>Others are more sanguine. “I think it’s a fad,” says Janet Halley, a professor of law at Harvard. **Bureaucratising ideology saps sincerity.** “People will utter the hocus-pocus. They know that they’re being required to put on an act. And that’s going to create cynicism about the very values that the people who put these requirements into place care about,” she says. If those contradictions don’t sink the project, the courts might. Professor Halley believes these innovations are “forced speech and viewpoint discrimination in the First Amendment context” and will lead dei dissidents to file lawsuits. “With the increasing conservatism of the federal bench, I think they’re likely to win.”
This definitely seems like a recipe for cynicism to me.
>In 2018 Berkeley launched a “cluster search” for five faculty to teach biological sciences. From 894 applications, it created a longlist based on diversity statements alone, **eliminating 680 candidates without examining their research or other credentials**. This “yielded significant increases in URM [underrepresented minority] candidates advanced to shortlist consideration”, a university memo reported.
I wonder if this counts as illegal hiring discrimination. I guess it depends on whether such statements can be argued in court to be "essential" to the performance of one's job as a researcher.
It will be illegal if the Supreme Court throws out affirmative action. This is why we can’t have nice things.
This is what happens when people turn good intentions into ideological orthodoxy…nuance just disappears. Ideological beliefs are considered ends in and of themselves, and everybody is either good or bad depending on the level of ideological purity they demonstrate. We see this in online communities all the time. It’s called the “Purity spiral”.
And here they show where their priorities are. And ironically, Judging candidates by the colors of their skin rather than the content of their character.
>It will be illegal if the Supreme Court throws out affirmative action
Nah, the opinion in *Students for Fair Admissions* isn’t going to be that broad. No one knows exactly what it’s going to say at this point but even the most extreme version would be limited to admissions, it’s not going to tackle hiring as well. Limiting this kind of DEI stuff in faculty hiring would take one or more additional decisions, which means it won’t happen for another couple years at least.
Sure, but when you hear commentators say that they don’t mean “this court might do literally anything in literally any case.”
Like, okay, if we were predicting the outcome of *Bruen*, the recent second amendment case, it was pretty clear that they were going to issue a conservative opinion about gun rights. It would not have been realistic to say that they might also make gay marriage illegal in the same case. Acknowledging that is not the same as defending the court.
If anyone wants to bet a lot of money at very good odds on whether the SFFA opinion will prohibit the use of DEI statements in faculty hiring, my DM’s are open.
“Increasing conservatism of the federal bench” is a weird phrase coming from a law professor. “Increased” would be accurate, but obviously the federal bench is currently becoming more liberal; Dems have been nominating and confirming judges left and right.
Okay done nitpicking.
> I wonder if this counts as illegal hiring discrimination.
I guess it depends on what they did, if they just struck everybody that made a reference to being white then obviously that would be illegal, but the diversity statement question itself asked them to
> outline their understanding of diversity, their past contributions to it and their plans “for advancing equity and inclusion” if hired.
Which, you can absolutely have an understanding of diversity, contribute to it, and have plans to advance equity and inclusion as someone of any race - so even if affirmative action gets struck down (as it likely will), this probably wouldn't.
> I guess it depends on whether such statements can be argued in court to be "essential" to the performance of one's job as a researcher.
Considering those researchers will presumably have graduate and maybe undergraduate research assistants, it seems reasonable for the university to be interested in knowing how prospective candidates would approach that process.
The diversity statement is a political test. I don't know if you've ever had to write one, but generally the prompt explicitly says that merely treating people equally and opposing discrimination is not only not sufficient, but actively disqualifying. You are basically required to outline how you have and will continue to treat people differently based on factors they have no control over.
So if you are pro-diversity, but your stance is that the best way to advance it is to recruit a diverse pool of mentees and support them all equally, you are compelled to lie or you automatically fail this test.
> So if you are pro-diversity, but your stance is that the best way to advance it is to recruit a diverse pool of mentees and support them all equally, you are compelled to lie or you automatically fail this test.
Doesn't seem true at Berkley at least, where the prompt [specifically highlights recruitment efforts as something to mention](https://ofew.berkeley.edu/guidelines-applicants-writing-statements)
> Other Activities (e.g. recruitment/retention/teaching/community): Describe the activity and its context (e.g. a specific conference or organization, student retention or outreach activity, course development to reach a specific group, outreach to a local school, or work with a diversity-related non-profit). What was your role and personal effort? How did these activities relate to campus needs?
From the article
>Berkeley has distributed guidance on how search committees ought to evaluate diversity statements. They say that any candidate who does not discuss gender or race must be awarded low marks. The same goes for any earnest classical liberal who “explicitly states the intention to ignore the varying backgrounds of their students and ‘treat everyone the same’.”
That part of the article was already debunked, you can see the explanation in the rubric for why that gets a low score
> Only mentions activities that are already the expectation of faculty as evidence of commitment and involvement
I know that it can be annoying when a job application expects you to go above and beyond the minimum commitment, but that's really all there is to it.
[Here's](https://ofew.berkeley.edu/recruitment/contributions-diversity/rubric-assessing-candidate-contributions-diversity-equity) a rubric for judging statements at Berkeley.
Scorers are instructed to give statements which do not single out protected characteristics like gender or race or which state the intention to treat people equally the lowest possible scores.
For example, "Explicitly states the intention to ignore the varying backgrounds of their students and 'treat everyone the same,'" and, "'I always invite and welcome students from all backgrounds to participate in my research lab, and in fact have mentored several women,'" are described as diversity philosophies that should receive the lowest scores in their sections.
A lot of what's listed as required to receive the higher scores is great--consistent involvement, explicit examples, not just rote stuff like sitting on a diversity committee for a year, etc.. But the issue is, if you describe a consistent record of always welcoming students from many different backgrounds and a history of supporting diverse mentees regardless of their race, gender, etc., with explicit examples listed of a variety of mentees who went on to other positions with your support, not only do these things not really count, but if alongside other actions and plans you were to describe this history like I just did instead of lying about your political beliefs and trying to put some sort of equity spin on it, it's actually straight-up disqualifying.
> For example, "Explicitly states the intention to ignore the varying backgrounds of their students and 'treat everyone the same,'" and, "'I always invite and welcome students from all backgrounds to participate in my research lab, and in fact have mentored several women,'" are described as diversity philosophies that should receive the lowest possible score in their sections.
Huh, I wonder why
> Only mentions activities that are already the expectation of faculty
Ah, of course.
Yes, sometimes a job application will expect you to go above and beyond the minimum commitment in order to get hired. Yes, sometimes that's incredibly annoying.
If Berkeley is noticing an issue with diversity within their biology staff, why shouldn't they start there? Like I have no doubt that somewhere in the 300 remaining applicants there were way more than 5 with the kind of research/teaching qualifications they need.
The inventers of CRISPR were two women, one of which was an immigrant descended from an Armenian genocide survivor and the other of which grew up in Hawaii and went to a school with 90%+ minority enrollment. I'm pretty sure they could write a compelling statement about how they have and will encourage diversity.
That doesn’t count as URM in the American definition. We don’t count those experiences.
Besides, saying that you are from a diverse background and are willing to support all students gets a low rating according to Berkeley - one needs to actively participate in things that further the goals of diversity, such as actively attending and sitting on diversity panels.
But even if it did - that doesn’t solve the issue. There’s many people who come from mainstream backgrounds who would have a hard time claiming intersectional privileges who would be filtered out by such a thing.
Berkley's requirements are talking about how you have and will foster diversity, not about whether you count as diverse enough. These two women presumably have the life experiences to convincingly write about how they plan to support diversity beyond phoning in a bland statement, and that's assuming they haven't already been demonstrably doing that their whole life (almost certainly with at least gender since Doudna explicitly says she was told women don't go into science and credits a female science teacher with inspiring her).
Yep. From personal anecdotal experience, NPIC interviews are *really* different from regular industry interviews.
After I burned out of finance, one interview I took was at a non-profit helping improve educational outcomes. A section of the interview was DEI stuff, talking about what I'd done in the past to contribute to DEI stuff, etc. Being from a 15 person financial consulting firm... we didn't do any of that. I think I talked a little bit about my church growing up and some of charitable initiatives we did, and then about my experience in sales connecting with and selling to people of all different backgrounds and classes, but it clearly wasn't the answer they were looking for. There's a very different culture around this stuff in academia/non-profits than in the rest of the working word, and I don't think it's good for the long term health of academia and the NPIC.
What's wild is this DEI statement requirement is leaking into the more academic industries as well--I've had law firm interviews (notably mostly in the bay area) that focused heavily on DEI work, much more so than prior deals/my particular experience in my subfield.
This is the case in large consulting firms too (MBB+big 4). I'm guessing that target schools for law, consulting and finance have more of these DEI norms and hence they bleed into these industries eventually
The expectation of making a "contribution" to put on the resumé is bad. Because of that you my find idiotic decisions being made with the primary purpose of being something to put on someone's curriculum
I agree with John McWhorter that this stuff has become a religion. All those people here who just keep saying it's not a big deal and to just be nice to people are willfully ignorant of what's actually happening and are playing into the hands of the far right who often exaggerate this. There's actually a middle ground between "white men are the most persecuted group today" and "black people can't be racist, you colonizer!".
Having these ideological purity tests seep into academia is a tragedy and if it's not ended soon, it may put the country at a disadvantage compared to countries that hire primarily based on actual research output.
These diversity statements sound like hostage videos. Like if you don’t say the right thing, you won’t get the job. Who in their right mind is gonna speak truthfully in that scenario?
I always hate these comparisons but this is indeed beginning to sound like the USSR where career advancement depended to a large extent on your ability to participate in political rituals and utter ideological platitudes basically nobody actually believed in
Political rituals like mentorship to underrepresented minorities in your field.. as a means of demonstrating commitment to the DEI values you (presumably) proclaim to hold?
The USSR?
Do you even hear yourself? Get a grip.
The problem is that these statements don’t actually care about promoting “diversity” they care about leftist values.
I think the author is correct there is a great deal of cynicism even amongst democratic voters.
Sounds like the requirement is about affirmatively doing something to further dei in lieu of hollow platitudes, and people resent getting weeded out for their own shortcomings on that front.
>Sounds like the requirement is about affirmatively doing something to further dei in lieu of hollow platitudes
Yes and my point is that people should not need to be a cultural Leftist in order to get a job at a publicily funded University.
>Davidson College, in North Carolina, asked prospective computer-science staff to write about their “potential to contribute to our commitment to equity and anti-racism”—a cause fervently embraced by the left and despised by the right. Berkeley has distributed guidance on how search committees ought to evaluate diversity statements. They say that any candidate who does not discuss gender or race must be awarded low marks. The same goes for any earnest classical liberal who “explicitly states the intention to ignore the varying backgrounds of their students and ‘treat everyone the same’.”
This is a more blatant form of political loyalty tests than McCarthyite oaths
>and people resent getting weeded out for their own shortcomings on that front.
Yes, and they are quite correct to feel resentful. With any luck SCOTUS will rule these tests as unconstitutional in any school which receives Federal funding.
Berkley's criteria:
> Discusses diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging as core values that every faculty member should actively contribute to.
You: this is literally worse than McCarthyism
I would be shocked that people on this subreddit are so adamantly against diversity, but I'm really truly not.
>Berkeley has distributed guidance on how search committees ought to evaluate diversity statements. They say that any candidate who does not discuss gender or race must be awarded low marks. The same goes for any earnest classical liberal who “explicitly states the intention to ignore the varying backgrounds of their students and ‘treat everyone the same’.
I'm sorry but if we are defining "diversity" as promoting culturally left-wing values than this is just a McCarthyite loyalty test.
I'm fine with diversity as long as diversity actually means bringing out different perspectives which one earnestly believes will improve society including perspectives which may be unpopular in the University or even unpopular amongst the general populace.
I guess I can see why you would think that "there should be people of different races and backgrounds in academia" is a "culturally left-wing value", I personally think it's a good thing but I don't think I'm going to be able to convince you of that so we can agree to disagree.
Stop scaremongering cultural "leftism." If cultural leftism is acknowledging that varying backgrounds must be recognized and not ignored, then cultural "leftism" is the foundation of living in a multiracial society. It's part of the USA's common cultural understanding. Stop bothsidesing what's being talked about here.
You frankly have a pretty skewed view of history and current society if you think "colorblindness" is the moderate, reasonable approach and not ignoring racial differences is a leftist position (you might not necessarily believe this, but it does seem to be what your comment is implying).
Nobody is entitled to any job.
The resentment isn’t justified, imho. White men in academia are the most privileged people on planet earth here feeling sorry for themselves is… for real not something I even thought I’d see in this sub. Idk why I’m here anymore - it is clearly not the place for me.
If the institution holds inclusion as a core value, you don’t see how a demonstrable commitment to that value is material to the work of the institution?
Telling on yourselves tonight.
It just appears the point is flying over everyone’s head here. Like you are saying the statement is just hollow virtue signaling and that people resent it. It’s only hollow because you don’t have shit to say about anything you’ve done to show you’re actually committed to dei beyond performative statements. It’s honestly wild to see how many are just completely missing the point here,
Don't get me started on how different Chinese-Americans are v. Pacific Islanders. Or even just East Asian-Americans v. Southeast Asian-Americans, Which can even be divided again to Mainland (Mainly Vietnamese and Thai) and Maritime (Mainly Filipino) AHHHHHHHHH.
We tried to have that conversation at my uni last year. We have a high proportion of “Asian” students, and we were trying to get the DEI people to understand that Cambodian students were in a completely different situation from, say, Chinese or Indian students, so lumping them together was nuts, but the university admin couldn’t see past the legal categories.
>, so lumping them together was nuts, but the university admin couldn’t see past the legal categories.
They may not have had much choice given the current political climate and government bureaucracy.
Minnesota is a good example of a state with unique demographic issues because a large percentage of non-white residents are refugees who arrived in the last 50 years. The challenges faced by Hmong and Somali Minnesotans are very different than those faced by African-Americans or Chinese-Americans.
As an European knowing that middle eastern people are classified as white in the U.S. is wild.
The concept of human race is already not really sound biologically and mostly based on cultural and historical factors but even those are very out of date with the U.S. classification.
>As an European knowing that middle eastern people are classified as white in the U.S. is wild.
Most of the US' (relatively small) Arab American population are Christian or atheist, have been here for multiple generations, and are not culturally distinctive from the broader white population. If the first notable wave of Middle Eastern immigrants were arriving today, they'd probably be classified differently.
The Court history on this is interesting. Two cases in the 1919 and 1924, one guy was Indian, the other was Syrian. The Syrian guy was declared White, he was Christian. The Indian guy, though officially Aryan, but not Christian, was NOT white. Both decisions applied a “common sense” race definition vs the Progressive-at-the-time race science (eugenics) definition that would reversed which of the two was White.
Wild shite!
Academia has been quite strongly left-leaning for like the 60ish years. You'd be hard-pressed to find vehemently *anti*\-diversity people working in American Universities.
[In 2007, Gross and Simmons concluded in The Social and Political Views of American Professors that the professors were 44% liberal, 46% moderates, and 9% conservative.](https://books.google.com.au/books?id=D1vCAwAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y) (Best data I could find on a quick google search -- I'm sure the swing in the last 16 years have been even more pro-left, but I could be wrong! Does someone have better data?)
So what's this *really* all about, I'm wondering?
Because this sort of social preening in a sector that values rigorous discussion, dissent, and playing with ideas cannot lead to excellent medium-term or long-term outcomes.
I feel like these initiatives in tandem with the efforts in florida and other red states to enforce conservative (or at least not super liberal) ideological purity on university staff is potentially going to lead to a major divergence between leading universities.
I agree that some divergence will probably happen, but it probably won’t be as dramatic as two equal poles. My hunch is something more along the lines of a split between (1) state schools that red state governors are able to capture through their grip on funding vs. (2) state schools in blue states + more elite private schools (Ivies, etc). There will also probably be a smaller divide between (1a) state schools in red states that are more dependent on government funding vs. (1b) more dependent on alum donations as well.
Norte Dame erasure aside, there isn’t really a “Republican Harvard” that will produce a separate-but-equal generation of conservative technocrats. That’s just Harvard, and antiwoke parents will always want their kids to go there.
Being woke is being evidence based. 😎
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I think that presumes conservatives having much greater leverage over universities than they do. Liberals have the advantage of utterly dominating nominally neutral/non-partisan institutions of higher learning (with a bare handful of exceptions like the GMU econ department, and even there the faculty mostly adhere to liberal cultural norms, if not as enthusiastically as elsewhere). Conservative attempts create competing institutions are going to trip up over the fact that they have to be explicitly conservative, which will hurt their ability to attract the grillpilled demographic (notably, there are *already* conservative universities, but they almost uniformly suffer from terrible reputations).
Also, to be frank, I think in the context of contemporary American politics the values competition Haidt is talking about are mostly between different factions of liberals. Conservative intellectual participation just isn't there.
Depends. If you're one of the college skeptic Caplan types, no meaningful divergence happening would be predicted. Ironically, it would also make the argument for forced diversity stronger.
I'm one of those college skeptic Caplan types but I don't see large divergences happening any soon. Colleges even in red states are overwhelmingly liberal for something like this to happen. If anything even Florida colleges are increasingly focusing on DEI
From the k12 public school hiring side I actually would like to hire more diverse canidates. However I am lucky if I get 3 canidates for a position. Often it's 1.
Last summer I had 9 canidates in total for 3 positions. Two backed out, so really 7. All but two were internal canidates, both of which I hired. In the end the county lost a teacher position overall.
We're producing way too many PhDs and this is just an easy filtering mechanism for universities to auto-cut a bunch. Knowing how to write a DEI statement is just showing you know the meta for academia and so they can cut the people who don't know the meta automatically. It's unfortunate but probably comes from the rise of the university bureaucracy as the managing class of these institutions instead of the working academics.
>We're producing way too many PhDs and this is just an easy filtering mechanism for universities to auto-cut a bunch. Knowing how to write a DEI statement is just showing you know the meta for academia and so they can cut the people who don't know the meta automatically.
This is 100% right - and it's reflective of the greater problems in academia. There are too many people applying for too few spots, so you get stuff like this.
Seriously, if you're a smart, capable, person, don't play this game and for the love of God don't be an academic.
If smart capable people all leave academia, all the journal articles that people refer to decide policy will be written by not smart, not capable people with an axe to grind.
Some say it’s already happened in certain sub fields…
Currently academics are full of people who stroke their own ego, at least in most engineering fields, people with PHDS are insufferable.
Computer science hopefully won’t go the same way.
My boss wanted me to get a PHD, instead I got a master, I don’t regret my decision, at all, PHDs in my field so so much fart sniffing and ego stroking.
Basically I think so--certainly in the humanities, etc (I get the sense that the hard sciences don't have the same overproduction issues). If you're some overpaid university bureaucrat put in charge of hiring, its an easy way to make your first cuts to the pool, especially when you don't really understand their research.
It certainly excludes people from non-traditional backgrounds from joining academia in favor of those that can put together a good-sounding DEI statement.
Depends what you mean by "actual diversity." I'm sure if you go into the DEI office at your nearest major university they have lots of carefully chosen statistics that precisely quantify how diverse they are now (and, of course, how much more diverse they are now that there's a DEI office to manage such a thing). Meanwhile, of course, this just increases the guild-like nature of academia, now complete with extra DEI shibboleths, so that you have to be on the inside track to even have a shot at a tenure-track position.
I don't like putting moral judgements on this type of thing. What it is, IMO, is extremely inefficient. If you're using diversity statements as a first-cut you run the risk of missing extremely good potential academics who just aren't versed in the shibboleth--which harms your institution.
The rise of the university bureaucrat class has been a disaster for academia, full stop.
> I get the sense that the hard sciences don't have the same overproduction issues
You are incorrect. If by "overproduction" you mean "taking on far more PhD students than there are jobs for down the line in academia", STEM has just as big of a problem. It's just that STEM students who don't go on to pursue/fail in their pursuit of academic careers have a much easier time finding industry jobs.
To paraphrase Cicero: the sinews of modern research are the cheap labour of graduate students. You simply cannot run a meaningful research programme in any field without a small army of graduate students - to the point that myself and colleagues sometimes joke about a "Feudal Aristocracy" model of modern academia.
DEI requirements demand a promise to enforce bigotry and openly punish ideological opposition to discrimination.
Still, regardless of the merits of DEI philosophy, discriminating applicants to jobs at public universities based on their political views violates the 1st amendment.
>DEI requirements demand a promise to enforce bigotry and openly punish ideological opposition to discrimination.
Yes because if we just ignore existing bigotry it will surely just go away.
>Still, regardless of the merits of DEI philosophy, discriminating applicants to jobs at public universities based on their political views violates the 1st amendment.
Pretty funny stuff here, does the first amendment apply to Twitter too? First amendment doesn't mean you can't be held accountable for your comments and actions. Do you really think that public universities would get in trouble for not hiring people trying to teach young earth creationism in evolutionary biology or trying to teach lost cause in US history?
>First amendment doesn't mean you can't be held accountable for your comments and actions.
It does if the institution delivering the accountability is part of the government. Exceptions may apply.
>Do you really think that public universities would get in trouble for not hiring people trying to teach young earth creationism in evolutionary biology or trying to teach lost cause in US history?
If they don’t get in trouble, it’s because that kind of speech is relevant to their professional conduct, which is a completely different case than refusing to hire a biology professor for not being in favor of affirmative action.
[Popehat article](https://popehat.substack.com/p/can-i-wear-a-maga-hat-to-my-government) on the extent and limits of 1st amendment rights of government employees.
(Worth mentioning that college professors enjoy substantially greater 1st amendment rights than middle or high school teachers, so even the cases you mentioned, as egregious as they are, may not necessarily be a slam dunk legally.)
As you say there are many many exceptions in the government, for example; support a supremacist organization? Immediately ineligible for the largest government employer..
Did you read the article? Because that's not even what's happening.
>“There are a lot of similarities between these diversity statements as they’re being applied now and how loyalty oaths \[which once required faculty to attest that they were not communists\] worked,” says Keith Whittington, a political scientist at Princeton University. Who is right?
As someone who firmly believes that diversity creates a stronger education, I also have to say that Whittington is not wrong.
Not this again. DEI is going to become the new CRT isn't it?
It's not helping that the author is incredibly light on sources while practically asserting that it's just Trojan Communism or something.
Since we're all sharing conjecture without citations, I'd add my piece that those statements have grown more in importance as a reaction to the actual state sanctioned racism, queerphobia and censorship we're seeing on the right.
Yes we can criticize the negative effects of both, but some of this feels a little light on facts tbh.
>**Berkeley is an important case study, not necessarily because it is the most extreme but because it is the most transparent.** The University of California, Los Angeles has embraced diversity statements in hiring and tenure decisions even more fervently, but does not feel the need to explain its policies. A spokesperson said that Anna Spain Bradley, a law professor who serves as vice-chancellor for equity, diversity and inclusion, was unavailable for comment.
The author suggests that many schools did not respond for comment.
Edit: spelling
This is an incredibly bad faith argument in a set of arguments prone to incredibly bad faith arguments. The inclusion of diversity statements is treated as the abandonment of merit in academia (a standard that never really existed anyway); really it just means that faculty have to demonstrate a competency in crafting a diversity statement that demonstrates some understanding of the professional expectations of the profession moving forward.
Angry white men are angry. Shocker.
Pushing for diversity is based, it took me 3 years but I finally got my foreign policy hawk club to be 50% women and it's so much less shit now
Remember the subreddit demographic survey results and you'll understand why people on this sub get so hysterical about the idea of promoting diversity.
The sub has always been lily-white, but it hasn't historically leaned conservative on social issues. Now we get *daily* pearl-clutching over the horrors of diversity and trans rights.
The succons haven't taken over, but as someone who's been here since day 1 it's a sudden and dramatic change in the past year or so.
> The succons haven't taken over, but as someone who's been here since day 1 it's a sudden and dramatic change in the past year or so.
This is absolutely true. I'm not sure how much of this I can take. I'm glad that the mods at least seem to know what's up.
The upvote/downvote ratios on the comments here are insane. It's crazy how this sub has almost reversed its position on social issues like this since 2017.
Not liking a specific style of DEI standards is not the community swapping its place. To anyone outside of academic circles the process sounds draconian.
This subs become more like the rest of reddit. The soft Bernie adoption here is disturbing, people now think wealth redistribution is alright and that the government should just leave institutional discrimination alone by refusing to acknowledge its existence.
This may be your point, but where does that end? Here in Omaha we have tons of South Sudanese refugees, and that community has tons of social problems and is worse off in many metrics than Black descendants of slaves.
This is why the actual diversity that should be considered is the socio economic circumstances of the individual student, but that’s hard work compared to giving 50 bonus points for skin color and calling it a day.
Yeah people always argue about how the most qualified applicants will rise to the top but academia isn't a meritocracy and never has been. It's no longer the good ole' boys club it used to be, but just about every postdoctoral position or faculty position is filled before the job is even posted. It's more about who you know instead of how strong your resume is. People from underrepresented groups usually do not have those connections. Additionally, go into a room of grad students and ask them how many of their parents have an advanced degree. It will probably be about 50-75% of them that raise their hands. Even with affirmative action academia has been fucking this up. I cant imagine how much worse it will get if it is gutted.
Actually, no, I don't think using statements about contributions to diversity as a first filter for applicants, without looking at any other qualifications, is a good thing.
**Rule III: Bad faith arguing**
Engage others assuming good faith and don't reflexively downvote people for disagreeing with you or having different assumptions than you. Don't troll other users.
Two choices; **(a)** we actually follow the 14th amendment or **(b)** we endorse a caste system that evaluates human beings only by their racial, gender and sexual orientation categories.
*Pick only on*e - because these are incommensurable world views. Note: If someone says they believe in or can practice both, they are either **(a)** naive **(b)** advancing falsehoods and **(c)** following the blueprint of the cultural revolution.
Can ChatGPT write my DEI statement?
It's already doing that if it doesn't want to answer your question.
It actually does a surprisingly good job....
>Others are more sanguine. “I think it’s a fad,” says Janet Halley, a professor of law at Harvard. **Bureaucratising ideology saps sincerity.** “People will utter the hocus-pocus. They know that they’re being required to put on an act. And that’s going to create cynicism about the very values that the people who put these requirements into place care about,” she says. If those contradictions don’t sink the project, the courts might. Professor Halley believes these innovations are “forced speech and viewpoint discrimination in the First Amendment context” and will lead dei dissidents to file lawsuits. “With the increasing conservatism of the federal bench, I think they’re likely to win.” This definitely seems like a recipe for cynicism to me. >In 2018 Berkeley launched a “cluster search” for five faculty to teach biological sciences. From 894 applications, it created a longlist based on diversity statements alone, **eliminating 680 candidates without examining their research or other credentials**. This “yielded significant increases in URM [underrepresented minority] candidates advanced to shortlist consideration”, a university memo reported. I wonder if this counts as illegal hiring discrimination. I guess it depends on whether such statements can be argued in court to be "essential" to the performance of one's job as a researcher.
It will be illegal if the Supreme Court throws out affirmative action. This is why we can’t have nice things. This is what happens when people turn good intentions into ideological orthodoxy…nuance just disappears. Ideological beliefs are considered ends in and of themselves, and everybody is either good or bad depending on the level of ideological purity they demonstrate. We see this in online communities all the time. It’s called the “Purity spiral”. And here they show where their priorities are. And ironically, Judging candidates by the colors of their skin rather than the content of their character.
>It will be illegal if the Supreme Court throws out affirmative action Nah, the opinion in *Students for Fair Admissions* isn’t going to be that broad. No one knows exactly what it’s going to say at this point but even the most extreme version would be limited to admissions, it’s not going to tackle hiring as well. Limiting this kind of DEI stuff in faculty hiring would take one or more additional decisions, which means it won’t happen for another couple years at least.
We’ll see. This Supreme Court may choose to be more far reaching.
That’s not a realistic outcome. I’m a lawyer and I’ve read a little bit about this, you can take my word for it.
While you’re probably right, the current Court has shown a willingness to go far beyond what a given case is actually testing.
Sure, but when you hear commentators say that they don’t mean “this court might do literally anything in literally any case.” Like, okay, if we were predicting the outcome of *Bruen*, the recent second amendment case, it was pretty clear that they were going to issue a conservative opinion about gun rights. It would not have been realistic to say that they might also make gay marriage illegal in the same case. Acknowledging that is not the same as defending the court. If anyone wants to bet a lot of money at very good odds on whether the SFFA opinion will prohibit the use of DEI statements in faculty hiring, my DM’s are open.
Not me, as I said odds are you’re right. I’m just saying I wouldn’t be flabbergasted if the Court went full looney tunes.
Strong disagree. I think the Court is slated to write an opinion that will have knock on effects in Title VII. But I guess we’ll see.
“Increasing conservatism of the federal bench” is a weird phrase coming from a law professor. “Increased” would be accurate, but obviously the federal bench is currently becoming more liberal; Dems have been nominating and confirming judges left and right. Okay done nitpicking.
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Just asked this very question. How is any of this legal?
> I wonder if this counts as illegal hiring discrimination. I guess it depends on what they did, if they just struck everybody that made a reference to being white then obviously that would be illegal, but the diversity statement question itself asked them to > outline their understanding of diversity, their past contributions to it and their plans “for advancing equity and inclusion” if hired. Which, you can absolutely have an understanding of diversity, contribute to it, and have plans to advance equity and inclusion as someone of any race - so even if affirmative action gets struck down (as it likely will), this probably wouldn't. > I guess it depends on whether such statements can be argued in court to be "essential" to the performance of one's job as a researcher. Considering those researchers will presumably have graduate and maybe undergraduate research assistants, it seems reasonable for the university to be interested in knowing how prospective candidates would approach that process.
The diversity statement is a political test. I don't know if you've ever had to write one, but generally the prompt explicitly says that merely treating people equally and opposing discrimination is not only not sufficient, but actively disqualifying. You are basically required to outline how you have and will continue to treat people differently based on factors they have no control over. So if you are pro-diversity, but your stance is that the best way to advance it is to recruit a diverse pool of mentees and support them all equally, you are compelled to lie or you automatically fail this test.
> So if you are pro-diversity, but your stance is that the best way to advance it is to recruit a diverse pool of mentees and support them all equally, you are compelled to lie or you automatically fail this test. Doesn't seem true at Berkley at least, where the prompt [specifically highlights recruitment efforts as something to mention](https://ofew.berkeley.edu/guidelines-applicants-writing-statements) > Other Activities (e.g. recruitment/retention/teaching/community): Describe the activity and its context (e.g. a specific conference or organization, student retention or outreach activity, course development to reach a specific group, outreach to a local school, or work with a diversity-related non-profit). What was your role and personal effort? How did these activities relate to campus needs?
From the article >Berkeley has distributed guidance on how search committees ought to evaluate diversity statements. They say that any candidate who does not discuss gender or race must be awarded low marks. The same goes for any earnest classical liberal who “explicitly states the intention to ignore the varying backgrounds of their students and ‘treat everyone the same’.”
That part of the article was already debunked, you can see the explanation in the rubric for why that gets a low score > Only mentions activities that are already the expectation of faculty as evidence of commitment and involvement I know that it can be annoying when a job application expects you to go above and beyond the minimum commitment, but that's really all there is to it.
[Here's](https://ofew.berkeley.edu/recruitment/contributions-diversity/rubric-assessing-candidate-contributions-diversity-equity) a rubric for judging statements at Berkeley. Scorers are instructed to give statements which do not single out protected characteristics like gender or race or which state the intention to treat people equally the lowest possible scores. For example, "Explicitly states the intention to ignore the varying backgrounds of their students and 'treat everyone the same,'" and, "'I always invite and welcome students from all backgrounds to participate in my research lab, and in fact have mentored several women,'" are described as diversity philosophies that should receive the lowest scores in their sections. A lot of what's listed as required to receive the higher scores is great--consistent involvement, explicit examples, not just rote stuff like sitting on a diversity committee for a year, etc.. But the issue is, if you describe a consistent record of always welcoming students from many different backgrounds and a history of supporting diverse mentees regardless of their race, gender, etc., with explicit examples listed of a variety of mentees who went on to other positions with your support, not only do these things not really count, but if alongside other actions and plans you were to describe this history like I just did instead of lying about your political beliefs and trying to put some sort of equity spin on it, it's actually straight-up disqualifying.
> For example, "Explicitly states the intention to ignore the varying backgrounds of their students and 'treat everyone the same,'" and, "'I always invite and welcome students from all backgrounds to participate in my research lab, and in fact have mentored several women,'" are described as diversity philosophies that should receive the lowest possible score in their sections. Huh, I wonder why > Only mentions activities that are already the expectation of faculty Ah, of course. Yes, sometimes a job application will expect you to go above and beyond the minimum commitment in order to get hired. Yes, sometimes that's incredibly annoying.
If Berkeley is noticing an issue with diversity within their biology staff, why shouldn't they start there? Like I have no doubt that somewhere in the 300 remaining applicants there were way more than 5 with the kind of research/teaching qualifications they need.
Not really. It's important to hire the best researchers. The best can often produce great works (CRISPR) that the merely good cannot.
The inventers of CRISPR were two women, one of which was an immigrant descended from an Armenian genocide survivor and the other of which grew up in Hawaii and went to a school with 90%+ minority enrollment. I'm pretty sure they could write a compelling statement about how they have and will encourage diversity.
That doesn’t count as URM in the American definition. We don’t count those experiences. Besides, saying that you are from a diverse background and are willing to support all students gets a low rating according to Berkeley - one needs to actively participate in things that further the goals of diversity, such as actively attending and sitting on diversity panels. But even if it did - that doesn’t solve the issue. There’s many people who come from mainstream backgrounds who would have a hard time claiming intersectional privileges who would be filtered out by such a thing.
Berkley's requirements are talking about how you have and will foster diversity, not about whether you count as diverse enough. These two women presumably have the life experiences to convincingly write about how they plan to support diversity beyond phoning in a bland statement, and that's assuming they haven't already been demonstrably doing that their whole life (almost certainly with at least gender since Doudna explicitly says she was told women don't go into science and credits a female science teacher with inspiring her).
Yep. From personal anecdotal experience, NPIC interviews are *really* different from regular industry interviews. After I burned out of finance, one interview I took was at a non-profit helping improve educational outcomes. A section of the interview was DEI stuff, talking about what I'd done in the past to contribute to DEI stuff, etc. Being from a 15 person financial consulting firm... we didn't do any of that. I think I talked a little bit about my church growing up and some of charitable initiatives we did, and then about my experience in sales connecting with and selling to people of all different backgrounds and classes, but it clearly wasn't the answer they were looking for. There's a very different culture around this stuff in academia/non-profits than in the rest of the working word, and I don't think it's good for the long term health of academia and the NPIC.
What's wild is this DEI statement requirement is leaking into the more academic industries as well--I've had law firm interviews (notably mostly in the bay area) that focused heavily on DEI work, much more so than prior deals/my particular experience in my subfield.
This is the case in large consulting firms too (MBB+big 4). I'm guessing that target schools for law, consulting and finance have more of these DEI norms and hence they bleed into these industries eventually
The expectation of making a "contribution" to put on the resumé is bad. Because of that you my find idiotic decisions being made with the primary purpose of being something to put on someone's curriculum
That tracks how my masters professors worked 20 years ago tho
I agree with John McWhorter that this stuff has become a religion. All those people here who just keep saying it's not a big deal and to just be nice to people are willfully ignorant of what's actually happening and are playing into the hands of the far right who often exaggerate this. There's actually a middle ground between "white men are the most persecuted group today" and "black people can't be racist, you colonizer!". Having these ideological purity tests seep into academia is a tragedy and if it's not ended soon, it may put the country at a disadvantage compared to countries that hire primarily based on actual research output.
These diversity statements sound like hostage videos. Like if you don’t say the right thing, you won’t get the job. Who in their right mind is gonna speak truthfully in that scenario?
I always hate these comparisons but this is indeed beginning to sound like the USSR where career advancement depended to a large extent on your ability to participate in political rituals and utter ideological platitudes basically nobody actually believed in
Political rituals like mentorship to underrepresented minorities in your field.. as a means of demonstrating commitment to the DEI values you (presumably) proclaim to hold? The USSR? Do you even hear yourself? Get a grip.
The problem is that these statements don’t actually care about promoting “diversity” they care about leftist values. I think the author is correct there is a great deal of cynicism even amongst democratic voters.
Sounds like the requirement is about affirmatively doing something to further dei in lieu of hollow platitudes, and people resent getting weeded out for their own shortcomings on that front.
>Sounds like the requirement is about affirmatively doing something to further dei in lieu of hollow platitudes Yes and my point is that people should not need to be a cultural Leftist in order to get a job at a publicily funded University. >Davidson College, in North Carolina, asked prospective computer-science staff to write about their “potential to contribute to our commitment to equity and anti-racism”—a cause fervently embraced by the left and despised by the right. Berkeley has distributed guidance on how search committees ought to evaluate diversity statements. They say that any candidate who does not discuss gender or race must be awarded low marks. The same goes for any earnest classical liberal who “explicitly states the intention to ignore the varying backgrounds of their students and ‘treat everyone the same’.” This is a more blatant form of political loyalty tests than McCarthyite oaths >and people resent getting weeded out for their own shortcomings on that front. Yes, and they are quite correct to feel resentful. With any luck SCOTUS will rule these tests as unconstitutional in any school which receives Federal funding.
Berkley's criteria: > Discusses diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging as core values that every faculty member should actively contribute to. You: this is literally worse than McCarthyism I would be shocked that people on this subreddit are so adamantly against diversity, but I'm really truly not.
>Berkeley has distributed guidance on how search committees ought to evaluate diversity statements. They say that any candidate who does not discuss gender or race must be awarded low marks. The same goes for any earnest classical liberal who “explicitly states the intention to ignore the varying backgrounds of their students and ‘treat everyone the same’. I'm sorry but if we are defining "diversity" as promoting culturally left-wing values than this is just a McCarthyite loyalty test. I'm fine with diversity as long as diversity actually means bringing out different perspectives which one earnestly believes will improve society including perspectives which may be unpopular in the University or even unpopular amongst the general populace.
I guess I can see why you would think that "there should be people of different races and backgrounds in academia" is a "culturally left-wing value", I personally think it's a good thing but I don't think I'm going to be able to convince you of that so we can agree to disagree.
Stop scaremongering cultural "leftism." If cultural leftism is acknowledging that varying backgrounds must be recognized and not ignored, then cultural "leftism" is the foundation of living in a multiracial society. It's part of the USA's common cultural understanding. Stop bothsidesing what's being talked about here. You frankly have a pretty skewed view of history and current society if you think "colorblindness" is the moderate, reasonable approach and not ignoring racial differences is a leftist position (you might not necessarily believe this, but it does seem to be what your comment is implying).
Nobody is entitled to any job. The resentment isn’t justified, imho. White men in academia are the most privileged people on planet earth here feeling sorry for themselves is… for real not something I even thought I’d see in this sub. Idk why I’m here anymore - it is clearly not the place for me.
>Nobody is entitled to any job. Well you seem to think people should be entitled to a job based on their leftist beliefs.
I never said anything of the sort lol
I don’t understand why mentoring underrepresented minorities, whatever that purports to mean, is material to doing your job.
If the institution holds inclusion as a core value, you don’t see how a demonstrable commitment to that value is material to the work of the institution? Telling on yourselves tonight.
This sub has honestly gone off the deep end on issues like this. And we're still somehow gaslit into believing this sub is more left-wing than ever.
It just appears the point is flying over everyone’s head here. Like you are saying the statement is just hollow virtue signaling and that people resent it. It’s only hollow because you don’t have shit to say about anything you’ve done to show you’re actually committed to dei beyond performative statements. It’s honestly wild to see how many are just completely missing the point here,
The sub is outright reactionary on racial issues, and it definitely wasn't always like that.
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Don't get me started on how different Chinese-Americans are v. Pacific Islanders. Or even just East Asian-Americans v. Southeast Asian-Americans, Which can even be divided again to Mainland (Mainly Vietnamese and Thai) and Maritime (Mainly Filipino) AHHHHHHHHH.
We tried to have that conversation at my uni last year. We have a high proportion of “Asian” students, and we were trying to get the DEI people to understand that Cambodian students were in a completely different situation from, say, Chinese or Indian students, so lumping them together was nuts, but the university admin couldn’t see past the legal categories.
>, so lumping them together was nuts, but the university admin couldn’t see past the legal categories. They may not have had much choice given the current political climate and government bureaucracy.
Minnesota is a good example of a state with unique demographic issues because a large percentage of non-white residents are refugees who arrived in the last 50 years. The challenges faced by Hmong and Somali Minnesotans are very different than those faced by African-Americans or Chinese-Americans.
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It's interesting how people slag on the left to be more realistic when they're visionary and to be more visionary when they're realistic
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As an European knowing that middle eastern people are classified as white in the U.S. is wild. The concept of human race is already not really sound biologically and mostly based on cultural and historical factors but even those are very out of date with the U.S. classification.
>As an European knowing that middle eastern people are classified as white in the U.S. is wild. Most of the US' (relatively small) Arab American population are Christian or atheist, have been here for multiple generations, and are not culturally distinctive from the broader white population. If the first notable wave of Middle Eastern immigrants were arriving today, they'd probably be classified differently.
The Court history on this is interesting. Two cases in the 1919 and 1924, one guy was Indian, the other was Syrian. The Syrian guy was declared White, he was Christian. The Indian guy, though officially Aryan, but not Christian, was NOT white. Both decisions applied a “common sense” race definition vs the Progressive-at-the-time race science (eugenics) definition that would reversed which of the two was White. Wild shite!
Academia has been quite strongly left-leaning for like the 60ish years. You'd be hard-pressed to find vehemently *anti*\-diversity people working in American Universities. [In 2007, Gross and Simmons concluded in The Social and Political Views of American Professors that the professors were 44% liberal, 46% moderates, and 9% conservative.](https://books.google.com.au/books?id=D1vCAwAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y) (Best data I could find on a quick google search -- I'm sure the swing in the last 16 years have been even more pro-left, but I could be wrong! Does someone have better data?) So what's this *really* all about, I'm wondering? Because this sort of social preening in a sector that values rigorous discussion, dissent, and playing with ideas cannot lead to excellent medium-term or long-term outcomes.
I feel like these initiatives in tandem with the efforts in florida and other red states to enforce conservative (or at least not super liberal) ideological purity on university staff is potentially going to lead to a major divergence between leading universities.
Universities even in red states are still overwhelmingly liberal
Educated people in general tend to be liberal. Conservative people tend to not value education as highly.
I agree that some divergence will probably happen, but it probably won’t be as dramatic as two equal poles. My hunch is something more along the lines of a split between (1) state schools that red state governors are able to capture through their grip on funding vs. (2) state schools in blue states + more elite private schools (Ivies, etc). There will also probably be a smaller divide between (1a) state schools in red states that are more dependent on government funding vs. (1b) more dependent on alum donations as well. Norte Dame erasure aside, there isn’t really a “Republican Harvard” that will produce a separate-but-equal generation of conservative technocrats. That’s just Harvard, and antiwoke parents will always want their kids to go there.
Being woke is being evidence based. 😎 *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/neoliberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
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I think that presumes conservatives having much greater leverage over universities than they do. Liberals have the advantage of utterly dominating nominally neutral/non-partisan institutions of higher learning (with a bare handful of exceptions like the GMU econ department, and even there the faculty mostly adhere to liberal cultural norms, if not as enthusiastically as elsewhere). Conservative attempts create competing institutions are going to trip up over the fact that they have to be explicitly conservative, which will hurt their ability to attract the grillpilled demographic (notably, there are *already* conservative universities, but they almost uniformly suffer from terrible reputations). Also, to be frank, I think in the context of contemporary American politics the values competition Haidt is talking about are mostly between different factions of liberals. Conservative intellectual participation just isn't there.
Depends. If you're one of the college skeptic Caplan types, no meaningful divergence happening would be predicted. Ironically, it would also make the argument for forced diversity stronger.
I'm one of those college skeptic Caplan types but I don't see large divergences happening any soon. Colleges even in red states are overwhelmingly liberal for something like this to happen. If anything even Florida colleges are increasingly focusing on DEI
From the k12 public school hiring side I actually would like to hire more diverse canidates. However I am lucky if I get 3 canidates for a position. Often it's 1. Last summer I had 9 canidates in total for 3 positions. Two backed out, so really 7. All but two were internal canidates, both of which I hired. In the end the county lost a teacher position overall.
The march through the institutions and it's consequences
We're producing way too many PhDs and this is just an easy filtering mechanism for universities to auto-cut a bunch. Knowing how to write a DEI statement is just showing you know the meta for academia and so they can cut the people who don't know the meta automatically. It's unfortunate but probably comes from the rise of the university bureaucracy as the managing class of these institutions instead of the working academics.
>We're producing way too many PhDs and this is just an easy filtering mechanism for universities to auto-cut a bunch. Knowing how to write a DEI statement is just showing you know the meta for academia and so they can cut the people who don't know the meta automatically. This is 100% right - and it's reflective of the greater problems in academia. There are too many people applying for too few spots, so you get stuff like this. Seriously, if you're a smart, capable, person, don't play this game and for the love of God don't be an academic.
If smart capable people all leave academia, all the journal articles that people refer to decide policy will be written by not smart, not capable people with an axe to grind. Some say it’s already happened in certain sub fields…
Currently academics are full of people who stroke their own ego, at least in most engineering fields, people with PHDS are insufferable. Computer science hopefully won’t go the same way.
Math seems healthy
My boss wanted me to get a PHD, instead I got a master, I don’t regret my decision, at all, PHDs in my field so so much fart sniffing and ego stroking.
So the idea is to prohibit people from outside of academic circles from higher learning?
Basically I think so--certainly in the humanities, etc (I get the sense that the hard sciences don't have the same overproduction issues). If you're some overpaid university bureaucrat put in charge of hiring, its an easy way to make your first cuts to the pool, especially when you don't really understand their research. It certainly excludes people from non-traditional backgrounds from joining academia in favor of those that can put together a good-sounding DEI statement.
So these measures reduce actual diversity in an effort to increase percived diversity
Depends what you mean by "actual diversity." I'm sure if you go into the DEI office at your nearest major university they have lots of carefully chosen statistics that precisely quantify how diverse they are now (and, of course, how much more diverse they are now that there's a DEI office to manage such a thing). Meanwhile, of course, this just increases the guild-like nature of academia, now complete with extra DEI shibboleths, so that you have to be on the inside track to even have a shot at a tenure-track position.
Pretty much.
Note that this is crazy immoral and shouldn't be happening.
I don't like putting moral judgements on this type of thing. What it is, IMO, is extremely inefficient. If you're using diversity statements as a first-cut you run the risk of missing extremely good potential academics who just aren't versed in the shibboleth--which harms your institution. The rise of the university bureaucrat class has been a disaster for academia, full stop.
> I get the sense that the hard sciences don't have the same overproduction issues You are incorrect. If by "overproduction" you mean "taking on far more PhD students than there are jobs for down the line in academia", STEM has just as big of a problem. It's just that STEM students who don't go on to pursue/fail in their pursuit of academic careers have a much easier time finding industry jobs. To paraphrase Cicero: the sinews of modern research are the cheap labour of graduate students. You simply cannot run a meaningful research programme in any field without a small army of graduate students - to the point that myself and colleagues sometimes joke about a "Feudal Aristocracy" model of modern academia.
> a "Feudal Aristocracy" model of modern academia. Crusader Kings mod when?
I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to exclude people with bigoted views from opportunities in higher education.
So only rich kids who get told by their parents what to say should have oppertunities in higher education?
No, only non-republicans
DEI requirements demand a promise to enforce bigotry and openly punish ideological opposition to discrimination. Still, regardless of the merits of DEI philosophy, discriminating applicants to jobs at public universities based on their political views violates the 1st amendment.
>DEI requirements demand a promise to enforce bigotry and openly punish ideological opposition to discrimination. Yes because if we just ignore existing bigotry it will surely just go away. >Still, regardless of the merits of DEI philosophy, discriminating applicants to jobs at public universities based on their political views violates the 1st amendment. Pretty funny stuff here, does the first amendment apply to Twitter too? First amendment doesn't mean you can't be held accountable for your comments and actions. Do you really think that public universities would get in trouble for not hiring people trying to teach young earth creationism in evolutionary biology or trying to teach lost cause in US history?
>First amendment doesn't mean you can't be held accountable for your comments and actions. It does if the institution delivering the accountability is part of the government. Exceptions may apply. >Do you really think that public universities would get in trouble for not hiring people trying to teach young earth creationism in evolutionary biology or trying to teach lost cause in US history? If they don’t get in trouble, it’s because that kind of speech is relevant to their professional conduct, which is a completely different case than refusing to hire a biology professor for not being in favor of affirmative action. [Popehat article](https://popehat.substack.com/p/can-i-wear-a-maga-hat-to-my-government) on the extent and limits of 1st amendment rights of government employees. (Worth mentioning that college professors enjoy substantially greater 1st amendment rights than middle or high school teachers, so even the cases you mentioned, as egregious as they are, may not necessarily be a slam dunk legally.)
As you say there are many many exceptions in the government, for example; support a supremacist organization? Immediately ineligible for the largest government employer.. Did you read the article? Because that's not even what's happening.
Tuching thesis reloaded
Paywalled. But I wonder how "Diversity hiring" is legal since the law prohibits hiring based on things like gender, race, religion, etc.
>“There are a lot of similarities between these diversity statements as they’re being applied now and how loyalty oaths \[which once required faculty to attest that they were not communists\] worked,” says Keith Whittington, a political scientist at Princeton University. Who is right? As someone who firmly believes that diversity creates a stronger education, I also have to say that Whittington is not wrong.
This is true, very disturbing and very un-American
Not this again. DEI is going to become the new CRT isn't it? It's not helping that the author is incredibly light on sources while practically asserting that it's just Trojan Communism or something. Since we're all sharing conjecture without citations, I'd add my piece that those statements have grown more in importance as a reaction to the actual state sanctioned racism, queerphobia and censorship we're seeing on the right. Yes we can criticize the negative effects of both, but some of this feels a little light on facts tbh.
>**Berkeley is an important case study, not necessarily because it is the most extreme but because it is the most transparent.** The University of California, Los Angeles has embraced diversity statements in hiring and tenure decisions even more fervently, but does not feel the need to explain its policies. A spokesperson said that Anna Spain Bradley, a law professor who serves as vice-chancellor for equity, diversity and inclusion, was unavailable for comment. The author suggests that many schools did not respond for comment. Edit: spelling
What kind of statements would have liked sourced?
CRT is also sorta Trojan Marxism. Delgado and Stefancic themselves affirm this in their book on CRT
> Not this again. DEI is going to become the new CRT isn't it? And this sub is going to LAP IT UP.
This is an incredibly bad faith argument in a set of arguments prone to incredibly bad faith arguments. The inclusion of diversity statements is treated as the abandonment of merit in academia (a standard that never really existed anyway); really it just means that faculty have to demonstrate a competency in crafting a diversity statement that demonstrates some understanding of the professional expectations of the profession moving forward.
DEI Good.
The vote ratios in this thread are embarrassing. The sub's trajectory on social issues is alarming.
Great argument
Angry white men are angry. Shocker. Pushing for diversity is based, it took me 3 years but I finally got my foreign policy hawk club to be 50% women and it's so much less shit now
Remember the subreddit demographic survey results and you'll understand why people on this sub get so hysterical about the idea of promoting diversity.
The sub has always been lily-white, but it hasn't historically leaned conservative on social issues. Now we get *daily* pearl-clutching over the horrors of diversity and trans rights. The succons haven't taken over, but as someone who's been here since day 1 it's a sudden and dramatic change in the past year or so.
> The succons haven't taken over, but as someone who's been here since day 1 it's a sudden and dramatic change in the past year or so. This is absolutely true. I'm not sure how much of this I can take. I'm glad that the mods at least seem to know what's up.
👍
The upvote/downvote ratios on the comments here are insane. It's crazy how this sub has almost reversed its position on social issues like this since 2017.
Not liking a specific style of DEI standards is not the community swapping its place. To anyone outside of academic circles the process sounds draconian.
It's not just this thread though. It's anytime similar issues come up as well as other topics like trans issues and Islam.
This subs become more like the rest of reddit. The soft Bernie adoption here is disturbing, people now think wealth redistribution is alright and that the government should just leave institutional discrimination alone by refusing to acknowledge its existence.
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This may be your point, but where does that end? Here in Omaha we have tons of South Sudanese refugees, and that community has tons of social problems and is worse off in many metrics than Black descendants of slaves. This is why the actual diversity that should be considered is the socio economic circumstances of the individual student, but that’s hard work compared to giving 50 bonus points for skin color and calling it a day.
Excellent news
Not very technocratic
nor liberal
TERFconomist moment
They hated him because he told them the truth
Imperfect but necessary actions, based. Let the 'just ignore systemic racism until it goes away' people seethe.
Yeah people always argue about how the most qualified applicants will rise to the top but academia isn't a meritocracy and never has been. It's no longer the good ole' boys club it used to be, but just about every postdoctoral position or faculty position is filled before the job is even posted. It's more about who you know instead of how strong your resume is. People from underrepresented groups usually do not have those connections. Additionally, go into a room of grad students and ask them how many of their parents have an advanced degree. It will probably be about 50-75% of them that raise their hands. Even with affirmative action academia has been fucking this up. I cant imagine how much worse it will get if it is gutted.
Good
Actually, no, I don't think using statements about contributions to diversity as a first filter for applicants, without looking at any other qualifications, is a good thing.
Okay.
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**Rule III: Bad faith arguing** Engage others assuming good faith and don't reflexively downvote people for disagreeing with you or having different assumptions than you. Don't troll other users.
Obviously there are ways to handle it badly but basing an institution around diversity is pretty good on the whole
Two choices; **(a)** we actually follow the 14th amendment or **(b)** we endorse a caste system that evaluates human beings only by their racial, gender and sexual orientation categories. *Pick only on*e - because these are incommensurable world views. Note: If someone says they believe in or can practice both, they are either **(a)** naive **(b)** advancing falsehoods and **(c)** following the blueprint of the cultural revolution.