Hacker News Reader

Comment by geekbird | Hacker News Reader

Seriously. His initial premise is so far off base that the whole article reads like some sort of conservative straw man pretending to be intellectual discourse.

Are there issue with some DEI initiatives? Yes, but they are often minor, and usually due to bureaucratic laziness, not malice against conservatives or white people.

He is butt hurt that reality has a liberal bias, and wants academia to subscribe to his knee-jerk conservative fantasies instead.

He essentially trying to argue that a completely straight, cis, white, male faculty and student body would still be "diverse" because some were poor/rich, some were rural/urban, and some were old/young. Sorry, that's not diversity, it's simply variations on a theme.

View on HN

If ensuring that people from marginalized backgrounds get good treatment is important in third level education, would the same arguments not apply in a much stronger fashion to first and second level?

I always (not an American) thought it was weird that all the focus was on university while the research would suggest that interventions at primary school level (and before) would be wildly more effective.

What made you think all the focus was on university?

The potency of affirmative action is a really good example. You seem to be dismissing his points when they are actually quite on the money.

Asking how someone reached a conclusion is not dismissing their points. What is the potency of affirmative action? How is it a really good example?

> If ensuring that people from marginalized backgrounds get good treatment is important in third level education, would the same arguments not apply in a much stronger fashion to first and second level?

They do, which is why [primary] school desegregation was (and remains) an important policy goal for various progressive and racial justice movements during the previous century.

edit: It may not be clear to folks who don't live in the US, but the focus on affirmative action is generally driven by the people who oppose such initiatives. The people in favor of them, as far as I can tell, largely view them as a single piece of a larger project for justice.

> They do, which is why [primary] school desegregation was (and remains) an important policy goal for various progressive and racial justice movements during the previous century.

Sure, but that doesn't really solve the problem. Given that the funding of primary schools is predominantly driven by property taxes, one could argue that this is actually been made worse (assuming lower prop taxes => less weathly parents => structurally disadvantaged races).

This seems prescient:

“The most “woke” people are the ones who aggressively try to silence all dissent (https://fakenous.net/?p=2932) and to exclude conservatives, libertarians, etc., from the Academy. So they not only fail to value intellectual diversity; they are just about the most stridently anti-diversity people in the entire country.”

Reply on news.ycombinator.com