Stephanie Nawyn is an associate professor and graduate program director in the Department of Sociology at the College of Social Science. Her research project to improve workplace culture and retention recently lost its federal funding.
Over the past decade, universities across the country have worked to hire more diverse faculty in STEM disciplines. At Michigan State University, we have made real progress — attracting top talent from underrepresented groups and building strong research teams equipped to tackle the world’s most complex challenges.
But while hiring has improved, retention remains a serious challenge. Many accomplished STEM faculty members leave academia, or MSU, not because they are not successful but because the work environment makes them feel unsupported or invisible. Often, it’s the very people we were most excited to recruit — women, faculty of color, and early-career scientists — who leave after tenure or mid-career because they do not feel supported or appreciated. It’s a significant loss of talent and a loss to the university in terms of the resources invested in each hire. This is not just a problem at MSU, but across higher education in the US.
These are the challenges that our team sought to address through a $1.24 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s ADVANCE program, which supports efforts to make STEM departments more equitable and inclusive. Our project, the STEM Intersectional Equity in Departments, or SIEDS, initiative — was designed to create a leadership toolkit for department chairs and other faculty leaders to improve work culture and retention. It focused on making science departments more equitable, inclusive and supportive at every stage of a faculty member’s career.
The toolkit was intended to provide practical strategies for creating fairer workloads, acknowledging hidden labor and valuing diverse forms of knowledge production — contributions that are often overlooked when carried out by women and faculty from underrepresented backgrounds. Perhaps most importantly, it aimed to support the development of leadership pathways accessible to all faculty members, regardless of their identity, career stage or discipline. We wanted to help departments become places where researchers not only survive, but thrive.
The project had momentum. Over the past year, I worked with a team of 36 faculty, staff and students across MSU and our partner institutions, Wayne State University and the Ohio State University. We built cross-disciplinary partnerships, collected data, and developed detailed plans to implement the toolkit this summer. More than 10 faculty members had committed to analyzing the data and co-authoring publications, with summer salaries tied to the project.
A year of planning, coordination and momentum disappeared overnight.
With little warning, our National Science Foundation award — along with several others — was rescinded due to shifting priorities in the program. The cancellation immediately halted our progress. We can no longer analyze the data we gathered or move forward with the work we planned. Faculty lost their summer salaries. Students lost research opportunities. The cancellation erased a year of team-building and momentum.
The grant cancellation isn’t just a setback for our team — it’s a missed opportunity for MSU to lead the nation in building inclusive scientific workplaces.
The cancellation has left our entire research team in a state of limbo. Faculty lost planned summer salaries, student researchers lost hands-on experience and we lost the ability to share the data we had already compiled. The convening we scheduled in May 2027 to share the SIEDS toolkit with all the research universities in the Great Lakes Region had to be cancelled, which was another lost opportunity. More critically, we lost time — and time is the one resource faculty never get back.
The SIEDS initiative is not a project that prioritizes one group over another. Our team designed the toolkit to benefit everyone in the department by promoting fairness, clarity and collaboration. MSU has appealed the decision on the grounds of scientific merit and national relevance.
Research shows that changes aimed at improving the culture for marginalized groups also enhance the workplace for everyone. Our goal was to create healthier, more productive departments and environments that foster innovation rather than inhibit it.
While this kind of behind-the-scenes work may not generate headlines like a medical breakthrough or space discovery, it is just as important. We cannot expect great science without investing in conditions that allow scientists to do their best work.
We need better environments to cultivate better scientists. If a plant is not thriving, you examine the sunlight and the water — you don’t blame the plant. If a scientist is not thriving, you must examine their environment as well. We remain committed to this vision. MSU will continue to lead in building academic cultures that not only attract talent but also sustain it.