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Comment by moab | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like you have not been in an R1 university (ever?) and are pulling your critiques out of a hat after listening to right-of-center podcasts like the Rubin report. I would love to hear about a _single_ R1 university that is hiring based on identity criteria, where the majority of the staff are "career bureaucrats who contribute nothing to research". The way you get grant money is by doing research that gets published at top-tier conferences, and at least in CS it is pretty hard to bullshit your way into those. Try not to make authoritative sounding posts like this without any knowledge of what you are talking about.

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Respectfully, I think you're basing this assessment on what it was like when you or I went to college and haven't kept up with recent trends. If you apply to most R1 faculties today, you'll be required to write what's known as a "diversity statement", a detailed explanation of what you've done for underrepresented identity groups and how you intend to help them in the future. And the UC headcount stats (https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/uc-employe...) show 11,559 tenure-track faculty vs. about 16,500 "managers and senior professionals" - I don't quite agree with the tone of the original claim, but I think it's fair to say that means there's more bureaucrats than researchers.

I recently applied to the faculty job market and wrote a diversity statement. I have also served on the hiring end (last year), and have heard enough to understand that the content in this statement will neither make nor break your case, but is an additional datapoint that the committee takes into consideration.

I hope the OP understands I was being mostly sarcastic, but really they wrote a (imo) uninformed post about the university life which is far from the reality at the research-oriented institutions I've passed through in the past 10 years.

Thanks for the additional datapoint. Speaking seriously, I am on the same page about bloat and there is a very real danger of it especially in the UC and other state school systems. Maybe private institutions are more robust to bloat since there is less protection for non-tenured employment. Generally the trend to hiring XM$/yr administrators as university heads is worrying, but I am not sure what the fix for it is in the endless competition for endowment and donor money.

Last edit: check out "Bullshit Jobs" by David Graeber if you haven't already. You may not agree with his politics or his prescriptions, but the book is a funny and highly alarming wakeup call to the proliferation of useless jobs (part of the book discusses bloat in university administrations).

Oh yeah, I've heard about that book before! I keep putting it off, maybe this time I'll actually read it over the holidays.

I have a graduate degree from an R1 University. Perhaps you should back off a little on the personal attacks and substantiate your rebuttal with more than insults. My point was on the overall US University system, not R1 Universities , not that it matters all that much.

For R1, on administrative bloat:

https://oir.harvard.edu/fact-book/faculty_and_staff

https://web.mit.edu/facts/faculty.html

In both you can see that there are more people in the Administrative staff than in the faculty. As to discrimination based admission, Harvard and Yale were sued for that, I am sure you know about it. As for discrimination in hiring, here is a Cornell study :

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2015/04/women-preferred-21-...

Thanks for the datapoints and level-headed reply, and apologies for the snark.

I didn't know about the Cornell study, although I am not at all surprised to hear that. How do you suggest representation imbalance in CS faculty gets somewhat closer to 50/50 without having some kind of bias towards hiring women, though? As someone of Asian descent, I totally understand where the lawsuits against Harvard/Yale were coming from, but at the same time I see no way to fix representation in undergrad/grad-school/faculty outside of some kind of "discriminative" hiring procedures (outside of fixing much broader and challenging systemic issues).

I think the problem is this belief that there is something to fix at all. It goes without saying that there should be no barriers to anyone doing anything they want, but we have that already. Why is 50/50 in CS a goal at all? Who cares? Do we also want 50/50 in nursing? on oil rigs? or in prison? Why? Seriously, WTF? Are we so stupid that we discount millions of years of evolution and chalk any difference in outcome to cultural norms? It is all so, so stupid, and we all know it.

I agree that in principle anyone can do what they want, and I hope that in our long term our society can actually realize this ideal, but in practice an individual's decisions are informed by the mores and attitudes of the culture they find themselves in. So the conflating factor is our society's history of discouraging women from pursuing technical paths, the (older) insistence that they be homemakers and take on more traditionally feminine roles (like K-12 teachers). Yes, we no longer overtly say such things, but the effects of these attitudes persist across large subpopulations and ethnic groups. It seems very likely to me that traditional gender roles and attitudes about what jobs a women is capable of doing has caused fewer women to pursue math/physics (e.g., see the statistics here: https://math.mit.edu/wim/2019/03/10/national-mathematics-sur...).

Also consider the very recent history of breakthrough results coming from female mathematicians like Lisa Piccirillo and Urmila Mahadev. How much human potential are we leaving on the table, untapped?

I see no "easy fix" for improving representation in higher education other than affirmative action. It's one of the few knobs that we have to turn without much more significant changes to society like implementing UBI or making the average work week much shorter. While it may hurt people like me who happen to be well represented, and prevent me from joining the institution "I deserve" to be in, well maybe that's better for society in the long run.

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