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Comment by ordinaryradical | Hacker News Reader

The irony is that the modern university's view of diversity is so narrow-minded that it doesn't actually yield a diversity of perspectives. Yes, you can bolster a student body by welcoming students of different backgrounds, but ask any conservative student, any Christian student, or any student with no obvious ideological home in the secular Left if they feel welcomed and free to contribute the conversation and you will get an entirely different picture of the university system.

Diversity is not merely a set of physical traits—it has to run through the psychological core of a person.

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I remember when I was at an elite institution’s diversity training session and the facilitator asked people to stand up and say how they felt oppressed because of their diversity. An enormous man stood up and said that he felt that people thought he was stupid because he had a Southern accent. That was so clearly the “wrong” answer that even the facilitator laughed, until finding the black people and women she had been looking for.

When I attended a private liberal arts college (04-08) there were plenty of conservative and Christian students, and to my knowledge none had any issues with administration or faculty. Most of the problems came from other students, typically because of the ideological fervor of a fresh (and uneducated) convert.

Occupy wallstreet was 2011, it ended with the narrative switching from class warfare to critical race theory and systemic racism. Gamergate was 2014 when the culture war really started to heat up. 08 was a different time, things have really changed that much.

I felt like it went into overdrive in 2016. Maybe partially driven by a certain political figure who seemed to be the perfect foil.

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.

> I think the irony of MAGA is that it made a bad situation far worse.

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.

> an entirely different picture of the university system

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.

Unless you're the one stating the views, you're not in a position to know if those students received no retribution for their views. What you perceived as your peers listening and responding thoughtfully to the non-tribal thoughts may well have been anything but to someone without your set of assumptions. You simply cannot know.

Claiming that you know otherwise is highly indicative you're part of the problem when it comes to diversity of thought in these venues.

Isn't the premise already a problem? Even the mainstream conservative views did not result in retribution. Yet extremist liberal views would never be considered for retribution.

> students freely contributed what would be considered conservative mainstream opinions without retribution

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.

Would love to see some statistics on party affiliation of faculty at these universities as a proxy measure for ideological diversity.

I haven't thoroughly investigated this study or its methodology, but it doesn't seem very hard to believe:

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.

That kind of makes sense though - university jobs rely on government funding and it's usually the Republicans who (at least claim to) try to reduce government spending.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/146786/democrats-lead-ranks-uni...

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

It's not a good proxy, at least not anymore, so I'm not sure why you would. Plenty of fairly conservative people had been registered Republicans for a long time up through and maybe including 2016. Maybe this was different in the 90's or 00's and may have worked then?

Heavily Democrat:

- 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...

A straightforward conclusion from that data would be that universities are overwhelmingly conservative, having donated to the more conservative candidate. But really it just shows the futility of discussing things in terms of group affiliations when one of the major parties in the middle of an upheaval.

A straightforward conclusion would be that you are spinning that data really hard to try to make it support your narrative.

I didn't spin anything. The comment I was replying to said that 95% of faculty donations went to Biden. Biden was the conservative candidate - he respects institutions, supports gradual changes to the status quo, and goes to church regularly.

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.

A fair point - once you bother to make it. You could have made the same point in your previous point without sounding like you went full-on troll, though...

This is a weak proxy in this case. Could be ideological conservatives that didn't want to donate to a particular candidate

>Heavily Democrat

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.

He did. He's also probably correct. I'm pretty sure R/D affiliation is a fantastic feature for tracking the end target of any specific donation. A small subset of R's might donate to Biden, but those are likely swamped by the general split across party lines.

> He's also probably correct.

Then prove it. Linking to an article to support an argument is fruitless if it doesn't support the argument.

I am a bit confused by this. I went to college in the Midwest in the 90s (grew up in the Midwest) and to grad school on the east coast. I am agnostic, but my grandfather was a baptist minister and have other ministers in the family. I am a democrat. I was in the engineering school and started college with a lot of credits, so the only humanities/social science course I took was a junior level english class--so I can't comment on classes. But, I remember that people seemed quite willing to share Christian views. My roommate in grad school was a devout Catholic and we had several good debates in issues like abortion. I had another roommate who was a libertarian who also wasn't shy about his views. In college, I had friends that tried to convince me that the bible was consistent with evolution. My point is that at least in my interactions people seemed pretty comfortable sharing their views even if we disagreed. Has this changed in colleges (I don't work at a university)? Again, in classes I have no idea because it just doesn't come up in say a quantum field theory course or when you are learning analysis on manifolds. Even with coworkers, I had an officemate who was very pro iraq war and we debated a lot-- I also had him over for Thanksgiving dinner. Do I live in a bubble?

At lot has changed in 30 years. Not only are you about two generations removed from the current zeitgeist on college campuses, intersectionality means politics is now appropriate in fields that used to be apolitical.

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.

Josh Hawley graduated from Stanford, didn't he?

Also christians/religious and people that don't speak in correct PC terms all the time tend to come from poorer backgrounds, so "diversity" ends up discriminating against the poorest of society. For historical reasons these are often the most diverse.

I do believe there exist some well-meaning conservatives who come to be Big City College and are hammered for their views. I think their misfortune is not just to be exposed to the same sort (but opposite polarity) of conformity demands I experienced growing up in a small southern town, but also to be used as political weapons by their supposed allies.

Agreed. I was in ROTC at a very left-leaning campus during the "Bush=Hitler" fad. It wasn't a pleasant experience.

I too dream of a day that even a group as oppressed as Christians are in the US will be able to hold the presidency, the highest office in the land. Who knows, maybe one of these days they'll even manage it 46 times in a row. /s

...

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.

People say this about tech, too, and I'm in tech and not particularly left by the standards here (I support free enterprise way more than anything else and can easily say X lives are worth less than Y money) and people haven't been dicks to me at all. In fact, people quite like me.

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.

If you're willing to say, whereabouts are you? My impression is that the rampant illiberalism in tech is mostly confined to California/SV and companies headquartered there.

Which needn't damn the whole sector, but is still worrying considering how influential those places are.

I live in San Francisco. To be clear, here are some views I've expressed and had others discuss with me while still treating me kindly after both as a human being and as a coworker:

* 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).

That's certainly controversial, but seems to avoid the major Hot Buttons Of Doom i.e. anything coded on (or insufficiently coded on) the officially important kinds of identity label.

I don't want to be flagged here, so I avoided mentioning any of those. Rest assured that I didn't hesitate to correlate "low-quality people" or who should be given heroin instead of jobs with the appropriate visible markers.

What you describe just sounds like standard neoliberal ideas that tech people with high salaries are likely to gravitate towards. That said, some of these are not necessarily expressed directly or are cloaked in euphemisms and emerge more as actual behavior than stated opinions. In any case, I'm not sure why you expected ostracism in the tech sector from those opinions alone.

I don't expect ostracism because I don't get ostracised. I expect to be listened to and it happens because people in real life like listening to me.

I suspect lots of people are just expressing views no one is eager to debate because they're uninteresting.

That's possible. I don't agree with most of your examples, but only one of them would make me want to reach for a pitchfork, and they're interesting enough to trigger a "hmm, okay, how would that work in practice?" reaction rather than a hardwired one.

In my experience, people only want to debate views that are familiar but with a twist. The actual depth of the opinion is not the main factor.

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.

I suspect that no matter how abhorrent the view is, I can start an in-person discussion if there is scope for discussion¹. Go ahead, state them here. I will bring the arguments up in person.

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 suspect that no matter how abhorrent the view is, I can start an in-person discussion if there is scope for discussion¹. Go ahead, state them here. I will bring the arguments up in person.

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.

Sure, but the topic of this thread is the idea that there is such a monoculture in Silicon Valley that mentioning these ideas will get you cancelled. I think that is wholly untrue.

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.

To get back to the topic of the thread, I do not think it is a rigid monoculture. In this sense, I agree with you. I see it more as a spectrum. I don't think that you will be cancelled wherever you go, either, merely that it will be much more difficult to strike up a debate or to keep it going. People tend to just glaze over and change the topic to something more fun or pretend-taboo, but not much more than that. If you do decide to test it out, I don't predict that anything remarkable will happen beyond an awkward lull in the conversation.

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.

Ah, well, this is a position I can easily avoid arguing with considering much of it is likely correct.

I'm sure I'll get arguments out of those but no cancelling so I'm content with that level of agreement.

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