Open letter to GRC/GRS UBER community
Dear GRC/GRS UBER 2023 participants, facilitators, presenters, and broader community,
Thank you so much for your contributions and engagement at the 2023 Gordon Research Conference (GRC) and Gordon Research Seminar (GRS) Undergraduate Biology Education and Research (UBER) meeting as we built this community together. We are writing with the unfortunate news that the GRC organization has decided to eliminate the UBER meeting from its portfolio.
In a direct quote from the GRC Conference Evaluation Committee (CEC) outcome letter, “GRC does not support conferences focused on, or perceived to be focused on, social justice.” The CEC handpicked a few attendee quotes, which at surface support a claim that there was not enough “cutting-edge research” presented and point to the emphasis on social justice. The CEC further reported a survey evaluation level of “intermediate” aggregated by questions -- important because many comments from new attendees were critical of the GRC format of not being inclusive, rather than the speakers and their content. The CEC decision was in direct contrast to our meeting with the on-site GRC evaluator, who noted our impressive levels of outside funding, as well as speaker and participant diversity, and sought counsel from us about lessons for other conferences in the GRC portfolio. The elected 2025 chairs were refused any opportunity to appeal the decision.
When we first proposed the conference title “A New Vision for Change: Re-imagining Biology Education Through Social Justice” to GRC, our conference handler replied that “The words “social justice” cannot be used anywhere in the title. It must be science based.” After advocacy by Carrie and Stanley, they eventually relented. We believe now that this was the moment when the decision to eliminate UBER was made, unlike afterwards as the CEC letter suggests. At the core, we argue that GRC’s decision to discontinue the UBER meeting is because the biology education community values social justice and inclusion, and we operationalized this value at the meeting as an important, integral, and integrated part of undergraduate biology education and more broadly STEM education research.
GRC's lack of commitment to fostering an inclusive conference environment has been evident since the early stages of our role as conference and seminar Chairs and in the demographics of other conferences they host. The GRC identity revolves around their exclusivity as an elite invitation to the “frontier” of scientific discussion. For example, when we and the former Chairs tried to make inroads in 2021 on supporting parents to attend, we were told that parents were already supported because GRC could provide cribs on site. As we finally planned an in-person meeting in 2023, we found that pre-paying for attendee registration was only an option for a small number of individuals. GRC is a reimbursement-only system for all grants, meaning that all participants, even graduate students and postdocs for whom we had allocated money, had to pay their entire cost - including registration - up front and wait for reimbursement months later at the conclusion of the conference. These examples point to a rudimentary understanding of the interactions between science and society continuously on display in every aspect of the GRC policies, which positions a concern for society as deficit to or separate from science and perpetuates the inequitable systems we currently have.
We apologize to everyone here, who has invested time in being part of this community and building this community. We capitulate that we had difficulties as Chairs, having not had the opportunity to shadow an in-person version of the meeting due to its cancellation in 2021. However, GRC has its own missteps, from new GRC computer systems and lack of Co-Chair and Vice-Chair access to backend management to improper handling of our final participant budget, which led to days of re-doing work that could only partially be recouped. This work presented extreme physical and emotional distress and labor, particularly for the Chairs of color. After experiencing this struggle alongside us, the new 2025 Chairs and Vice-Chairs team has decided not to reapply as a new conference, due to the now burdensome counterculture lift of inclusiveness. Bates College has also been made aware of the cancellation: The Budget Faculty Advisory Committee, the Vice President for Finance and Administration and Treasurer, the Vice President of Equity and Inclusion, and the Vice President for Academic Affairs/Dean of the Faculty have all been formally asked to reconsider its financial portfolio’s dependence on the GRC, considering Bates’ longstanding commitment to educational justice and GRC’s explicitly anti-social justice stance. Our final reports to the GRC/GRS UBER meeting funders will include transparency about this situation and recommend that funding agencies should be made aware that the GRC organization is directly opposed to diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice in STEM and that funding agencies’ alignment with such an organization sends mixed messages about where they want to see the future of STEM.
Our cancellation is not a failure. It shines a light on the injustices of our scientific system – how those with entrenched ideologies of eliteness uphold them at all cost. We also want to celebrate our successes. We put together an incredible GRS and GRC UBER meeting program. We showcased experts from the communities that have historically and continually been sidelined and marginalized. The visibility of American Sign Language interpretation, a seeing-eye service dog, wheelchair use, gender non-conforming pride, diverse races and ethnicities, inclusion of scholars from many institutional types, and so many other identities altogether actively celebrated the true diversity of our nation and our discipline in a show of resistance to the dominant narrative of what elite is that will not soon be forgotten. We discussed the education of incarcerated individuals; Black researchers showcased research and student success at HBCUs and other higher education institutions; rural educators highlighted their work in relation to local knowledge; Indigenous researchers shared how they are re-imaging the boundaries of a colonial education; LGBTQ+ colleagues challenged imprecision in both research methodologies and biology content in the curriculum; dis/abled scholars championed genuine inclusion and non-performative access for all of our students. We also involved early-career researchers from the seminar in conference leadership as co-facilitators despite grievances from the GRC organization -- all of which is “cutting edge science” which directly confronts the norms of GRC’s elitist culture.
We should note that this definition of cutting edge research was validated by so many of you who shared in the experience of the 2023 GRC/GRS UBER meeting. It was also noticed by right-wing news and covered in the Daily Caller. This is not about any one organization but about an intentional and organized scheme to characterize human rights and our civic responsibilities as separate from science. In our mind, this kind of attention only galvanized how much the GRC/GRS UBER meeting experience is needed. Our important work collectively to bring cutting edge research (including theory and practice) at the intersection of science and humanity was also noticed by other GRC organizers. Almost as soon as our letter from the GRC CEC arrived, we were contacted by the organizers of another GRC conference wanting to know how to organize a conference like ours. We told them how tirelessly we worked within a tightly constrained system to bring our vision to life and warned them that if they chose this path, they would risk cancellation. This does not mean that they should not fight, but rather, we offered to be in the trenches with them. If every GRC conference is canceled, perhaps we can start our own conference series rooted in inclusive principles.
We know this letter may come as a shock. If there is interest, we can schedule some open meeting times to discuss further and process our collective grief and renewed commitment.
Sincerely,
Your 2023 GRC / GRS UBER Co-Chairs
Carrie Diaz Eaton, Joshua Reid, Stanley Lo, and Starlette Sharp
Change notes: We were asked to maintain anonymity of the GRC conference which sought our counsel. Therefore the reference to the specific conference was removed.
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