The rise of universities’ diversity bureaucrats (2018)
economist.com
economist.com
Labelled as "A Witch" [1]
> .. and she got roasted for it. Folks called for her resignation, and said the AMS shouldn't have published it.
And what do you do with witches? BURN THEM!
These D.I.E. apparatchiks are no better than the witch-hunters of yore. No better than those in the Monty Python clip [1] linked to here and a lot less entertaining at that.
No, you didn't get shot for dissent. No you didn't disappear. It was all much more bland and insidious than that, you were accused of a thought crime and that might kill your career. Conformity was the name of the game and I see increasing evidence that we're very much following this trajectory in North America. And it has that insidious quality too that you can't speak out against it because if you do you're clearly a racist/misogynist/homophobe/insert-bad-thing-hereist.
The nomenklatura formed a de facto elite of public powers in the former Eastern Bloc [comparable to] the Western establishment holding or controlling both private and public powers (for example, in media, finance, trade, industry, the state and institutions).
That is what they seem to be aiming for: cushy jobs for them and ideological purity for their organisations.
The suspicion is that inclusion of these diversity statements in the hiring process is a way to stealthily discriminate on the basis of race when it is ostensibly illegal to do so.
It misrepresents what happened at Cal. Candidates were not rejected on the basis of their statement, which was merely one factor in scoring the 800+ candidates they interviewed.
> A total of 993 applications were received, of which 893 met basic qualifications. The LSI Committee conducted a first review and evaluated candidates based solely on contributions to diversity, equity and inclusion. Only candidates that met a high standard in this area were advanced for further review, narrowing the pool down to 214 for serious consideration.
What was misrepresented? "Evaluated solely on contributions to diversity, equity and inclusion [sic]" is not quite the same as evaluated solely on their diversity statement, but it doesn't seem too far off the mark. Aside from the candidates' diversity statement, how would the bureaucrats evaluate their "contribution to diversity, equity, and inclusion"?
As far as the effect on applicant demographics, here's the stats before the diversity evaluation / After diversity evaluation:
Female: 41.7% / 60.3%
Male: 56.5% / 39.3%
African American: 2.8% / 6.1%
Hispanic: 13.2% / 22.9%
Native American: 0.4% / 1.4%
Asian: 25.7% / 18.7%
White: 53.7% / 48.1%
1. https://ofew.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/life_sciences_...
This is a fancy way of saying that they used affirmative action to advanced African American, Hispanic, and Native American candidates.
Race-conscious hiring is allowed if it would increase under-represented minorities. Whether you agree, or disagree with this policy (which I think most of us do), it is nonetheless legal in California, and it is what happened at the UC schools mentioned in the opinion piece you cited.
Fun fact: Berkeley and UCLA each employ more conservative professors than most "conservative" schools do. But they employ real conservatives, not the modern snowflake conservatives that constantly portrays themselves as victims.
And what does this mean, besides reviewing their DEI statements? We know that review of diversity statements are one component of this - you keep alluding to the notion that there's more to it than that, but neglect to actually provide any such example of how the universities measured this contribution besides their diversity statement.
> This is a fancy way of saying that they used affirmative action to advanced African American, Hispanic, and Native American candidates.
This is illegal in California. This is why people speculate that the review of diversity statements is a smokescreen for universities to illegally discriminate on the basis of protected classes.
Many ways. For one there’s an interview where such topics can be probed. For another there are various talks given, where candidates can expand on their DEI activities. Finally there are grant applications and grant activities which relate to DEI that can be evaluated.
It sounds like a fancy way of saying "the sign says no Homerssss. We're allowed to have one."
(From the Simpsons:) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwHGE7uhjco
It's interesting (by which I mean utterly unsurprising and completely typical but in a revealing way) that social class and money are not considered for "diversity" and are, in fact, rather pointedly ignored. This debunks the whole thing, but I'm sure the proponents will be incapable of understanding why.
>...ways of using the statements by reading them _prior_ to any other components of the application, scoring them using a rubric of their choice, and deciding which applicants to consider further using the entirety of the application. Exercising their discretion, faculty on some committees elected to move most applicants forward, while others (especially from the large colleges) preferred to continue with less than 50% of the original applicant pool.
So based solely on the DEI statement, some have rejected over 50% of applicants without taking the rest of the application into consideration.
The proposition you failed to link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Proposition_16
Does anyone actually check whether recipients of these de facto reparation actually have been affected by any of that? As far as I can tell, nobody does, because nobody cares, it’s literally just based on the skin color.
> The effects of redlining, as noted in HOLC maps, endures to the present time. A study released in 2018 found that 74 percent of neighborhoods that HOLC graded as high-risk or "hazardous" are low-to-moderate income neighborhoods today, while 64 percent of the neighborhoods graded "hazardous" are minority neighborhoods today. “It’s as if some of these places have been trapped in the past, locking neighborhoods into concentrated poverty,” said Jason Richardson, director of research at the NCRC, a consumer advocacy group.
The linked page[0] goes into more detail about how disastrous this was and the impact on wealth it has to this day. Considering how neighborhoods were even less integrated then than they are now, it's safe to say the correlation of redlining to skin color was very high.
0: https://www.investopedia.com/the-history-of-lending-discrimi...
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Owners%27_Loan_Corporatio...
For many black skinned people in America, sure. For all? Certainly not. There are millions of African immigrants and their descendants in America, who have not experienced any of this. Does anyone bother to differentiate them from the American descendants of slaves? No, it really is all about skin color.
Reparations would at least be a coherent policy. But Prop 16 proponents also want the policies to favor Latinos, who given the demographics of California would by far be the primary beneficiary of such policies. But Latinos enjoy similar income mobility to whites. Favoring Latinos over whites isn’t “reparations” but just straight up racial discrimination. Ironically, Prop 16 was voted down in every single Latino-majority county in the state.
I think there’s a simpler explanation: most of the people behind Prop 16 are racist. Their only knowledge of race is the black-white dichotomy and they categorize Latinos as black for political purposes because that's the only framework they have for thinking about people with dark skin.
someone should send a memo to remind countless california institutions who nevertheless persist
The "grades part"?
We are talking about academic positions here, not student applications.
Welcome to the historical experience of numerous underprivileged people who were excluded through no fault of their own. But since DEI statements can be rewritten at any time, applicants are not stuck with the prospect of permanent exclusion.
I am not a fan of college administrators in general, nor of the heavy-handed bureaucratic approach described here. But administrators are looking for faculty who can produce more distinguished grads in the future, who might be 'the next Albert Einstein or Jonas Salk'. You could be an outstanding brain in your field, but if you're not interested in maximizing the search for undiscovered talent, are you likely to attract it to your school?
Emphasis on historical. You have to make sure not to swing the pendulum too far, otherwise you'll just end up creating a new generation of aggrieved people. Especially if your actions are themselves illegal.
> https://651d7eef-05d1-4785-8f04-93b49cc8d71f.filesusr.com/ug...
It seems like you are expected, as a staff member in a position to influence the diversity of your workplace and of the students whose educational experience you exercise power over, to do so in a manner consciences of issues of diversity, not even just in general, but in the specific context of your job.
I mean, just for instance, a low '1' rank is described as, among other things: (*my emphasis*)
> Defines diversity only in terms of different areas of study or different nationalities, but doesn’t discuss gender or ethnicity/race. Discusses diversity in vague terms or platitudes. Does not provide any evidence of having informed themselves about diversity. *May discount the importance of diversity.*
I mean - yeah, I wouldn't want someone who fits that description being in charge of my education, or my kid's education - I wouldn't even want to be around a coworker who fits that description. I'm not even sure how well it would work trying to be friends with someone like that - I mean, in this day and age? How could you possibly excuse being so irresponsibly underinformed of such an important issue?
Compare that to a high '5' rank: (again *my emphasis*)
> Clear knowledge of experience with, and interest in dimensions of diversity that result from having URM identities. This understanding can result from personal experiences *as well as an investment in learning about the URM experiences of those with identities different from their own* ... Comfort discussing diversity-related issues (including distinctions and connections between diversity, equity, and inclusion), both in writing, and in a job talk session and one-on-one meetings with students, staff, and faculty.
I mean - that sounds really good doesn't it? Why shouldn't that skill set make someone a more attractive candidate to hire? Isn't that all good stuff that we would all benefit from more people being well-versed in? Doesn't demonstrating that well-versedness indicate a willingness to put the work in, as required to help actively oppose systemic oppression and bigotry? (as opposed to merely paying lip service to an ideal?)
What would you rather see here?
Unfortunately for them, the job includes teaching a diverse classroom, so applicants who don’t give serious consideration on how they will do a critical aspect of the job, or even what are the salient issues, are rejected. This is true of any job.
Viewing race as a quaint and antiquated concept that is completely irrelevant to higher education.
It’s essentially the argument against “I don’t see colour” - the problem is that modern racists and the legacy of racism persists whether you see colour or not, and the targets of systemic oppression continue to experience repercussions whether you personally target them or not.
In other words, they don’t want employees to simply opt out of racism - that’s comparatively easy. They want employees to actively work against racism. That’s harder, and more worthy, and in my opinion worth actively seeking in new hires, especially in areas like education, politics, health and social services, and real estate that have an outsized impact on the accessibility of the American dream.
It’s not asking employees to pass a test to prove they’re not racist - it’s asking employees to be actively equipped to fight racism as part of their job description. Think of it like being hired for a UX/UI position - are you educated on Dark Patterns in user flows, and can you show experience in identifying and reversing them?
I don't know a single person who has anything genuinely thoughtful or insightful to say on these topics that I would describe as "comfortable" discussing them in the current environment.
You'd have to be exceedingly naive to feel like you can include any amount of nuance into the prevailing narrative, let alone push back against it, without opening yourself up to a slew of mendacious attacks on your character. In many places you can, but within academia or certain corners of the media it's downright risky. There seems to be a rotating example of the day of poorly informed and hyper-reactive school administrators coming down hard on faculty based on nothing at all. Like most recently, the thing with the images of Muhammad being shown in an Islamic history seminar with warnings included in the syllabus and before the lecture being attacked as "Islamophobic."
Nobody is ever comfortable talking about this stuff unless they're up on the current jargon and issues and willing to parrot whatever the approved dogmas and shibboleths of the moment happen to be.
I don’t personally know a single union master craftsman carpenter, but I have no problem acknowledging their existence, or their market value to employers. Why should this skill set be any different?
Yes all of the problems you mention are real - so why should an employer not specifically look to hire individuals who are equipped to face them? Like seriously, in what other industry would you protest the necessity of being conversant in applicable jargon? If I walk into a technical interview, and they ask me to use a ternary statement to assign an enum value to a constant based on whether the result of performing a spread operation on a collection of tuples yadda yadda yadda… do you really think my smug “I don’t keep up on shibboleths and dogma” is going to make me look like an appealing candidate?
They’re asking that applicants demonstrate their awareness of the current lay of the land when it comes to systemic oppression. Why should lack of awareness and lack of ability or willingness to engage with these issues be attractive when hiring? these are important issues, the handling of which are essential to the continued effort to reverse the effects of bigotry in our country. You might not want to do the work yourself, but that doesn’t mean the work doesn’t need to be done, and it doesn’t mean there aren’t people out there who are much better qualified than you and I to do it.
Because it's not the lay of the land when it comes to systemic oppression. It's the lay of the land as perceived by a clade of under-qualified and unaware administrative functionaries. These people are operating off vibes and public outcry, not any research or evidence backed understanding of history or sociology or policy analysis. The images of Muhammad example is a perfect case because that's exactly what happened. The DEI initiatives were used as a cudgel by the most extreme elements of Islamic movements to impinge on the academic freedom of the professor, and they just dressed up their highly conservative point of view in DEI jargon to manipulate the administration into taking action against her. But all the Muslims who did not agree with that perspective, as well as most scholars of Islamic history, had way more nuanced perspectives on the issue that agreed with the professor. This is basically just an instrument for the administration to erode worker power among an already beleaguered and exploited labor force.
It's also not really germane to most of their disciplines. It would be like asking a mathematician about their knowledge of epidemiology during the COVID pandemic. Why would I expect that of a mathematician? I expect them to do math and to follow whatever directives the public health experts tell them to.
I don't actually think conscripting random people whose core expertise is not policy or equity into doing bootleg equity initiatives are actually going to result in very good policies or a very accurate understanding of equity or diversity issues. I think what it actually ends up getting you is more people who operate off vibes and truthiness they picked up from social media instead.
The issue isn't that people care about diversity or equity, the issue is that this is done in such ham-fisted, lazy, and counterproductive ways. This all suggests they don't care enough about the thing in itself, they care about showing off that they're doing something so everything just revolves around optics instead of outcomes.
As to whether it's germane to their disciplines - my understanding is that it's germane because of the position they are in as educators, as employees of educational institutions, not because of their particular discipline. Of course you don't need to need to know anything about the modern concept of diversity to be a mathematician - you need that concept to be an effective teacher. Every one of those people in that class room is a whole person, with an entire life leading up to that day of attendance - "Why would I expect that of a mathematician?" - because you should expect that of everyone, but especially of people in positions of power, who have the ability to either reinforce or disrupt systems of oppression. That's the angle.
Of course, many people would react negatively to someone saying flat-out “diversity is bad”, especially because people with those opinions tend to be coming from a place where that’s a toned-down version of more abhorrent views.
But, people with more measured criticisms of specific policies get lumped in with the first set. So because it’s very hard to say “there is a better way to do this” or “this may not have positive systemic effects” or “this does not seem relevant in the context it appears in”, there are few checks and balances, and you get these instances where it’s clumsily shoehorned into things because nobody dared disagree.
I think for many people, this bothers them more than any specific thing.
If you work in a huge bureaucracy like the University of California, if leaving isn’t practical, you just need to behave and hunker down and focus on what’s productive to you.
The populist paradox is that most people probably disagree with this, but are not willing to stick their necks out, leaving it to those who have nothing left to loose aka the crazies who have populist leaders few of us want to support.
It's a bit like border policy, the vast majority of Americans don't want willy nilly open borders, and recognize that 'it's complicated' but it seems 'one side' doesn't have the tenacity to do much about it and their more radical elements kind of want 'de facto' open borders, but the people screaming about the problem and wanting to 'build a wall' are themselves to angry and radical, not a movement regular people want to be supportive of.
We need calmer heads to prevail.
It may be more possible now that Trump is gone, whatever you think of him he was a least 'polarizing' and put people in a tizzy.
Bureaucracy does whatever it's master wants. I've been acquainted with organizations where these sorts of bureaucracies get usurped by changes at the top. You'll get some variant of crazy, just with different target. It's sad and silly, but what can you do?
The border policy stuff is different. "No" is very simple and easy to understand. You can say "Hey Farmhand Bob, illegal aliens are taking good american jobs" and there's a visceral reaction to it. Never mind that Farmhand Bob's job depends on his boss hiring migrants to get the harvest in. Anything other than "no" is nuanced, and is easily shot down by reactionaries.
Identity bureaucracy is just tribal/sectarian politics.
From my own perspective, the idea of encouraging or endorsing something that hurts unity, cohesion, and understanding. I cannot think of a way in which diversity would not be a bad and damaging thing.
I have, of course, heard comparisons to things like species of dogs, "Mutts are healthier than purebreds", but people aren't dogs. Or the human immune system being able to fight of disease, "Being exposed to different diseases makes your immune system stronger", but people aren't diseases, either. It disturbs me when people are boiled down to those types of inhuman terms. Those types of analogies never really address the issue without comparing it to something that isn't the issue itself. It always seems to fall short. I've never heard of someone explain why encouraging intrinsic division wouldn't be a destructive thing.
I've heard some vague phrases like, "It's good to have different perspectives to appeal to different groups of people", but that seems to be a criticism against diversity, not encouragement for it. It seems to say that diversity is disunity; chaos. That it is a kind of confirmation that different groups do not understand each other at all, and can only communicate through some kind of manufactured means. It just seems like a position that isn't very well thought out.
Again, I hope it doesn't come off sounding some specific way. It seems like it's a topic that's easy to sound hateful on. I don't wish to seem such a way; I've never really understood what it was that people who endorsed diversity were trying to hint at. It's like there's some core concept that's never been said out loud, and there's just been a lot of assumptions built off of that thing that was left unaddressed. I'd really like to understand what that inner thing is.
Of course, the devil is in the details. I tend not to agree with how most diversity programs are implemented, despite agreeing with the mission.
But what do I know. I'm just a hick from Alabama (:
The biggest fear of reactionary types who control resources is that rural poor that trends white and urban poor that trends minority will figure out that they share more common interests and challenges.
The whole schtick is to keep people angry at their neighbor so they don’t notice what they don’t have.
On the surface it seems reasonable that adding diverse viewpoints to a problem set would result in a higher likelihood of locating an optimal solution, though I haven't seen any real science to support this.
I also haven't seen any studies that have attempted to measure this effect and balance it against the cost of DEI initiatives, all of which are difficult to quantify.
[1] https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/medical-vibrators-treatment-fem...
You have apparently only considered reason (2). Your comment then runs the gauntlet of extreme reactions to the idea of diversity. It seems to be because you don’t understand that both cohesion and diversity sit somewhere in the middle of a priority order for most organisations. The only people who agree with where you appear to have placed cohesion in the priority order are the architects of 1930s fascism. The reason saying “diversity is bad” and all the other things you said (“Diversity is disunity. Chaos”) is wrong is because you sound like a fascist. I am not exaggerating. You absolutely do sound like one. That is a prime example of “bad systemic effects” as the comment above said; if you say stuff like this, your organisation will no longer be conducive to anything except violent political movements. You should, in swift order, reconsider how important cohesion is to you and any organisations you’re a part of.
Addendum: you did say you didn’t know how to ask this without sounding hateful. Fair. Pointing out the connection to hateful groups is still appropriate and necessary because the devotion to absolute cohesion was a huge part of what made fascism successful. Saying stuff like you did is a bad way for society to go, good people recognise it and rightly reject it vehemently. So your ideas about cohesion being always preferable to diversity are always going to get this reaction from most, and eventually your organisations will be filled with the remaining people who do agree with your comments, and those people are amenable to hate even if you were originally just trying to get some team spirit going. It is a bad path. So is making your university staff swear allegiance to ideology. The only way forward is a balance of cohesion and diversity.
One more point to consider is that you might have a mistaken impression of how important idea (2) is in organisations’ views of diversity. Despite the primacy of idea (2) in framing the issue (as in, “diversity is strength” etc), organisations often care about (1) more because the harms from not enough diversity are so stark and obvious and measurable. The benefits of diversity are real, but the toxicity you get from too much cohesion is really dangerous, unproductive, damaging to a company’s hiring and retention ability, and makes your product unattractive if consumers hear about it. (I would cite Travis Kalanick’s tenure at Uber, where “cohesion” seems to have meant “being male”.) But you won’t hear companies talk about that danger, because it would sound like they already have a problem or that they are thinking about this purely in a liability sense or that they feel like they’re being forced to do it which seems like they don’t care. So everyone talks about the potential upside instead, which needs not be measurable in dollars or dramatic, but is regardless a good excuse to take action to avoid the dangers that do have a very concrete cost that these places have learned primarily through the real pain of having done it wrong and run into trouble.
It’s easy to lose sight of that when everyone talks about diversity in flowery terms, but remember this is the marketing-department-approved translation of a century of learnings through civil rights movements, political movements, legal reforms, huge lawsuits, spiralling company failures, and wars over this stuff, and it is all still lurking right there behind the flowery language.
It doesn't matter how you mince it the only truly homogeneous populations are at-risk marginalized nomads. With that framed: you can find greedy, lecherous, exploitative, amoral or immoral slouches in every corner of the Earth regardless of race, you can equally find people that you'd invariably frame as noble, selfless, vulnerable understanding humanitarians... and we can fairly posit then, from every race, creed, region and religion you can pull from these pools any imaginable quantity of the human spectra - and I expect anyone else would, and they would elect people deliberately close to their own beliefs and goals because it's necessary to have some alignment within any large organization and especially a society. In fact there's something to be said for religion to affect this conversation, and it's that it permeated every early civilization - and one would rightly point out that's because values were made concrete and "objective".
Now I expect you didn't consider it, but there are a lot of groups that don't share your values. They feel very strongly, to the extent they would kill you and dismember you over it, some would just kill you, maybe torture you beforehand. I mean, that's really diverse is are those individuals you'd want in your institutions? I expect no. Likewise there is not necessarily some imminent moral concern that doesn't at least parallel that: some people don't want to be around other people - values collide because ultimately we live in a relativistic world.
The real problems you described can be chalked up to a few things:
The state: Monopoly on power, disempowers individuals, individuals relinquish their moral obligations including refusal to participate
Nucleated power: Institutions are supposed to act exemplars of behavior, instead they simply are exemplars and people follow, and then more follow suit. Suddenly the Third Reich is marching on Poland. Purpose and moral delegation is performed by institutions that are, due to human limitations, intrinsically unsuitable for the task. Obviously there is the element of controlling incalculable resources like every competing power in WWII had which emerges from this...
Limited options: Individuals and communities are unable to disband from their respective state apparatus e.g. secession due to the imminent threat of violence, retaliation and/or a complete lack of peaceable legislative or political option.
Scale: Dunbar's number, hypothetical maximum of about 150 people for functional human communities. When a neighborhood school in rural America doubles that easily, one is left to wonder how an institution deals with that, it's by mishandling every human it deals with. Catch-22's and C.S. Lewis's hell. People are abstracted into cattle (see Eichmann) or mechanisms in a greater machine, expected to go flawlessly whirring away without question or complaint at the throw of a lever.
It doesn't matter if my friend group is a contractile 10-man squad because we all came from different backgrounds and currently live entirely disparate lives. And we're from one of the most demographically and politically homogeneous states in the US and not one of us has similar views. We're irrelevant because everyone defers to the clueless state, for one, for two we're 10 out of a denominator of millions of hundreds of millions.
The problem is with institutions, and hierarchy, and bona fide power, and the concepts of property on which they're founded which again, circularly is a reference to the deference individuals must grant the state which makes it all fall into disproportion. Nazis couldn't work to found a kingdom without people to participate in their game.
I elected "institution" because there are a lot of voluntary organizations, but an institution is fundamental and intersections with them are inevitable. My friends, my [hypothetical] church, the workout classes organized by some nice lady, the food bank, salvation army... Individuals have mobility and they're able to reject or accept. Institutions your workplace and government - by dint of being necessitous - drastically reduces one's degrees of freedom, limits their mobility, and entraps them to varying extents. That's a real problem. If I don't like Nicaragua they can arbitrarily refuse me a Passport so I can't leave, forcing me to work at a sweatshop, and then the government can hold me at gunpoint to take some fraction of my infinitesimal income.
Anyways, there's different strokes for different folks and there's just as big of a proportion of any "minority group" in every corner of the world that would just as soon self-segregate so they can attend to their communities as there are people who want to live in "diverse" communities in accord with their values. And there's also a lot of performative white guilt bullshit from people who won't bend their ear to a black man, but will naively attempt to run to his "defense" at every opportunity. It's disrespectful.
So yeah, mate, I am very aware that there are groups who would murder me for expressing the views I have on cohesion and diversity. Was that meant to be a threat or just an appeal to tribalism as a natural thing? Everything else you said is… You seem to be grappling with the idea that there are a lot of people in the world. I don’t really see a point emerging from it.
It was really an economic classification wherein business was subordinated to an authoritarian government. And again to my point, hierarchy, institutions, power, and scale are what lead to the immense destructive forces witnessed in the early 20th century.
And by that logic I don't see a whole lot of distinction between the Axis and Allies - there was a difference in values but hardly one in architecture at the time. There was also the point of aggressors and aggressed which paints moral connotations.
And companies do have armies, really it's private property, but... Companies own all of the property that's valuable. Corporations in particular, which mind you do have a history of directly or indirectly leveraging government power, in some cases military or "intelligence". You don't need an army when you can threaten someone with global sanctions for attempting something like a sovereign default or violation of international IP law. There is no distinction between starving someone out and killing them in war, in fact, that's what war used to consist of. Siege the city and hold the walls, wait and watch as they starve to death and wallow in their own filth as disease creeps in.
Your last point is grasping at straws. You know as well as I do I wasn't specifying you, or your particular values. Stop parading legitimate diversity around as tribalism and painting it, self-righteously, as some inexorably evil idea. I can do the same with your naive globalist cosmopolitanism: whatever intrinsic real diversity does emerge, it's amalgamated into a uniform homogeneity because the elements within are pigeonholed, and expected to behave in a narrow band of "cosmopolitan acceptability". Isn't that what you don't want? One totally uniform population and a flat earth? Politically, nationally, racially, philosophicallt identical, because to me that is the logical conclusion.
Schismogenesis is a self-limiting principal and had ought to be embraced. It would be hard for a continuously dividing society to accrete enough power to do what the West did to the Americas, or colonialism or Pol Pot or Mao or Hitler or the Russian revolution... The scale is the important factor. And those dividing lines that we create in these nuanced differences in value are important by that nature. Some will fail, some will succeed. It's hardly any different than mitosis. Forbidding that from occuring is holding back evolution, isn't it? That was the whole proposition democracy was suppose to solve in the US - it was a laboratory for experimenting with... Everything, and yet the accretion, centralization, scale, and institutionalization has all but defeated that.
https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/e...
I would expect that very few people of today would be able to define it accurately. And because of that, yes, it remains a catch-all for "enemy" and lacks meaning aside. Nobody else abides by your methods, just as every "Classical Liberal" fails to label themselves strictly as a "Liberal" as prescribed by Mises (or was it Hayek?). Thus there is a stunning failure to identify internal mechanisms as, at an elementary level, fascistic in both organizations and institutions. It's a pretty considerable failure.
It's a wildly successful formula because we're all doing it and we're ignorant of it because it's a word without meaning and that makes it a contagion of stupidity.
But of course I'm bewildered. Watching people naively building cities housing tens of millions of people, driving millions of cars, rampantly reproducing so that millions more people and millions more cars might grace the congested arteries. Then being so audacious as to complain about pollution and urban sprawl in the same breath as they have their prepared tangerines in light syrup canned in a plastic cup shipped from some developing nation 4000 miles away, but damn that smog! And it's all enabled by what had ought only be described as a fascistic imperialist regime.
Nobody is free to do that, by the way. It's a forced participation scheme. Pay taxes or it's taken, if it's not given violence is deployed. To pay taxes you need money, to get money you must work and make yourself culpable. These are the things that Ghandi railed against and pointed to as agents of moral decay, and likewise Tolstoy - perfect heteronomy by which we can lease all our deference to the state and institutions that make up "civilization" - another ill defined word.
Honestly, I'm just glad that I haven't received any death threats, so far.
However getting a multicultural society to function is indeed very hard, and many places that aren’t so diverse definitely operate with less conflict.
What I don’t have a good answer for at the moment is if we should be purposely building diverse societies or if we are just trying to make what we have work better.
Some things seem obviously true e.g people should have equal rights and women should participate in the work force.
When we travel we often talk of broadening our horizons. So incorporating new ideas also seems obviously true.
But this mandated bureaucracy seems wrong and unhelpful when you have teaching staff limiting contact with students to minimise the possibility of perceived slights.
Speaking as someone in the US, where many disadvantaged groups for a long time were systematically prevented from doing things (like living in a certain area or having a certain kind of job) and represent sizable parts of the population, a lack of diversity often suggests that there is still some kind of inequality causing it. If your institution is big or important enough, people will wonder why those benefitting from it aren’t representative of society as a whole.
A cause that unfortunately still exists, and any respectable person wants to avoid associating themselves with, is when you are just outright excluding or hostile to a particular group. This could vary from outright discrimination to a historical association with discrimination that nobody is actively trying to reverse (such as with country clubs, Greek life). The second one that is much harder to deal with and more pervasive, is when there are not explicit barriers preventing diversity, but rather lingering systemic problems stemming from things like historical discrimination - for example, segregation and redlining created black ghettoes with cyclic poverty and poor educational outcomes that still exist today. Another big one is unconscious bias, like how if you modify the same resume to have a “black sounding” name it may get fewer interviews.
I’m not saying some group of tabletop gamers in rural Minnesota need to go out of their way to find a non-white person to not be racist. I think a lot of people not from the US or from monocultural parts of the US think that’s what being “pro-diversity” means. I don’t think hiring someone with different color skin magically means your team will be more effective either.
In essence it boils down to:
1. Discrimination still exists. Effects from discrimination from the past remain into the present day. Fundamentally nobody should be barred from a job/college because of something like race. And considering the historical injustices that occurred, along with many people harboring those views to the present day or very recently, it’s not enough to not-exclude people - you need to make efforts to actively include people, since they may otherwise think that they “don’t belong” somewhere because of their race.
2. When an institution operates across a broad population, it should try to represent that population. If it doesn’t even come close, this may suggest they are discriminating. Let’s say for instance I start a tech company in the bay area and I only hire white people - with more than a handful of employees that starts becoming astronomically improbable if I’m fairly considering the entire pool of eligible hires.
Also, I think some level of representation is helpful from a simple effectiveness standpoint. Maybe some product doesn’t perform as well on darker skin, or maybe it doesn’t address the needs of a bilingual sub population, or unknowingly commits some cultural faux pas.
3. The huge problem is what to do when outcomes are still very far off from being representative even without any kind of active discrimination. Sometimes this leads to controversial policies. But IMO we shouldn’t let those bad implementations detract from the problem or make us think diversity is bad.
Active inclusion of members of currently or formerly marginalized peoples. The "inclusion" term of DEI I think more speaks to once the person is inside the group, or sometimes in reaching out to particular outsiders (such as a local community) for input into decisions, because they are also stakeholders.
I think at some point a lot of people got fed up trying to give answers to those "good questions" and just settled on "eat shit" and "get the fuck out of my store!" and "I am tired of your shit and I quit!" (or something along those lines lol)
I think if Fauci and someone really smart like Peter Hotesz would have beat anyone the covid skeptics could have put up and established their credibility and authority in the eyes of the general public by not appearing to run.
One thing Steve Jobs did well was take hard questions in public venues. He didn't always make everyone happy but his willingness to stand for his ideas inspired confidence in the Apple community.
Fauci's lack of willingness to face a respectfully adversarial audience or interview really hurt his perception as a leader. It almost certainly cost many lives.
In fact, being too honest or too nerdy is often a disadvantage. There’s a reason cases on technical matters in courts still get argued my litigators with subject-matter experts as witnesses, not by the SMEs themselves.
There were people asking questions who were MDs and PhDs with good records that could have been used.
Refusing to take any adversarial questions also leads to discrediting by the public. The refusal by Fauci and Birx to do so almost definitely caused a needless loss of life. Leaders show competence and rise to challenges. When people see that they're willing to follow.
Fauci attempting that tack would have been disasterous, esp. in the midst of an unknown and (for a while) scary pandemic.
Hell, "be like Jobs" is terrible advice for most businesses, too. Final nail in that coffin was Holmes and Theranos.
Diversity is good. Protectionism and enforcement of artificial diversity is bad
A lot of these "forward" ideas are undergirded by postmodernist ideology. I think this is interesting on two points, one being that class is almost unanimously ignored, and this was criticised by the communists of the era as being liable to divide the proletariat - and so it is. But also the deconstructivism and conception of language furnishes jointly a strange shibboleth and doublespeak which further promulgates this... Invisible enemy. Unironically, though, most of the social ills which are lambasted as systemic failures are products of class, itself a function of race but only coincidentally - the reality is these things are mostly independent in the US. But when you divide the the poor and the poor and the middle class and the middle class and the poor and the middle class, you get a rapidly deteriorating status quo for everyone.
But it also creates a disruptive interface: When you hear equity as someone who is not strictly apprised of the meaning it sounds good, as does diversity, but their definition lies outside the canon of the English language.
Equity, equ- equal... The implicit connotation of that word, even the definition equality of rights sounds noble to anyone that hears it. But that isn't what they're saying, what they're saying is give someone with an unquantifiable disadvantage (which may not exist at all), based singularly on outward identity, a step up. Nothing to do with legitimacy of hardship or their class, just blatant and racist, sexist, and sexual assumptions. Literally doling out extra credit for being a trans Asian.
And it's all really patronizing, it's all really racist and sexist. Most of all it's performative, and falls hard into Goodhart's Law. Protectionism is paternalistic, but patronizing people is just wanton disrespect towards someone's individual potential. I'm all for helping hands, but now when it isn't inclusive (another term they misuse) and fair.
That’s not what we are saying.
The DEI efforts at my university at least aren’t about giving disadvantaged people a step up, they’re about raising the bar for everyone, and making sure it’s not lowered for anyone.
In practice, what this means is expanding the applicant pool and not just considering applicants from the ivies. It turns out there are just as good candidates elsewhere, and they will apply to your program or job if you market it to them.
The end result is that you can have a diverse faculty and student body without compromising on quality at all.
Nothing about this process is patronizing, racist, or sexist. The main tool we use is to just not be lazy and out in the extra work to find good candidates. Because they are there. I’m guessing the “performative” aspect you are noticing would be places who don’t want to do the extra work but don’t want to seem like they’re doing nothing. But you can’t conclude that’s what everyone is doing based on your limited experience.
The first rule of ___ is that you don't talk about ___.
The whole point of DEI was supposedly to "equalize" things so once you are a beneficiary of a DEI policy, you should no longer be able to claim victim status. In fact, once they get in, they argue for even more grievance policies, power, and special treatment. Often that is specifically what the job is meant to do. What is the real end result of this in particular for universities which are gateways to power? It's not surprising that universities are where this battle is being fought and not fast food or retail jobs.
This is why this social issue is unsolvable. Everyone has a different version of what is fair.
If you were a medieval knight, you wouldn't say "it's unfortunate that our opponents, occupying that castle, shout us down whenever we attempt to discuss their position." Of course they shout you down: they compete with you for authority.
This is how I know this is about politics, power, and paychecks.
They are. And for the “diverse” people themselves they are a sort of minstrel show. The goal is to show off a superficial version of diversity in a way that’s pleasing to white people. For example if you’re Muslim, they want you to one of those Ilhan Omar intersectional Muslims, not one of those billion other Muslims who believes what Islam teaches to be true. Or if you’re Indian immigrant you’ll get a lot further writing about the need for “solidarity between black and brown people” than anything that maps onto how typical Indian immigrants view their experience as a minority.
1: https://thehill.com/homenews/house/453007-pressley-democrats...
"A rhetorical device in which any denial by an accused person serves as evidence of guilt."
Heresy and heretics are usually extirpated with extreme prejudice, at least if they threaten the interests of the establishment. Fortunately the DEI bureaucrats at the universities cannot condemn people to death, but the big question is if the Western civilization can survive if its own sources of knowledge and truth are slowly converted into a secular equivalent of Pakistani madrasas, where articles of faith are mindlessly chanted.
Theocracies tend to become very ossified and ossified academy is worse than useless.
If the program merely existed, that would be one thing. But if the company is spending millions and talking about their dedication to increasing URM representation, that makes it clear that dissent is not welcome.
To go full Godwin, firing people for expressing outright fascist viewpoints is also anti-diversity: it's excluding fascists.
Basically, there's no way to have true diversity and inclusion for all viewpoints, because so many viewpoints are mutually incompatible. There's simply no way to reconcile the viewpoints of two people, one of whom is LGBT (or at least pro-LGBT rights) and one of whom thinks such people should be marched into death camps. This really goes for any kind of viewpoints; you can only accept so much diversity of opinion before you get into an irreconcilable conflict.
In normal polite society, we avoid this problem by simply forbidding discussion of certain topics in certain places. But that means people cannot feel safe expressing themselves fully in those places; there's simply no way to allow that as long as diversity is allowed.
who cares about their viewpoints? it's not even a slippery slope because it's just so absurd that people should be polite and respectful of genocidal ethno-nationalists. /shrug
You'll very quickly be sent for "re-education" if not downright fired.
In 2021 they had a slide on the town hall for 'Whiteness down 13%' and the black host said 'we can do better'...
Might as well pack up, clearly unwanted here.
20+ years in the same company, never heard this phrase spoken by HR until the DEI craze.
Now 'we can do better' is Newspeak for more surveys, townhalls, implicit bias training, more 'education' that cuts out working time in the limited hours.
Bureaucracy is a Pyrrhic victory.
Disclaimer: No disrespect or offense to Molossian descendants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molossians meant in usage of the term Pyrrhic
Reminds me of the controversy at Pinterest a year or two ago when an Asian engineering manager asked how we could reduce the % of Asians in the engineering org (which was 68%).
I remember this. Even on Blind today he's referred to as "Mr. 68".
It was an interesting exchange because it revealed to many of the company's Asian engineers that they were overrepresented (which could be visually confirmed at any meeting) and that their overrepresentation was something being thought about behind the scenes by the DEI folks at the company.
The axiom "when the future arrives it's not the future we want" or "when change happens it's not the change we asked for" seems to hold true here. I think most Asians supported these diversity initiatives at first, but now they're getting "Harvard-ed" or "Ive Leagued" and are losing out due to their ? over-performance ? in the tech space.
There was also discussion of over-representation relative to the population around them. In the case of Pinterest they are in the SF Bay Area, which has a lot of Asians but is not made up of 68% Asians leading to the status as over-represented at PINS.
Remember when we just called them racists?
Most people who support "diversity" unsurprisingly withhold support when the numbers are against their particular demographic.
For out-groups looking at the movement, the movement makes you think it's one large movement consisting of women, oppressed, and other minorities - i.e. everyone not including heterosexual white males.
From the inside of that large movement it looks a lot different.
Homosexual males will resent being sidelined in favour of a white heterosexual women while homosexual females will label being passed over in favour of a homosexual man as "sexism".
Almost all heterosexual, and many homosexual, women don't want to share the public bathrooms with any males, even if those males identify as women.
A heterosexual male supports the movement, until he finds out he just slept with a woman who is male.
All the women (homo and hetero) support the movement, until it becomes clear that they need not bother attempting to win any prizes or break any records in sports anymore, because those are all held by women who were boys throughout puberty (and got irreversible physical advantages due to male puberty).
It is quite a fractured movement, and any time dissent is raised it is attributed to the out-group - like the fracas over transgender people in public bathrooms.
"Prevent males going into females bathrooms" is something almost every women agrees with, but the opposition was "those old white men over there!".
"Let female athletes compete amongst themselves because they have less physical strength than men" is an argument from females. Men aren't throwing their toys over women competing with them on the field; women are, and men support them.
In short, you see this large movement as one large movement, but all the participants clearly have goals that are contradictory to other participants' goals.
The largest subgroup within that movement is also the one that is most likely to have members who distance themselves from the movement - as far as who gets best treated by society, it's white heterosexual women, so they have the most to lose if the movement succeeds for any of the other subgroups.
Bill Burr has a great bit about this: https://youtube.com/shorts/AdO9X7Lxzvs?feature=share
If I were a Muslim with one legally recognized wife and two common law wives, could I bring all three of them to a corporate event and introduce them as my wives? Surely such an employee is also entitled to five prayer breaks, with facilities adequate to support the correct movements (this type of fact pattern has lead to much recent litigation and multiple 8-9 figure settlements).
If I were a practitioner of some version reconstructed Roman paganism, would I be permitted to perform the sacrificial augury ritual during a quarterly budget meeting? If not, why not?
Should Scientologists be permitted to administer e-meters to co-workers on company property during mealtimes and other breaks?
Should a Jewish employee be permitted to wear a Star of David flag pin to work if it causes offense to Palestinian employees working at the same facility? If not, why not?
Should a Black Hebrew Israelite be permitted to discuss popular documentary films produced by their co-religionists on religious topics with co-workers on company property, given that such beliefs are intrinsic to their religious identities, or should they be terminated for even mentioning content from such films because it can cause offense to others?
In practice our corporations require a sort of rainbow-neutered-prozac-addicted-egalitarian-Protestant-tinged secularism, but the expansive rhetoric invites a lot of limit-pushing behavior. It cannot possibly be stable, but I think all those fascinating contradictions help to explain why so many corporate employees eat so many pills every single day.
Yes it would probably be permitted, but I think most people would know you are trolling, and I also doubt this hypothetical trans employee would really care much
> If I were a Muslim with one legally recognized wife and two common law wives, could I bring all three of them to a corporate event and introduce them as my wives? Surely such an employee is also entitled to five prayer breaks, with facilities adequate to support the correct movements (this type of fact pattern has lead to much recent litigation and multiple 8-9 figure settlements).
Many corporate campuses have facilities available for use as prayer rooms, this isn’t that unusual. As for “this fact pattern has led to “multiple 8-9 figure settlements,” going to need a citation on that one
> If I were a practitioner of some version reconstructed Roman paganism, would I be permitted to perform the sacrificial augury ritual during a quarterly budget meeting? If not, why not?
This is trolling, not going to bother to respond to this one
> Should Scientologists be permitted to administer e-meters to co-workers on company property during mealtimes and other breaks?
Non-solicitation policies prohibit this sort of thing, which is one reason why most employers have them
> Should a Jewish employee be permitted to wear a Star of David flag pin to work if it causes offense to Palestinian employees working at the same facility? If not, why not?
Permitted? Probably yes, if it follows the corporate dress code, but expressing opinions on controversial political topics at work often has informal implications for one career
> Should a Black Hebrew Israelite be permitted to discuss popular documentary films produced by their co-religionists on religious topics with co-workers on company property, given that such beliefs are intrinsic to their religious identities, or should they be terminated for even mentioning content from such films because it can cause offense to others?
Non-solicitation would prohibit this (also again trolling)
If only there was a term for this
I’ve known many devout Catholics, not one of them ever constructed a devotional shrine at their place of work; it’s not really a part of modern Catholic religious practice, even among more traditional Catholics.
> A Jew mildly expressing their faith should be punished in their career, and "expressing opinions on controversial political topics at work" is career limiting.. but a trans flag is fine, because even though that's a controversial political topic, it's the correct opinion, right?
If you think people who display the trans flag at work don’t experience career limiting consequences informally, even at allegedly inclusive companies, you are very naive. I mean, how many openly LGBTQ tech industry leaders can you name who were out before being at the pinnacle of the industry?
> One might even say that political opinions that are "correct" are fine, like the trans flag, but ones that aren't are obviously trolling.. like wearing a star of David?
OP did not say “Star of David,” they said a “Star of David flag,” ie the flag of the State of Israel, a nation-state. They are not the same thing. People wear religious symbols like the Christian cross, the Star of David, etc all the time at work and it’s not really an issue.
I really don't think praying and having some religious items on your desk is trolling...
For one thing it ignores religion and class.
But it also ignores a good few decades of research into personality disorders, which suggests that the people you absolutely do not want to hire are the Cluster B types.
A "diverse" workplace run by narcissists and sociopaths is going to be toxic and anti-productive no matter what the gender/race balance is.
Don't worry, the borderlines will drive them away. :P
That might be the worst goal for any workplace. There are clearly parts of ourselves that have no place at work.
They are doing a good job. Why create a good product? That's difficult and failure is possible. Much more fun to work on the diversity stats, because quota hiring is an easy win at review time. Who cares if strategic hiring is bad? Big companies have enough process inertia that no one will know if the new hires are working out for years.
The HR department at my previous employment sent out a similar survey last year, with the intention to identify, and remove troublesome individuals during a period of downsizing.
Needless to say it was quite effective.
"Here is a metric about diversity, and everyone keeps talking about how great it is, and look -- we're so much better about it! Promotion plz."
They then included in their quarterly survey questions how connected people feel with that strategy. When the unrelated units scored quite poorly on this subject, they decided the reason was that the line managers had failed to educate their reports on the importance of this strategy enough, so started marking them all on how connected their reports felt and giving out educational material so people could understand the strategy, missing that people understood the strategy well enough, it just there was no meaningful connection to their business unit to understand.
Mine had a comment box for each question and for this one I just stated that it's wildly inappropriate to be your home self at work. You should be your work self at work.
Many of the USA's colleges and universities cannot afford a 20% decline in tuition dollars. They will collapse under the weight of fixed costs and higher unit costs, even with substantial cuts to faculty and staff. The only path toward survival for many of these institutions is to increase the size of the pie, and the WASP demographic is saturated.
In Tech, DEI is an HR and Recruiting department. In Higher Ed, DEI is also -- primarily, even -- a sales and marketing department. An existentially important one. I've heard a few different college presidents discuss it very explicitly in those terms.
--
[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/blogs/online...
Protecting people who can do the job but need a little help for whatever reason is one thing. Forcing companies to hire a bunch of people who will not contribute to satisfy DEI quotas so they can meet ESG goals and qualify for discount financing is a whole other thing. The government is basically outsourcing social programs by forcing businesses to hire people.
Is the (US) government pushing this directly through financial incentives?
* https://www.sba.gov/federal-contracting/contracting-assistan...
* https://www.sba.gov/federal-contracting/contracting-assistan...
* https://www.sba.gov/federal-contracting/contracting-assistan...
"Department of Defense requires approval of a formal justification if the 8(a) sole-source contract exceeds $100 million; all other federal agencies require approval for sole-source 8(a) contract actions that exceed $25 million." That is, you can help the government launder up to $100M per contract and no one even has to write down a justification. Buy whatever the government asks you to, resell it to them for a 10% mark-up, and you can get up to $10M. And if you think people aren't playing that game, I have a bridge to sell you, but actually to this other person, who will get 10% for just existing.
Some really are 'lite' white nationalists, or sympathize. It's a very convenient boogeyman for the DEI crowd.
It is absolutely not, the entire scheme is zero-sum, so it can't replace social programs. What is given to one is taken from another, and even if this has some mild redistributive effect which could potentially lessen the need for social programs, it's never going to have much of once because the vast majority of money is held by people who will never be impacted by DEI by design.
DEI is just classic rent seeking and political influence of private business. The character assassinations of its critics are again, a function of furthering rent seeking. It's a very old story.
Ah, there's the problem.
I think that in large bureaucracies this will always happen. As a manager looking for career growth, the more headcount you get and the more scope you “manage”, the easier it is to make the argument you should be a Director/VP/whatever - or to get hired in your next job as such. Managing 10 people is being a line manager. Managing 50 people is being a director. If you can make the case for hiring more people to support all the initiatives you are working on, you may have just doubled your income.
In a smaller organization, people are usually more directly involved in the organization’s efforts and there is a more limited amount of funding for new things, so the only way you can empire build is by doing something that is very organizationally valuable (like making more money).
In government, academia, and huge corporations, you have massive amounts of money coming in, and most people’s work is far removed from why that money is coming in. Advancement and growth is mostly about being able to secure as much of that money for your department as possible.
There is one question a diversity authority needs to answer:
"If you want a larger amount of people from a small pool of viable candidates, how do you do that without lowering the bar?"
Stated differently, if 1 in 100 university graduates earning a software engineering degree are black, but you want your company's demographics to match the population demographics which is 15 in 100, how do you get closer to 15 in 100 without accepting unqualified candidates or without having the average black employee under perform the average employee as a whole?
Any diversity bureaucrat that fails to answer that question is absolutely unqualified and is a detriment to the institution they are a part of.
There is one harsh reality that needs to be understood: Affirmative action and diversity initiatives ("C" level diversity focused staff) are functionally reparations.
The American public has robbed entire classes of people of wealth, and therefore their ability to pay for competitive advantages, like private school, which other people can afford. This results in not just systemic disadvantage, but generational disadvantage.
I don't think generational disadvantage can be solved without efforts like affirmative action, but the packaging that diversity bureaucrats are selling is one that requires proportional response, and therefore foments backlash.
Diversity bureaucrats try to use power, rather than justice, to achieve their goals. "We will fire you if you disagree" is using power. "Reparations are the right thing to do. Offering opportunity to those we have taken them from" is justice. The difference is subtle, but important.
> "Reparations are the right thing to do. Offering opportunity to those we have taken them from" is justice.
Couching reparations as inherently being just, which perhaps you didn't intend, is where I disagree with you. The idea of reparations is pretty contentious[1]. I think that very fact is exactly why these affirmative action programs have to be dressed up, and faux-support has to be forced, as much as it is.
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/261722/redress-slavery-american...
Wasn't Cortez a big meanie or something? You might point out he had little to do with the USG, but the core DEI crowd doesn't care about that, just European colonizers.
Some claim that racism inside the university is why Black students drop out of STEM. However, the rates of persistence in STEM for the same level of academic performance is the same for all races: a Black student with 700s on their SAT is as likely to succeed as a white or Asian student with 700s. A student with 600s or 500s is less likely to succeed, and equally so regardless of their race. But if you admit a lot more Black students with the latter scores, you can see how this will affect persistence rates.
And in answer to your question, I assume it's virtue signaling because it is all the rage these days. Did you miss all the black squares on Instagram?
It has to be asked though, did student:teacher ratio stay constant during this time? Because if it's risen (i.e. professors about the same, but more students,) then a case could be made that the bureaucrat increase corresponds to more students. Why should bureaucrat count correlate to professor count?
Astronaut 1: You mean, the purpose of the university isn't to teach?
Astronaut 2: Never has been.
Even in the 90s, when I was going to a second- or third-tier name brand university, the emphasis clearly wasn't on teaching but on snagging grant money and cranking out papers. Even the professors seemed to consider teaching an annoying distraction from their real jobs.
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2011/08/28/administrators-ate-...
A rise in administrators can't explain the rise in tuition. If you spike your manufacturing costs for a product, it's true that you won't be able to turn a profit without charging a lot more for it.
But it doesn't follow at all that you'll be able to turn a profit by charging a lot more for your product.
We see college tuition going up at the same time that college enrollment goes up. That is not a result of increases in the cost of providing college. Increases in the cost of provision would increase tuition and decrease enrollment.
The conclusion to draw here is that colleges have raised tuition prices because they can and the extra administrators are an effect of that (the money has to go somewhere), not a cause.
True, but this is also mostly true of the facilities and the endowment.
Don't imagine the dean thinking "I need to spend all my revenue or something terrible will happen" and choosing compliance officers as the right way to accomplish that goal.
Imagine the dean thinking "hey, revenue is higher than ever" and a bunch of people asking him for funding and mostly getting it because the money was there. Growth in compliance officers occurred because the funding was available, not because anyone other than the compliance officers thought it was a good idea.
If you leave food around in your kitchen, you will get insects. If you leave sugar water or bread around, you'll get mold. And if you leave money around an organization, you'll get administrators. You'll get those things regardless of whether you want them.
Aa member of a university faculty, this line is something routinely parroted here on HN that I must disagree with.
Yes there are many layers to the bureaucracy at any University. But in many cases those layers are vital to the functioning of the system and make my function as a professor easier.
For example, we run a tutoring office, which requires administrators. But this office reduces the need for TAs and office hours, which means more students get competent help, and I have more time for research. Far from saving anything, getting rid of this office would be an act of flushing money away.
Other examples abound. The research office helps me write grants which bring in money. They cost dollars to run but also bring in a lot of money.
The IT office is a huge bureaucracy, but I doubt anyone here on HN would be advocating the elimination of IT on campus, because everyone here understands why they are there and how they help the community. Yes they cost money, but getting rid of them would make everything way worse.
Unfortunately, because HN isn’t an education forum, not many here have experience with academia beyond being a student at some point. Therefore, the utility and efficacy of an office like Student Support Services is discounted if the individual never had to rely on the office. The critical role they play on campus isn’t recognized, and their elimination is advocated in the name of cost savings.
Sometimes these offices exist to fortify failing city infrastructure. My university runs a bus service, a police department, and a health clinic. These things cost a lot of money, but they exist to keep students safe and healthy. Parents send their students to us with the expectation that we can do this, and so relying on city services that are underfunded and oversubscribed doesn’t work. They won’t appreciate a reduction in tuition if we tell them the savings came from eliminating EMS services.
All this is to say that “it’s the administrative bureaucracy!” is not the end of the story. It’s far more complex, and the discussion here on HN is typically very shallow and mostly wrong on this front.
It is entirely possible that these two things are not related at all, and it is also possible that admins realized they could raise prices when they were forced to by increased budgets and were pleasantly surprised with the result so no, that isn't the conclusion to draw.
Well, no, it actually isn't possible that revenue and expenditures aren't related at all.
> and it is also possible that admins realized they could raise prices when they were forced to by increased budgets and were pleasantly surprised with the result
Sure, but that would be a coincidence with no explanatory power, and prices would have risen by the same amount anyway. You should always assume that prices are in equilibrium unless you can explain why, in the immediate term, they are out of it.
The fine article directly refutes this assertion: "Universities say that a boom in regulations under Barack Obama’s administration increased the need to hire more bureaucrats of every kind. But one study found that for every dollar spent to comply with government rules, voluntary spending on bureaucracy totalled $2 at public universities and $3 at private ones."
This is not to say university bureaucracies are not bloated, but the bloat is multi-faceted and often grows in different directions for very different reasons.
Where did all these buildings come from? Wealthy donors and government grants. What do all the bureaucrats do? They run all of these facilities, their maintenance staffs and kitchen staffs and counselling staffs.
This is the reason all these costs have gone up: nobody donates money to pay for bureaucrats. They donate the building and saddle the school with the maintenance bill. These are white elephants that do nothing for education. Schools like them though because they increase their marketability. Taken as a whole, these things are a huge liability for society because schools are in a zero sum game when it comes to competing for students.
The corporate bureaucracy was growing, but it didn’t have much to do with those student services or facilities because that was all separate.
Still a shame - universities need to treat their research and teaching staff better. But it’s not as simplistic as the picture being painted in a lot of places.
(And I wonder what the student-faculty and student-administrator ratios were and now are, too.)
I'm genuinely curious if ethnic minorities and women are underrepresented among university faculty/staff. I would have guessed "no", but this statement implies otherwise.
They lost a case in court but they still do this covertly [1].
In other places, it's not official but de facto there's a huge bias.
[1] https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2020/07/eindhoven-university-l...
Are we sure women and minorities aren't overrepresented in other departments enough to offset this...?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was once asked how many female justices sitting on the Supreme Court would be enough. Her answer was nine. (N.b. the U.S. Supreme Court traditionally has nine justices.)
It's not really a joke. In any instant, equal proportions of men and women would represent equality (by sex). But taking the long view, 100% of the positions in those fields were held by men, so 100% would have to be held by women for a while in order to redress the historical injustice. This is "equity", a step beyond mere equality, and it's the E in DEI/JEDI.
I think this statement is going past equity straight into reparations.
Equality: Men and Women should have equal criteria for getting the job.
Equity: Women should have an easier time to counter an unbalanced gender representation
This statement: Women should have an easier time because men in the past had an easier time, even if the pendulum shifts.
“WHEN I’M SOMETIMES ASKED ‘WHEN WILL THERE BE ENOUGH [WOMEN ON THE SUPREME COURT]?’ AND I SAY ‘WHEN THERE ARE NINE,’ PEOPLE ARE SHOCKED. BUT THERE’D BEEN NINE MEN, AND NOBODY’S EVER RAISED A QUESTION ABOUT THAT.”
My reading of the quote is that is she's saying that a female justice should be not be any more surprising than a male justice, and thus that an all-female court should be no more surprising than an all-male court.
Just working out the probabilities, if women and men were selected as justices with equal probability, single-gendered courts should occur about 0.2% of the time for each gender.
That's a small number, but not a vanishingly small number. While I don't think we can say much about courts prior to ~1975 (equal gender opportunity to the court not yet being an objective), it seems reasonable to say going forward that IF we are achieving the stated goal of equal gender opportunity, we should expect that an all-female court will eventually occur.
This is probably a recent phenomenon, but it shows the trend.
1: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/04/14/study-suggest...
As a fraction of the overall department, yes, because anybody who hired in before ca. 2000 is basically a white or Asian male with almost no exceptions. So the demographics on paper still look pretty skewed, but it gets better with each passing year.
Why would that matter? Did you think the goal was "equal" (what does that eve mean?) representation?
The goal is more of some people and less of others.
It's a great podcast, strongly recommended.
[...]
> The era of Donald Trump seems to have strengthened the diversity bureaucracy’s belief that students’ feelings must be protected.
This article is very weird. I realise that The Economist isn't just journalism, but also editorials and that every article is very open about its slant. The constant use of the deragotory "bureaucracy" and "bureaucrat" plus the use of a pseudonym of the author indicates that whoever wrote this has an axe to grind and is afraid to publicly grind it. It's obvious what the author thinks: diversity is bullshit, white male professors should be able to speak without fear, too much money is being used to scare white male professors.
Don't get me wrong, though. Unlike B. S., I am not telling you what to think. I am just remarking how odd it is to see such a slanted article.
Our enemies are salivating while our Generals are getting sex changes.
Administrative bloat (and the tyranny of corporations) is a problem, but don’t presume they (or DEI initiatives) weren’t invented to solve a problem, even if it’s just as a band-aid. Some kind of baby and bathwater thing seems to be going on here.
And, in any case, every extant country, every political faction, every institution is likely going to have some weakness at some point in time, because we are human beings and we fuck up a lot of things constantly. Something something iron law of oligarchy.
And, which generals are you talking about?
I imagine that the real harm will be like in most of Southern Europe where once mighty nations languish as their economies labour under the weight of regulation and the population is mostly poor outside a few cities.
Their generals will fall to femboys and furries. But their businessmen can still win.
(And I wish we had more concrete data to critique instead of vague, monolithic enemies like “administrators” or “regulations” (typo), where each side simply fills in the blanks according to their own biases.)
Agree. And happy to discuss if you're in SF.
But yes. I would further suggest that sometimes people get too invested in online spaces and calibrate their worldview based on it perhaps a bit too much. (And prior to this it was traditional mass media, or their IRL local community echo chambers, etc.) It takes effort to find and evaluate truly original research.