Academic researchers are going to have to learn algospeak

Imagine you’re an academic researcher. You’re writing a pitch for funding to the National Science Foundation (NSF), the independent agency of the federal government that funds projects designed to advance our understanding of the world. But you can’t use the words excluded, historically, socioeconomic, systemic, or women. Go.

That’s the quandary that researchers across the country find themselves in thanks to a misguided attempt to try to eliminate what President Donald Trump and lackey Elon Musk would likely describe as “woke” research. The Trump administration’s drive to tamp down studies that promote an agenda pushing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) involves hitting small nails with very big, very blunt hammers, with all ongoing and future research projects reportedly being analyzed to see whether they contain any number of newly forbidden words. ­

Among them are terms that Trump and others might dislike, such as diversity, inequities, or multicultural. But there are also words that almost certainly get caught in the dragnet inadvertently, including women and historically. “The mood is pretty glum here,” says one academic, granted anonymity because of a fear of reprisals. “While my work has implications for DEI, it’s not explicitly DEI in writing. For academics who do work in this space, it’s a death knell.”

“It really seems like a huge mess,” says a second academic researcher, also granted anonymity to be able to speak over fear of reprisals or their research being targeted as a result of speaking out. “The list is long and vague enough that all kinds of research will potentially be harmed. Everything from biomedical research to engineering to research in the social sciences.”

That researcher says they believe the guidelines have been drawn vaguely “by design, not an accident,” in order to give the government—through the NSF—enough leeway to block anything they want to. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the world’s largest technical professional organization for tech research in academia, declined to comment for this story.  

“ACM supports technology research in a wide array of areas and understands that priorities for funding of research can shift for a variety of reasons,” Jody Westby, vice chair of the Association for Computing Machinery’s US Technology Policy Committee, wrote in a statement to Fast Company. “ACM hopes, when this happens, that funding from other sources also shifts to fill gaps so needed research can continue.”

Researchers will still likely pursue their work under the current administration, even if the NSF’s list of forbidden words stymies them. It just means they may have to take a page out of the book of online content creators, and understand how to deploy algospeak—or the rephrasing of words in order to avoid blocks put in place by online platforms, most commonly found on social media.

“There have been many examples of researchers using different terms to try to get their work funded by different organizations, particularly private philanthropic foundations which often have an only slightly hidden political or ideological alignment,” the anonymous researcher says.

Euphemistically referring to subjects that might otherwise be seen as sensitive using a crude check of content in order to evade censorship could well be a path that researchers have to follow, fears Carolina Are, a researcher at the Center for Digital Citizens at Northumbria University. Are has studied platform censorship and how rank-and-file users avoid its clutches. “With the broligarchs in power greatly affecting and influencing the way the U.S. is run, bolstered by Trump’s politics, [what content creators had to do] is being broadened out to research.”

It’s possible to use doublespeak or euphemism to dance around contentious phrasing, Are explains—but it does significantly impact the ability to disseminate that content, and finding work-arounds taxes thinking that could otherwise be put to the broader problem that needs addressing.

Are also worries that researchers will end up in a cat-and-mouse game with the NSF in the same way that creators are, where terms and words that are being used euphemistically are added to block lists and the effect is nullified, meaning people have to find new ways of subverting barriers. “It’s not a long-term solution for people,” she says.

One of the researchers Fast Company spoke to is more pessimistic than that. “I’m not sure we’re going to see people successfully using different terms for the banned research terms because when you can’t even use words like female or systemic, there’s not really a way to get around that,” they say. “All biomedical research that looks at more than men is potentially out of bounds, and that’s by design.”

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