A year ago, Black physicists at Fermilab demanded change. What’s happened?

Brian Nord

By Jeffrey MervisJul. 2, 2021 , 11:10 AM

Within days of the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on 25 May 2020, five early-career Black physicists at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) began to write what became a 17-page manifesto calling on lab leaders to do more to achieve racial justice and equity.

The manifesto was a daring—and unprecedented—act of public protest by employees of the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) preeminent high-energy physics laboratory. The scientists, all under the age of 40 and none of them tenured, say they knew they lacked institutional clout. But Doug Berry, Jessica Esquivel, Brian Nord, Bryan Ramson, and Tammy Walton could no longer tolerate what they saw as the lab’s failure to provide “a welcoming, equitable, and just work environment for Black people,” they wrote. Transforming an institution at which Black scientists have historically been almost invisible should begin, they continued, by “listening to and doing what Black employees say they need, and not making plans for us without us.” And they chose a name, the Change Now collective, that emphasized their sense of urgency and the importance of united action.

Floyd’s murder and the resulting surge of the Black Lives Matter movement triggered many such calls for change across the U.S. scientific community and around the world. One of the largest events occurred on 10 June 2020, when participants in #ShutDownSTEM demanded an end to “business as usual” at universities and research facilities.

Now, a year later, advocates and others are taking stock of what has been achieved—and what hasn’t. At Fermilab, both Change Now members and lab management say they see some progress in addressing justice and equity issues they spelled out in their June 2020 manifesto. But significant disagreements remain over the needed pace of reform, the transparency of those efforts, and who bears the primary responsibility for catalyzing change.

“The topic is now on my desk”

Fermilab Director Nigel Lockyer says the manifesto has had a “huge impact” on him. “The topic is now on my desk, and I’m spending real time at it, including talking to you,” he told ScienceInsider last month.

Lockyer readily agrees that, for most of its 55-year history, Fermilab’s record on equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) is deplorable. But he hasn’t raced to adopt Change Now’s multipronged recipe for reform, which includes setting hiring and promotion targets for scientists from marginalized groups, investing in local Black communities, expanding science outreach efforts, and revising the lab’s employee evaluation process to allow for recognition of outreach and equity efforts by staff. A scorecard prepared last month by Change Now lists a “no” next to most of the 30-odd demands in the manifesto.

The one area where Fermilab appears to have acted swiftly is promotions. Three of the five members of the collective have moved up Fermilab’s career ladder in the past year: Esquivel and Walton from postdoc to associate scientist, a tenure-track position, and Nord to a tenured scientist slot.

Lockyer says he is now counting on Nord, a computational cosmologist and the lab’s only tenured Black scientist, to lead the lab’s effort to hire and promote more minority scientists. “I want to build around Brian, that’s my strategy,” says Lockyer, who became Fermilab’s director in 2013, 1 year after Nord arrived as a postdoc. “I need somebody to be an attractor, if you will, so that a young Black scientist [looking for a job] would say, ‘Gee, I want to work with Brian.’ So he’s kind of where I’m putting my money.”

Nord’s age—he’s 39—passion, and leadership skills make him the best person for the job of improving Fermilab’s demographics, 68-year-old Lockyer adds. “He is a natural leader,” Lockyer says. “So I’m saying, here’s the keys, and we’ll support you as much as we can.”

Nord says he is honored to receive such a vote of confidence and believes he has “demonstrated that I can handle the pressure and lead on these issues.” But he thinks Lockyer’s approach falls far short of the institutional commitment that the collective feels is necessary. Nord also doesn’t understand why Lockyer would want to put all his EDI eggs into one basket, much less one carried by a Black man.

“That’s a dangerous strategy,” Nord says. “What if for some reason I had to leave? Why not build upon the work of the entire cohort of Black scientists at the lab?”

Asked why he was singling out Nord, Lockyer says, “It doesn’t have to be on the shoulders of one person. But you need a leader,” he adds, “and the research shows that having someone of the same race is an approach that works.”

Nord, however, is worried about what happens if the numbers don’t improve. “It sets me up as the point of failure,” Nord says about Lockyer’s strategy. “If I don’t succeed in improving the demographics at Fermilab, does it then become my fault? Fermilab really needs to be looking at how it got to the point where I am the only tenured Black scientist. They are the ones in control of those policies.”

“The needle is not moving”

By “they” Nord means the older white male physicists who make up the dominant culture in U.S. physics and who occupy the vast majority of positions that oversee research budgets, hiring, and promotion at Fermilab.

When Fermilab opened in 1967, the lab’s founders vowed to be “more than mere spectators” in the civil rights movement swirling around them, the Change Now manifesto notes. But the record suggests that pledge never drove hiring and retention decisions. For example, Herman White was among the first 80 physicists hired by Fermilab when he started working there in 1971. He retired in 2019, having spent his entire 48-year-career as the only tenured Black member of the lab’s scientific staff.

Underrepresented minorities—in effect, Black and Latino scientists—make up 3.8% of the 298 people classified as scientists among the lab’s 1882 employees. Lockyer says he can’t provide a more detailed breakdown because the tiny numbers could make it possible to identify individuals, which would violate their privacy.

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

Lockyer says he would like the percentage of Black scientists at the lab “to look like the U.S. ratio,” which is 13% of the population. But he admits that he’s at a loss about how to make that happen. “We’ve tried to change our hiring practices across the lab, but the needle is not moving,” he says. “You’d need a microscope to see any change.”

A 2020 report from the American Institute of Physics (AIP), known as the TEAM-UP report, suggests one reason for that inertia. The report, which focused on the disturbing decline in the share of undergraduate U.S. physics degrees going to Black students, says institutions seeking to improve those numbers should first adopt a theory of change, which it defines as “how and why a desired change is expected to happen in a particular context.” Then they need to get buy-in from everybody in the organization. Without a consensus on what the organization wants to achieve, the AIP report says, any changes are likely to be piecemeal, sporadic, and short-lived.

“One or two champions won’t be enough to change the environment,” says Mary James, a physics professor at Reed College who co-chaired the AIP task force that wrote the report. That suggests Lockyer could fall far short of his goal by relying on Nord. At the same time, James believes it’s important for institutions like Fermilab not to wait for a consensus before they act.

“There may be some people who are not capable of making these changes,” says James, who in 1986 became the 15th Black woman to earn a U.S. Ph.D. in physics. “So you want to start with people who are open to having a conversation about improving diversity.”

Fermilab has never gone through such an exercise. But in June 2020 Lockyer promoted Sandra Charles, a longtime human resources manager who is Black, to the new position of chief EDI officer and put her in charge of a task force examining labwide EDI policies. “You know, Sandra and I had worked for several years to improve hiring, for example, which is a superhigh priority for everybody,” Lockyer says.

The task force began to hold biweekly meetings in August 2020. But Berry, who was hired as an associate scientist in 2019, worries he and others on the task force may be spinning their wheels. “It’s unclear whether [the EDI review] provides any benefit to scientists,” he says. “We haven’t been authorized to make policy changes, and it’s not even clear how that would work.”

The EDI task force, Berry says, “gives the people in charge an opportunity to say that they are doing something. And if we want to push harder for change, we have to be willing to participate in the process. At the same time, he says, “as far as I can tell, the policy changes needed to make Fermilab a pinnacle institution with regard to equity, diversity, and inclusion haven’t happened. I’m pretty frustrated.”

Lockyer hasn’t given the EDI task force a deadline for delivering its recommendations. Charles says the group will continue to meet “until the items that have been identified through [an employee survey] and by Change Now are addressed” but that there are “no plans” to make public its recommendations. That lack of transparency is a sticking point for members of the Change Now collective, who have also been pushing for a full public release of a 2019 employee survey, a summary of which is posted on the lab’s website.

Lockyer has also ordered up a review of its in-house Fermilab Committee on Scientific Appointments (FCSA), which oversees the process of hiring and promoting scientists. Nord is co-chairing the review along with Joel Butler, a 42-year Fermilab veteran whose job is the equivalent of a distinguished professor at a university, and Lockyer says he’s ready to act on their recommendations. “If scientists aren’t happy with the hiring process, then we’ll change it to something they like,” he says.

But the review has yet to get underway. Nord and Butler said last month they are still waiting for the administrative support they need to operate. Nord says Lockyer had assumed that Nord would tap a postdoc from his research team to provide the needed help. But Nord says he is already stretched thin with outreach and mentoring activities that he is essentially doing on his own time.

“I told them that, if you also want me to do my social justice work, I need this support,” Nord says. “There’s a clear line, and Nigel knows this.”

Lockyer agrees that Nord’s request for administrative support is “reasonable,” but says “we’re still trying to figure out how that’s going to work. You don’t just all of a sudden find somebody with nothing to do.”

“How hard are we trying?”

Tackling what Butler describes as “the process by which a physicist succeeds at Fermilab” is a complex issue, with a relative handful of people from the dominant white culture calling the shots, he says. “There is an influential group between their late 40s and early 60s in key supervisory positions who make the nominations and set the tone,” he says. “They need to step up and support change, and then make it clear to those below them.”

Asked whether he thought the review was a result of the Black Lives Matter protests, Butler says they “heightened awareness [of] a problem that we knew already existed.” But he thinks there are limits to what the review can accomplish.

So I’m saying, here’s the keys, and we’ll support you as much as we can.

“We cannot tackle all the problems” identified by the Change Now manifesto, Butler says. “Changing Fermilab is within our charge. Changing the larger systems affecting society is not. And I hope that Change Now is willing to confine itself to what is pertinent to our mission.”

Nord believes Fermilab’s mission must include more aggressive outreach to qualified scientists who are Black, Indigenous, or people of color who might otherwise not apply. Currently, hiring committees recommend candidates for open positions to the FCSA. But the process fails to address an important question, Nord says: “How hard are we trying to build ties to the affected communities?”

Another issue, Butler says, is that Fermilab has traditionally had a hard time assessing scientists who have traveled what Butler calls “different paths to candidacy.” “How do you compare someone who has taken time off [from academic training] with someone who has gone straight through, or who came from a program or who worked with people who you’re not as familiar with?” he says. That could distort how managers perceive Black candidates and those from other underrepresented groups for hiring and promotion, he notes.

In promotion decisions, scientists are currently judged on three criteria, Lockyer says: their research output, their leadership within the scientific community, and their contributions to commercial development of new technologies. “I hope we can add a fourth, something like advancement of the lab’s mission,” Lockyer says, “because part of our mission is to be welcoming to a broad cross-section of people from around the world.”

It’s not a new idea. Butler, who is a past chair of the FCSA, says a scientist’s broader “service to the community” was once part of Fermilab’s evaluation process but that “it disappeared in the 1990s.” Butler thinks revising the review process will be essential to encouraging Fermilab scientists to become engaged in promoting equity and social justice. “If the lab wants young people to do this,” he says, “then it has to find a way to account for it in the overall evaluation of their productivity.”

White says assessing performance was simpler in the lab’s early days, when job titles and career paths weren’t as important. “The first 79 hires were just called physicists,” he says. White says the lab’s founding director, Robert Wilson, also applied a simple yardstick in judging their productivity: “Find a problem and solve it.”

White readily acknowledges the lab’s lack of diversity, but doesn’t think it deserves to be singled out for criticism. “I don’t know of any institution that has done enough,” he says. “The physics community has never figured out what it takes to produce more African American” scientists.

White also disputes the assertion in the Change Now manifesto that Fermilab offers an “unwelcoming environment” to Black people. “I don’t know what that means,” he says. “It’s competitive, that’s for sure. But if they’re saying African Americans aren’t welcome here, then I disagree. I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in Tuskegee, Alabama, and people shot at our houses to stop us from integrating. It was terrifying. But we didn’t stop.”

Members of the Change Now collective insist that their outreach efforts represent another facet of their commitment to their work. Ramson, a postdoc who works on long baseline experiments to measure neutrino oscillations, also co-directs Fermilab’s long-running Saturday Morning Physics, a 26-week program open to area high school students interested in hands-on, out-of-school instruction. In addition to doing that job, which Lockyer calls “a labor of love,” Ramson has spent years doing his own outreach in Chicago public schools, whose students are overwhelmingly Black and Latino. “I chose to live on [Chicago’s] west side,” Ramson says, “so the students could see that there are scientists who look like them.”

Nord leads an afterschool science program for Chicago teenagers and curates ThisIsBlackLight, an educational website that highlights the achievements of Black people in all fields. He was also instrumental in last year’s #ShutDownSTEM action as part of another group of physicists, Particles for Justice.

Esquivel has worked hard to make Fermilab a presence at Wakandacon, a celebration of science and the Black experience based on the saga of the Black Panther superhero. It’s part of her ongoing efforts working with Black middle school girls—all on her own time. “I don’t want to do science without having the chance to talk about it to people who look like me,” says Esquivel, who identifies as an Afro-Latinx lesbian. At professional gatherings, she adds, she often finds herself as the “only” physicist fitting one or more of those demographic categories.

“A symptom of the culture”

Despite their common interests, some members of the collective barely knew one another until a year ago. Much of that separation was because they worked on different projects and carried a heavy workload. But being Black also played a role.

“Even though we are the only two Black women in the whole scientist division, we deliberately kept our distance,” Esquivel says about Walton. Both work on an experiment to detect the anomalous magnetic dipole movement of muons that could suggest the presence of new particles, and Esquivel says their colleagues “already can’t tell us apart. We also were afraid of being seen as too Black; if we were talking together, somebody might think we were too loud and acting unprofessionally. So you have to build a wall around yourself.”

One week after Floyd’s murder, the five scientists dismantled that psychological wall in order to protest a 2 June 2020 letter that Lockyer sent to all Fermilab staff in the wake of local street protests.

The letter’s “message was racist, insensitive, and harmful,” declared the collective’s manifesto, citing Lockyer’s emphasis on “peaceful” protest, his call for “mutual respect” and “tolerance,” and his reference to a “spectrum of views on these events.” The letter “implies that some members of the Fermilab community may be responsible for inciting violence,” they asserted, and reinforced the idea that violence should be associated “with Black people [rather than] with the actions of the state.”

I don’t want to do science without having the chance to talk about it to people who look like me.

Lockyer says his message was misconstrued but that he can see why the Black scientists might have taken offense. “I was disappointed that Brian [Nord] took that position,” Lockyer says. “But I also understand that it was a horrible environment for him and other Black people. It was a difficult time at Fermilab, and we had protesters just down the street from the lab.”

Even so, Lockyer insists that there were no racial overtones in his reference to violence. Instead, he says, it reflects his life experiences, which include 6 years as director of Canada’s high-energy physics laboratory before coming to Fermilab. (He spent the previous 2 decades as a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania.)

“One thing I learned in Canada is that looting follows hockey games and it’s got nothing to do with racial violence,” Lockyer says. “It just happens. And nobody understands why. [The Change Now collective] should also look at me as somebody that has not grown up in the United States and who doesn’t have the same kind of what I’ll call baggage.”

“Toy models of freedom”

Members of the collective have been on an emotional roller-coaster ride for the past year. Their heavy workloads made it hard to sustain the initial flurry of social justice activities, they say. They also began to wonder whether their demands for “change now” would ever bear fruit.

Speaking in February at a webinar on diversity convened by leaders of the American Physical Society, Nord chastised his colleagues for lacking a sense of urgency. “At every place I’ve worked, I’ve witnessed promises unkept and seen racism in their committees,” he said. “Most of my secure, senior colleagues—white men—encourage gradualism, and whitesplain to me that ‘change takes time.’ But whose time are you talking about? What gives you the right to use your clock to decide my freedom? I am not your Negro, and I am done with your toy models of freedom.”

Nord stands by those words. But he and the other members of the collective also say they are modestly encouraged by some recent steps Fermilab has taken. In particular, this spring the lab chose two outside Black physicists for prestigious named fellowships: Jennifer Ngadiuba was hired into a tenure-track position, and Nathan Saffold as a postdoc.

“Fermilab has never had four tenure-track Black scientists,” says Berry, who is a member of that quartet. “So that is significant. But the real question is, will they stay?”

Asked about his expectations for the next 5 years, Lockyer says, “I think we’ve got momentum. The [Black] people we have hired are exceptional talents. But the only way this succeeds is to keep the bar high. And I would say it’s not a 5-year effort, it’s gonna be a 20-year effort.”

As another member of the tenure-track group, Esquivel says her decision on whether to build a career at Fermilab could hinge on whether lab leaders deliver on their commitment to diversity. “I decided to come to Fermilab as a postdoc [in 2018] because I felt they shared my values,” she says. But she was disappointed with the lab’s initial reaction to the Change Now manifesto, and says she has faced repeated institutional resistance to her outreach efforts.

“The first year I did it all by myself,” she recalls about her work connecting the lab with Wakandacon. “The second year I lined up a sponsor. But I kept getting pushback on anything I requested. And at one point I had to have a frank conversation with the marketing department because their materials were not appropriate for the audience we were trying to reach.”

That friction persisted, she says, despite her willingness to serve as the lab’s EDI emissary to outside groups. “I’ve always said ‘yes’ whenever they asked me to speak or meet with somebody because I feel so passionate about it,” she says. “But it’s also exhausting. Sometimes I feel that I’m bleeding so that people can learn [about the importance of diversity].”

Facing the end of her initial postdoc appointment later this year, Esquivel had already lined up two other job offers when lab officials came to her this spring and asked, ‘What will it take to convince you to stay?’ Her answer: the opportunity to join the lab’s rapidly growing neutrino division and support for her work with young Black girls. So far she’s only been assured of the first, she says. But she’s decided to take the lab’s word on its promise to consider funding her outreach work from a competitive pot of money that has traditionally been used only for research activities.

“I don’t know how things will end up,” she says about both her grant proposal and, more broadly, her progression up the lab’s career ladder. “But I think the lab needs to start taking recruitment and retention of minority scientists, including postdocs, a lot more seriously than it does now.”

“In 3 years I’ll be up for a tenured position as a staff scientist,” she adds. “I don’t want to sound vain, but I think we have a lot to offer.”

Source: Science Mag