Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism

Oh wow. Thank you. Maybe I would accept an outlier community college here and there, but it is hard not to come to the originally posited conclusion. I will admit that it fills me with an odd feeling of bemusement. Those schools are no mere diploma-mills. There is a medical school and a law school. If those poor souls that are hit so hard by this verdict, how on earth are they going to cope with the real world ( and the very real burdens of those professions ), which is noticeably less nice than US of A?

Can you provide a single case to support your position? You can’t ask someone to prove a negative. But you have told us this this is happening “often”. In fact it’s so prevalent you can’t even imagine an alternative conversation.

You presented a specific conversation. Did you hear that conversation personally? If not, who told you this conversation happened or where did you read about it happening? I’m not doubting you, I just want to get more hard facts into this thread.

You said that teacher associations have “often” written this into their “agendas” so it’s not a conspiracy theory. What are these associations and do you have a copy of these agendas into which they have written this? Since it happens often and it’s written down, you should show us and we can have a more substantive discussion about what they actually wrote versus your interpretation of what they wrote.

>then the teachers reads this and adds books because the authors are black

maybe the teacher finds appropriate authors who also happen to be black.

Look, if you don't believe me that's fine. But I'm not lying or being disingenuous. I didn't spend all the time writing that out because I'm trying to trick anyone. I did it because I'm trying to engage in an honest discussion.

Anyway, let's talk about your link. First of all, let's give some context as to what exactly this document is and how it's produced. This was probably written by the very people you have in mind as a DEI woke liberal activist professor. Looking at the bios of the people at the bottom, that's the impression I get. That's why you are reading the "dog-whistling" but I would call it virtue signaling. Because it's there. It's the kind of document people in this community will show off to one another as a model DEI initiative. But that doesn't give this document any real weight in the hiring process. I'll explain why.

Frist, everything that's written here isn't really required for the hiring packet. It even says:

  To aid you in writing your DEI statement, we have provided brief descriptions of five different topics to consider addressing in your statement below. There are no requirements that you must address all of these topics, and you are not limited to only discussing these perspectives. Your statement should reflect the relative importance of these issues to your work and reveal your personal commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

So already it's telling the applicant this is a very open ended thing. Secondly, I'm curious about some of your interpretations of the various sections. For example, you said

> they want them to make diversity, equity, and inclusion a core part of teaching, research, and the candidate's personal life. A professor researching, for example, graph theory who merely creates a respectful classroom environment and treats students and research associates without distinction based on their identity doesn't meet these criteria.

But I don't see exactly where this document is implying that. Do you have that impression based on this document or based on something else? Because the document for example says this about research:

  If your research addresses issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion, describe them here. If you work with marginalized populations in your research, explain how your research advances knowledge and addresses equity in different communities. Describe how you respectfully engage in that research and how you honor those communities in your scholarship. 

This is just giving the applicant a writing prompt. It's saying "if" your research addresses DEI topics, you can talk about them in the DEI statement. It's not saying that graph theory researchers must talk about how they incorporate DEI topics into their graph theory research. I should clarify that some government grants require a portion of the grant be dedicated to community service, but usually that looks like "We did a summer program to teach local students about our research."

As for their personal life, again I don't see the basis in this document to support that. The document says:

  Highlight your service and mentoring experience. If you have examples of serving on committees, participating in community outreach, or volunteer work, describe them here. Share some of your accomplishments or lessons learned from those experiences. If you have mentored underrepresented students, explain what you have learned from those relationships and how you will continue mentoring others.

Again, these are all qualified with "if" to make clear they are example scenarios. But a plain reading of this is that it's prompting the candidate to talk about their community service. Which I will restate is a job requirement for being a professor. You literally have to engage in community and university service as 20% of your time spent. I don't think many people understand that so I want to make that clear. This means serving on committees and doing community outreach. If a candidate has nothing to say about this, it's a red flag from a professional standpoint, as it wouldn't be clear the candidate has the necessary experience to carry out the duties of the job.

Finally as far as teaching goes, this is the one where I will say yes, it's completely acceptable and indeed required to integrate DEI practices into teaching. That's the job. The authors of the UT document agree with me, as the language in this section is not qualified with an "if":

  Describe how you create inclusive and equitable learning environments for your students. You may describe frameworks you utilize when designing courses and assignments. Explain some of the teaching strategies you use to make your classroom accessible and inclusive.

This is absolutely required because as I said, the student body is diverse. There's no getting around that. They are the customers and every single one of them deserves to be there. You may not agree with any of this DEI nonsense but if you want to have the job of teaching in that classroom, you are signing up to teach a diverse audience. There are issues that need to be navigated, and they can be sensitive and personal. If you think this isn't the case, I welcome you to walk a mile in my shoes. This is the job: manage a classroom of people from varying races, ethnicities, financial backgrounds, religions, nations, genders, sexual orientations, hair colors, heights, weights, shoe and hat sizes. Some of these issues are more relevant than others, and effective, experienced teachers know which ones because they've dealt with them first hand. The DEI statement is your chance as a candidate to demonstrate you know how to manage a classroom and how you handle the kinds of issues that can arise.

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Okay, so that's the content of the article. But then there's the separate issue of how the DEI statement is used in the hiring process. I think maybe if you understand how the process works, you will see exactly where and how the DEI statement factors in. Here's how it works at my institution, and it works like this in many other places. We are by no means unique.

First of all, the people who wrote this UT page and their counterparts have little to no sway on the hiring process itself. The hiring process is conducted by the department, usually by a committee of professors appointed by the department chair. The committee requests permission to hire from the dean. The dean grants the permission to conduct a search and an ad is posted. When the application deadline listed on the ad passes, the application packets are collected and distributed to the committee members. The committee will rank the applications by any criteria they deem appropriate. It can be completely arbitrary. They don't even have to look at the DEI statement. They invite top candidates to a phone screen. Usually on this screen they will ask some DEI related question related to teaching because it is part of the job. After all interviews are conducted the committee will rank the candidates and choose who will be offered an on-campus interview. The ranking, again, is done in an arbitrary way by the hiring committee. 99% of the discussions I've been involved in focus on the merits of the candidate's research agenda.

During the on-campus visit, the candidate meets with faculty members outside of the committee over a 2 day period. The candidate's application packet is distributed to the rest of the faculty in the department. The candidate will meet with someone from the DEI office. This is usually to explain to the candidate the University's commitment to DEI. It's not an inquisition into the personal beliefs of the candidate, or a filter, or a purity test. The candidate will then have meetings with maybe a dozen or so faculty members, during which they can discuss any topic whatsoever. Usually the topic discussed is the candidate's research. They can discuss DEI topics or not. At some point the candidate will give a research presentation, and they will meet with the dean and department chair.

After all candidates have been interviewed in this way, the faculty convenes to vote on whether to extend an offer. A discussion commences wherein members may voice support or concern. Concerns usually revolve around the likelihood of a given research agenda to attract funding from top funding agencies, and which classes in the curriculum the candidate could teach. After the discussion the decision is taken to a vote. If the vote passes, a recommendation is taken to the dean. The dean makes the final decision (100% of the time in my experience they side with the faculty, but I'm sure there are reasons candidates have been rejected by the dean), and an offer is presented to the candidate as far as salary and startup package. After a period of negotiation the candidate accepts or rejects the offer and so concludes the academic hiring process.

Now, where does the DEI statement play into it? The DEI office doesn't have much sway. The content of the DEI letter isn't prescribed. Well, for us there's no official mandate to consider it. Others implement some kind of mandatory scoring system that was alluded to in another post. But at the end of the day the decision to hire/pass is typically a democratic process left to the department faculty, who are granted the agency to vote however they see fit, by whatever criteria.

Anyway, I've spent a long while typing this out, so I hope you can see I'm not trying to be disingenuous or mislead you in any way. I'm telling you my honest and candid first-hand experience of how DEI statements are used in the hiring process for University professors. I understand it's not quite what you imagine it to be, but it’s not a lie. And in fact if it were what you implied in your original post, that it was akin to signing if a pledge to join a political party, I would be the first in line to oppose that.

I appreciate your response and I will point out a few things about the links you provide. Regarding [1] I will say a few things. First, the paper makes clear that the effort described is not a typical search process.

  This search was unique, both in scale and in intent ... Limiting the first review to contributions in DE&I is itself a dramatic change of emphasis in the typical evaluation process which generally focuses on primarily on research accomplishments. 

So we must be clear that this is a unique and dramatic departure from the way things are usually done, as described in my reply to your sibling comment. You can't point to this as the way things are in academia because it's a self described outlier at an already outlier institution, UC Berkeley.

Secondly, I will also tell you that filtering down applications from 893 to 214 on the basis of a robust diversity statement is not surprising. A lot of people treat it as a cursory exercise and devote no real effort to it. It's not hard to spot these. And ~24% seems like a reasonable ratio based on my experience. One of the issues with academics is as they are being brought up through the Ph.D. system, they do not place a large emphasis on DEI activities at all. So it's easy as a Ph.D. student if you're not careful to devote 100% of your time to research and very little to DEI related activities. And as I've said in another post, DEI issues are important discharging the actual job duties of a professor. I'm going to keep emphasizing that because it can often get lost, giving way to the idea that this whole DEI thing is orthogonal to professorship. It's not.

Third, this looks like it was a special search process directed for the specific reason's stated in the document. This kind of experimental and one-time thing is typically separate from the normal hiring process.

> But I have read one set of rating criteria [2]. Candidates that merely do "what is already expected of staff" [3] regarding diversity (I.e. what you claim is the goal of DEI statements) are given the lowest scores.

What [2] is saying would be the lowest score isn't really what I was saying in my post. The document characterizes low scoring DEI statements as "vague", "little expressed knowledge", "little demonstrated awareness", "seems to be not aware", "no specifics", "brief descriptions" etc. A vague DEI statement should score low on the rubric.

The "Only mentions activities that are already the expectation of faculty as evidence of commitment and involvement" is because a lot of people will say something along the lines of "My experience with DEI is that I tutored a black/Hispanic/female/Muslim/blind person" or "I've taught in diverse classrooms". That's not what we're looking for. We want specific examples of practices that you have implemented in your classroom and mentorship that demonstrates an understand of the issues faced by educators who teach diverse classrooms. It's not interesting to anyone that you taught a diverse classroom. We all do that. How did you teach it? What specific teaching methodologies did you deploy and why? What was the specific outcome of those teaching practices? How did you adjust them? These are all basic questions that yes, probably 75%+ of applications cannot answer.

Look at how the the rubric characterizes top scoring DEI statements: "clear knowledge", "aware", "comfort", "understands", "discusses", "consistent track record", "roles taken were significant and appropriate", "identifies", "clearly formulates", "convincingly expresses". The bar is not super high here. You just have to demonstrate a clear understanding of the issues, show examples of actual instances where they mattered to you as a teacher, and talk cogently about the subject. It's not hard, and yet indeed, many fail because they don't take it seriously as a job requirement. Many aspiring faculty think the job of being a professor is 100% research, and that's just not the case and really never has been.

And anyway, even if you only do the minimum expectation you can still score a 12/15, so not exactly the "lowest" scoring. The lowest scoring would be if you do the minimum, and also are vague and express little knowledge of the field and have no track record. That sounds reasonable to me.

> And that's in academia, in California - the most liberal of the most liberal.

I mean, we're talking about Berkeley here. It's one of the top schools in the world. The applications will come from all over including totalitarian regimes like China and Iran where I imagine there's not a lot of emphasis on DEI. Applications aren't restricted to Californians.