The Impact of Chief Diversity Officers on Diverse Faculty Hiring
nber.org
nber.org
This is certainly no surprise to anyone. The real question is - is this because most college administration jobs are just bureaucratic rent seeking, and really don't do anything to begin with, or is it because trying to hire diversity is difficult because there is a low supply of diverse candidates who meet requirements?
At the risk of appearing trite, that *or* is very probably inclusive.
Honestly, I think university culture is too diversity/intersectionality/critical race theory etc. focused at the expense of other goals. So it wouldn't surprise me if additional diversity is hard to achieve.
I'll admit, this possibility is incredibly small.
Diversity is not merely a set of physical traits—it has to run through the psychological core of a person.
I disagree. When I was in college ~4 years ago there were diverse discussions in all my classes and students freely contributed what would be considered conservative mainstream opinions without retribution - and when well argued earned some support from their more liberal colleagues.
University means different things to different people. For many it means partying. For others it means the paper certificate you may then use to get a higher paying job. To me the heart of a university is the discussion sections where students pick and prod at their lectures and each other's ideas. Diversity initiatives did not, anecdotally, affect those for me personally.
Claiming that you know otherwise is highly indicative you're part of the problem when it comes to diversity of thought in these venues.
Sure, but the presence of these opinions is not the same thing as proof of a diverse, free-thinking environment. I shared unpopular opinions too—when I felt I could. It wasn't always easy to do so.
The chilling effect is hard to measure because people self-censor and self-censorship is invisible. It's a bit hard to explain, but if we take your metric and extend it, you can see where it falls short: just because there are black students on campus doesn't mean they feel welcome or comfortable to share their minds.
https://econjwatch.org/articles/faculty-voter-registration-i...
>We looked up 7,243 professors and found 3,623 to be registered Democratic and 314 Republican, for an overall D:R ratio of 11.5:1.
Across federal employees, that doesn’t seem to matter much. I also wouldn’t expect republicans to care so much that they’d put monetary source before job type/location — it’d be quite difficult to be a republican teacher and find a job that’s not significantly government-funded
- Of 12k donors from University of California faculty, only 6% donated to Trump, 94% to Biden
- MIT, 5% Trump, 95% Biden
- Stanford, 5% Trump, 95% Biden
- Harvard, 4% Trump, 96% Biden
- University of Colorado, 4% Trump, 96% Biden
- University of Washington, 3% Trump, 97% Biden
And so on: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-election-trump-biden...
What I was doing was being a bit facetious, by using the plain definition of the word conservative rather than the contemporary stretched definition referring to a movement that is better described as radical populism. And I obviously don't believe that colleges are full of conservatives - that was a reductio ad absurdum.
My actual point is that it's foolish to be looking at that 2020 presidential race as a proxy for conservatism on college campuses, especially tolerance of conservatism, when the candidate calling himself "conservative" is nothing of the sort. Put another way, shunning Trump supporters is in no way shunning conservatives.
You are making an assumption that Republicans only donated to Trump and not to Biden. The Bloomberg article is about donations based on profession and large employers, not political affiliation or party.
Then prove it. Linking to an article to support an argument is fruitless if it doesn't support the argument.
I think the irony of MAGA is that it made a bad situation far worse. Or rather, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. The question is whether or not we’ve learned that lesson.
At some level I believe that this is accelerationism. You see pockets of it on both the far left and the far right. It was at least a competiting narrative of the last 4 years, though perhaps subdued from the mainstream.
So considering that there's all this wolf-crying about tech, and the warnings about universities sound almost exactly the same, I'm going to go ahead and just assume they're also wolf-crying.
Which needn't damn the whole sector, but is still worrying considering how influential those places are.
* Universal tracking and rating would allow better standards of living for normative people
* It's okay to exclude low-quality people from some parts of cities since they are generally bad for everyone else
* It's okay for some army of people to be kept quiescent with heroin since it is societally cheaper than attempting to get them productive
* Government employees are mostly rent-seekers. We can create systems far more capable than them.
* Most government services should also have auction lanes where you can just bypass the normal line.
Essentially, lots of anti-equity stuff, lots of anti-privacy stuff, lots of callous nonsense. People engage with this all in good faith (which is nice, because I'm not trolling them).
I suspect lots of people are just expressing views no one is eager to debate because they're uninteresting.
For instance, among those you have listed there is the bog-standard and comforting "we have to control poor people and keep them away from us" but with the pretend-edgy "using heroin" as a twist. An excellent candidate to invite debate.
If you were to express views that were actually alien to them, I sincerely doubt you'd find an audience among your colleagues no matter your personal characteristics.
¹ The relative merits of coprophagia, for instance, are sort of boring. Some enjoy it, others are disgusted, but there's really nothing interesting about "is coprophagia cool". Likewise, "are evil Jew bankers eating babies?" is sort of boring too.
I don't need to be convinced, I am sure you can come up with arguments for any topic. My point is more along the lines that what stops debates in real life isn't edginess, extreme views in and of themselves, or the lack of arguments. After all, many people enjoy the feeling of camaraderie that comes from sharing purportedly taboo topics with people they don't know all that well yet. It's just that what is actually abhorrent as measured by people's actual rejection of a discussion has more to do with calling into question the status or material wealth of their own class. For example, looking at a typical high-salary liberal in the tech sector, they generally hold a mix of standard pro-equity beliefs, some more discreet randian/ancap beliefs about separating themselves from what they see as lower classes and the meddling government, and a strong taboo surrounding an actual decrease in their social or effective capital.
Of course, this is all an intuitive reasoning based on anecdotal experience, so we might just be butting anecdotal realities at each other.
If there is a monoculture, then there are ideas that are abhorrent to that monoculture. I will attempt, at my own risk, to bring up these ideas and see if I'm cancelled if someone out there will just state them instead of talking in vague terms about these automatic blackball ideas.
We can test this hypothesis. I am volunteering. There is no risk to anyone else. I don't see why no one is taking me up on this. Or rather, I do see why.
My entire point is that I was surprised because of all the beliefs you mentioned having tested out in a social setting, all seemed to sit squarely within that spectrum (distancing from other classes, technocratic solutions to social ills, desire to bypass the government... etc.). Some examples of ideas that would probably be less well received: - Far-left principles involving redistribution of tech worker capital - Explicit racism instead of the condescending or implied version - Anything to do with reversing gentrification or having poor people move next to their homes
Basically anything that would upset someone who is both socially liberal on the surface but has a discreet cynical side and a strong material incentive to keep the status quo going. In other words, a neoliberal. Beyond that, there's not much else I was looking to add or test out.
I'm sure I'll get arguments out of those but no cancelling so I'm content with that level of agreement.
Edit: Adding on to the generational change asepect, the Millenials and Gen Z people I know are much more sensitive to the idea of offending someone. And to be honest... are much more likely themselves to be offended. My alma mater now has an offical BERT - Bias Education Response Team. As a student you can file a complaint with the BERT against the offending person(s). When I went to college the expectation was that your worldview would get challenged and that was a good thing. But now it looks like you can get in some serious trouble for doing so.
...
Cut it out with the regurgitated Fox News talking points. My college has a university funded Bible studies club, an entire religion studies department, and a rather large college conservatives political club. My advisor is literally a Deacon in the Orthodox Catholic Church and another professor in the same department used to be a protestant pastor. Nobody is coming to brainwash your children.
what if the goal is to entrench an ideology?
a good strategy would be getting control of the hiring process. then adding signals and filters for like-minded people. CDOs may be highly effective if measured on that basis.
Best way to get "diverse" tenured hires is to get "diverse" grad students. And the best way to get "diverse" grad students is to get "diverse" undergrads.
And, shockingly, getting "diverse" undergrads can be achieved... by investing in whatever "diverse" community you want to grow.
If only it were so simple. The world's best intelligence scientists and education researchers have spent the past three generations confirming and reconfirming the persistent gap in intelligence between different races.
The gap persists even as average IQ skews upward over time.
The "woke" viewpoint, and the friendly-seeming, easy-to-agree-with framing is that every difference in outcome is explained by oppression--full stop.
That this completely contradicts what we'd expect based on 60 years of hard data and irrefutable evidence is of no concern--as the arbiters of what is culturally acceptable, it is now verboten in most venues to even acknowledge the obvious race-based intelligence gaps. See: Charles Murray, a truly gifted scholar, being pilloried and cast away as though he were a holocaust denier.
It's also possible a small to mid size organization gets into some imbroglio on Twitter and realizes they need a CDO to try and stop the bad PR.
As you stated, this functions to benefit the large organizations that can afford the premiums while smaller organizations will go unprotected and pay the costs of the outrage that will be deflected their way.
It's just that hiring someone specifically for this seems a bit silly. To take a coding parallel, it's as if you had a "chief code review officer" to ensure people are doing enough code reviews. We all agree that code reviews are a good thing, and that most companies could do with more of them, but we also think it's a bit silly to have n executive position for it
i.e. I'm not saying that selection should be based on skin colour, I'm saying that it's a good long term goal for our institutions (be they fortune 500 companies or universities) to reflect the diversity of our society. There are lots of ways to get there, and american-style racial quotas are definitely not the best way IMHO
From the start, there are absolutely people out there who argue diversity is bad and that ultimately we should live in some kind of ethnostate. Then there's a whole gradient of people from that end to people who think the government should force integration in pretty much any semi-public setting. There are definitely people out there arguing diversity is bad. I don't agree with these people, but I at least acknowledge these people do exist.
In this spectrum, there are other people who don't have a problem with diversity but only wish for such things to happen more or less organically. Of course there's a view that if the people making hiring decisions are always a particular kind of world view they're going to usually select people they can self-identify with leading to a self-selection bias that restricts the rate of integration in an organization. Enforcing such integration or not, or the level of such forced integration, is absolutely a diverse range of policy viewpoints largely anchored on base political ideologies.
Your own opinion that "hiring someone specifically for this seems a bit silly" is a view you have based on your ideology. Others don't find it silly, which is their view based on their ideology.
And FYI it's not a paradox that you can 'care about diversity' and still be bullied by activists.
Major corporations are making requirements for panels at conferences etc. and it can get very complicated.
A female documentarian in Montreal just quit the industry over the institutional rejection of her work which focused on homelessness and happened to be mostly 'white men' due to requirements of diversity.
In my own discussions with 'executive level people' I find that they are generally of the classically liberal type (think European liberal). Basically - they are nice, upper middle class white men who actually do 'care' about such things, but generally are not exactly well read or super thoughtful on the issue. They're not 'up on the lingo' and are very, very afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing. The 'right thing' is effectively forced upon them, and they generally act to placate angry voices and want it to all go away, like a Father caving to his teenagers angry demands about this that, hoping that tomorrow it will all just go away.
I've heard, even my own very white, executive golf club member say the most 'woke' things lately it's almost made me laugh, when I inquire about it, it's clear they have no idea what they are saying, they are repeating the argument made to them by someone with a more radical view.
Because there is no 'pushback' on the issue (everyone is afraid), then things get out of tilt.
I'm not sure what the end-game is, but it would be nice if there were some kind of 'centrist' and defensible ideal that people could appeal to that enables execs to make thoughtful decisions about diversity but that aren't based on 'caving out of fear to activism'.
Homeless folks were white men in Montreal? How is that surprising?
The industry preference is for sympathetic stories of Aboriginal, LGBTQQ, PoC etc..
This becomes apparent everywhere there is government or related money, i.e. grant applications for projects, even commercial enterprises.
Of course there's some thoughtful impetus behind this on some level, but these trends become cultish and authoritarian, sometimes promoting some upside down worldviews.
It was one in a long string of "jumping the shark" moments for me, as it became clear that, even in a department full of people who were deeply and genuinely concerned about diversity issues, it didn't really matter what was actually done. What mattered were the formal legalistic trappings of it.
These types of formal programs can really backfire as well. I can recall another instance where the college had a sort of endowed faculty line aimed solely at minority hires. The irony was that this had the effect of attracting the most psychopathic elements in the programs, who publicly advocated hiring faculty under this mechanism in a sort of "pump and dump" scheme. That is, the line was in a certain area of research, which certain faculty had made it clear for years they believed was unworthy of hiring in. However, they were happy to advocate hiring using these diversity funds as a way of bringing money into the department, solely as a financial input, with the implication that it didn't really matter what happened to the faculty being hired. So in this sadly ironic way, this line, which was meant to bring in minority hires, ended up hurting minorities, by luring them into positions where they were almost certainly never going to get tenure, just by virtue of the politics of the research area in that program.
To be clear, I'm not actually advocating against diversity programs or officers per se, as I've seen these offices intervene in situations where it was desperately needed. It's almost like the current approaches I've seen have had the effect of creating as many problems as they solved, canceling everything out. It probably mirrors some of what goes on, where the same people aggressively advocating for addressing prejudice with regard to one characteristic can be some of the most bigoted prejudiced people with regard to another characteristic. Or people will change their tunes on diversity issues to suit their financial benefit.
One could force up those candidates that would add to a department's diversity, even if there is no indication of prior adverse circumstances. This is however considered undesirable - it might not be fair and also be bad for the candidate's reputation in the long run.
Academic hiring can be great fun but in the end it is already a completely ill-defined optimization problem. I do not see how a CDO could be a valuable addition to the process.
See, people keep saying this, but when I was in school (in the U.S.) - especially when I was in grad school in the mid 00's - I was the lone white male in a sea of Indians. My teachers were Indian. The TA's were Indian. My classmates were Indian. There was one class where there were two Americans, including me - and the other one was born to Indian immigrants.
And today, all my co-workers are Indian.
I should not have said "white male", in particular because in my field there are also a significant number of (excellent) Chinese and Indian researchers. Although we should not forget about the many other underrepresented groups, the most visible diversity issue for us is the gender asymmetry.
While I don't have the numbers, it would not surprise me that for at least CS/Software and likely other many other professions white male is by no means the run-of-the-mill applicant.
The press release is the least impactful long term consequence of the decision.
I assume it's in steep decline the last few decades.
> # Mentioned in the News > * Colleges Are Hiring More Diversity Officers Than Ever - Here's How Racial Resentment Could Be ... JULY 13, 2020 SOURCE: THE DAILY CALLER > Surprise: Diversity officials pull down big salaries with little effect > SEPTEMBER 7, 2018 > SOURCE: THE COLLEGE FIX