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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