An important new report has just been released (December 2022) by the National Association of Scholars (NAS) which provides empirical support for the extent to which CSJ has penetrated higher education institutions. Although this report concerns STEM subjects, it is relevant to anyone in the therapy field who needs to counter claims made that this CSJ capture is exagerated. See the link in the introduction provided below on the NAS website.

Ideological Intensification examines 100 college and university websites and Twitter feeds; the content of four major academic associations; the grants awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health, and the Ford Foundation; and the scholarly literature contained in PubMed, arXiv, Google Scholar, and Web of Science. In total, the study incorporates over 30GB of data in more than 280,000 files.

Goad continued, “To our knowledge, this is the largest quantitative study of DEI in STEM to date. There is still some noise in the data, but the signal is quite clear: DEI-related language is co-occurring with STEM-related language at a much higher frequency than even a few years ago.”

The study finds that college and university websites incorporating DEI and STEM terms were 26 times more frequent in 2021 than they were in 2010. NSF funding for so-called “antiracist” themes more than tripled from 2020 to 2021. Similar trends are visible among the scientific literature. The study notes that much of this increase was likely triggered by the Black Lives Matter movement, as evidenced by the rapid spike in incidence in the summer of 2020.

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.’