Hacker News Reader

Comment by adamsmith143 | Hacker News Reader

I think we'll find a pendulum effect where schools that lean far into DEI are going to lose out on top students, grants, researchers, etc. They'll have to readjust and swing back into pedagogy because it will be very clear that if e.g. UC Berkeley is training students in DEI and not as much focus is spent on the actual subject matter their students won't start great companies, they won't get PhD's at other top schools, they won't win Nobel Prizes, etc. It's a guaranteed death spiral for them. Meanwhile somewhere like University of Chicago which has made great strides to protect free speech and explicitly prohibits Diversity statements, will likely continue to put out excellent students and research.

View on HN

That's going to be the pudding the proof would be in, indeed.

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.

Why would that be the outcome of explicitly de-incentivizing excellence?

How do DEI programs explicitly de-incentivize excellence?

You no longer hire the best candidate on the merits but rather the one with a sufficiently high DEI score.

Isn't "ability to work with people of a diverse background" also one of the merits in a very, very diverse society?

Ding ding ding. I'm still struggling to understand what is so bad about wanting to have a diverse workplace...

If my goal is to hire e.g "the best physicists" in the world then its probably going to be low on my list. Particularly in stem where disagreeableness is high in general.

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.

So assuming that's what the university is optimizing for, I can see your point.

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.

Why can't that just be "ability to work with people" full stop, regardless of their background? If society is very, very diverse, then surely we all have to work, live and grow up with different people anyway.

Sure that’s fine a fine sentiment to hold. But it’s also anodyne and unspecific. It’s certainly not the kind of thing that’s going to differentiate you in a competitive job application process.

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.

So for example if you're a math teacher, and the job is to teach a diverse classroom, what the hell does that mean?

https://blogs.ams.org/matheducation/2017/03/06/six-ways-math...

If you are a math teacher, the job is to teach math to a diverse classroom. For example, one thing you could talk about in a DEI statement could be your experience e.g. teaching math to a student who was bound to a wheelchair and couldn’t talk except through a computer, and how that impacted your teaching practice in general.

> top students, grants, researchers, etc.... Nobel Prizes

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...

>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).

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.

> So why play the kabuki game at all if it's all so pointless.

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.

> You also submit, as a 20-something who has only ever been a student:

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.

>Faculty hiring is straight up insane, and DEI/Faith statements don't even make the top 10 list of reasons why.

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?

> Not sure how you can say this with such assurance

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.

> The idea that because there are other issues with hiring in Academia that these "Faith Statements" don't matter rings pretty hollow imo.

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.

WASP? You mean they don't have enough Catholics or Germanic students? You mean to tell me Harvard/MIT can't recruit foreigners? I see MIT's first year student survey shows Asian American as the highest group at 40%. Internationals are 11%.

Do students actually learn anything that causes them to be better at starting companies, anywhere, ever?

why not? quality peers and staff absolutely make each student better thinker, more risk tolerant, and more likely to find suitable cofounders and/ or help during bootstrap

Sure, if you're creating a high tech company you need high levels of competence in high tech. Which you presumably can gain at somewhere like Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com