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Comment by danielvf | Hacker News Reader

Here's a scoring guide from a US university for DEI statements. To me it's much more informative to go to primary sources for what is selected for, rather than only reading about them second hand.

https://ofew.berkeley.edu/recruitment/contributions-diversit...

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Thanks,i agree its best to look at it directly.

But i do wonder what lines like "Clearly formulates new ideas for advancing equity and inclusion at Berkeley and within their field, through their research,..." mean

What does it mean for a math professor to advance diversity through their research?

Like i could maybe get it for the arts or even some social sciences, but what does that look like for math?

The full quote is "Clearly formulates new ideas for advancing equity and inclusion at Berkeley and within their field, through their research, teaching, and/or service." The last two are naturally more relevant for fields where advancing DEI through the research itself isn't as feasible. The examples given in the rubric are all of teaching/service categories, as well.

Collaboration would be the most obvious answer to me for that.

Note that collaboration is not mentioned in that rubric at all. It is very much judging an individual commitment to DEIB.

Collaboration with external partners typically overlooked is an answer to advancing equity and inclusion within your field through your research. Actively seeking out and forming these relationships is something you are committing to doing individually.

It helps to think of the things _around_ math rather than the elements of any particular mathematical field. For example, the authority conveyed when an economics argument relies heavily on partial differential equations. Those things _around_ math are studied in the anti-racist math classes.

The American Mathematical Society has been grappling with this:

https://blogs.ams.org/inclusionexclusion/2020/01/31/can-math...

Pure math is very different than social studies. But, in applied math, your research will be used for something promoting one group over another. Personally, I find it manipulative to attribute my own problem-solving contributions to the politics of someone using them.

Not only that, but it presupposes that diversity is a good in and of itself, which I think is quite false when it comes to diversity of physical characteristics (which is all that these initiatives ever care about). Diversity is neutral. It is just as erroneous to think that a group is enhanced by adding people just for their race (or gender, etc) as it is to think that a group is enhanced by excluding people just for their race (etc).

You aren’t going to get a job like that.

Well you could always turn to a life of crime if you want to keep your dignity. Only half joking.

Some may presuppose that, others may suppose instead that physical diversity is a proxy indicator for other diversities of experience and culture. Sometimes proxies are good enough, other times they’re not.

Not research, but Jelani Nelson at Berkeley ran programmes in Ethiopia to expose schoolchildren to programming. (In case it needs to be said, Jelani is a top-shelf theoretical computer scientist.)

Why should a STEM professor be required to devote time to such activities? It doesn't seem to be their specialty, humanity does better when we are allowed to specialize, other people can do such things.

Because if they don’t, they might be the wrong sort of people.

To try to argue it:

Humanity does better when we don't marginalise people for dumb reasons such as membership in a visible minority group. Marginalising someone for a dumb reason is an individual decision, and it's a decision that a professor is frequently in a position to make.

Arguably the higher-leverage parts of a professor's job are teaching classroomfuls students at once, advising graduate students, and "service," meaning things like sitting on committees within the university, attending and sometimes organising conferences, and so forth. These all involve the professor spending time to help others' careers. Owing to their leverage, it's especially important that these aspects are done well. And since candidates for tenure-track jobs generally haven't been in such a position of leverage before, it's especially important to screen for suitability for teaching and service when hiring tenure-track professors.

I'm sure you can polish this, and I'm sure there are other arguments in the same direction.

Regarding specialisation, I gave an example of a world-class researcher who also does outreach to an underrepresented group in the post you replied to.

Moreover, the research, teaching, and service parts of a professor's job aren't as separable as you'd hope---the overarching purpose of it all is to keep a field of academic inquiry alive, where research, teaching, advising, and service all operate at different time scales. The field of a group of researchers who don't teach or advise students dies when they all die. A hypothetical teacher who isn't involved in research can't bring students near research-level work.

I think there is a pretty big jump between expecting a professor to treat all their students equally and with respect regardless of their gender/race/religion/etc and expecting them to to teach underprivleged children in foreign countries.

Everyone (well at least everyone reasonable) agrees with the former. The latter on the other hand feels like a totally different set of skills than what a professor does, and it feels unfair to expect that out of someone who doesn't have the inclination to do that (or to bring it in terms suitable to the HN crowd, the same way it is toxic when companies push good engineers into management against their will or as a requirement in order to advance)

> new ideas for advancing equity and inclusion

It means providing research containing useful narratives that can be used by others to promote DEI political objectives.

For example, in math it means publishing commentary on how math is widely used for racial discrimination and should generally not be trusted. See the popular book "Math Is Racist". Several Mathematicians are cited in the book.

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