Mandatory DEI statements are becoming the norm in academic hiring
economist.com
economist.com
It's already started bleeding into the workspace with mandatory training and verbiage that essentially says anything you do in your interactions with a minority if they accuse you of anything they are right and you must meekly accept it and bow your head in shame.
The worst part of it is at most of the companies with strong DEI programs there are zero minorities in leadership. it's a dog and pony show that is only forced upon the non sr. leadership.
You even have companies doing layoffs now intentionally focused on laying off non minorities.
Another issue is that Asians while less in number than most other minorities are treated as white by DEI.
I worry about my kids if this keeps escalating. I dislike Desantis for many reasons but ended up voting for him specifically for this reason and a couple of other cultural issues.
Yep. There’s likely going to be a huge blowback to all of this and the supporters will write it off as the country being full of racists. At this point I no longer care. This is draconian stuff.
Desantis is banning books. Yes, these culture wars are bad. Stupid. But it feels like there is drift into both-sidesism.
That side of the right is most certainly not for free speech any more than Elon Musk is when taking over Twitter.
We make those decisions sometimes hundreds of times a day when dealing face to face with people. We self-censor every day with our family and various social groups to avoid social and professional consequences. I don’t understand why that is so hard to translate when we go online.
He's not going to do anything about it. He's going to start a few fights to get press attention, then give up on it as soon as they stop paying attention, since he's just running your state government as PR for a presidential campaign.
(You may remember he started a fight with Disney over being too woke or something and threatened to cancel their special powers over their parks, but the actual bill came out today and does approximately nothing. Although it does remove their unused rights to own an airport or a nuclear reactor.)
> He's not going to do anything about it. He's going to start a few fights to get press attention, then give up on it as soon as they stop paying attention, since he's just running your state government as PR for a presidential campaign.
So who will do something about it?
I ask because I often see arguments as yours as a tactic to encourage passivity or for someone to take action against their own goals (e.g. "the people who seem to agree with you are only doing it for show[, so stay home or vote for the people who disagree with you]").
> Well, someone who isn't running for president.
Huh? The only person who will do something about it is someone who refuses to seek the power to do something about it?
(It's mainly foreign policy.)
A whole heck of a lot, actually.
> (It's mainly foreign policy.)
Don't be ridiculous. That's just an area where there are fewer checks.
But I really really really need for people, like you, who are annoyed by it and whatnot to really see the bigger picture here.
I have no problem turning the dial down on "DEI" as practiced if and only if we effectively address and recognize the ways in which these people actively do throw minorities under the bus in other ways; e.g. gerrymandering, reductions in public services, etc.
I know it's difficult to address these holistically, but the agenda of the guy you voted for is not to help any culture besides him and his cronies.
My kids happen to be white, heterosexual males, they should not be vilified for it and that's the route I see so many pushing for. Until that changes I am forced to vote for people like him.
I am fairly confident I am one of the only straight white males in this comment section who has applied to faculty positions and received job offers, across a variety of institution types. I am almost certain I am the only one in this comment section who meets those criteria and isn't currently in academia (I truly have no horse in this race, except annoyance that the discussion is so low-quality).
Most people commenting here have never written or reviewed a DEI statement, have never applied to faculty positions, and likely don't even have the minimal requisite education to quality for these positions.
What's worse is that there's a concerted effort by the political class to terrify parents. On right this manifests as "the wokes want your white boys to starve to death". It's all bullshit peddled by useless people who need your attention in order to extract money from the economy without doing anything useful. You're the mark.
So, here's the actual truth about how university hiring DEI statements impact your white hetero sons:
At most colleges and universities, the concern about DEI has a lot more to do with finances than "woke ideology".
There's no interest in "replacing the white males". On the contrary, they'd love to have as many people of whatever background around as possible. But keeping their current enrollment numbers requires recruiting and retaining more diverse students because they are losing up to 20% of the total addressable market due to the post-2008 baby bust. They want to know faculty can serve a more diverse clientele, because they are pretty certain they cannot continue to exist if they are 80+% white. Especially from a retention perspective.
And, to be blunt: the colleges are correct to be concerned and prioritize DEI. The existing tenured faculty are terrible at working with students who aren't from a very traditional socio-economic demographic. That is why colleges lose more than half of their paying customers after the first year of enrollment. Retention numbers broken out by demo paint a very clear picture.
Consider this: you are a business. Your TAM is decreasing by 20% in the next decade and there's competition closing in from every side. Not just that, but you lose loses HALF your customer base in their first year as customers. And it's clear the reason you lose half your customers in year one is that your faculty either DGAF or don't know how to help that demographic succeed (aka retain customers). Wouldn't you want to hire staff who have proven experience working with the portion of the customer base you keep losing -- center that in job interviews, even?
And, again, straight white males are fine candidates. Faculty who do not give a fuck about retaining non-affluent students are not okay. Because the institution will go bankrupt if that's the attitude.
It's really that simple.
This doesn't describe every institution, but it does describe the vast majority of America's 4,000+ post-secondary institutions.
DEI that I have experienced in the work place is very aggressively anti white and anti male and openly advocates against giving women and minorities a step up over them. DEI teaches that white men are aggressive and old fashioned and essentially a detriment and should learn their place. White supremacy is positioned as the source of all wrongs in the world including the spate of anti asian violence perpetrated by other minorities a couple years ago. I am not presenting this opinion as something I have heard about rather I am presenting it as something I have experienced (openly, not inferred) over my last few jobs.
Then I'm honestly confused why you're posting on this article. Do you care at all about the topic or do you just pattern match on "DEI" and start spitting out next-tokens?
It's especially maddening that "lol I'm not talking about college" is the hot take from the top-voted comment on this story. Speaks volumes to the quality of HN discourse on this topic: just a bunch of scared nonsense.
> telling kids about the gays
So what? I was told the gays are evil as a kid and I turned out okay.
The gays are okay. If telling the kids that the gays are okay is some sort of existential threat to you then I'm not sure what to say.
> DEI that I have experienced in the work place is very aggressively anti white
Not gonna lie, I see this a lot and "my HR training was dumb as shit" is a weird basis for political ideology. My anti-phishing training was patronizing as fuck and poorly executed, but I'm not about to use that as a basis for an argument to defund the DoD or whatever.
Also, sounds like you work in weird places. At the universities I worked at the older profs made occasional comments about the tits and asses of undergraduate students, talked about homosexual faculty in way that made even us white straight males uncomfortable, etc. Whatever woke nonsense you think is happening at universities, they're absolutely unregulated compared to most corporate environments and have nothing resembling the sanitary corporate training -- on DEI or a million other things -- that I have to do every year.
Because I want to. I mentioned nothing about college in the original comment that you replied to. I pattern matched :) Judging by the number of responses to my post, other people wanted to discuss it from my perspective as well. Thats one of the nice things about HN, the open, unrestricted flow of conversation
I know that gays are ok. I have absolutely nothing against gay people and am very pro gay marriage. I just dont think its an appropriate topic for elementary school. I very much do have an issue with transexuality being pushed as an option in schools though and I think that its dangerous and results in kids being confused and mistakenly thinking they may be trans. I feel for trans people and wish them nothing but happiness. I just dont want anyone telling my kids its an option as its a much harder life.
"Not gonna lie, I see this a lot and "my HR training was dumb as shit" is a weird basis for political ideology"
I think it goes a little deeper than that and I think you are intentionally downplaying it. Work is one of the cornerstones of most peoples lives. Many people spend more time there than with their kids. If they work in a place where they are told they are the problem thats going to lead to some issues.
I've never understood what this means. Is talking about another student's two Daddies not okay? Teacher talking about their same-sex spouse? Do people imagine they're passing out porn to second graders? Don't get it. Sounds like stupid bullshit. Literally worse than HR DEI training slide decks tbh.
> I very much do have an issue with transexuality being pushed as an option in schools
Your sons aren't going to be unemployed because of DEI essays. Schools "pushing transexuality" is also some stupid bullshit meant to make people feel scared and capture eyeballs.
Regarding the two daddies comment, I have no issue with my kids knowing child X has 2 dads or whatever. Its the pushing of gay pride events, etc. Its making it seem like its a desirable trait that perhaps a kid should experiment with that I don't like. If my kid is gay/trans then so be it, I love them the same. I just don't want them thinking they are based on in school propaganda.
Now you may posit that its all in my head but its also in the head of many many other people. In addition there are very real policies in states like California that indicate its not all in my head. End of the day the thing I am most against is schools conspiring to withhold information from parents.
But in practice some of the most selective institutions (Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth) have some of the strongest commitments to DEI. Maybe some institutions are motivated by market forces, but that cannot be the case in these elite institutions. There must be more to the story.
I do, however, know that I am pretty accurately describing how the other 4000+ colleges and universities work. Based on a sampling, yes, but I'm somewhat confident here.
To be a bit blunt: IDGAF about the top few dozen colleges and universities and I genuinely don't get why everyone else obsesses over them^1. Most of us will attend/work at the other 4K institutions. Let's focus on making those places good. (And, no, the ivy league and other elites aren't thought leaders in those orgs.)
--
[^1]: In my own life, I see a lot of the anti-DEI stuff about those institutions combing from parents of thoroughly mediocre kids who think that their special little snowflake didn't get into Harvard because of racism or whatever. To the point where I wonder if this entire genre of reporting, especially in places like the Economist, is basically just therapy for yuppie parents with over-inflated opinions of their child(ren, but usually not).
I have been both, and I would say your take is basically accurate, but it’s actually more fundamental than what you describe.
Diversity statements are needed because teaching a diverse classroom is part of the job today. Applicants must demonstrate that they’ve grappled with the issues that arise while teaching. Applicants who can’t articulate a salient position on real issues they will face on the job are rejected for being unqualified, not because they don’t adhere to some Marxist political agenda pushed by radical DEI administrators.
I agree with what you wrote in your other post, that a lot of the discourse here is from people who have neither read nor written a DEI statement. It makes the discourse frustrating, because it means people are getting worked up over what they imagine the process looks like - which is usually a caricature of the sort you see being portrayed in other comments. The dearth of actual experience on this topic means that these 800 comment threads that crop up here are low quality echo chambers.
What would change my view on this is to hear someone who has reasonably strong disagreement with present-day progressive stances on education, and nevertheless felt comfortable stating their true beliefs in a DEI statement and was still hired.
> Applicants who can’t articulate a salient position on real issues they will face on the job are rejected for being unqualified
But that is the whole question right there. What is a salient position? If only one world view is credited as being "salient", then it is a de facto political litmus test.
I have no clue what the fuck this means, but I can tell you I think HR DEI training is a bunch of bullshit. I have to do it, of course, just like I have to do the AML training and the Insider Trading training and the Phishing training. It's all dumb bullshit. And the corporation has to require it because the risk of not requiring it is too large. So we all play the dumb game.
> and nevertheless felt comfortable stating their true beliefs in a DEI statement and was still hired.
LMAO. This would not get you hired. Like, "faculty make fun of your app on the hiring committee slack channel" levels of not getting hired >'D
MechE gives the reasons why -- people are asking if you can do the job and going on a political rant in your job application is a huge red flag regardless of your politics.
Believe me -- faculty, esp in STEM departments, are wary of hiring wacko leftists. It's not even about the political valence. You just don't want to work with someone who's obsessed with politics and feels the need to spout off about it in their job application. Those sorts of people fucking suck to spend time around.
When reading DEI statements, universities want to know that you can help increase the size of their total addressable market. The harsh cold logic of financial capitalism combined with demographics demands that they only hire sufficiently woke faculty. If you don't like it, time travel back to 2008 and pop out a bunch more white babies.
Once again, the purpose of a DEI statement is not to articulate how much you agree (or disagree) with progressive ideology. Doing either will sink your application.
The point of the essay is to describe how you handle on the job challenges related to diversity, because they are not abstract. Discussions of trans kids, sick people, blind people, wheelchair bound people, etc. are abstract to many here on HN, because meeting and serving the needs of such people is not part of the daily job description of the commentariat here. But it is part of the daily job of a professor, so it’s essentially addressed in the job application. Could you imagine giving your political views during a C++ coding interview? DEI statements are no different.
Just because the political parties have made diversity into a political issue, doesn’t mean it’s a political issue in our department during the hiring process. We never talk about candidates with any political colorings, only about their ideas and experience related to the job.
The key mistake many posters here are making (including you) is assuming this process is carried out by political actors looking to implement an agenda. Maybe you can find instances of that (as you can anywhere), but it’s mostly people just looking to hire a colleague, and trying to find the best one. It’s not political. Consider yourself lucky that political parties haven’t turned your hiring process at your job into a political football. I didn’t ask for this grief.
> What is a salient position? If only one world view is credited as being "salient", then it is a de facto political litmus test.
The salient position is that: the classroom is diverse, and that creates challenges in teaching. Any denial of that is to deny the reality of the job. That’s not a political litmus test, that is a job qualification test. Every member of the faculty knows this to be true from experience, from the famously conservative prof in the bio department, to the purple haired feminist in the sociology department. To deny this on your application is to telegraph you are willing to put your own political feelings ahead of the realities of the job.
Moreover, when an applicant parrots anodyne platitudes about how they treat every student equally, they neglect an opportunity to set oneself apart by highlighting experience in this area. For instance pronouns are a hot button issue. Some applicants will make some big deal about pronouns not being necessary, and we will have to reject that application because we all have our pronouns in our signatures. Not for political reasons, but because we have many trans students, and it makes things easier for everyone when pronouns are used upfront; when you have a Frank on your roster who is wearing a dress and lipstick and goes by Francine, having a protocol of pronoun visibility reduces friction in the classroom. It makes Francine feel welcomed and it helps her classmates as well. It’s a net win for everyone, and so political options about tans and pronouns are just not needed. You may feel political about pronouns, but our acceptance and usage of them is a practical matter for us because we have trans customers. Therefore arguments from a political position have no place in a DEI statement. You can argue that they aren’t practically needed, but that will go against our experience.
Feel free to hold whatever political opinion you want. Like I said, the bio prof is famously conservative. But you should keep your politics to yourself, especially during the application process. I believe that’s universally applicable advise.
You have just told me that putting pronouns in one's signature is effectively a condition of employment, because it "makes things easier for everyone" if people comply with this policy. That is a remarkable statement.
Consider how asymmetric these affordances are. On one hand it is considered a top priority that trans students are not only accommodated in their desired pronouns, but that everybody participates in a shared pronoun protocol on an ongoing basis to make trans students feel more welcome. On the other hand the community cannot tolerate a faculty member who prefers not to put pronouns next to their name; it is so intolerant of this behavior that the institution will not even hire such a person, let alone attempt to make them feel welcomed or accepted.
It is right and admirable to expect faculty to treat students with respect, including using requested pronouns within reason. But why should a faculty member be expected to put pronouns next to their own name if they prefer not to? The choice of how to identify is a very personal thing; that is the entire reason why this topic is so charged. What if someone strongly does not identify with putting pronouns in every place their name appears? Shouldn't they get a chance to decide how they identify?
It is not the accommodation of student requests that makes this political, it is the highly asymmetric offering of affordances. You are describing a culture where some people's choice of how to identify is protected as sacrosanct, but other people's choice is rejected as unacceptable and disqualifying. That is picking winners and losers on a charged topic where both sides have strong and closely held beliefs.
I'm probably speaking out of turn here because I went back and checked, and some faculty don't have this in their signature. So it's optional after all. Even still, leadership has asked us to put our pronouns in our signatures, so my perception was that it wasn't optional.
> Consider how asymmetric these affordances are.
I would soften both sides of your argument. On the one hand, it is considered a priority that to accommodate all students. Normalizing pronoun usage isn't a huge ask for anyone, dissenters are apparently accommodated, and trans customers (I'll refer to them as customers here to highlight that these accommodations are in fact made in the context of a transaction where large sums of money are exchanged) feel more visible and welcomed.
On the other hand, while the employer can apparently tolerate an employee who prefers not to put pronouns next to their name, it aspires not to hire people who outwardly express their political opinions about our paying customers during working hours, or in a way that would negatively impact revenues. This is the prerogative of all businesses. I'm using the employer/employee dichotomy to highlight the fact that this is in fact a job, where the expectation is that the employee will leave their politics aside.
So yes, the affordances are asymmetric, because the relationship between these groups and the institution is not the same. One is a paying customer, the other is an employee. Customer concerns are treated as a priority because education is a person-centric business. It's all about personal service to the customer. If a school gets known for a bad customer experience, that impacts enrollment which drives down revenues.
Conversely employee concerns are brought to HR and handled through internal channels. Otherwise employees abide by the institution's rules and procedures and are compensated with a salary and benefits.
I'm sorry if that offends your political sensibilities or strong and closely held beliefs, but they should be kept closely held in the context of your employment. The personhood of our customers is not debatable, because at the end of the day they are paying a large sum of money to attend our institution, and there's a lot of heavy competition out there. If that's picking winners and losers so be it. They're voting with their wallets so that's why they're winning.
I find this explanation unconvincing. If we take you at your word, then your institution would follow the preferences of the students even if they went in the other direction. Suppose the next cohort of students was against this pronoun protocol: not only do they eschew pronouns, they prefer for nobody else to specify them either, and they vote accordingly with their feet. Are you saying that you and your department would be prepared to reverse course on this issue and ask any faculty (including trans faculty, if there were any) not to specify their pronouns anywhere? Or even to reject faculty applicants who specify their pronouns during the interview process, for being too "political"? I doubt that the morals of the faculty are truly this flexible, nor should they be.
Market forces are real and I have no doubt that a loud contingent of students demand the practices you are describing. It is undoubtedly a difficult position to be in, and it is one I do not envy. But there must be a limit to how far customer focus can or should go. What if all of the students demand to get As? What if they demand that a math professor teach 2+2=5 or that a biology professor teach that biological sex is not a concept that has any basis in reality? At some point the faculty need to stand up for what is right and what is true.
And if the faculty and staff are not willing to do this, then other market forces will come into play like the article that we are commenting on. Public universities take public funds and are therefore accountable to the public, while private universities depend on alumni and donors. All of these people are entitled to have an opinion about whether they want to support this kind of behavior. You see the press turning this into "political football" that is causing you grief, I see it as a much needed check on institutions who have abdicated their responsibility to resist illiberal trends within their walls.
For a long time that was the case; Women and black people weren't allowed on campus for over a hundred years after the University's founding, but that all changed as generations churned.
> Suppose the next cohort of students was against this pronoun protocol: not only do they eschew pronouns, they prefer for nobody else to specify them either, and they vote accordingly with their feet.
I think changes like these happen at a longer timescale than cohorts. More like generations. We millennials are now teaching gen Z, and so obviously things are going to be very different from when boomers were teaching us. It will probably change again when Gen Z start getting faculty positions and gen "Alpha" (I had to look it up, who comes up with these?) start taking college classes.
> Are you saying that you and your department would be prepared to reverse course on this issue and ask any faculty (including trans faculty, if there were any) not to specify their pronouns anywhere?
I could see this happening, sure. Likely what would happen is people would complain, students would complain louder, and in the end they would get their way. Faculty would grumble, and then probably let their contracts lapse, while others who wouldn't find the situation so vexing would take their places and do their jobs.
> But there must be a limit to how far customer focus can or should go. What if all of the students demand to get As?
Grade inflation is a thing, so this is a real concern. Fortunately it's semi-checked by competing interests from our customers who appreciate that we maintain standards so that an A means something. But we're not immune from it, that's for sure. Squeaky wheels do often get grease when it comes to grades.
> What if they demand that a math professor teach 2+2=5 or that a biology professor teach that biological sex is not a concept that has any basis in reality?
Tenure and academic freedom play an important role here. Lord knows there's all kind of nonsense being taught on college campuses across the country. People can have different opinions on what constitutes nonsense; I'm sure there are topics I wish they'd shut up about that other people want taught, and topics I want taught that others would prefer be defunded and shut down. But you know what, I shrug and don't pay too much mind. I certainly don't go on about the "conservative bias" I see in many departments here. If people want to teach nonsense that's fine. If it has any utility or merit, they will attract funding, and students, and it will make our community better. We have people teaching things here that I consider to be actually far less coherent than 2+2=5. But I say, whatever, go for it. Teach away.
> At some point the faculty need to stand up for what is right and what is true.
We all are. Every single one of us. But that's why we have a marketplace, because not all of us can be right and true.
> Public universities take public funds and are therefore accountable to the public, while private universities depend on alumni and donors.
Private universities rely on all kinds of public funding to operate, not the least being public grant money. None of us are immune from public scrutiny, but in general the public better know what they are talking about if they want to leverage a criticism. If they want to open a dialogue, that can happen, but so far it seems like political and media firebrands are leading the charge, so a dialogue doesn't seem to be possible in this climate.
> All of these people are entitled to have an opinion about whether they want to support this kind of behavior.
Sure, and if they want a louder opinion so that they may be heard, they can spend more dollars. In the meantime, there are thousands of schools out there, and especially among the top schools, we are competing for the top students. And as it turns out, you can find the top students from almost any background. So when word gets out that school X is a welcoming and diverse environment, then it becomes easier to recruit top talent. If state schools get a reputation for being political playgrounds for whatever state governors or political parties, they will fall behind because they will fail to attract top talent from the new generation.
> I see it as a much needed check on institutions who have abdicated their responsibility to resist illiberal trends within their walls.
Respectfully, you've made it pretty clear you don't really know what's going on in the walls, so any assessment on how illiberal or not the activities are must be incomplete. The level of discourse in this entire thread is generally stunted because the HN commentariat is talking out of its depth. Software developers, web devs, people who have never been in academia aside from being a student, or haven't been in decades, are voicing their thoughts on what they think is happening in academia. These opinions seem to be fueled mostly by chatter in the right-wing media sphere, especially Tucker Carlson in recent days.
Absent from the entire conversation here seems to be people with first-hand experience reading and evaluating these DEI statements. I think I've noticed 2 other posters in the thousands of comments generated in the past 3 or so HN threads that hit the front page, who I would say have an accurate read on what goes on within academic walls. Everyone else seems to have somehow made up their minds about how these statements are used and what's in them, without reading a single one or asking anyone how they are actually used in practice. Instead you get people claiming as confidently and baselessly as ChatGPT that the whole practice is abjectly racist, illegal, unconstitutional - I've heard it all. You yourself said that you are dismissive of positive first-hand accounts because you assume they are just politically biased. There is zero curious inquiry going on surrounding this topic, and that should sound warning bells that this is just a political tornado.
I don't listen to Tucker Carlson, but I have been listening to what you have been telling me in this thread. From your own first-hand testimony I have learned:
- You have first-hand knowledge of faculty applicants who have been rejected on the basis of their belief that universal pronoun protocols are not necessary, or that they personally prefer not to volunteer their own pronouns.
- You do not count this as a political litmus test, instead you accuse the applicant of being political by having an opinion that is different from what students are demanding.
- You acknowledge that the institution is extending asymmetric affordances, and picking winners and losers on a charged topic, but rationalize this by citing market forces and a philosophy that the customer is always right.
Even if I had heard nothing else, that right there is the case for an illiberal trend. Some opinions are endorsed while others are rejected in the hiring process, and this is not based on any appeal to truth, fairness, or equal protection, but rather the arbitrary demands of the customer.
Respectfully, the fact that you would tell me all of this openly, but then think that I need right-wing agitation to consider this an illiberal trend, just reinforces to me how much of an echo chamber academia must have become. I'm sorry, but no amount of condescension on your part will convince me that this is ok.
> You yourself said that you are dismissive of positive first-hand accounts because you assume they are just politically biased.
I told you that I would credit such accounts if they came from someone who had significant disagreements with the dominant thinking on these subjects, and was able to be hired without hiding this.
It is little credit to the fairness of a process if the people who are aligned with the ruling school of thought find the process to be unburdensome.
Does it help female students, knowing that they have to accommodate this misogyny?
But I can guarantee that at least some of your female students are scoffing at the misogynistic idea that "woman = lipstick and dress and she/her pronouns".
I can tell you don't work with students. They are very vocal when you do something they don't agree with, to the point where they will anonymously send you their thoughts via a burner gmail account if they actually do feel for some reason they will suffer repercussions (which they never do). If the silent dissenters have thoughts, they will go unaddressed as long as they remain silent.
But to be clear you're arguing for a hypothetical person, correct? When you say "they stay quiet out of politeness", you are talking about students you invented that you assume exist, and not actual students you know personally who voiced this particular concern to you?
> "woman = lipstick and dress and she/her pronouns"
If you're trying to imply this is something I've said here or in the classroom, neither has occurred.
This statement seems incredibly hyperbolic. Do you believe that DEI statements are simply "how intersectionally oppressed are you"? Have you had to answer any of these yourself? What were the exact questions?
That's really all I need to know. While I have much deeper opinions on the topic, I'm fine just stopping there, I don't want my kids to live in a world where that sort of instruction is the norm.
On more than one occasion I heard professors in our department talking about the boobs and asses of female undergraduate and graduate students, make weird remarks about homosexual faculty, and even one comment about how black people don't enjoy math anyways.
I think a lot of the super weird stuff is not so much that academia is radically free-speech or anything and more just that professors stay around until they're 80 and 80 year olds say crazy shit.
But, anyways, a lot of faculty/grad student lounges/offices would make your average anti-woke corporate worker bee blush.
Fear your fears about the future and your children; we all do. And if those fears lead you to endorse and support a white nationalist movement, own your actions. No one forced you to do that.
Us jews are notorious Nazi's and white nationalists.
OP’s point is these aims may be in opposition to one another. Pushing ideology-affirming DEI requirements in academia alienates allies who would have given support to electoral reform.
I admittedly haven’t seen joint polling on this. But competitive districts certainly show overlap, and joint increasing animosity, towards these elements. Speaking personally, corporate DEI always struck me as usual bureaucratic drudgery; gatekeeping academic positions with an ideological questionnaire makes me pause, particularly when those same institutions are proposing solutions to our inequality and electoral problems.
Did you sleep through 2020?
Asian kids stand to be hurt the most by this. They want asian kids to view themselves as oppressed minorities (e.g. the California ethnic studies curriculum). They make thinly veiled accusations that our cultural traits (keeping our heads down and not complaining) is an effort to uphold white supremacy. But when the chips are down, they’ll categorize Asians as “white.”
“Asian” is even worse since it refers to a group of people who share neither ethnicity nor culture. It’s a label that is workable only because these unrelated groups share some common experiences in America due to immigration patterns. Even there, though, Indian immigrants and Vietnamese refugees have little in common.
This happened, exactly as you describe, before my eyes at a well known education startup in Denver 2 years ago. HR representatives publicly humiliated someone for defending protestors on January 6th. Their take was entirely in bounds and amounted to "I think we're talking past one another with the heightened rhetoric, we should have more compassion for other perspectives." They later were forced to publicly apologize for their "short-sighted comments" that "harmed BIPOCs." It was insane.
Looking back, that place was a leftist echo chamber like I have never seen, and hope to never see again. Really sucks how much politics is still driving a "data-driven" world.
It's worse, you tell somebody they are a victim enough, and they begin to believe it, they even play the role of a victim. You are now starting to see a generation of young minorities that have become what they are told they are. You now have a permanent victim class.
> It's already started bleeding into the workspace with mandatory training and verbiage that essentially says anything you do in your interactions with a minority if they accuse you of anything they are right and you must meekly accept it and bow your head in shame.
The result in this will simply be that people avoid interactions with people who pose a risk to them. You already see for example men are very cautious of being alone with women, or teachers alone with students.
> You even have companies doing layoffs now intentionally focused on laying off non minorities.
Those who choose this policy over merit deserve the rotten companies they are creating. Ultimately you do end up with what you optimize for.
> Another issue is that Asians while less in number than most other minorities are treated as white by DEI.
White Asians are a problem for the ideology, because they are a minority that statistically does well. They have to treat them as white, otherwise the ideology falls apart.
> I worry about my kids if this keeps escalating.
You'll probably find they are already being indoctrinated. I have teacher friends working in younger education who admit on social media they purposefully neglect boys when picking students with their hands up, and similar scenarios. Statistically men before this movement were doing worse than their female counterparts, I hate to think where we are after another 10 years time.
Planning for the future
Delayed Gratification
Self Reliance
Adherence to the nuclear family
Objective, Rational thinking
Hard work being the key to success
I've worked with a number of young black adults for example that have said (paraphrasing) "this work is too hard, where I am from we do not work this hard". My response is always something like "the greater the work, the greater the reward".
According to DEI, what I should have done is made the work easier/irrelevant for them, and then balanced out the end result (probably by degrading the work of others).
But being a white supremacist, I made them work hard, and they got a great end result. Afterwards they thanked me for pushing them and they were (rightfully) proud of what they had achieved. It had value because it was not easy to obtain.
[1] https://nmaahc.si.edu/learn/talking-about-race/topics/whiten...
I don't know how "right-wing" became a slur, but it's unhealthy for people to hold their opposition with such low regard.
Progressive politics (typically left-leaning) is the idea of making "progress" (read: change), so most issues raised if not implemented or occurring already, will occur in the near future.
Conservative politics (typically right-leaning) is the idea of conserving the current way of life, but they are rarely successful and only serve to slow down policies. Conservatism for the most part is a mostly liberal position. Most honest people would agree there is a great advantage to making change slowly and carefully - all the longest living institutions (up until recently) survived by doing this.
The problem in the US is that conservatism is also conflated with lots of other random ideas, like religion and right-wing policies (anti-abortion, anti-LGBT, etc). There's no way to vote for the parts you like without voting for the parts you don't like.
They're not conflated. They are stances held by large swatch of US conservatives.
I think these activists are to racism what SlimFast/WeightWatchers is to dieting. They have no interest in actually solving the problem, they instead would much rather you perpetually be a victim.
But I believe DEI proponents often insist on the effects instead of the motivation in the first place. Bad word is a bad word, regardless of the context and such arguments...
Yeah, I hate the Republicans. But I vote for them now.
I keep seeing this statement but I never really get an explanation as to how it makes them a "special lesser class" or it's the "civil right movement in reverse." Could you elaborate?
>says anything you do in your interactions with a minority if they accuse you of anything they are right and you must meekly accept it and bow your head in shame.
I would like to see the language that says this.
No, mandatory DEI statements (statements about how a person has and/or plans to advance the institutions diversity goals through their work) do not treat minorities as lesser or needing “protection”.
Wired Magazine: "A Glimpse of a Future Without White People"
https://www.wired.com/story/mohsin-hamid-the-last-white-man
It's the same one we're supposed to discriminate against in the workplace.
Considering the book banning he just enacted this seems like an extremely short sighted and poorly thought out reasoning.
Come on man, you know what "banned books" are. They are books that libraries are not allowed to carry/lend and schools cannot assign/carry/lend. It could be the result of local/state/federal law, or a school administration's decision, or a PTA, whatever. Why are you pretending you don't know this?
DeSantis has banned books at the state level with the GOP legislature in Florida. That is what we are talking about.
That's fascinating to me. I checked out books all the time. In fact, we were required to check out books for various assignments. We also had a program called AR (accelerated reading) where you would be able to take a quiz on a library book and gather points which let you get various prizes, up to principal for the day.
Constantly. It was the only library I could get to regularly and I had a voracious appetite for reading.
Uh, yeah. All the time actually.
Is it?
Here's what MLK has written:
> “Whenever the issue of compensatory treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree; but he should ask nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic.”
> “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for the Negro.”
> “A section of the white population, perceiving Negro pressure for change, misconstrues it as a demand for privileges rather than as a desperate quest for existence. The ensuing white backlash intimidates government officials who are already too timorous.”
DEI initiatives, when executed correctly, show substantially and consistently superior outcomes for the people and organizations who implement them. You will see more, and more successful, DEI initiatives for the rest of your life, because they work. Companies who are successful will tend to be companies who execute DEI initiatives well (I can post many high quality sources if folks are interested).
It's completely fair to criticize bad implementations of DEI, and we all know there are a lot of those, but to throw the baby out with the bath water here would be a mistake, and not one corporations will make willingly. You'd have to be pretty militant and aggressive with the law in order to stop companies from pursuing a win/win like DEI.
Here, I challenge you to be specific in your criticism:
> Along all dimensions measured, the more similar the investment partners, the lower their investments’ performance. For example, the success rate of acquisitions and IPOs was 11.5% lower, on average, for investments by partners with shared school backgrounds than for those by partners from different schools. The effect of shared ethnicity was even stronger, reducing an investment’s comparative success rate by 26.4% to 32.2%. [0]
> Increased diversity in the healthcare workforce helps reduce or eliminate racial health disparities, according to a 2014 meta-analysis of 25 studies. [1]
> A large-scale study of all Texas schools reveals diversity’s impact in public education systems. They find student performance most-improved when there was greater management diversity, and a closer racial match (representation) between management and student. [2]
> Most of the sixteen reviews matching inclusion criteria demonstrated positive associations between diversity, quality and financial performance. Healthcare studies showed patients generally fare better when care was provided by more diverse teams. Professional skills-focused studies generally find improvements to innovation, team communications and improved risk assessment. Financial performance also improved with increased diversity. A diversity-friendly environment was often identified as a key to avoiding frictions that come with change. [3]
> Our latest report shows not only that the business case remains robust but also that the relationship between diversity on executive teams and the likelihood of financial outperformance has strengthened over time. These findings emerge from our largest data set so far, encompassing 15 countries and more than 1,000 large companies. By incorporating a “social listening” analysis of employee sentiment in online reviews, the report also provides new insights into how inclusion matters. It shows that companies should pay much greater attention to inclusion, even when they are relatively diverse. [4]
> Using data from the 1996 to 1997 National Organizations Survey, a national sample of for-profit business organizations, this article tests eight hypotheses derived from the value-in-diversity thesis. The results support seven of these hypotheses: racial diversity is associated with increased sales revenue, more customers, greater market share, and greater relative profits. [5]
[0] https://hbr.org/2018/07/the-other-diversity-dividend
[1] https://www.ucdenver.edu/docs/librariesprovider68/default-do...
[2] https://academic.oup.com/jpart/article/15/4/615/991022
[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30765101/
[4] https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inc...
[5] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/000312240907400203
DEI has been proven to benefit white woman the most. Not sure I’d call that a success for black American socio economic uplift.
Here's an equity implementation that seemed to work: https://www.corporatecomplianceinsights.com/how-successful-d...
> Schulman realized he had to do something about the large gap between the lower-paid employees and the rest of the company. “Imagine asking people to double down on serving customers when they’re more financially stressed than ever before, when they don’t even have healthcare benefits,” he told Insider. So PayPal raised wages for lower-level workers by about 7 percent – not a huge amount, but enough to ease money worries – and gave them restricted stock units so they could share in PayPal’s success. The company also covered more healthcare costs, cutting the amount lower-level employees contribute by around 58 percent.
> Employee turnover has been cut in half
Here is a diversity initiative enacted politically: https://www.hrdive.com/news/virginia-outlaws-hair-discrimina...
> Discrimination based on hair texture, type and hairstyles such as braids, locks and twists will be illegal in Virginia starting July 1. Gov. Ralph Northam signed a bill on March 4 that “clarifies” that when the law bans discrimination “on the basis of race,” that includes “traits historically associated with race, including hair texture, hair type, and protective hairstyles such as braids, locks, and twists.”
I'm sure I could fine more examples if I didn't have a meeting in 5 minutes.
Well, don't tease us like that?
It's a right-wing bogeyman and they use it to scare people because it works. Just like it did with you.
The thing is racism, at least the racism that actually matters to people's quality of life, is systemic. You're black? Higher mortgage rate for you, even if all other factors are the same. You're Asian? Then you're probably the better student, even if all other factors are the same.
The point of DEI is for you to recognize prejudices exist, we're all prejudiced in some way, and what steps are you going to take to prevent your prejudices from clouding your judgement. It's not about minorities getting preferential treatment (outside of the context of reparations which is a highly controversial topic), but making sure minorities get a fair shot. And in case you're wondering, yes, I remember "the good old days" when minorities were targeted for mass layoffs.
I'd argue if we weren't such assholes then we wouldn't have most of the problems we have in society but we just can't help ourselves, can we?
Your right, I'm an idiot unable to think for myself. Me and everyone else that believes this. People who believe as you do are the only intelligent ones able to think for themselves.
Everything I have experienced related to DEI is not real and part of the massive collective hallucination experienced by anyone that doesn't 100% support it.
Being told to "sit in my shame" was good. The VP of DEI responding to Asians expressing fear during the rash of unwarranted attacks on them a year ago by other minorities by telling them white supremacy was to blame was good.
Thank you for showing me the light.
"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."
It is bold of you to admit this, but I commend you, even despite your apparent and admitted idiocy.
Academia has obviously been historically discriminatory, and due to the massive problems with the structure of US universities it still has all sorts of problems. The way to fix that is obviously to bring in senior leadership who have experience and understanding of the myriad complex issues facing academia today and who can create a series of changes to tackle some of the systemic underlying issues which have embedded a monoculture in most institutions. Actually doing that is really difficult though, and challenges a series of power structures that are well embedded and aren't going to change. Senior leadership at universities answer to donors, not junior staff.
So there's a push to change, but it's not going to change? What do you do? You cover your ass by making sure you meticulously document just exactly how you are making changes so you can point to stuff when people realise that absolutely nothing is changing. You say to your woke alumni "look at the great initiatives" and you say to your non-woke alumni "Psstt... I think we've got a spare space for your 85 IQ grandson"
No. No, my goodness no.
The way to fix that isn't to continue to expand an already bloated bureaucracy that is uninterested in actual intellectual development. The way to fix it is to blow up the university system itself in this country.
Which problems, in particular? At the big land grant school I attended in the 1990s minority representation in classes and teaching positions exceeded their demographic representation in the surrounding area.
Fast-forward 30 years and the same is true at the big school my kid is attending now with the notable exception of one minority.
If you know that the general population is 20% race A, 10% race B, 30% race C, and yet your admissions are only pulling in 40% race C, 5% race B and 55% race A, you know something is wrong. Policies designed to keep your admissions closer to the general population would not count as discrimination because if everything is functioning correctly your distribution is going to at least resemble the gen pop distribution. Obviously it will never be a perfect fit, because various factors like location, education etc will influence your hiring pool.
A lot of people insist that trying to get your metrics to match reality is discrimination because they think it means someone who "doesn't deserve it" will get hired instead of them. The reality is that a biased pipeline might exclude you too, regardless of your gender or skin color, because a biased pipeline is probably filled with things like nepotism, people blackballing candidates off of Vibes(tm), hiring based on appearance, etc. For every time biased hiring benefits you, it probably hurt you 3 times and you might not have noticed.
The reality is that if you look at the raw DEI metrics for most large corporations they do not even vaguely resemble the general population. There's no rational excuse for that, you have to do something.
Where artist choice comes in to the picture is if a label focuses on a single genre, you're now subject to the race balance in that genre. I don't think that's a problem, but it still is ideally fair recruiting.
It is not a problem to be solved when different cultural groups make different choices for themselves and their families. The real problem is that DEI comes about 20 years too late to do anything to help, and sometimes it is in industries that don't appeal to the cultures it is trying to attract. Properly investing in children will greatly increase the number of minorities in the pipeline for college and well-paying jobs.
Investing in children and creating equal opportunities for children are both great measures to take to boost diversity in education and the workplace.
Suppose I observe that 10% of the population is in class X, but only 5% of my hires are. I could try to adjust my job application acceptance criteria to increase that number to 10%. I could try to change my outreach efforts to encourage more of that class to apply. And I could possibly determine that a lot less than 10% of the pool of potential qualified applicants is in the class, that much of the bottleneck is earlier in the pipeline, and that something needs to be done about the pipeline.
And note that those latter options are hard. In many respects, affirmative action is an easy way out.
There was a large case study on this in California: prop 209. Here’s an article about the outcomes:
The upshot is that the measures taken after public university affirmative action was outlawed in California were more effective than affirmative action was.
I read a much better and more detailed article about this, but I’m having trouble finding it now.
Doesn't this ignore the fact that there actually might be biological differences between various races of humans? I mean, aren't most top runners black? I don't follow this closely, but it does seem there is bigger percentage of black people compared to general population.
Isn't the fair way to focus on equal opportunities, not outcomes? Give everyone the chance, but pick based on objective criteria (ideally in a blind way)?
Show me that we have a society in which everyone is enabled to thrive to their full potential and then make this argument. Until then biological essentialism is profoundly stupid.
Yes, genetic advantages are a thing which is why the NBA is dominated by black people but social factors are also a thing which is why the NHL is dominated by Canadians.
Diversity programs aim to address the second factor i.e. giving a temporary boost to people who didn't have access to social and economic privilege.
Why are black people disproportionately in pro basketball? "It must be genetics!". It couldn't possibly be the fact that basketball courts are easier to build in the inner city than baseball fields. It couldn't be the fact that many poor black kids see the salaries that sports stars make, see the accessibility of a basketball court, and think "that's my ticket out.". (A neat documentary about this is "Hoop Dreams")
For some reason people find it easiest to default to looking at personal characteristics, which in the alt-right online spaces is genetics (in the regular right it's culture). If I had to guess a reason I'd guess that we're evolutionarily used to living in small tribes, sharing the same environment with everyone we meet, so we look to personal factors to explain preferences and abilities. But we no longer live in those homogeneous environments.
The location of basketball courts is incidental and i'm not certain what your point is.
Which is coincidentally the average height of NBA players (meaning almost half of them are below this height).
There are a maximum of about 600 NBA players at any given time, so a little more than 300 at 6' 6" or above.
Having good height genetics means you have a 0.25% chance of being an NBA player in any given year. Not factoring in foreign players. Maybe a 2% chance in your lifetime.
Being a black person doesn't give you any more advantage than being a white person when it comes to height. In fact, in the USA, white American males average an inch taller than black American males: https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/average-hei...
(Yes, I'm aware of standard deviations, and unfortunately don't have this statistic for the two groups.)
> The location of basketball courts is incidental and i'm not certain what your point is.
The importance of social factors in opportunity (and motivation) to build talent in certain endeavors.
However - and this is a major issue - the outliers aren't captured in averages. I read a book called Taboo by John Entine that went into this exact issue. The issue is that the outliers are what determine champions at the elite level and people with west african heritage have slightly more genetic advantages - notably in sports like basketball. there is also the issue of rising incomes and the breaking down of societal barriers. As more black americans have access to sports like basketball, more of their slight genetic advantages can express themselves. All this gets masked by averages.
Entine's book makes a point in passing - africans will slowly start to dominate sports like football (soccer) that were traditionally dominated by white people. The french men's and women's football teams are showing this, as are many other european football teams. Football is more about skill and places less of a premium on height but there is one role where height is important - the goalkeeper. In the french squad, all their goalies except Lloris are either black or mixed heritage.
Do certain traits tend to be more prevalent within certain broad genetic backgrounds? Sure. But for any given individual, or even family, this tells you nothing. And unfortunately, when people start to use these broad genetic backgrounds for prediction, you end up with cultural filtering whether you wanted it or not. The measuring stick becomes the goal in some way.
Let people be people. Let them find their own path through trial and error, unless they actually come looking for advice. Let them know if they're genuinely not a competitor after they have tried, but give them the genuine chance (a rare few will overcome even this).
Within the last couple of hundred years we've finally developed societies in which people don't have to follow in their parents footsteps, but can find their own vocations. I don't want to lose this because of some eugenics inclination and racial stereotypes.
:D Sumo wrestler football goalies FTW. :D
Academia may have been historically discriminatory, but their biggest problem today is a pipeline problem. K-12 education, and especially public K-12 education, is not just historically discriminatory but has very real, ongoing discrimination against BIPOC minorities, and against female students' success in STEM subjects. That's what really needs to be addressed head-on, DEI is pointless window dressing.
People that honestly fall for such statements are too naive to really fill out any leadership position in my opinion, but it really seems that is their expectation after they paid that much tuition?
Hard disagree. This is the type of thing only colleges do, it’s the equivalent of an essay and also displays how different academia is from the professional world. No one cares about publications in industry, and people buy into this stuff much less sincerely than in academia
I’ve been in and around various colleges for years and I’ve yet to see anything worth getting upset about; let alone worth people outside of this space getting upset about.
You don't want to hire a racist now, do you? No? Good, so mandatory DEI pledges for all!
Once neglected, DEI initiatives now present at all Fortune 100 companies: https://www.hrdive.com/news/2022-fortune-companies-dei/62765...
This stuff have been in the private sector for years now.
There's plenty of academics to go around. I need my hands dirty.
Academia does have to find a new place since the logistics of information and knowledge transferal became very cheap. You can acquire a lot of knowledge in today's world without a formal education. Not comparable to having a mentor, but neither is true for students in university.
Nobody verifies my impressive resume claims. Just my employment dates and degrees, if even those.
So claim you ran a workshop for transgender black women. Nobody is going to dig deep enough in most cases to know if it is true.
New epistemologies have taken root and from them, derived new values. Stamping out new ideas is a very very difficult task after they've reached enough people. The new guard sees the old rules as constraining as you find the new rules.
Most revolutions happen in people's minds decades before social relations change. You have to realize that there is no repeating the thesis to the antithesis. If you want to get a step ahead of the antithesis, synthesis is one's only option.
Kissing the scepter doesn't mean you love the scepter. Rejection is a strong possibility. Most ideas do die (dei?).
Deciding the because one must be forced to believe universalizes into other's being forced to believe is an empathy gap. If you wish to understand how how these ideas take root, don't fall into the "enemy is strong and weak" trap. Deciding that oneself believes because principles but others believe because they are forced to or are told to is a good way to fight the wrong fight.
You cannot simply wield and old value against a new symbolic universe. You either have to derive it in the new universe or create an even newer symbolic universe which probably can't happen yet because the problems with the new symbolic universe have to be realized within itself, not within the old universe.
Take free speech as an example. The DEI universe was created as a response to the symbolic universe free speech was forged in. In order to value free speech again, a post-DEI symbolic universe has to be developed as a response to the internal contradictions of the DEI universe - not the contradictions external to it. Trying to maintain a steady state symbolic universe is itself a contradiction - it's simply not possible. Evolve or die.
But as far as ideas goes that would be general humanism like color blindness, freedom of speech and expression, freedom of association, guilty until proven innocent, equality instead of equity (although a balance here is probably most desirable, DEI tends toward totalitarianism).
Maybe DIE isn't opposed to all these values, but it has positioned itself as such. And I believe opposing such values became en vogue by a class of academics to set themselves apart ironically. Although its ideas aren't that new as well.
My claim is that the values you mentioned(free speech &c.) are derivatives of enlightenment thought whose epistemological basis is objective reality. This appears tautologically true for true-believers within objective reality.
The DEI values are derived from an internal contradiction within objective reality which is something like, "How can X,Y,and Z bad things exist when people can [supposedly] embody <the values you've listed>?" That's the contradiction I'm referring to within the symbolic universe of objective reality. This contradiction creates cognitive dissonance that is typically either resolved through individual failings (individualism being another value) or in the case of the avant-garde, substituting the whole or parts of objective reality with an alternative one ie: the subjective one.
The big hurdle here seems to be understanding objective reality as itself a totalizing and reified instantiation of a particular symbolic universe. It's something that's difficult to explain through text, but a glancing shot might be to examine the contradiction at the horizon of objective reality, namely that the displacement of a subjective reality by objective reality's totalizing nature precludes the values that objective reality contains, specifically "the individual's freedom to choose one's reality." In a universe where individuals are free to choose anything, not being able to choose subjective reality feels like the universe singing a version of Meatloaf's ballad on repeat[1].
I can't help but point out that the values you've mentioned (to me) aren't a response to DEI, but what DEI is responding to. The way I know this is that they predate DEI. Values that are a response to DEI cannot predate DEI.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27d_Do_Anything_for_Love_(Bu...
Abstracted further, the way you describe some DEI ideas react to the enlightenment ideas, is to say that idealism doesn't solve real problems (color blindness is nice an all, but inequalities remain). That is not wrong even if everyone indeed believed in equality. Everyone wants to provide disability access and is in favor of that. But ask yourself how often you actually acted on that wish. Or how often you forgot about it. But there are pragmatic ways to solve it without discriminating the healthy at all.
But don't let all that fool you. This isn't a battle about objective or subjective reality. It is much more simple. It is about monarchy and people believing their ideas makes them your betters. This is what prestigious institutions want to sell in the modern world where logistics of knowledge come into reach of everyone. The need to differentiate themselves and their institutions. People that believe they should cut the pieces of the pie you deserve in their opinion. One as subjective as everyone else's. Why is it successful? Because it instills fears in its followers. That there are evil racist and sexist people that are out to get you. In response the believers do away with enlightenment values. I believe it to be wrong that there are deeper thoughts behind it. In the end these are just people with special interests trying to sell their religion. The Alex Jones of Harvard. I wouldn't even say they are smarter in selling their product. Maybe a bit more subtle.
Their failure is that they are absolutely incapable to connect to the working class in a competitive economy. No, psychologically safety and bad words aren't on the mind of people that try to get by and fear the need to justify their jobs every minute.
Much stricter: they have a well-established mechanism for reconciliation and forgiveness! In fact, several!
The end always justifies the means, with little care given to the truth or reality of whatever means is co-opted and tortured to advance their end.
You must adhere to the core beliefs, which will change depending on the red fool's soup de jour. Your beliefs are not important, as their beliefs are gospel without question. It is an old and very insidious religion, revitalized, that has no place in a free and civilized society. We've been down this road before. We know where it leads.
Yet we go head-long into the abyss to the chants - the same Marxist slogans and ideology that heralded the starvation and torture of tens of millions of people, whose only 'crimes' were opposition to compelled speech and the desire for individual liberty.
I'd like to think it will get better, that western civilization would reject cultural revolutionaries that produce nothing but misery and death under the banner of "equity"
...which means ownership, not exclusive equality...
but I am not hopeful. The red guard is back, but this time, they are even more dangerous given the cornucopia of deceit, false promises, reach, and old but effective tactics that poison the minds of the young, so that they march lock-step with cheers & smiles into oblivion, dragging everyone and everything with them.
A free and civilized society has allowed the oppression, dispossession, and outright murder-without-consequence of far, far too many of its citizens to traipse along unquestioned.
The new 'fairness' is incompatible with blind hiring or individual merit, because its ultimate aim is to make what you are more important than what you have done.
You might say 'that's a good thing' but to claim these aren't polar opposite concepts of fairness or justice is disingenuous.
We tried, for decades, a simple meritocracy solution. It brought us deeply-embedded racism and the robber-baron era of industrial monopoly. And in the current era, we're watching technology create another gilded-age-style haves-and-have-nots divide.
Turns out a society that's as close to best for everyone sometimes needs some thumbs on some scales to work, because people are selfish and short-sighted and "meritocracy" depends heavily on where you start and how lucky you get.
That's an interesting viewpoint and I'm not sure how it squares with a university's First Amendment right to freedom of association. After all, they're at liberty to grant tenure to whomever they think is worthy of it, by their own criteria. If they think that a tenured physics professor's views on getting more people of diverse backgrounds into physics are as important as their views on plasma confinement, who has authority to tell them otherwise? How does such a requirement differ from, say, a requirement that a tenure-track professor have teaching experience (because a prof who can't pass knowledge on is worthless to the university)?
The short answer from the courts is - if you take money from the federal government, in any way, or have students who take money from the federal government, in any way, or distribute funds from the federal government, in any way, as a corporate entity you lose out on many of the rights entailed to a private citizen.
If anything, government money tends to include more diversity entanglements, not fewer.
The first amendment, as originally noted.
This is most relevant at public universities, which effectively are the government.
Diversity statements are not viewpoint statements, they are statements of achievements and concrete plans related to organizational goals.
The first amendment does not prohibit public employers from asking for, and basing employment decisions, on such statements.
If a public school’s “organization goals” have extended into the realm of advancing DEI political ideology, then the organization is operating outside its remit.
No, they aren’t. They are “how have/would/will you achieve specific goals” statements. Some actual prompts (with institution names removed as a distraction here, if included) [0]:
“Applicants should submit a statement explaining how their teaching at the College will contribute to a culture of inclusion and campus diversity.”
“A description of how the applicant would contribute to the development of a diverse and inclusive learning community at <institution> through her/his teaching, research, and/or service.”
“[…] discuss how the candidate would help achieve <institution>’s goal to attract and graduate more women, Hispanic, and students from other underrepresented groups.”
“Qualified candidates should submit […] a diversity statement (describing how you incorporate diversity into your teaching, research, and/or service)”
“Pursuant to the college’s vision for cultivating a diverse and inclusive community, the search committee will ask all applicants to address how their past and/or potential contributions might serve to advance <institution>’s commitment to teaching and mentoring young people from a variety of personal experiences, values, and worldviews that arise from differences of culture and circumstance.”
> If a public school’s “organization goals” have extended into the realm of advancing DEI political ideology,
Diversity is well-established (in cases both supporting and striking down particular diversity policies) as a compelling government interest under; promotion of diversity is not outside the remit of public universities, and, therefore, neither is asking prospective employees both their track record on advancing, and their plans going forward to advance, that interest in their work.
[0] examples from: https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/developing-and-w...
Sounds like one for the courts.
This is of course a separate issue from whether or not the statements are a good idea, but my layman's perusal of supreme court cases around compelled speech found that this almost certainly doesn't rise to the level of a first amendment violation.
It'll be interesting to see what happens if they not only continue to generate excellent students and research but excel because the diversity theories are correct.
Also if a University is optimizing for say "Most High Impact Research published" by a prospective hire, their skin color is going to be pretty irrelevant.
As noted in peer comments in these threads though, universities aren't solely in the business of pure research. They optimize for a wide band of goals, including teaching, grant acquisition and use, and publication. Those are human interaction skill-spaces, not particle-behavior-comprehension skill spaces.
And even in the realm of pure research: of the top ten big physics and astronomy institutions, four are in Europe (across three countries), one in China, one in Japan, two in Russia, and two in the United States. The ability to work cross-culturally with diverse people is extremely important for physics collaboration in the 21st century.
Because the job in fact is to teach a diverse classroom. So if all you have to say are banal platitudes in your DEI statement, you will be passed over.
Not because your position is wrong, it’s not. But because others are able to articulate with specificity and examples as to how they handle the job of teaching a diverse classroom. That’s what you’re up against as an applicant.
LMAO. If you're hiring top-tier researchers there's enough cut-throat competition for revenue that DEI statements are marginal and everyone agrees no one gives a shit about Service (DEI is service). I'm sure there's an exception here or there, but even in those cases... Harvard/MIT have thousands of qualified candidates for every spot, and any of those people would do the job well. In a very real sense, Harvard/MIT/etc. pick who wins as much as the other way around.
> It's a guaranteed death spiral for them.
No, it's EXACTLY the other way around.
The schools where DEI statements matter the most in hiring may or may not even have an office of sponsored research (aka not even enough grant revenue to bother budgeting for a secretary or accountant to help with paperwork). They depend on tuition dollars.
Their student base is declining by as much as 20% in 2025 due to a collapse in birth rates after 2008, and they NEED to increase the size of the pie or they will die. The easiest way to do that is to recruit non-WASP students, since the WASP demographic is already college-saturated. Enter DEI. It's about $$$, not Ideology.
Ie, the reason many institutions are requiring DEI has more to do with the fact that they're terrified they will run out of money and blink out of existence if they don't manage to start recruiting non-traditional student demographics between now and 2030, and right or wrong (imo wrong btw) they think DEI focus in faculty is crucial to recruitment of certain degraphics: https://www.capturehighered.com/how-to-climb-higher-eds-impe...
So why play the kabuki game at all if it's all so pointless.
>The schools where DEI statements matter the most in hiring may or may not even have an office of sponsored research (aka not even enough grant revenue to bother budgeting for a secretary or accountant to help with paperwork). They depend on tuition dollars.
We're talking about the UC schools which have been top of the world generally and the DEI stuff seems to matter quite a lot there.
>Their student base is declining by as much as 20% in 2025 due to a collapse in birth rates after 2008, and they NEED to increase the size of the pie or they will die. The easiest way to do that is to recruit non-WASP students, since the WASP demographic is already college-saturated. Enter DEI. It's about $$$, not Ideology.
This doesn't map to reality because it's some of the most elite schools, with the most applicants, the largest endowments, the most Federal Research Money, etc. that have been pushing this the most aggressively, Harvard, Yale, the UC's etc.
That's academia. I'm really, really serious.
You also submit, as a 20-something who has only ever been a student:
1. a multi-page research statement summarizing a five year research agenda,
2. a multi-page teaching statement (in some cases the candidate has literally just been a grader for one course and stretches that out for 2.5 pages),
3. three letters of reference (multiple pages, must be glowing with lots of anecdotes, preferably from senior and respected people in your field),
4. 5 page CV summarizing your first six years of work (at least one of which was just taking classes; lol), and
5. A diversity statement and/or statement of faith.
That's before your first phone interview. After the phone interview you have a 2 day on-site interview that involves an hour long talk, one-on-one interviews with dozens of people, and every meal with a different group of stakeholders. They sometimes even pick you up from the airport, drop you off at the airport, and have you sleep in a university house that you are "always on" from touch-down to take-off. No shit: I heard an anecdote about a candidate that didn't get an offer because he left the bedroom messy.
That's the process for an entry-level position that might only pay $60K.
Faculty hiring is straight up insane, and DEI/Faith statements don't even make the top 10 list of reasons why.
> We're talking about the UC schools which have been top of the world generally and the DEI stuff seems to matter quite a lot there.
Are we? The article starts with a discussion of Berkeley, but quickly generalizes to the rest of the industry. Very few of the comments here are about the UC system in particular.
By institution count, CA's public system is a teeny tiny fraction of the US's 4000+ colleges and universities.
But I get it. For a certain mark, California gets the cortisol goin'.
> ...pushing this the most aggressively, Harvard, Yale, the UC's etc.
LOL no they're not. The push is FAR stronger at no-name tuition-dependent corn row colleges in the midwest who have snow white undergrad populations and are literally existentially threatened by the coming decline in white 18 year old midwesterners.
But the Big Elite Coastal Schools are only institutions that people who lose their god damned brains over stuff like this ever want to talk about.
The idea that because there are other issues with hiring in Academia that these "Faith Statements" don't matter rings pretty hollow imo.
>By institution count, CA's public system is a teeny tiny fraction of the US's 4000+ colleges and universities.
But I get it. For a certain mark, California gets the cortisol goin'.
I'm actually a fan of the UC's and California generally but I also think that the UC's are the gold standard for Public Education in the US and what happens there often spreads across the rest of the big State University systems.
>LOL no they're not. The push is FAR stronger at no-name tuition-dependent corn row colleges in the midwest who have snow white undergrad populations and are literally existentially threatened by the coming decline in white 18 year old midwesterners.
Not sure how you can say this with such assurance, given we can see countless examples of DEI gone wild at the Ivies or Stanford or Wellesley, etc. You did your undergrad/phd at multiple Ivies and have worked at a dozen of those corn row schools and know what's happening there?
I'm wondering if you're willing to tell us how many faculty DEI statements you've actually read. I'm very sure that if we forced the posters here to disclose the same, the median across this thread would be 0 or 1 (that one being the first hit that could be found searching Google).
Personally I've read dozens upon dozens in my role as an educator, and thwayunion has been spot on in their assessment. As for this:
> given we can see countless examples of DEI gone wild at the Ivies or Stanford or Wellesley
There's always going to be examples of things going wrong in a chaotic and distributed process. Pointing them out doesn't prove much. That said, a lot of the "gone wild" examples that people can bring up are also based in the same ignorance as people complaining about DEI statement who haven't read a single DEI statement. The recent Stanford word list that you probably have in mind is just one example; in that case, the freakout was over some overzealous members of an IT department publishing their internal content guidelines. It was probably misguided, but the ensuing freakout on the internet was overblown and rooted in a deep ignorance at how organizations like Universities operate.
So as far as this conversation goes, thwayunion's perception is properly calibrated. It seems to come from experience.
You may have missed it, but by "Faith Statements" I literally meant "Faith Statements". As in religious institutions requiring you to write about your religious beliefs.
> Not sure how you can say this with such assurance, given we can see countless examples of DEI gone wild at the Ivies or Stanford or Wellesley, etc. You did your undergrad/phd at multiple Ivies and have worked at a dozen of those corn row schools and know what's happening there?
I have a lot of experience in both of those worlds, yes.
Tbf the process is the same for senior candidate applications. It may seem like a lot for junior applicants but the bar is lowered significantly. But like you say, it’s competitive, so naturally the pageantry gets turned to 11.
Private entities are protected by the First Amendment while state government entities are restricted by it (technically as incorporated by the Fourteenth).
Conflating the two situations just leads to confusion.
I have honestly no idea what SCOTUS would do with these cases absent an agency rule or legislation banning DEI statements, for example, and IMO anyone who claims otherwise is a clerk, a SCOTUS judge, married to a SCOTUS judge, or lying :)
I am fairly confident that state legislatures could ban DEI statements at public universities, but I am also fairly confident that this wouldn't actually change anything and that people who think otherwise haven't ever been a serious applicant for a faculty position.
"I think many DEI initiatives are treating a symptom of a genuine problem in society and think that striving to treat every individual in a fair manner and ensuring they feel included in my lab is the best way to ensure that all individuals can best succeed and best contribute to society." is an answer a candidate could freely speak/write.
Not really. The only colleges that wouldn't immediately reject a candidate who said something like that also wouldn't have demanded a DEI statement in the first place.
> At other colleges, refusing to identify as a conservative Christian would get the candidate immediately rejected.
Other than a seminary, can you give a specific example of one?
> Not really. The only colleges that wouldn't immediately reject a candidate who said something like that also wouldn't have demanded a DEI statement in the first place.
Nonsense. Many -- I think the majority -- of conservative religious people aren't anti-diversity, anti-equality, or anti-inclusion, even if they're anti-"DEI". And their institutions aren't just conservative talk radio echo chambers. Lots of thoughtful people are conservative and have a multitude of complex viewpoints. Intellectual/nuanced conservatism is over-represented at places like colleges and universities, as you might imagine.
Religiously affiliated institutions often ask about DEI topics at some point in the interview process; sometimes they ask to include discussion in your faith statement, other times they ask in person, and I've seen at least on place ask for both a faith statement and a DEI statement.
The answer above would work very well at those institutions.
> Other than a seminary, can you give a specific example of one?
It's common enough that the CUNY Graduate School includes special instructions for folks who are applying to those jobs. They also mention specific examples of institutions and letter requests in that article: https://careerplan.commons.gc.cuny.edu/blog/religious-statem...
Tons of small religiously-affiliated liberal arts colleges require the Conservative Loyalty Oath equivalent of a DEI statement. Still others use Faith Statements responsibly, the same way some responsible universities use DEI statements.
DEI statements have right and wrong answers, and giving the wrong answer will disqualify you from a job, and ultimately, filter anyone who disagrees out of the academy entirely.
That’s very dangerous forced speech.
Your example, by the way, would score very low as a DEI statement.
I would like to see some examples of DEI statements and what scores they received.
The First Amendment places broad constraints on the government's ability to impose consequences, and several laws place far narrower constraints on private individuals and privately-owned corporations.
(I personally think "speech with consequences" isn't really 'free', but it's legally free in the sense people mean when they're talking about the First Amendment, and some kind of constraint against any consequences for speech whatsoever would be a massive imposition upon individual liberty. Turns out "we live in a society" and by the nature of that existence, one can't just say and do whatever and expect no response from others. If that's how it worked, we'd just be "full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing").
Don't direct that fear and anxiety upward in the org chart though, wouldn't want that :)
Companies are dispassionate, like elephants and insects. You are worthless to a company.
You are hated by DEI people.
This doesn’t make sense to me; let alone being upset on behalf of others!
Do you think the essay itself is really why people are upset, or are you being glib? It's hard to tell.
Which brings us back to: if no one here has read any of these essays, what‘a with all the angry comments?
Lying is extremely underrated as a way to get things done.
It was a revelation for me when I realized that nobody follows up to check your claims for job applications in great detail, so little of it needs to be true.
How can you write something like that, which shows that you 100% understand that this is racism, and then finish with:
> The fuss about it is overblown.
I'm a white straight male and my DEI statement did not mention ethnicity or gender.
I was consistently told it was one of the best DEI statements the faculty had ever read.
I have no doubt that DEI statements get used in ridiculous and stupid ways; Academia is full of ridiculous and stupid things and that's why I left. But they do get used well at some institutions.
> white, male scientist from an affluent background
Instead of "white people can get high dei scores". Anyway this discussion always end with a Motte-and-bailey fallacy. You say something obviously racist, I call you out on it and then you retreat to a defensible argument. The only real way to fix it is to vote for people willing to fix it. Not to argue with Internet strangers about it.
"Yes, you can still theoretically have a shot, you just have to be XXX% better than a {non-white-non-asian}{non-male}"
When you make it so one demographic has to grind a lot harder to get the same opportunities, you're only going to increase the gap between them.
Also this:
>so that other things being equal
Comical. So yes, all things being equal, you will not get a job vs another candidate strictly because they have the "correct" race and you don't. This is literally institutional racism. I'm supposed to tell my son that he has to study 10x harder, work 10x harder just to make sure he doesn't fall in the threshold where this DEI score won't hurt him?
Here's some nuance that I hope cuts through the mass media narrative-building machine:
First, it's not just stupid ideology. There are real economic incentives at play. I wrote a comment here on why Colleges and Universities view DEI as existentially important to their finances: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34672053
Second, value statements are nothing new in Academia. Many religious institutions require Faith Statements, and there are event Title IX carve-outs for these institutions when they receive federal funds [2]
Third, DEI statements are not all bad. Eg, when I applied to academic positions (none of which I took), my statement had everything to do with serving kids who arrived at college unprepared. Not a single mention or race, gender, etc. Instead of talking about starting "women in X" clubs or other BS [3], I talked about volunteering in public schools and gave anecdotes about how in my teaching I worked to keep kids in college who would've otherwise dropped out. Every place I applied said it was one of the best DEI statements they had seen.
My personal opinion: I am fully aligned with the criticism of DEI statements. Most DEI statements are cringe-worthy at best, I have no doubt in the heights of incompetence that can be found in university administration, and the entire uni hiring process is broken. But these statements can be used in a reasonable and responsible way at colleges who, in order to survive financially, NEED to start recruiting and retaining students who aren't in the "dual income upper-middle class parents with a 3.8GPA" mold. And, as an aside, if we're going to go after Loyalty Oaths in non-public-university academic hiring, let's start by eliminating Title IX carve-outs for religiously affiliated institutions.
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[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34672053
[2] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-34/subtitle-B/chapter-I/p...
[3] BS because they are often the sort of "I started/joined a club" thing that for most people amounts to zero actual effort put into helping individual students succeed.
Right now in the US, there are parallel "flag-waving" and "flag-burning" revolutions. There's no question that the flag-burners are winning the biggest shifts in established power, but the flag-wavers are predominantly the rank-and-file enforcers of the flag-burner policies.
It’s a pointless, anodyne and unobjectionable pledge that prescribes nothing.
It’s stupid, but not remotely comparable to DEI statements, or commitment to much more specific political ideals.
I am not religious so why should I pledge an oath to be ruled under a god.
I am forced to recite a daily mantra filled with propaganda for a republic which is more concerned about arguing for liberty and justice than it is actually providing liberty and justice.
I didn't have to take an oath to get my diploma, but I'm not a medical doctor. I've also never had to swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, etc., as I've never witnessed anything the Courts cared to interrogate me on.
There's a lot of contexts where oaths are required; they're not limited to the USSR and GDR. Oaths are just one of those tools societies use to bind together a heterogeneous people.
What is wrong with treating everyone the same? Isn't that anti-racist by definition?
For starters, explicitly not defending this. I think it's stupid. For race in particular, I've seen a lot more damage done by well-meaning but tone-deaf attempts at DEI than by people just being normal non-shitty humans.
>> The same goes for any earnest classical liberal who “explicitly states the intention to ignore the varying backgrounds of their students and ‘treat everyone the same’.
> What is wrong with treating everyone the same? Isn't that anti-racist by definition?
No, because "backgrounds" here can also mean "academic background" or "financial background" or a million other things that aren't race or gender.
If I were at an institution with a sizable population of academically under-prepared students then I wouldn't hire a faculty member who said they have no plan for how to differentiate their instruction and support academically under-prepared students, or non-traditional (read: older working) student, etc.
I know of someone that has actually lost a job opportunity because they weren't diverse enough. (SE Asian) They were interning and it leaked that the team lead wanted someone more diverse and the HM was all too eager to agree. The messages were deleted before he could take a screen shot. He came to me asking what to do about it and I really didn't know what to say. Unfortunately it just wasn't worth it IMO to fight a large tech company. I'm sure the messages could be recovered but it seemed like an insane uphill fight and who would want to even work at that company at that point.
Hell, companies are "proud" to tell you that they would straight up do this too. The worst people imo are the types that try to make every justification and gaslight you into believing its "justice" or something.
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
“A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for the Negro.” - MLK
Zero, because his dedication to his objective of replacing the American system of capitalist oppression with a just economic system free not only from direct racial discrimination, but from economic and other oppression (which also crystallizes the effects of past racial discrimination) would not really compatible with university (or state more generally) employment.
Have you read literally anything of King’s besides the Right’s favorite sentence to quote out of context?
Put another way, two people, A and B, may have this dialogue:
A: Evidence for my contributions for DEI include <some examples>
B: The <some examples> do not qualify, because the parties impacted do not qualify as "diverse"
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Regardless of which side of that argument you're on, it seems to me like this is generally a good thing.
It's much easier to argue against DEI initiatives such as this when their proponents can't wield the Motte-and-bailey fallacy.
I couldn't read much of the article as it is paywalled. I had assumed the applicant would have some recourse in the [frankly rather likely] scenario you outlined.