The National Science Foundation (NSF) is giving the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UBMC) $10 million to implement a diversity-focused hiring model in Maryland, and, through sub-grants, at several other large state university systems.
The program, with the ungainly name “NSF INCLUDES Alliance: Re-Imagining STEM Equity Utilizing Postdoctoral Pathways,” or RISE UPP, seeks to foster “recruitment, engagement, and transition to faculty roles for minoritized postdoctoral scholars.” RISE UPP uses the fellow-to-faculty hiring model, whereby universities hire postdoctoral fellows, placing a special emphasis on diversity, and then fast-track them to tenure-track positions, sidestepping normal hiring procedures. Through the program, a team of administrators led by UMBC aims to spread the fellow-to-faculty model to new university systems that participate through sub-grants. Documents that I’ve acquired through records requests, which include the program’s proposal and a handful of supporting materials, show that the universities involved in the program have hired faculty on the basis of race, sex, and “underrepresented” status.
One document that I obtained describes two longstanding hiring initiatives that serve as models for RISE UPP. The first is the University System of Maryland’s “PROMISE Academy” postdoctoral program, which, since 2018, the NSF has given universities in Maryland more than $3 million to support.
The document notes how, for PROMISE Academy, fellows must be “historically underrepresented and underserved in the STEM enterprise such as African Americans, Alaska Natives, Hispanics, Native Americans, Native Hawaiians, Native Pacific Islanders.” According to the document, RISE UPP has expanded this identity-based criteria slightly: “we are all allowed to also include ‘persons with disabilities, persons from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, and women and girls’ as fellows in RISE UPP.”
The universities participating in RISE UPP apparently followed that guidance. A spreadsheet that I obtained shows that fellows recruited in RISE UPP’s first two cohorts were hired at UNC Charlotte, Towson University, University of Maryland Eastern Shore, University of Maryland College Park, University of Maryland Baltimore, and UMBC. The spreadsheet, notably, lists demographic information about each fellow. Of the 16 postdoctoral candidates, it lists 12 as “Black/African American,” three as “Hispanic/Latinx,” and one as “Asian American.”
This should have raised red flags for grantees and grant-makers alike. “The University of Maryland is both a state institution, subject to the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, and a federal funding recipient, subject to Title VI,” says Dan Morenoff, executive director of the American Civil Rights Project. “Under current case law, unless they can satisfy strict scrutiny, it’s illegal for them to discriminate in picking beneficiaries of their programs like this.”
RISE UPP, which isn’t set to expire until 2027, might receive legal scrutiny from the Trump administration. As Morenoff put it, “these programs look to be precisely the kind of faddish, illegal discrimination that the President has told all agencies to make sure they no longer support.”
There’s a bigger issue here. As I’ve documented with similar programs, RISE UPP and programs like it, created to serve minorities, often turn into career carve-outs for scholar-activists—what I’ve called the “scholar-activist pipeline.”
Consider the second of RISE UPP’s inspirations, the University of California’s President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (PPFP). RISE UPP’s proposal notes that “UC’s PPFP program can provide sample system-level language and policy to facilitate” the postdoctoral conversion model. This is significant, since, as I’ve previously reported, PPFP achieved its diversity goals indirectly, by screening applicants for their “commitment to diversity.” In practice, this tilts the scale in favor of activist scholars.
This “commitment to diversity” criterion plays a significant role in the RISE UPP project. As its proposal notes, RISE UPP builds on several earlier fellow-to-faculty programs within the University of Maryland system, including UMBC’s Postdoctoral Fellowship for Faculty Diversity, which also selects scholars “committed to diversity, equity, inclusion, and access in the academy.” In that program, former fellows’ interests include “comparative race and ethnic studies,” “Critical Dance Studies,” and “queer of color critique.”
Like its progenitors, RISE UPP has also recruited a fair number of scholars who specialize in intersectional analysis. Mia Dawson, a fellow whom UMBC hired through RISE UPP, wrote her dissertation on how “racial capitalism is entrenched in urban landscapes,” a problem that can be remedied through “the spatial practice of abolition.” Dawson explores the theme of “abolition” in another article, titled “The Kings ain’t playin’ no one tonight: Desanctifying property as an abolitionist practice in Sacramento,” where she examines “the significance of disrespecting property”—that is, vandalism—“as a long-standing practice of abolition.”
Other universities have integrated the fellow-to-faculty model into larger NSF projects. Clemson University’s $3.4 million TIGERS ADVANCE program, funded by the NSF between 2016 and 2022, promised to create a Provost’s Pathways Postdoctoral Fellows program. “Women (and especially minority women) will be hired into these research fellow positions with limited teaching responsibilities and will be mentored through their transition into a tenure-track position (ideally at Clemson),” its proposal states. A progress report for the grant, acquired through a records request, boasts of the program’s success, noting that the university “has hired a total of 11 Pathway Fellows (all from URHM identities) during the award period” and that “eight have been hired into tenure-track positions at Clemson.” (The report doesn’t explain what “URHM” stands for, but its use seems to suggest that Clemson met its demographic goal.)
RISE UPP itself was designed to expand the fellow-to-faculty model into three university systems participating in the grant program: the Texas A&M University, University of Texas, and University of North Carolina systems. The RISE UPP proposal praises all three as “excellent” partners “with leadership committed to diversity and equity at the institutional and system levels.”
Policymakers in Texas and North Carolina have enacted sweeping policies to curtail diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. But the RISE UPP program seems to be continuing apace. Last November, Robin Cresiski and Dawn Culpepper, two RISE UPP administrators from the Maryland system, wrote that “PPFP and PROMISE Academy Alliance postdoc conversion models are being adapted” in all three systems. UNC Charlotte has hired at least three fellows through the program, according to the list of RISE UPP fellows that I acquired. At Texas A&M University Corpus Christie, an informational flier describes how the system’s RISE UPP Postdoctoral Fellowship Program hires early-career scientists who “[d]emonstrate a commitment to diversity.”
The RISE UPP alliance is another example of how universities have furnished a career path for scholar-activists, while seemingly violating nondiscrimination law. The NSF grants reveal that this trend is funded, in part, by the American taxpayer. The Trump administration should put a stop to it.
Photo by Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/For The Washington Post via Getty Images