DEI Statements Stir Debate on College Campuses | Hacker News Reader

DEI Statements Stir Debate on College Campuses

nytimes.com

31 pointspseudolus23 comments

> The university asked him to fill out the requisite papers, including a statement that affirmed his belief and work in diversity, equity and inclusion.

Affirm that you believe in and will comply with our religion. That's bold. Is that even something explicitly religious colleges do? "Sign here to affirm your belief and work in Catholicism"?

What a strange time we live in.

> At Berkeley, a faculty committee rejected 75 percent of applicants in life sciences and environmental sciences and management purely on diversity statements, according to a new academic paper by Steven Brint, a professor of public policy at U.C. Riverside, and Komi Frey, a researcher for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which has opposed diversity statements.

75% of applicants are rejected because of their statements. That's a very impactful section of the application.

Depending on the wording, these DEI statements may be legally actionable as religious discrimination. “I agree to follow applicable federal and state non-discrimination laws” is probably fine. But requiring any “affirmation” beyond that is almost certainly infringing on freedom of conscience and the rights of adherents of religions that believe in e.g. procreation as the basis of sexual relations.

Diversity statements that require orthodoxy are beyond "not having a measurable positive effect". The article just now has given an example to the contrary.

This is a emperors new clothes parable. Since university administrators probably aren't too stupid, it might be adequate to suggest that it is indeed malice that motivates their actions.

For the grad students it is probably severe naivete. Hopefully universities concentrate on helping with that.

If you want to improve universities, you would start to exclude people like the law dean, that changed the mission of universities because his ego demands it.

Eh, we've been spending decades pumping out people with degrees in this kind of "social criticism". It just turned out that no businesses except the universities themselves were interested in hiring for such positions, so of course damn near every university administrator is grinding this axe: they were told they could make a career out of it back when they were in school and can't get work elsewhere.

By that logic - shouldn't university administrations have been taken over long ago by people with degrees in Art History, Egyptology, Medieval Literature, Ancient Greek Philosophy, etc. etc.?

You think it wasn't? Back when I was in school basically every senior admin had a degree in one of those fields.

Back when you could have an RTS about green rocks that fall near the Tiber river and people knew what you were taking about Tiberious726

The grad students in the department successfully blocked this professor for getting fired because he said, on a podcast, that diversity statements are "virtue signaling" and don't result in better outcomes for diverse students.

That's not hurtful at all. There is nothing even borderline wrong with what was said.

The urge to scold seems pretty innate, and socially reinforced from an early age. Seems tied to the parental instinct, and maybe this is related to the demographics of its presentation.

Could we not engineer a substitute, or even a better scolding experience for these scolds, a safe outlet? One without the obvious detrimental impacts, or at least one that tends toward self-limiting. A lot of contemporary tech and even older stuff probably could be used to satisfy the scolding urge.

In the past scolds were attracted to evangelical churches.

Those are no longer in fashion, mostly limited to one day a week, don't pay well or at all.

Now they can excercise their scolding from on high in the administrative layer of colleges and Fortune 500s all week and get paid for it.

Human nature is dark and we love ganging up on outgroups. When a socially acceptable way to do so emerges, we go all in and really bad stuff happens. People intentionally or though emergent behavior channel this desire for their own power. That's what's happened in the past and that's what's happening here.

> Professor Soucek, at Davis law school, said ideological diversity is not the point.

> “It’s our job to make sure people of all identities flourish here,” he said. “It’s not our job to make sure that all viewpoints flourish.”

This is a fundamental change in a core value of western academia. For the entire history of academia in the US, open-mindedness and fostering debate has been central.

Fairly recently Jews, Blacks, and more groups were literally excluded from joining many universities... I'm not entirely unsympathetic to your point but it's not as if universities are historically unproblematic.

It seems like Asians have been excluded from universities like Jews were excluded from Universities, except the former is happening now and the latter mostly happened a hundred years ago

Pretty much against what the mission of universities is. With that position he might need to become a pastor, but certainly not head an institution like a university.

With quotes it feels like we are living in the 2nd dark age.

It’s more insidious than that, because it also means reframing identities that are built around viewpoints. Islam, for example, gets reframed as post-Christian humanism in a hijab.

Some interesting numbers from the article

> According to a report by Berkeley, Latino candidates constituted 13 percent of applicants and 59 percent of finalists. Asian and Asian American applicants constituted 26 percent of applicants and 19 percent of finalists. Fifty-four percent of applicants were white and 14 percent made it to the final stage. Black candidates made up 3 percent of applicants and 9 percent of finalists.

Another nail in the coffin for the relevance of universities.

no disagree - it is a turf war in a time of decline for the higher education crowd. This is directly confrontational -- a wolf in sheeps clothing.

https://archive.ph/l2HiW - non-paywall version

Linked within it is the original letter from graduate students opposing the highlighted professor's hiring: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A3L4VYGbdJoLnIe5HjUF7bI3...

IMO the NYT selectively quotes the letter to fit a narrative that resistance to signing a DEI statement was the exact area of concern that caused the reversal of the hiring. But there are other quoted statements in that letter, including the professor's insinuation on his podcast that the Society for Personality and Social Psychology "underrepresent[s] white people" and, separately, his quote that "who are gonna be like more centrist on social issues such as abortion? It’s gonna be the nonwhite people."

It's not at all clear that his views on DEI statements were the red flag for the administration, but rather that they were about to hire a person with a penchant for soundbites that discuss race in an oversimplified way outside his area of research - and that hiring him could impact the university's reputation. It's unfortunate, to say the least, that the NYT did not address this possibility.

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