.
As Perry sees it, the foundation is offering colleges “dirty money” and needs to be stopped. Over the past three and a half years, he has filed close to three dozen federal civil-rights complaints against colleges that have received grants from the Clare Boothe Luce Program, roughly half of which have been opened for investigation.
But some former recipients of Luce awards say they’re concerned — even appalled — by Perry’s campaign. They argue that female scientists face challenges that their male counterparts often don’t, and they worry that attempts to abolish female-only scholarships and professorships will set back decades of progress in increasing the number of women in STEM fields.
“If the world ever gets to the point where we don’t have gender gaps, maybe we won’t need this kind of program,” said Leilani Miller, an associate professor of biology at Santa Clara University who said her career has been shaped by the grant she received as a young professor. “But we’re not there yet.”
More Than $228 Million Awarded
The Clare Boothe Luce Program is named for a former editor, playwright, ambassador, and congresswoman who helped establish the Atomic Energy Commission. When she died in 1987, she left a bequest that would award annual grants to colleges — including 13 “designated institutions” — to provide scholarships and professorships to women pursing STEM degrees or starting academic careers in science.
Since 1989, the foundation has awarded more than $228 million in funding to 210 colleges, supporting more than 3,300 women in STEM fields.
Miller, who began her professorship in 1994, used the money to buy a microscope and chemical reagents, purchases that got her research going and helped her land federal grants early in her career. Weijia Shang, an associate professor of computer engineering at Santa Clara University who was hired the same year as Miller, used it to pay for a Montessori school for her young daughter and for a release from some teaching duties, freeing up time for her research.
If the world ever gets to the point where we don’t have gender gaps, maybe we won’t need this kind of program. But we’re not there yet.
Both women say they also received emotional support through the program, which provided a community of female colleagues. Miller met her closest mentor, a chemistry professor who had just finished her professorship, through the program.
“It was very important to me as a budding scientist to have a female mentor,” she said.
Women have made significant strides in STEM fields since the Luce program started more than three decades ago, and they now outnumber men in biology and some other scientific majors. They account for close to 60 percent of undergraduate enrollment over all.
Perry and other critics of sex-based scholarships point to that progress as proof that women no longer need set-asides — that it’s men who now need an extra boost.
Cheryl Crazy Bull, president of the American Indian College Fund, a Luce grantee, empathizes with that perspective. Native men are among the most underrepresented groups in higher education. Still, she opposes opening up the Luce awards to men, believing women face distinct barriers in pursing STEM degrees and careers.
Even today, women account for barely a quarter of the bachelor’s degrees awarded in math, computer science, and engineering, and make up a little more than a third of the science and engineering work force, according to the Luce Foundation.
“The problems that Ambassador Luce recognized more than 30 years ago persist,” said Sean Buffington, vice president at the Henry Luce Foundation, in a statement. “We will do all that we can to support women scientists and aspiring scientists in American higher education.”
A Violation of Title IX?
Perry’s 35 civil-rights complaints — and a handful filed by Adam Kissel, a visiting fellow for higher-education reform at the Heritage Foundation — allege that colleges that award Clare Boothe Luce funding on the basis of sex are violating Title IX, the federal law that bars discrimination on the basis of sex in educational programs and activities that receive federal funding.
While that law prohibits most sex-based scholarships, the Office for Civil Rights has allowed colleges to grant some donor-funded awards to targeted groups, provided that “the overall effect of the award … does not discriminate on the basis of sex,” as a Q&A issued in January 2021 states.
In practice, that has typically meant adopting a “pool and match” approach: Putting scholarship funds into one pot; choosing award recipients using neutral criteria, such as major or GPA; and then matching those recipients to specific scholarships, based on donor intent.
Most of the colleges that have resolved complaints involving Luce funding so far, including Santa Clara University, have switched to some variation of this approach. But one university, Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, opted to return the money instead.
Of the colleges that have settled complaints, only the University of Dayton agreed to comment. It renamed its Luce program to include “allies,” doubled the number of scholarships from two to up to four, and made men eligible, so long as they commit to advancing women in STEM. Women who are chosen for an award will be given Luce funds; men will get general scholarship funds.
In a statement, university officials said, “[We] saw the opportunity to open up our program as a natural extension of our Catholic and Marianist values that all people are welcome and can use their collective gifts to achieve a shared mission.”
But Perry argued the university will still have an incentive to select at least two women for a grant so that the Luce funding isn’t “wasted.”
Perry said he was satisfied with Santa Clara’s switch to a single application portal with a common set of guidelines for evaluating undergraduate research proposals, calling it “fair and logical, as long as the university doesn’t cheat.” But he was skeptical of its claims that the professorship is legal because the university conducts a national search for faculty using sex-neutral criteria.
“If the university hires a female professor” using Luce funds, “it costs the university nothing,” he wrote in an email. “The financial incentives for hiring a female faculty member over an equally (or more) qualified male faculty member would be so irresistible that female faculty would always be hired.”
He believes returning the money, as IUPUI did, is the most “ethical and legal” response.
But Miller points out that doing so could ultimately hurt male students, since it would mean there is less money to go around.
‘Crucial Financial Support’
Last December, the Luce Foundation put out a press release announcing its awarding of nearly $10 million in grants to 25 institutions, including the 13 supported in perpetuity through Clare Boothe Luce’s will. In the release, John F. DiTusa, dean of the School of Science at IUPUI, one of the new grantees, said the funds would reduce, or even eliminate, the cost of attendance for selected female students in science and engineering programs.
We’re not going to go out of our way to change an awarding process for the entire university out of fear of what this person is pursuing.
“This crucial financial support, along with the recognition provided by the award, will encourage and assist women in their junior year to persist and complete their degrees,” said DiTusa.
This year, there has been no such announcement from the foundation — the recipients simply appear in a list of grantees on the foundation’s website. Only two colleges — the Colorado School of Mines and Bowie State University have publicized their awards.
Perry, who waits for colleges to confirm receipt of a grant before filing a complaint, suspects the foundation is coaching colleges to “hide the evidence” to avoid legal challenges. He said some past complaints have been dismissed after colleges scrubbed their websites to remove mention of the Clare Boothe Luce Program.
Perry filed a complaint against the Colorado School of Mines this week. He’s holding off on Bowie State, a historically Black university, until they put more information on their website.
Brent Swinton, Bowie State’s vice president for philanthropic engagement, said the university has no intention of extending the grants to men. He described the roughly $300,000 the university received from the foundation as “transformational” for female students of color pursuing careers in computer science.
“We’re not going to go out of our way to change an awarding process for the entire university out of fear of what this person is pursuing,” Swinton said. “If there is a challenge, fine. Smarter minds will answer that challenge.”
Swinton said he finds it ironic that conservatives like Perry, who tend to support free enterprise, are trying to dictate how a private foundation spends its money.
“They’re not asking for any tax money or taking dollars out of anyone’s pocket,” he said of private foundations. “The only people who could possibly worry about something that doesn’t hurt them but benefits society are people who are wallowing in their own privilege.”
But Perry, who has devoted his retirement to challenging sex- and race-based programs, policies, and scholarships at colleges has no intention of backing down, either.
“My motivation to continue challenging CBL programs is that it seems so highly unethical, unprincipled, immoral, and illegal for a private foundation to provide funding to colleges and universities that require those recipients to violate their legal obligation as recipients of federal funds to actively enforce Title IX,” he wrote in an email. “So far the only institution that looks good here is IUPUI.”
