Forbidden Words
By 
They’re going really hard on DEI, which has surprised me a little.
There is so much to consider in the attacks on DEI, and I’m gonna add A for accessibility to disabled people. The degree of anger and what it means about mediocre white men. The damage they want to inflict on everyone who is not a white probably Christian of a particular sort man. The desire to erase everyone. The need for a word to describe the exclusion of everyone but white men. The compliance by various parts of the government. The potential for splitting the Democratic coalition. I’ll deal only with parts of those in this post.
Shockingly, the NSF has been more compliant than I would have hoped. Someone there generated this list of words that potentially disqualify a proposal for funding.
The list gives some insight into the person who generated it, and perhaps the kind of people valued by the administration: not terribly knowledgeable about the subject matter, and highly sensitive to DEIA issues. The kind of person who would have been a political officer in the Soviet Union.
Some specifics:
Among the forbidden words are female and women. Not male and man. It took some time, but biologists now recognize that hormonal constitution makes a big difference in, say, response to drugs. Apparently all that is to be wiped out.
Gender is forbidden, but sex is not. The cultural expression of biology does not exist.
Bia, equality, and inequality remove a fair bit of statistics and mathematics, not just from studies in those fields, but from any field that uses statistics – that is, most of them. Bias is also a concept in electricity and has applications across fields, in cell biology and chemistry.
Diverse in its various forms is also likely to show up anywhere, referring to variation in many phenomena.
Energy barriers, something that figured in my chemistry research, are gone. And the computer privileges I’ve just written about here? Nope.
Oh, and btw Dan and Rob, we can’t talk about political science any more. And Erik will have to give up historically!