Despite all the hyperbole in this thread I will try to speak plainly. It has become tiring to see how DEI has affected all aspects of academia. Hiring people based on race, awarding grants to work exclusively with members of a particular set of minorities, etc. I'm sure most people choose to close their eyes to such things and move on and focus on the actual important work but there must be unimaginable waste going on in addition to unethical race based preferences.
This is simply a delusion detached from reality. I am a white man in STEM academia. I've never been discriminated against once. None of my white male colleagues have either. They are all successful in academia. And my colleagues who aren't white men are in no way inferior. Just let us vote and ask if we feel discriminated against or oppressed because of DEI. We'll vote no.
It's simply a delusion that DEI is some unmeritocratic disaster. The reality is academia has its pick of top talent regardless of race or gender. I don't know any scientists who buy into this delusion irl. Diversity is a small factor in hiring because the field is already predominantly white men and it's no harder to pick top star talent when you diversify.
Simply insane that you are promoting the destruction of US science, US foreign aid, and so much of the good stuff the US government does, all in the name of a deeply delusional witch hunt.
It's an ideological disaster. Viewing this through a white v/s black lens is itself too simplistic. Look at the Harvard affirmative action lawsuit. Asians are in fact and provably being discriminated against. This is also the case in immigration policy. DEI/affirmative action policies were created by the executive and are being undone by the executive.
>Just let us vote and ask if we feel discriminated against or oppressed because of DEI.
A majority of the electorate did vote for ending this.
Shocker, a majority white country voted to end programs that identified biases which benefitted them...
> Asians are in fact being discriminated against
I have a feeling someone fed you some false information about this case.
The judges ruled that Harvard's admission program violated the equal protections act, but never said once that Asian Americans were ever discriminated against.
The programs that these decisions got rid of impacted minorities other than Asians a lot more, but for some reason you don't want to talk about that?
That is because none of your colleagues who think so would ever tell you. The problem with this is that the ideology has led to a point where I and many like me will simply never tell someone like yourself what they think of.
Even now that it's "better" I would only write something like this anonymously in fear of a future person seeing and judging my beliefs. I have personally watched in corporate and academia the effects. I am small fish but have personally wanted to hire someone who I thought was the most qualified for the position and was rather non obviously told to not because the team already had to many white men. We instead had to go with my 3rd choice a female who while great did not have the technical skills I valued in the first.
The main problem is people who say things like you do is that you don't realize you have a very incomplete picture. Those who disagree with the ideas will literally never say them. In many career paths saying your beliefs that don't align is basically career suicide.
> This is simply a delusion detached from reality. I am a white man in STEM academia. I've never been discriminated against once.
This is demonstrably false. Harvard and many other universities recently lost a Supreme Court case due to persistent racial discrimination over decades (https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/jun/29/us-supreme-court...). Whites and especially Asians were methodically discriminated against on the basis of their race. Just because you don't personally see the racism doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Why are so many people saying "Asians and whites were discriminated against" and pointing to this case?
The judges ruled that the program was unconstitutional and had to be changed, not that Harvard had been illegally discriminatory in their admission practices(as was attempted years prior by the same conservative funded activism group)
Just because you personally see racism, doesn't mean it's actually happening(aka, "facts don't care about your feelings")
> The judges ruled that the program was unconstitutional and had to be changed, not that Harvard had been illegally discriminatory in their admission practices(as was attempted years prior by the same conservative funded activism group)
What on Earth are you talking about? Here are the 237 pages of the Supreme Justices exploring centuries of American law and hundreds of relevant cases regarding racial discrimination:https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf
Specifically, the Justices found Harvard's race-based admissions practices violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court found that these practices resulted in racial discrimination against Asian American applicants.
Did you just make that up and hope no one would call you out?
> Did you just make that up and hope no one would call you out?
No, but it looks like a lot of people are misunderstanding the court's ruling...
`The question presented is whether the admissions systems used by Harvard College and UNC are lawful under the Equal Protection Clause of the Four-
teenth Amendment`
"This admission system is not lawful" is not the same as "your institution has been illegally discriminatory towards a certain race". One is pointing out mismatches between law and reality, the other needs to be backed up by data.
Is it quite possible that the program was unconstitutional and had to be changed because they were being illegally discriminatory in their admission practices?
Yes it is, but the court case only answered the first question and previous court cases failed to get a satisfactory(for the conservative groups behind them) ruling on the "illegal discrimination" parts.
It's also possible that the "unconstitutional" program lead to satisfactory results for minority groups(both asian and non-asian), but we are just guessing either way based off of a ruling that's only tangentially related.
1. So if the supreme court ended 'racial discrimination' at universities in 2023, why is the administration destroying scientific organizations now in the name of doing so?
2. That court case is for undergraduate admissions - what does it have to do with hiring practices in the academic sciences?
Even if it's a delusion, people believe it and I think we should take it seriously and help them see through that delusion.
I'm not advocating for shutting down these departments at all, or slashing and burning research.
I'm hoping that we can help people realize that people love them and care about them and support them more than they could ever imagine, even if they're a white man.
I say this as a white man who has dated black women and had them say some really harsh things about me as a white man, only to realize that often it was an internal conflict that they had about being black but also liking some things from white culture. Some of them had been called white by their own black communities, and so feeling stuck between those worlds.
I think the vast majority of us just need to learn how to deal with emotional attacks, to realize life is combat and everyone is trying to deal with innumerable conflicts at the same time, all the time.
Unethical race-based preferences is what those policies have been trying to fix. Not sure you’re aware of this, but academia used to be basically off-limits to anyone not white and male.
> academia used to be basically off-limits to anyone not white and male.
How long ago was that? In Canada 60% of college grads are women[1]. In the US the story is similar and the gap is widening[2]. Part of the reason that some left wing ideas seem so out of touch is because they are. People are still parroting social problems from the 1960s as justification for policy in 2024.
How many of these women are graduating from programs that people wanting to eliminate DEI see as "unimportant"?
It's also interesting to see statistics brought up about women and not races, since the percentage that identifies as "Black or African American" is still underrepresented: https://pnpi.org/factsheets/black-students/
It did, but how long ago was that the case? I'm not aware that academia was off-limits to anyone non-white and male right before DEI training became the norm.
Not the OP, but I believe any distribution of limited resources could be seen as inherently discriminatory or racist or classist or whatever ist one wants.
If there is only 1 job but 10 candidates, the job has to go to someone. If everyone has the same scores on an exam, what's the fair way? Flip a coin? Perhaps. What if there are intangible skills/knowledge that are important for the job? One person has a better score on the exam, another person speaks a language (or dialect) that is important for the job. Maybe 9 of 10 come from one academic background, the 10th comes from a different one...which may actually provide a different perspective and provide new insights and break group think. Maybe one comes from a culture that is more confrontational, which means they may speak out more than others.
So many factors are intangible or at least not explicit and I think that's where "merit" can become so dimensionally reduced, not realizing how multidimensional each individual is.
In academia, there are more qualified people than positions, on an extreme level in fact. I agree, we have to distinguish people. We must distinguish on intangible characteristics sometimes. Suppose I am hiring for a position in an department and there are three finalists. They are all extremely qualified. What is an acceptable way to distinguish people? "Alice was more thoughtful and well-spoken during than Bob and Charlie, I believe she will make a better colleague and mentor to our undergraduates. I suggest we accept her." Compare with the following. "Alice is a black, homosexual, woman unlike Bob and Charlie, who are white, presumably homosexual men. Our university has a stated DEI policy promoting the acceptance of more women and BIPOC faculty. Therefore we should admit Alice." Do you see the difference?
We do not need to enter a deep philosophical debate about what is "merit" and its many dimensions. I agree with you, it's complicated. But the issue is universities are explicitly discriminating and ranking candidates and students on the basis of DEI factors. We know this because, as in the CU case I have linked to already in other comments, their very own notes say so! This is just the tip of the iceberg.
> Alice was more thoughtful and well-spoken during than Bob and Charlie
Is a relative statement. Someone who expresses anger in one culture can be considered thoughtful and in another culture can be considered disrespectful.
I agree it's super complex and even believe that it may have been too formulated and structured. I personally want humans of different cultures to befriend each other. But intercultural connection can be uncomfortable and hard and have lots of conflict, and some people don't do that well without some nudging.
Again, I think the nudging has gone too far, yet I don't think the solution is to pendulum swing all the way back.
I think this is well articulated. My response would be: what is the north star? What is the aspirational state? It is perhaps inherently unachievable, but what should we be aiming towards? I suggest that that be the thing which guides all other policies. If we intend to admit students on the basis of ability, an SAT score is just about the fairest way to do that. The waters became very muddy over the last few decades because universities decided that having people of many different skin colours was the goal. They dressed that goal up by pretending it had something to do with diversity, but that fails the sniff test. A poor black and white man have much more in common with each other than they do a rich man. If diversity were the goal, students would have been selected on the basis of place of residence, wealth, religion, voting affiliation, values, and interests. Quite the opposite occurred. In many universities more than 90% of faculty identify as left wing. So the goal had nothing to do with diversity.
I suggest we instead return to the idea that aptitude be our north star. IQ tests were originally created to provide opportunity to underrepresented children who might otherwise have been looked over due to their socioeconomic conditions or race. Let us return to a colour-blind north star.
> If we intend to admit students on the basis of ability, an SAT score is just about the fairest way to do that.
(Bashes head on table.) Intelligence, aptitude, and potential are incredibly hard to measure and judge in a purely objective way. The SAT is just a thin slice of that picture.
> In many universities more than 90% of faculty identify as left wing.
And less than 10% of university astrophysicists think the world is flat. Where's the diversity?!
> (Bashes head on table.) Intelligence, aptitude, and potential are incredibly hard to measure and judge in a purely objective way. The SAT is just a thin slice of that picture.
What is a better test?
> And less than 10% of university astrophysicists think the world is flat. Where's the diversity?!
I suspect you wouldn't be making this naturalistic fallacy if the ratio were flipped. Either way, you appear to confirm that the purpose was not diversity.
As far as the SAT: You can take prep classes, hire a tutor, and do all sorts of resource-intensive things that will boost your SAT without really contributing to your overall intelligence. You can study for the test. And guess who is more likely to have resources available to access these things? Is a rich kid who spends a year in prep inherently smarter than a poor kid who can't afford a tutor and has to work an evening job to help her family make ends meet?
And why, more broadly, are we completely fine tilting the tables in favor of the wealthy and entrenched but the second something seems like it might give an ounce of advantage to a disadvantaged class people lose their minds?
We get rid of DEI, but I haven't heard a word about getting rid of legacy admissions and rooting out nepotism.
Um. Racism and sexism have not been eliminated in our country. I mean, just look at who's running the executive branch of the government at the moment. We need initiatives to lift up traditionally underrepresented groups now more than ever.
My guy you aren't getting it. You were lied to. You bought it. You are just plain wrong and openly propagating a lie as fact and you seem to be doubling down.
From psychology department at University of Washington [1]:
> I advise deleting the statement below as it shows that URM [underrepresented minority] applications were singled out and evaluated differently than non-URM applications (which is not allowed as [redacted] noted)
> At a faculty meeting, someone whose name is redacted “informed faculty that the Hiring Committee had three outstanding candidates and so they used DEI to distinguish and select a first offer"
Nobody is saying it's not happening but the notion that it's systemic -- as the opposite is -- is categorically a lie and, again, as you've been told a few times in this thread, DEI's goal is to prevent even this scenario from happening as its intended goal is to foster merit-only hiring.
My most charitable reading of your comment is that the DEI policies were simply grossly misunderstood by the department in this case. Therefore, it would seem that an unintended consequence of DEI policies has been to foster the scenarios it was designed to prevent.
> DEI's goal is to prevent even this scenario from happening as its intended goal is to foster merit-only hiring.
That was 20 years ago, today merit only hiring is called evil by the same people, there is a reason people started to get really against what they do lately.
(Psst: There's no such thing as purely merit-based hiring. And DEI's mostly just about just making sure perfectly capable individuals aren't passed over or alienated because they're not white men. Because that's what's been going on for most of the past -- checks notes -- 500 years of American history. Pass it on.)
Hiring people based on race (white) and gender (male) is what happened _before_ Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives.
Do you know what is the original and ultimate identity politics? Enslaving people because you deem them inferior to your own race. The civil war, the civil rights movement, and modern social justice movements are a response to this, not the root of the conflict.
I'm a white guy in academia - not tenured yet - and I cannot fathom the ignorance necessary to believe that white males are at an disadvantage because of university administrators being "woke". Give me a break!
> Enslaving people because you deem them inferior to your own race.
This is irrelevant to the discussion of hiring in 2025, unless you believe your fellow “white” population harbors literal beliefs of a.) racial identity and b.) racial superiority, that c.) the “white” people making hiring decisions are actively excluding candidates based on these beliefs, and that d.) application of a nonwhite bias is just and measured in the face of a-c. I think all are incredible claims, and they’ve only lasted a decade because they have become rabidly-defended shibboleths for people who want to fix racism (and sexism and…).
> I cannot fathom the ignorance necessary to believe that white males are at an disadvantage because of university administrators being "woke"
If 1000 group A individuals and 10 group B individuals apply for a team, and both groups are accepted at ~50% due to a group B preference, then group B is ~100x as likely to be selected for the role due to that preference. Such observations are where my own perception of “disadvantage” comes from. Unless you’re claiming that no such preference exists, or that some prejudice you might have about group A justifies its individual members’ relatively unlikely chances of being selected, I can’t see how this preference doesn’t qualify as a disadvantage for such individuals.
> ...unless you believe your fellow “white” population harbors literal beliefs of a.) racial identity and b.) racial superiority, that c.) the “white” people making hiring decisions are actively excluding candidates based on these beliefs, and that d.) application of a nonwhite bias is just and measured in the face of a-c.
I believe many of my fellow "whites" believe this, but more importantly it's pretty obvious that many of the most powerful "whites," including the current President and his boot-licking minion Donald Trump, absolutely believe this.
Hah definitely now, tho we’ll see how things play out.
I really hate how poisoned the well has become on this topic, there’s definitely elitism and exclusion that should be systematically addressed in hiring. I’d support programs promoting cheaper and universally-accessible paths to getting skilled jobs (e.g. accepting projects/certs/etc or offering literal job training) as long as they were open to anyone regardless of protected characteristics. You shouldn’t need to mainline an ivy-league path your entire childhood to have a chance at being hired at Google. I think such programs would be far less controversial and produce real value for real people.
How does it require ignorance to believe something that’s spelled out in black and white policies? It’s not even belief it’s just reading comprehension at that point.
"It has become tiring to see how DEI has affected all aspects of academia. Hiring people based on race, awarding grants to work exclusively with members of a particular set of minorities, etc."
You mention in another comment diversity in admissions but that is not hiring or grants. Do you have any examples of hiring people based on race in academia?
There are not countless examples. Instead of "hiring of people on the basis of race" I may more accurately say "using race as a decisive factor in the consideration of an application resulting in its acceptance or rejection" which also happens to be illegal.
From the journalism department at CU [1]:
> Our commitment, should we be successful with this application, is to hire someone from the BIPOC community
From the geography department at CU [1]:
> Our aim is specifically to hire a Black, Indigenous, or Latinx faculty member
From ethnic studies at UC [1]:
> We have an urgent and qualified need for BIPOC femme/women of color faculty in an Africana Studies focus who will contribute to the social science division thematic cluster hire in racism and racial inequality.
From psychology dept. at U Washington [2]:
> I advise deleting the statement below as it shows that URM [underrepresented minority] applications were singled out and evaluated differently than non-URM applications (which is not allowed as [redacted] noted)
> At a faculty meeting, someone whose name is redacted “informed faculty that the Hiring Committee had three outstanding candidates and so they used DEI to distinguish and select a first offer"
I have friends in faculty positions at well-known universities who were very unhappy about these practices, but could not publicly discuss it fearing repercussion, prior to these events.
TBC, I am not supporting any of the things happening. I do think the DEI thing went too far, but what the new admin. is doing can be much worse.
"A 2021 American Enterprise Institute survey of academic job postings found that 19% required DEI statements, and elite institutions were more likely to require them."
"Speech First, a group advocating for First Amendment rights on US campuses, released an investigation on Thursday that found 165 of 248 selected institutions — from American University to Williams College — mandate DEI-related classes to meet general education requirements."
DEI is a good idea that has led to a catastrophic backlash.
Imagine a world where us intellectual types hadn’t given the right this kind of talking point on a silver platter. Election might have gone differently.
I like to imagine a world where the institutions that were supposed to protect us had done their jobs, and enforced the gentleman’s agreement we had, that worked so well these past 50 years.
I largely agree but I doubt other issues would be such massive free wins for Republicans. The Republican base has become rabid over DEI and trans issues and it has been really obvious for a while now that it was going to be a massive problem for Democrats. Sadly these issues have become more divisive than even gun control.
"trans issues" are literally an issue they invented. They've been workshopping attack vectors for years. Bathrooms didn't really work, so they switched to athletes, which did.
They will continue inventing issues until they find one that sticks.
They spend hundreds of millions of dollars on ads trying to convince people these things were a problem. That is, by definition, not a free win.
You have to realize some of these issues didn't used to be as divisive. They made them divisive. Abortion being the most obvious. If you need an issue to rally around, you create one.
You point to the issue Republicans have with trans people existing, isn't that a counterpoint to your point?
They were able to make a massive issue out of the existence of less than a percent of the population, if the can do that how can you say they wouldn't have made issues of literally anything?
Should one be required to submit a statement proving their past support of DEI as part of the hiring process in academia? What should people who disagree with such efforts put in this statement?
But it is. DEI indicates ideological capture. Whether it's good or bad doesn't matter, it's not germane to the purported goals of "advancing science/health/military readiness/etc". At best it's tangential.
If we were a robust and wealthy country, then perhaps we could engage in these sorts of boutique social experiments. But we are not. We've got serious problems on multiple fronts. Fixing it before it all goes blooey means serious disruption, and we're now well into 30 years of positive reinforcement on the ideological capture. You're not going to get the results you need from the people who benefitted from the previous mismanagement. Trump learned that lesson quite directly the last time he was in office.
You don’t even know what you’re arguing against. “Ideological capture” is not an argument either. Whatever system is in place will be the result of one ideology or another.
“We are not a robust and wealthy country.” Good lord, who is telling you this?
If you could please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42951612 and stop breaking HN's rules, regardless of how wrong anyone else is or you feel they are, we'd appreciate it.
I know it's not easy when times are urgent and feelings understandably run high, but those are the times when the rules need to count the most (as the site guidelines say: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.")
Do you think that DEI is just some line item in a budget that can easily be produced? Without which we'll just have to shrug our shoulders and endlessly equivocate about how their might be some waste?
> ...Faculty Diversity Action Plan, a special funding program for diversity-focused faculty hiring, which ran until 2023, when it was restructured and renamed. Created in 2020, the program played a significant role in dictating whom the university hired. In a 2022 faculty meeting, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences was asked how many professors were hired through the program since it began. He estimated that around 90% were either hired through the program or were spousal hires.
I have written a version of this twice and deleted but just can't let this statement stand unopposed. This is, almost inherently at this point, a rant and my last contribution to this thread.
This simply is not the case, I know it is something that you and many others believe is that case but you are being lied to by actual racists. I say that as a white man working in STEM academia. Academia had a long history and tradition of NOT doing meritocracy, but of claiming meritocracy and using bad markers of meritocracy to prove it. The 'DEI work' that people are so concerned about is about trying to make merit based decision making actually merit based. You think that is based on giving some preference, but it isn't - its based on acknowledging and working to eliminate actual prejudice. Its about hiring the best people instead of the person who's advisor is friends with our search chair.
I'll give a concrete example: I ran a hiring search for three faculty members. We did a blind search. The hiring committee did not know the gender, race, ethnicity, or even institutional affiliation of any candidate. The candidates were ranked, the top invited for phone interviews, and then ranked again during the interviews with everyone blind to the first set of rankings. We repeated this for a smalled group of in person interviews The order of the rankings at all three phases matched. More relevant, we interviewed and hired the most diverse crop of faculty we have ever hired. Simply because of the appearance who we hired, two different candidates who were did not received interviews emailed me and my department chair to decry that we had used 'DEI' in our BLIND hiring process. One threatened a lawsuit. We blinded it to race, to gender, to all markers of 'diversity', but the gender and race of who we hired was all the proof that person needed they were less qualified than him.
In other cases, this 'stuff' protects against asshole colleagues and bad science. (1) Diversity statements help us avoid getting sued by students and employees. The statements that wax philosophic about inclusion, that quote MLK, the ones people use to label this as some ideological test, SUCK to read and get applications ignored because they lack serious thought about being a colleague. The good ones, which get noticed, are about how people work effectively with other people, and how they make an effort to understand people as part of working with them. The context, whether its about being Green, Left-handed, or Neurodivergent tell us whether this person has thought about being a mentor to people unlike them, has a capacity to empathize with a student, or is going to be a self-righteous asshole that is going to make us hate faculty meetings even more. They help us know if their grad students are going to be in tears in the chairs office or the parents of an undergrad are calling the dean. (2) They actually tell us a lot about doing good science and getting grants. Theres a long history in medicine of fucking up because of who is in our participant pool. NIH now makes you articulate about how you will not do bad science through lazy recruitment[2]. We've asked questions about this requirement of candidates during interviews. The answers are fun and telling - using coded language to say you won't recruit Black people because they are 'less reliable' is just evidence you don't get it, not that you are some purist doing important work.
That is the DEI you are being propagandized to be against - what it actually is not what you are told it is. It is not hyperbole and you are tired by design - because you are a victim of propaganda. The nonsense narrative that is being pushed is, without concern for the truth, entirely grounded in the assertion that certain groups are unqualified to do intellectual work (c.f.[3]). It is (by design) meant to establish that the mere appearance of a Black Women or a gay person on a faculty is only because they are unqualified. It is meant to exclude people who have always been excluded. It is not about pushing back on (nonexistant) out of control efforts to include them. What is changing is efforts to counteract the actual, long established, clearly evidenced, bias in favor of certain groups of candidates. That is not some ideological project to eliminate people like me because I'm not a minority, that is the thing you want.
Thank you for writing this- it aligns perfectly with what my own experience, as a white male in academia, has been with these issues.
When I talk to people outside academia about “DEI”, it’s clear to me that whatever they think that term means, it has no relationship to anything I’ve ever seen in my career (involving faculty searches, recruitment of students and staff, education, involvement in clinical trial design and recruitment, etc.).
I have personally hired less qualified candidates based on race and gender. I have made this choice from direct superior's comments as well as political requirements to climb the ladder of the organization I was in.
The truth is that if you are on the "left" your blind to what many are thinking. In person I will never tell you the bias or problems I see. I've learned doing so would make it nearly impossible to work with you.
Not saying you are "wrong" but the problem I an many like me face is that the softpower pressure to conform to left ideals mean I never do or say anything because I assume everyone around me would push back or push me out.
It's partly paranoia but it's also part of a factual experience I've had in highly liberal environments. They don't want to hear it and if they do you are damaged. Very different from the people we all know who are expounding and preaching liberal ideals in ever conversation they have.
I certainly can't (and wouldn't want to) dispute what your lived experience has been, and I am sorry that you've found yourself in those kinds of situations and interpersonal dynamics. That sucks and is not how things should be. All I can say is that, going on my own experience, that is very much not the norm, at least not as far as I have seen and been aware.
To your point about being blind to what many around me are thinking- by definition, I wouldn't know if I was, right? So I'm not going to try and argue one way or another about that. I will say, however, that I have worked with many colleagues with whom I disagreed about many different things, some of which fall under the general umbrella of what one might call "identity politics", and as a general rule have been able to have open and civilized conversations with them. One thing I have learned is to not make any assumptions about what somebody does or doesn't think about a given topic, as basically every time I've done that I have been surprised.
I too have had these "open" identity politics discussions.
I have blatantly lied.
For someone on the liberal side, these conversations mean nothing and there's literally no risk in discussing.
If you are not on that side it's a risk of career suicide to openly discuss it.
I always just thought I was an outsider but I am starting to think there are many who are just like me. I wonder how many conversations in Sillicon valley I have had where both of us were lying about our political beliefs worried the other may be liberal.
Me, I was hiring someone to be on my engineering team. Found someone with lots of technical experience. Was not so subtly told we cannot hire them and had to hire a female for the team. I could either push back but I was lucky I was even getting a hire. So we found a female engineer to bring on with a lot less experience.
I literally skipped dozens of men in the interview application pipeline just because it had to be a female hire.
It was a very bad feeling for me but I have no doubt HR is doing this constantly, to read a name and specifically pass them over because it didn't sound like a woman's name. For every female applicant there is easily 20+ male for a technical role.
Shortly after this I was no longer allowed to search or filter for my own applicants. It was an odd time where our HR was gone and I had to do it myself. Really giant eye opener to how this bias works in a real sense.
Still remember I told my manager: "I am not used to not hiring the most qualified"
Their response: "Work is not just about work but also about life"
Not sure what that meant (I believe he was pushed from his boss, same as I) but stuff like this is an every day occurrence in SV
>Diversity statements help us avoid getting sued by students and employees.
Why does anyone need to write a diversity statement ? This is bonkers. When I applied for grad school many years ago as an international student, many applications asked for a diversity statement. My stupid ass didn't even know what that meant at the time. I forced myself to write some crock about how I studied Physics and Computer Science, and how I had some ideas about interdisciplinary work. I thought they meant diversity in technical backgrounds. Not only was what I wrote a load of crap, the stuff that these people expect is an even bigger pile of crap. Can we do away with this ?
Call it an "impact statement" then, "diversity" was just the buzzword of the day. But the requirement to articulate how your research will impact the broader community is necessary.
It's not. And this is where I think we fundamentally disagree. I do research to scratch an itch. GPU goes brrr. It may or may not help the community. I'm doing it to amuse myself. I hope that it also amuses others.
Why do you think you deserve access to public research dollars to scratch you personal research itch? If you can't explain to taxpayers how your research impacts them, I think it's fair that they should deny you their money.
Because every invention has been someone's personal itch. That's how the invention business works. From academia to VC, you fund a bunch of ideas and some of them change the world. Diversity statements don't play any part in this process.
> You think that [it] is based on giving some preference, but it isn't - its based on acknowledging and working to eliminate actual prejudice.
I would like to understand your point here. I agree with you that the stated justification for DEI policies is based on "acknowledging and working to eliminate actual prejudice". I also believe that they explicitly give preference to certain groups of people over others. So what is the point here? Because they are based on a noble goal, we should accept them? And if, instead, they were based on another nefarious purpose, they would not be acceptable?
A policy may arise from various motivations, but eventually it must be evaluated on its own merits. Of course, the same policy may be implemented in various ways, toward a nefarious purpose or to a noble purpose. You sound like you genuinely care about this issue and I appreciate that when you hire people you consider they may contribute to the community in your department, how well they will mentor students, and so on. Those are all important things and I am happy you interpret DEI that way, but unfortunately that is not how they are often interpreted.
From the journalism department at UC [1]:
> Our commitment, should we be successful with this application, is to hire someone from the BIPOC community
From the geography department at UC [1]:
> Our aim is specifically to hire a Black, Indigenous, or Latinx faculty member
From ethnic studies at UC [1]:
> We have an urgent and qualified need for BIPOC femme/women of color faculty in an Africana Studies focus who will contribute to the social science division thematic cluster hire in racism and racial inequality.
From psychology dept. at U Washington [2]:
> I advise deleting the statement below as it shows that URM [underrepresented minority] applications were singled out and evaluated differently than non-URM applications (which is not allowed as [redacted] noted)
> At a faculty meeting, someone whose name is redacted “informed faculty that the Hiring Committee had three outstanding candidates and so they used DEI to distinguish and select a first offer"
> Before finalists were narrowed to three, five finalists were invited to virtual visits, with the schedules including meetings with the Women Faculty and Faculty of Color groups. But a member of the latter group expressed opposition to meeting the white candidates. “As a person who has been on both sides of the table for these meetings, I have really appreciated them,” the unnamed person wrote in an email. “Buuut, when the candidate is White, it is just awkward. The last meeting was uncomfortable, and I would go as far as burdensome for me. Can we change the policy to not do these going forward with White faculty?”
If you believe that the sentiments expressed above are acceptable in a professional, academic setting, then we have totally different ethical values.
You mixed up UC with CU. Also, the hiring practices described in these op-eds are illegal, whether DEI exists or not. If the allegations are true, the correct action would be to file a lawsuit, not to do the stupidity we're now seeing.
> I also believe that they explicitly give preference to certain groups of people over others. So what is the point here?
You give the example of the journalism, geography, and ethnic studies departments specifically seeking minority viewpoints.
FWiW I don't think the DEI corporate and other programs in the USofA have been particularly well executed, they appear (from afar) to be more performative than substantive, however ...
The three examples you gave should more or less answer your own question for you.
Journalism, good reporting, brings deep informed insights from the ground. That's not going to happen when reporting on foreign countries and disadvantaged communities if all the reporters are (say) from a WASP background and perspective.
Geography isn't just maps, there are strong elements of people's relations with land that are part of that domain .. again a breadth of viewpoints gives richer coverage.
Ethnic studies. .. I mean does this really need a comment as to why diverse viewpoints deliver broader outcomes?
If the sentiments expressed in those internal deliberations seem perfectly normal to you, we really do have irreconcilable moral and ethical viewpoints.
> breadth of viewpoints gives richer coverage
Breadth of viewpoint has nothing intrinsically to do with the color of one's skin.
> Journalism, good reporting, brings deep informed insights from the ground. That's not going to happen when reporting on foreign countries and disadvantaged communities if all the reporters are (say) from a WASP background and perspective.
Again, the quality of a reporter and their work has nothing to do intrinsically with the color of their skin.
> If the sentiments expressed in those internal deliberations seem perfectly normal to you
I didn't say that. Perhaps you might like to re-read. We may have different backgrounds in parsing English.
> Breadth of viewpoint has nothing intrinsically to do with the color of one's skin.
Again, I didn't say that.
The point of these fat fingered US attempts to fix a problem is to ... fix a problem.
The problem is that the starting point in reporting, ethinic studies, and geography was that the fields were dominated by an unrepresentative minority; white faces with vanilla backgrounds being the voices of authority on subjects they had no experience of.
> The nonsense narrative that is being pushed is, without concern for the truth, entirely grounded in the assertion that certain groups are unqualified to do intellectual work (c.f.[3]).
Also, I would like to say, I agree with you! Such a sentiment is deplorable and must be condemned. However, it does not follow that academic departments should use race or sexuality or gender as a factor when hiring professors.
In fact, when you are hiring professors on the tenure track, I am sure the first ten or even twenty professors (at least!) are all eminently qualified. Of course, there is a degree of randomness in any selection process. But as the sources in my sibling comment suggest, DEI factors are being used explicitly to distinguish and rank people. That I believe is unacceptable.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
You're welcome, of course, to make your substantive points thoughtfully.
I'm not happy with what is going on, to be clear. But I am also not surprised that it is happening, and furthermore I don't believe there was any other alternative to this scorched earth war against DEI. If one had any reservations against DEI before, one would speak only in whispers. Now the backlash is here.
Of course there is an alternative. Through actual leadership.
It's not hard to effect change over time with a few memos (e.g. no more "pregnant people") and reviews. It may not be quick enough for certain items already in motion, but that really doesn't matter if the pipeline quickly empties out as the memos take effect.
The scorched earth policy is intended to sow fear.
Unfortunately I think the problem is much deeper than something that can be fixed with a few memos. I was just Googling for examples and found this "inclusive language guide" from University of Washington [1]:
> sanity check (why it is problematic): The phrase sanity check is ableist, and unnecessarily references mental health in code bases. It denotes that people with mental illnesses are inferior, wrong, or incorrect. Using an appropriate replacement will also clarify what is intended.
There are of course endless examples. Such sentiments are so absurd on their face, and yet they abound. The first thing "actual leadership" must do is speak the truth and acknowledge that there is a problem.
Yes. But what is happening now isn't speaking the truth, it's just causing chaos for chaos sake. Forget the DEI topic itself. From a managerial point of view, does this look like good management to you? Is this leadership you would want to work for with all the abrupt decisions that keep flip flopping? Does it instill confidence in you that they actually know how to manage anything?
This does look like good management to me, but that greatly depends on one's values and objectives. If your objective is to maintain peace and order, these actions must seem quite harmful. If your objective is to root out the racism, these actions seem wholly justified. Which one of these you care about most surely determines your perception of current events.
I don't like DEI either but you're drinking the Koolaid, there is nothing "good management" about sending out a vague memo with enormous consequences on Monday and rescinding it on Wednesday.
Trump's undersecretary of state for diplomacy tweeted last fall that "competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work".
These people in power are using any good faith doubt about dei that an everyday citizen may have, and are using it to revert to White-by-default government, and tearing up the entire civil service.
If you don't know if and despise Russell Vought and Stephen Miller and their philosophy of the Constitution, you need to.
There may places where it has become discriminatory in practice by overcorrection or by demonizing certain groups.
My point is that the people you cheer on are white supremacists, and people who want to destroy the federal government while making the president completely unaccountable.
You're cheering on a serial killer being made a custodian because he's a clean freak and the halls are messy.
You think we need to start trade wars with our allies, hire white supremacists throughout government, end all DEI, cease all foreign aid, attempt to illegally abolish multiple federal agencies, gut consumer and worker protections, and institute a purge of apolitical career civil servants because you saw a stupid list of words put out by a liberal college group?
Are you serious? I'm not trying to troll. You can't separate out what is being done right now, and who is being put in charge. Trump is a package deal with no surprises. Reading your other comments I can tell we disagree but you seem to be reasonable. I simply can't see how what is happening to the US right now is worth it in order to clean up perceived problems with DEI.
University of Michigan DEI is 1100+ employees strong (!!) at a cost of over $30M/year (the equivalent of 1,800 students’ worth of tuition), and they are launching an even bigger DEI 2.0.
I am not a DJT fan at all, but stories like these are exactly what has people stark raving mad. I can’t really blame them.
While the stated goals are noble, the truth in many cases is that it is an excuse to exclude white males. And I expect downvotes, but you don’t have to look too far to see the truth.
I studied electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois before switching to intercultural communication, because partially, I found it a helluva lot more difficult to solve.
I think the challenge with DEI is the framing of it. If we called it intercultural competence, or intercultural teambuilding, or whatever, then it focuses on how we are a highly multicultural society in the US and that there are huge benefits to being able to connect and collaborate with people across a wide variety of cultures.
Have customers who are in a rural area? Well, sometimes it's really hard for people in the city to comprehend what rural life is like, sometimes much easier to have someone on your team from the rural area to provide that tacit knowledge. Sell beauty supplies and looking to get into the African-American market? Can be really hard for white men to know the tacit knowledge involved in managing 4c level curly hair (most white men probably have never knew there was a classification system on the level of curliness of hair).
I worked in innovation consulting for a few years. The ability to empathize and connect with people across cultures may be one of the most important skills in innovation and problem solving. So maybe it's just a framing issue.
>If we called [DEI] intercultural competence, or intercultural teambuilding, or whatever, then it focuses on how we are a highly multicultural society in the US and that there are huge benefits to being able to connect and collaborate with people across a wide variety of cultures.
And it would be a lie because DEI is not solely about race.
It might not be about race, per se, but when on the flip side the effect is to exclude people based on race or gender, it does kind of become about race, doesn’t it?
I don’t see DEI helping poor white males, for example, and there’s a lot of those in America. Even those whose families don’t own property and have never been to college.
It's interesting that you're willing to accept the anti-DEI crowd's motives on good faith, but not the DEI initiatives'
> the truth in many cases is that it is an excuse to exclude white males.
One might think that the current pushes are an excuse to exclude various minorities. Considering what DEI initiatives were born of just a few decades ago, I don't think that's an unreasonable conclusion either.
I do think there's some truth to listen to from those so opposed to the initiatives - there's some that go too far and should be reigned in - but, as others have pointed out in this thread, drinking the Kool Aid with this push isn't really going to fix anything. It's just swinging back and forth on the political pendulum. Is that really what people want?
But what’s missing is just a fundamental sense of scale. One can rightly think this is a bit ridiculous, while also understanding it’s not that big of a deal. Honestly, there are so many economic and social issues that have real importance on people’s lives, and half the country is wound up in a culture war over which words are considered polite or not.
White men feel abandoned and life expectancy for white men in the US is going down, often due to deaths of despair (suicide, overdose, etc).
Some just shrink away, others lash out with vengeance, but I do think it is a huge societal problem, especially as the demographics of the country shift and white men may no longer have the majority in a democratic society.
Many democratic societies that are ruled by a minority demographic do not tend to survive, and so I think the transition from white majority to non-white majority is actually a fundamental issue for our democracy.
I think there's a number of issues with this diagnosis, but chiefly: Trump won a second term on the back of a massive surge in non-white support. He's basically where he was in 2016 with white voters.
I'm not saying this is why Trump won, I think it has more to do with a global pandemic that hurt a LOT of people and instead of processing that pain, we blame others, and Trump is good at blaming others. But also, if you feel lots of pain and Democrats say life is great, you don't believe them because your life doesn't feel great and someone who says "Make America (you) (feel) Great Again," well, probably gets your resonance and vote.
But about why people are upset about DEI, I think that has more to do with white people, especially men, not feeling well. Unless there's a huge portion of non-white people who have such vitriol towards DEI. I think maybe some of the Asian-American population, but I don't know about other segments. But im open to being wrong on that
Not just fear. Chaos, uncertainty, and cover for what I expect will be the biggest looting in history.
Even if someone thinks DEI had to go, they ought to be aware that their beliefs are being used as nothing but a smokescreen for unparalleled destruction and plunder.
Because the plundering is to pull the power to the white men, so that even if white men lose the democratic majority, they (we? as i'm a white american man) can still have power.
White men feel abandoned, powerless, ignored, blamed, and all sorts of attacks, and if we don't talk about this, then this country may continue a sort of death spiral, borderline suicidal people taking us all down with them.
You want all scientific research in the US halted, just because the term "pregnant people" bothers you? Look, I think the term is a bit cringeworthy, but ripping up the entire US scientific system over that is psychotic.
The issue is cultural and they think the cultural issue will change by slashing the government, not realizing the cultural issue doesn't come from government.
I think it was someone on the right, Steve Bannon or even Andrew Breitbarting, that said politics follows culture. So to focus on culture first.
They're trying to change culture at the political level, and I'm not sure that's how it works.
I don't think that's what the OP or many people likely want at all. I think what the OP was saying is this is what Trump rode to power on. The left is great at eating its own. Reasonable people who were traditionally allies of the left, felt attacked and alienated because of using a wrong word. Add in the economic issues and it was a perfect storm for Trump to rise to power.
The OP said there was no other alternative to what Trump is doing.
What is happening now is not at all a rational response to DEI. It's not even motivated by DEI. Trump and his gang simply want to gut the federal government, because they don't want to pay taxes. DEI is just an excuse.
Academics should keep in mind that they rely on the generosity of taxpayers to fund their research.
They don’t have an entitlement to other people’s money, and if they are perceived as wasting it or spending in discriminatorily then you should expect the public to become less willing to give it to you.
Ah, your post helped me realize that a lot of people probably have an anger or resentment towards academics. So maybe part of it is DEI, part of it is the resentment towards the kids in school who always knew the answers.
I'm not saying this is what's coming from you, just reminded me of how many people have had so much animosity towards me over the years because of my intelligence, or maybe more so, my confidence in my intelligence. A jealousy/envy/admiration all mixed together.
Smugness usually turns people off. It doesn’t matter how smart you are. No one likes people who act superior to them. Hilary lost over her “deplorables” comment. It makes me sad that the left is not taking the right lesson from this election.
I hear you, I think it's a balance of people trying to not be so smug (aka not attacking other people's intelligence) and people trying to not see other people as smug (aka not thinking the other person is attacking their intelligence).
I've struggled with the former a lot in my life. I was really good at school and feel very confident in my intelligence. So when I feel attacked, I often punch back at someone's intelligence without even realizing it.
Sometimes me feeling attacked is just confusion or sadness or disappointment that someone doesn't know something and I feel lonely that I'm the only one who does, and often angry when their decisions impact my life. Takes a lot to remind myself they know other things a lot better than me.
This... explains a lot. Taxes probably need a new phrasing, framing, and mind set. If the military can get $820b (13% of the pie) and be celebrated, then we need to get there with education, infrastructure, healthcare, etc. as well.
Defence is a homogenous concept, or close to it, so people can confidently state they support it.
Research is a messy mix of things people like and things they don’t.
It is it significantly easier to obtain public support for, say, cancer research, than say, fat phobia, but both are lumped together from the public’s perspective as NIH funding.
This makes it harder for people to support, because they cannot easily support what they care about without supporting what they perceive as wasteful spending.
Yes, it's a two-sided problem, with the "more intelligent" sometimes looking down on those who seem "less intelligent" and the "less intelligent" sometimes thinking the "more intelligent" are looking down on them.
You say this like we didn't just have massive outrage at hard medical science because the reality was that, yes, you should be made to get the damn vaccine.
The american public, beyond all else, hates being told they are wrong.
They are rarely right. So how do you square that circle?
That's only true in a very myopic sense. You don't get the US economy (and all of the benefits that come from that) without science and technology and basic research funding.
~82% of all R&D funding in the US is non-Federal, and 75+% is industry. The total investment by companies on R&D is about the same as the US defense budget. Many people still think it is like the 1960s and 1970s, when US government funding of R&D was a large percentage of the total. Federal investment in R&D hasn't declined so much as industry massively increased their investment.
The Federal government found a niche in basic research for a few decades and funded the vast majority of that. Per NSF, today even basic research is <40% funded by the Federal government, again not due to a decline in Federal funding but due to vast increases in industry investment. This shift toward industry investment in basic research was not overnight, it has been a monotonic trend for decades. Over the last century, the areas where Federal research funding is critical have dwindled greatly in scope because industry spends more money and is willing to take more risks.
One of the more interesting stories here is why and how this change happened in the US, to the point where the vast majority of R&D is funded by industry even in areas historically dominated by Federal government funding.
It's worth distinguishing between R&D and science. In my experience in industry, R&D is very focused on product development. Sometimes on a little longer time horizon than engineering, but it's research to solve some problem that the company has. Sometimes that problem is also more broadly useful towards advancing human knowledge and understanding, but often it's not. At my last company, the R&D department focused entirely on 1) building algorithms for a specific product (nothing that advanced the state of the art, just applying well-established techniques to the company's particular hardware); and 2) helping market the company's products by letting them claim that they were clinically-proven. Would they ever publish anything that showed a result that wouldn't serve the company's interests? Of course not. Yes, I know there are some industrial labs that do more basic research, but I've never worked at one.
Also, industry isn't really doing that much to train the next generation of scientists.
We are at the tail end of a 50 year bull run powered by declining interest rates. Maybe ZIRP is the new normal and private industry R&D investment stays high, but I don't think we should gamble our status as an economic, scientific, and technological powerhouse on that and gut our government financed R&D programs.
Further more, my wife works in biotech so I have seen first hand the compromises one has to make to secure private funding. They care about things like market size and revenue potential when making these investments, which means you end up with most of the money flowing towards diseases that largely affect rich people and solutions that are either expensive or recurring. And lets also not forget that almost all of these companies are working off of or spinning out from research programs that were funded by the government. I have yet to meet a single company where that wasn't the case.
I need to read more details on this because everything I’ve seen in the past 30 years has involved industry shutting down basic research.
Maybe it’s more true in some fields (biotech?)
How is this counted? If it’s based on tax figures, there’s a lot of corporate “R&D” that gets written off that wouldn’t be considered research in an academic setting.
Those numbers come from NSF, so I assume the definition of "basic research" would align with NSF.
The rise in basic research in industry coincides with the rise of technology as a major component of the US economy decades ago. I suspect these are not unrelated. The growth of deep tech investment by the private sector probably has a lot to do with it.
You are speaking on an intellectual level. The comment you replied to is speaking on a practical, political level. If voters do not like what is going on in universities, they will defund them. This is a political reality.
Voters are overwhelmingly in favor of funding US science. They are overwhelmingly in favor funding US international aid. The public thinks we spend way more on these than we do.
The idea that the blatantly illegal actions by the current administration reflect public will simply isn't based in any kind of reality- just calling it out as a lie.
DEI is nominally good but its just racism. Not like reverse racism or indirect racism - just racism. There’s really no other way to slice intentionally discriminating based on race.
Whats probably most egregious is the idea that its good because its racist against the right people.
