STEM Is DEI-ing
A recent National Association of Scholars Report finds DEI “has spread rapidly through the universities and colleges of the United States. The most alarming spread has been that which infects the natural sciences, where it undermines the norms of open discourse, objectivity, devotion to evidence, and intellectual independence that constitute robust science.”
Reading a report issued by the National Association of Scholars on how DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) identity-group ‘social justice’ ideology is taking over STEM (science, technology, engineering and math), I thought of the board game Risk!, with countries falling one-by-one until world domination is achieved.
I predicted the fall of STEM back in 2017, when a common wisdom was that social justice never would poison STEM as it had virtually every other academic field:
“If you think this is just a Humanities and Social Sciences problem, stay tuned. In 3-5 years, if we’re still here, we’ll be writing about how the social justice warriors have corrupted the STEM fields. It’s happening now, it’s just not in the headlines yet.”
It’s now been 5 years since I wrote that in “3-5” years we’d be writing about the corruption of STEM. NAS’ Report quantifies the ideological corruption of STEM.
The report, authored by Mason Goad and Bruce R. Chartwell, is titled Ideological Intensification – A Quantitative Study of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in STEM Subjects at American Universities. Here is the Abstract:
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) ideology has spread aggressively through institutions of higher education in the United States and throughout the Western world. Arising from within the humanities and social sciences, DEI has begun to influence the natural sciences, where it promises to do great intellectual and economic damage. This report documents and quantifies the growing prevalence of DEI-associated language in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields in the United States. For this study, five new datasets were assembled—comprising over 30 GB of data in over 280,000 files—focusing on American university webpages, university Twitter accounts, annual programs of academic associations, grants of major scientific research funders, and publications of scientific research, making this the largest study to date of DEI ideology’s intensification in STEM fields.
Our findings show that DEI-related language has increased significantly in all STEM sectors over the last decade, and exponentially so within the last few years. DEI indicators linked with STEM have risen 2,600 percent compared to a decade ago on university websites, with similar trends observed in social media content. This increase has been catalyzed, in part, by significant increases in government spending. The two principal funders of scientific research, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), increased DEI-related research spending by roughly 300 percent in one year alone (2020–2021). This increase is also visible in scientific publications, with DEI-related language rising up to 4,200 percent between 2010 and 2021.
The dataset used by NAS to measure the intrusion of DEI is a measurement of language in various contexts:
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) ideology has spread rapidly through the universities and colleges of the United States. The most alarming spread has been that which infects the natural sciences, where it undermines the norms of open discourse, objectivity, devotion to evidence, and intellectual independence that constitute robust science. This report is the largest quantitative study of the growth of DEI-related language in the sciences published thus far, with the construction of five original datasets drawn from a variety of online sources.1 Analyses of these datasets document the growth of DEI-related language over time.
The five datasets are:
- The websites of the top 100 research universities and colleges in the United States;
- Twitter feeds of the top 100 research universities and colleges, as well as their affiliated accounts;
- The annual programs of academic associations in the four major branches of the natural sciences (physics, chemistry, life sciences, and mathematics);
- Grants by three major funders of scientific research in the United States (the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Ford Foundation);
- Scientific publications in four literature databases and preprint repositories (Google Scholar, arXiv, Web of Science, and PubMed).
NAS offers this additional analysis of the importance of the Report:
The resources provided by Ideological Intensification, including over 30 graphs, an animated map, and extensive data mining tools, afford other researchers opportunities to continue investigating DEI’s rapid growth in the natural sciences. Ideological Intensification finds that DEI ideology has spread to almost every facet of the scientific enterprise.
“The DEI assault on the natural sciences is a worrying trend not just for the few remaining heterodox scientists, but also for the quality of research that our government and experts from around the world rely upon,” explained J. Scott Turner, Director of the Study of DEI in the Sciences Project. “As recent years prove, public trust in all institutions, and especially experts, is on the decline. Public trust in our institutions of higher education will continue to decline so long as ideologues use them to advance their vain political agendas.”
The use of language may not be the only measure, but I think it’s important and relevant. As we know, the control of language in academia is a key tool for control, it’s how — using the Risk! analogy — domination of every academic field has been achieved.
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My alma mater university’s recent publication introduced their new DEI assistant dean for the School of Engineering. Female – check. POC-check. OK…. now what? Since my first B.S. degree was in Nuclear Engineering , do we DEI ourselves into another Three Mile Island or Castle Bravo?
Check.
Reactors, certainly… but luggage carousels hardest hit.
Yeah, a few years back my alma-ish’s School of Engineering secured their new dean — with Ph D in “education.” They couldn’t talk enough about DIE, with programs on their programs doing “social engineering” — which is neither, all about “access” — by blocking and impeding access.
The Really, Real World is the original anti-racist, all-access system. You start choosing “science” because it’s socially convenient vs. tracks, and “engineering” based on who can do it vs. what works, and you get energy distribution collapse, and supply chain disruptions. And those are the easy cases.
Yep.
https://www.takimag.com/article/diversity_bridge_is_falling_down_my_fair_lady_david_cole/
About two years ago I withdrew from a highly successful physics-teaching initiative because it went “woke”, and told me to just accept, without question, the claim that a “societal belief that women don’t belong in physics” accounts for the fact that men earn the majority of physics degrees.
The UC System has social promotion for doctoral candidate physicists, provided they have a certain skin color. I can’t imagine how this could possibly have a happy result, for anybody involved.
Ambitious people push themselves to failure, and a whole lot of people are simply unsuited to doctoral-level physics. But failure in one field only means that a person needs to look for something more suitable, because somebody who can almost make it in any rigorous field has considerable raw ability. Lying to someone about failure in any field is leads a person astray and wastes valuable time that surely could be better applied somewhere else.
Now IUPUI has announced a social promotion program for faculty members to get tenure if their research and teaching aren’t good enough, but they have the right skin color to fulfill one of their DEI quotas.
https://news.iu.edu/live/news/27627-iupui-approves-new-path-to-promotion-and-tenure
When university faculty members can get tenure in STEM fields just for being the right race and doing the approved sorts of racial agitation, then the quality of science is truly a lost cause. Once these guys get their social promotions and become the tenured faculty, then they can prevent anyone who is actually good from being promoted.
You are not alone in raising this question. Remember that Larry Sommers, former president of Harvard, a major research university, lost his job for even suggesting that the question of whether biological differences between males and females might in part contribute to the relatively small proportion of females among tenured faculty in physics and math was best answered with data and warranted research.
“Nothing is more unequal than the equal treatment of unequal people.”—Thomas Jefferson
Perhaps another way of phrasing it might be, “Equalizing outcomes for all, regardless of ability, is the core concept of communism.”
We are losing.
.
It is an attempt at reparations where everyone loses.
Give it to incompetence…a winning idea. /sarc
It may be an attempt, but money is on the table now and that is more to be desired than anything this side of heaven.
When I see a video of one of the African homebuilt airplanes or helicopters actually fly I’ll pay attention.
Until then, I will let history guide my observation.
https://youtu.be/vaSOdPdrM-Y
Modern medicine, welfare and the widespread abolition of public execution have wreaked havoc with natural selection. Nature’s mistakes now survive, and in their malice, populate the courts, government and academia, working to destroy the system that once tossed them aside.
A doctor could respond to the charge that “modern medicine is ableist” by saying, “yes, it is” and bursting out in helpless laughter. Or, by saying “yes, it is” and poking their patients in the eye with a sharp stick.
DiversityInequityExclusion (DIE) is a doctrine of Progressive sects under the Pro-Choice ethical religion. First, they came for the babies.
You have no idea how bad it really is. Here is an article currently being promoted by the Dept. of Health and the NIH.
“Dismantling the master’s house: new ways of knowing for equity and social justice in health professions education”
…
“Grosfoguel argues that the structure of knowledge upon which the Western University (and, we would argue, by extension HPE) is built on a canon of thought “based on the knowledge produced by a few men from five countries in Western Europe (Italy, France, England, Germany and the USA)” (Grosfoguel 2013, p. 74) and on a structural foundation evolved from late 15th century conquests of territories and religious genocides (Grosfoguel 2013). Rather than a Christian God as the foundation of knowledge, Descartes’s philosophy of “I” (“I think, therefore I am”) and the Enlightenment thinkers that followed him moved Western philosophy away from having one fundamental category of things and towards the separation of the body and the mind. This dualism then raises questions about consciousness, intentionality, and the self (Robinson 2020). Constructing man as having control over the mind, beyond a Christian God, afforded the Western man who held power epistemic privilege: power over how knowledge is structured (Robinson 2020). This privilege has been used in conquests over religion and territories, and continues through colonialism. We would argue that medicine and medical education rely on this privilege.”
———-
And on and on with this nonsense. Basically arriving at a point where a witch doctor or voodoo priest could graduate from a medical school with absolutely no medical qualifications at all…..sort of like Fauci and the Pfizer scientists.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10459-020-10006-x
DEI is the most “racist” outfit around. Their assumption is that people of color cannot make it on their own. Tell that to Thomas Sowell.
That’s not their assumption.
I just heard from friends who still have their kids in the school district that made national news for hiring a black woman with a criminal record to be on the school board because she was a CRT/BLM activist…
Thanks to shutting down the schools, their kid is way behind (wonder why?) and so the current year teacher who is pretty good (and STEM) was spending 15 minutes extra at the end of the school day to help her with her reading.
The school forced her to stop giving this student an extra 15 minutes.
Bet your ass they have 1 (or more) LGBTQ counselors on staff – not joking- thanks to COVID, but are actively blocking giving help to kids in actual education. This is about the 3rd or 4th time I’ve heard of them blocking getting help to kids that are behind.
We pulled our kid out.
I’ve been watching for them to release the enrollment numbers as annectdotally the home school programs and private schools are all waiting list only at this point. The numbers are submitted by the districts in Oct. Here we in mid Dec getting ready for Christmas break and Inslee still hasn’t published them.
Mercifully we’re finishing in May, when our Daughter Finishes Her BSME..:with Honors Level Grades…While Working Full-Time (i.e. she doesn’t have enough hours/semester to graduate with honors)…and Paying For It All By Herself.
I will stipulate to D.E.I. in Engineering, IF AND ONLY IF THE TEACHING PROFESSORS AND DEANS of any Engineering College or University WILL BEAR THE LEGAL AND FINANCIAL RESPONSIBILITY AND CONSEQUENCES OF ANY LAW SUITS WHEN PEOPLE ARE KILLED OR INJURED BECAUSE THE “ENGINEER” THEY TAUGHT DIDN’T UNDERSTAND AND CORRECTLY APPLY THE PRINCIPALS THAT THE ENGINEER WAS REQUIRED TO BUILD THE STRUCTURE THAT KILLED AN INDIVIDUAL THAT USED THEIR PRODUCT (e.g. The Silver Bridge, at Pleasant Point, West Virginia).
If an Engineer can’t pass a Professional Engineer Certification Tests Requirements, maybe they should not be a practicing engineer.
I predicted the fall of STEM back in 2017,
It was apparent in stodgy old publications for the American Society for Civil Engineers beginning about that time. Mandatory ‘concern’ for global warming – when engineers were supposed to be scientific skeptics! – and what the Cultivated Engineer would do to Save Humanity from the exaggerated rise of the oceans. In every issue. They conquer the Editorial Boards first, apparently.
Now, of course, it’s carefully multicolored photos of Engineers preaching Equity.
F=mA and PV=nrT are racist. I remember an extra credit question on a test: Derive Newton’s law of gravitation from F=mA. Clearly white supremacist stuff.