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Comment by onepointsixC | Hacker News Reader

Academia is such a brutal cutthroat battle for faculty positions, you have zero choice but to participate. An acquaintance was applying for faculty positions and every single position they were applying to required a DEI statement. It's only a matter of time till it starts bubbling out of academia to industry.

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> It's only a matter of time till it starts bubbling out of academia to industry

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

We're nearing a decade of academia spilling over to the real world, rocketing political polarisation at every level. "Industry" doesn't have any particulars that would render it immune.

Did you attend college?

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.

This absolutely will leak into MBA programs and become "best practice".

You don't want to hire a racist now, do you? No? Good, so mandatory DEI pledges for all!

Not in industry?

Once neglected, DEI initiatives now present at all Fortune 100 companies: https://www.hrdive.com/news/2022-fortune-companies-dei/62765...

A major tech company forces DEI statements on RFPs for outside vendors. They wanted stars by the names of the diverse people on the proposed team.

This stuff have been in the private sector for years now.

This is one of the things that nudged me out of academia. Once I realized the odds of making a Feynman-class discovery were low, but that was the bar for tenure (and salary scales below tenure were... Uncompetitive), I started crunching the numbers and decided I'd likely be happier in industry applying discoveries than in academia making them.

There's plenty of academics to go around. I need my hands dirty.

I think the artificial rules will increase, but the authority of academia as a whole will suffer from those that come out on top here. I think the progress already started when education become a very expensive product instead of a privilege.

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.

Just lie about it when it does.

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.

It's only a matter of time until it's required by law to be employed, which is pretty fucked up when you remember that health insurance is so closely tied to employment, in america at least.

That could actually be a net benefit for society considering that the people who are most likely to hold views outside of the DEI norms are also the ones who are most likely to vote against candidates who support real healthcare reform.

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