Education Department Adds Evolutionary Biology to List of Majors Eligible for New Grants

The U.S. Education Department made it official on Friday that students majoring in evolutionary biology will be eligible for a new federal grant program designed to reward students concentrating in engineering, mathematics, science, or certain foreign languages. The department's original list of majors that qualify for Smart grants, awarded under the National Science and Mathematics Access to Retain Talent Grant program, did not contain evolutionary biology. That absence, first reported on Tuesday by The Chronicle, was made conspicuous by the fact that very few other hard-science majors were missing. And the line where evolutionary biology would have appeared, according to the government's classification scheme, was blank. Those facts raised eyebrows among education leaders and scientists because the teaching of evolution has been highly contentious in recent years. Critics, including advocates of the concept of "intelligent design," have tried to attack the scientific merits of the theory of evolution, while proponents have said that evolution is such sound science that the attacks are meaningless. President Bush has said he advocates "teaching both sides" of the debate. On Friday, the department announced that it had updated the list to restore "certain majors" that had been "inadvertently omitted." Besides evolutionary biology, the department also added back exercise physiology. Smart grants provide additional awards of up to $4,000 a year to juniors and seniors who are eligible for Pell Grants and who major in engineering, mathematics, science, or certain foreign languages. The Education Department released the list of majors eligible for Smart grants as part of "interim final regulations" it issued in May detailing how it would put the program into effect. In its announcement on Friday, the department said that it had received public comments on the interim rule "that raise other issues related to the list of majors." As a result, the announcement stated, "additional changes may be made to this list as the department reviews those comments." (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
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