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The War on Studying Inequality
The same investigation, restaged one beat at a time. Drive it with the arrow keys, space, or autoplay. Nothing is cut from the piece — long runs are split across frames. Read the full investigation or open the Who Controls What You Get to Know hub.
The War on Studying Inequality
A state strikes sociology from the college core. The federal science agency cancels ~$1.1B in research. An op-ed in the country's biggest business paper asks whether to 'liquidate' the field. Different hands, same target: the disciplines that measure who has power.
State curriculum rules, federal research cuts, and elite opinion are separately narrowing the study of inequality and power — and together function as a campaign that makes it harder for the public to measure how unequal the country is.
You can't fix what you're not allowed to count. Each act is FACT; the 'campaign' throughline is posed, not proven — convergence, not a control room.
Florida removed introductory sociology from its general-education core, calling the field 'hijacked by left-wing activists.'
Jan 2024: Florida's Board of Governors + State Board of Education dropped Principles of Sociology as a core social-science option; Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. said it was 'hijacked by left-wing activists.' Follows 2023's SB 266 barring gen-ed teaching that systemic racism/sexism are inherent in US institutions. Fence: not banned — still available at the institutional level; it just no longer counts toward the mandatory core.
The NSF terminated 1,500+ research grants worth ~$1.1B in 2025 — nearly 90% diversity-related.
After the Jan 21, 2025 EO ending federal DEI, the NSF canceled ~1,574 projects (~$1.1B, ~4% of active portfolio) by end of June; per the Urban Institute nearly 90% were diversity-related, concentrated in inequality, environmental-justice and misinformation research. DOGE claimed an early 402/$233M tranche. Litigation forced partial reversals (114 UC awards reinstated). Documented; legality contested in court.
The WSJ's opinion page ran a column asking whether it's time to 'liquidate' the study of sociology.
July 2026: 'Is It Time to Liquidate the Study of Sociology?' by Jukka Savolainen (Wayne State sociologist), reacting to Florida. Precisions: it's OPINION, not news, and the author is an academic in the field, not a corporate executive — best read as elite media amplifying/legitimizing the state and federal moves, not a billionaire's decree. We grade the column's existence and argument; we don't adopt its conclusion, and it says nothing about the WSJ newsroom.
We do NOT claim the WSJ's news operation is compromised — the op-ed is opinion, by an academic, not the reporting desk.
The critique the campaign leans on — that academic sociology is ideologically homogeneous — is not baseless.
Ignoring this would be a strawman. The charge that sociology skews heavily left and sometimes blends scholarship with activism is made inside the field too — the op-ed's author is a working sociologist, and defenders concede the field is politically lopsided. Real, widely conceded pattern ('homogeneous' is a matter of degree). The point: a genuine debate about a discipline's culture is being used to justify cutting it from the core and defunding research — a remedy far out of proportion to the complaint.
Together these function as a campaign against the measurement of inequality — but they're separate actors, not one control room.
Line them up — state cuts sociology from the core, federal agency cuts ~$1.1B in mostly diversity-tagged research, elite opinion calls for the field's end — and the disciplines that document inequality are narrowed from several directions at once. Posed as convergence, not conspiracy: different actors, overlapping-but-distinct motives, no single coordinating hand in evidence. The cumulative effect isn't in dispute — less sociology taught, less inequality research funded, more argument that the enterprise is illegitimate.
You can't fix what you're not allowed to count.
The most durable way to protect an unequal order isn't to argue inequality is fine — it's to make inequality harder to see. Curricula decide what the next generation is taught to notice; research funding decides what gets measured at all; elite opinion decides which questions are respectable. Squeeze the same subject at all three points and you get a quieter public, working with less evidence, less able to say how unequal things have become. Same machine as book bans and buried records — run on the academy instead of the library.
Help us fill these lines.
- OpenThe 'campaign' is posed (SOME SMOKE): convergence of separate actors is real, but no single coordinating hand is in evidence — we don't claim a conspiracy.
- OpenFences kept: sociology wasn't banned (removed from gen-ed core); NSF cuts were DEI-tagged (overlapping with but not identical to 'inequality'); some grants reinstated; the WSJ newsroom is not implicated.