Harvard's largest faculty eliminates requirement for DEI statements in hiring
bostonglobe.com
bostonglobe.com
I am rather glad about that. While I support DEI goals, the effort seemed to tackle only the superficial symptoms rather than core problems which are hindering diverse representations. It also didn't help that there was no clear leader with a coherent goal (eg. MLK in 60's who wanted voting rights for Blacks). Instead, we had weak-sauce thought leaders (Kendi or DiAngelo) and DEI essentially meant whatever one wanted it to mean, leading to a lot of potential attack surface for detractors.
The public narrative is that DEI was being pushed by some outside, socially progressive force, but when you look into the details it was almost always investors that were pushing for DEI in companies with internal cheerleaders being the champions.
I'm not entirely sure what the true motivations of this trend coming from investors was but I'm a bit too cynical to believe it was primarily "love for humankind".
The same thing was true with the anti-police movement. We can all see problems with policing and envision alternatives, but most practical attempts to implement alternatives (like the now wildly unpopular reformist prosecutors elected in the bay area) had unintended consequences people didn't expect and got walked back.
With DEI the "flip" for me in my head was when it switched from ensuring that there was no bias in hiring and reaching out to try to give everyone a fair shot to instead seeing that every single instance where the racial/gender outcome doesn't match the population distribution is inherently an issue of discrimination. My favorite example for the HN crowd is when they cancelled ElectronConf years ago after only getting male speakers despite having a fully blinded application process (and explicitly stating that any "ties" would be given in favor to underrepresented groups). The problem with that stance is that it becomes an unfalsifiable position, allowing everything to forever be blamed on discrimination even if there was no evidence. Even the language changed: it was no longer about "minority" representation, it was about "underrepresented minorities", as if the discrimination and struggles of East Asians and Indians no longer counted.
It's worse. Whenever things tip over to an "ideology", you no longer can question whether the original goals are right, just, moral, fair, reasonable, or achievable.
This is a company which went hard on and is now currently backtracking from DEI but this policy of "don't discuss anything controversial at work" has strengthened the entire time making diversity of thought a moot point.
In hindsight, she (& others) might feel that they ought to have pushed back more strongly, and debunked this hoax more definitively, when it was first trotted out.
Since then, we've had, on campuses, Zionist students made into media darlings for a day for being stabbed in the eye, when all that happened is that a piece of fabric lightly brushed her cheek. While other (Seinfeld funded) students attacked campus protestors with lead pipes and whatnot, but getting away scott free.
It's like McCarthyism, mixed with 30's era brownshirts, with the mainstream media coverage being directed by Goebbels.
The problem is that diversity isn't just based on metrics like racial, sexual orientation, gender, ect. It also comes from including people who have different biases, backgrounds, political leanings, economic status, ect.
What makes this complicated is that organizations are powerful because of who they include and who they exclude. It's a good thing to say "we're not going to exclude people based on race / gender / sexual orientation;" but then to say "we're going to favor people who have left-leaning politics" basically unravels the advantages of a diverse organization.
Time will tell.
> going forward candidates for tenure-track positions would be required to provide a more broadly focused “service statement,” instead of a statement focused specifically on “diversity, inclusion, and belonging.”
Nothing really changed except saving a few minutes of some applicants' time, and not hurting the feelings of people who didn't want to think about diversity, inclusion, and belonging. The hiring committee can still evaluate the quality of the applicant essay against their priorities, which might or might not weight those factors, same as before.
Our country has had a centuries-long problem with racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism keeping large numbers of people from accessing the mainstream of American life. We have tried to create a variety of often imperfect tools to combat this situation and create a more equitable country — something right-wingers in general and the Republican Party specifically in the last couple of generations have worked hard to tear down. Lately they've been getting extra aggressive and, sadly, successful at it.
So, again, this action on its own may or may not be a good thing. But we need to make sure not to let the bigots in our country return us back to the very broken situation of thirty, fifty, a hundred years ago.
Those consequences were largely negative even if you are a great advocate of diversifying our great institutions because they hamper academic freedom, period. The great Universities of America had (till recently) a reputation of being a place where tenure was so strong faculty members could think and state opinions most normal people could never try to articulate. Forcing all faculty to accept a certain ideological position in the manner of the diversity statement really hinders that ability, that academic freedom, which incubates so much intellectual work.