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.
The proposition you failed to link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Proposition_16
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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?
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.
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_...
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.
This is a fancy way of saying that they used affirmative action to advanced African American, Hispanic, and Native American candidates.
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.
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.
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
>...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.
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.