Inflammatory quote plus snarky one liner is definitely against the site guidelines. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on.
Was it I who pushed this thread into a flame war or the other commenters?
I only intended to point out that education, by its nature, changes people which inevitably leads to friction with other people who don't like that change or what that change enables which is not new. The origin of the word "erudition" highlights that point quite well.
If you had actually pointed out what you say you intended to point out, that would have been much better. What you actually posted was an inflammatory quote plus a snarky one liner, and the expected value of that is a flamewar [1].
I realize it's not so easy to make intent explicit, because it seems obvious to you (by "you" I mean all of us, of course)- the problem is that it exists in your head where no one else has access to it - therefore the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate [2].
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
This is exactly what you shouldn't do. As long as you can talk to people you should. These people are talking, they aren't out there being violent or murdering people, they are just sitting there talking, if you attack verbally them like this then their kids will hate you as well. Like "my parents aren't racist, they just want us to get the best books we can get instead of just forcing us to read books based on the skin of the authors", do you really think that view is so intolerant that we need to create a huge rift in society to fight it? I don't.
More like "we are inclusivist therefore we cannot tolerate intolerance such as yours".
That's one hell of a take.
Honest debate requires being open to have your mind changed.
If you believe that killing children is ethically unacceptable you cannot at the same time engage in a debate on when to kill children.
There is a reason why legal systems have a distinction between crimes that allow debate, extenuating circumstances, statutory time limits and others don't have such wiggle room.
Intolerance of intolerance isn't just political theatre. It's a deliberate attempt to avoid the kinds of practical horrors that racism etc create in an otherwise liberal culture.
Those horrors includes personal and mob violence, lynchings, rapes, other random murders, institutionalised economic apartheid, privilege (and its close ally, corruption), the reduction of public debate to reactionary dogwhistles instead of future substance - and ultimately, with tedious predictability, torture and mass murder.
There isn't really a paradox here. These are all very, very hard to justify on basic humanitarian grounds.
And if someone wants to say "But communism" - it's not hard to agree that's often been a different brand of authoritarianism which takes root in countries with no liberal tradition.
But the question remains - can "not communism" prove it's better? If it's justifying and accepting racism etc, I don't see that it can - because if you're on the wrong end of endemic social violence you get a very different view of your culture to the people who live in the comfortable and privileged part of it.
And this is not an abstract debate, but something that is going to affect your lived experience, possibly on a daily basis.
Those are real problems, yes. But it should still be allowed to question the solutions people claim to have to those problems. The author here claims that you shouldn't be allowed to question solutions, if you do then you are evil and should get rejected by society.
Why should we be having social discussions about whether or not genocide against a particular out-group is acceptable? Would the proposition that slaughtering an out-group be a good faith discourse about the best path forward for society? If not, why should we have that discussion at the cost of other discussions?
But it’s very rare to see discussion on this level. As seen in this thread it usually stops way earlier.
If I’m allowed to branch to a separate topic, I think this is reflected in what I believe is a fundamental issue in larger social networks: moderation. It would solve so many problems (and introduce new ones, which can be solved) if, like email, it was by filters set both by user and server (assuming sufficient federation).
This could breed an economy of curation markets/algorithms. If you want to stick to a particular echo chamber, you could.
Conway’s law on global scale.
Correct. It's called paradox not because it's a logical impossibility but simply because some people *incorrectly* assume that a tolerant society should tolerate every behavior including those that harm others.
Mmm so true. When authorities and regimes imprison their enemies or fire them from jobs over opinions or brainwash their children or put them under constant surveillance, they are simply totalitarians being totalitarian, but when authorities and regimes you like do it, they are the manifestation of inclusivity descending into the material world to defend itself against the nasty totalitarians who need to be put in their place. I'm 100% sure that the only difference between the two is not just you affiliating with the latter, that's a completely irrelevant detail. Just like everybody knows that my religion is right and that doesn't have anything to do with the fact that it's mine off course.
>downvoting me to -4
The Horror! what a massive injustice to good men and women everywhere that a database record somewhere contains your words next to a negative integer. Hacker news reader sure do have a lot of totalitarian tendencies for expressing contempt for your opinon in the savage and inhumane way that they did. It worries me a lot, keeps me up at night even.
Have you considered, though, the possibility that hacker news readers decided that you're a threat to tolerance and therefore shouldn't be tolerated ? Surely that's a thing you would support and admire ?
The teacher should make the knowledge he wants to impart approachable and use an angle that the student can accept so as to convince him/her.
Political groups that tell you that teaching facts about society and history have the goal of bringing their propaganda into the schools.
Secondly the idea that this worldview is increasingly prevalent: do you have any data on this, that teachers and daycare workers increasingly believe their students are bigots? When did this belief start increasing? How fast is it increasing? If we know it’s increasing we must have a measure on how much and how quickly. Is it a lot rapidly, or not so much over a long time?
I’m seeing a lot of strong conclusive statements in this thread without a lot of accompanying evidence. I’m sure your statements are rooted in well-researched evidence or at least personal experience with the educational community, so I’m just curious to see exactly what so I can incorporate them into my own point of view.
It’s an interesting trend where suddenly the universities are not only trying to find the truth, but apparently they have a monopoly on it.
I don't think it is impossible either way. Rittenhouse trial showed some interesting divisions in US.
This is a sampling of some of the statements issued by colleges and universities in response to the Rittenhouse verdict. Lot of prominent names on the list including Columbia, NYU and Stanford.
So apparently a person who is willingly fully vaccinated, believe vaccines work, and believes that everyone should get vaccinated may still be an “antivaxxer”.
That’s some Ministry of Truth level stuff.
“Look, we literally can’t force your child to do anything. If they prefer to sit non-disruptively and receive a zero in that part of the curriculum, that works for us.”
Teacher: Your kid needs to read a book by a black author.
Parent: Why do my kid need to read a book by a black author? I don't think that is a good way to pick books.
Teacher: So you say you refuse to let your kid read any books by black people? Stop being such a bigoted racist! Society isn't tolerant enough to tolerate people like you!
I like to think of myself as an educated person, and I’m struggling with this. I’d struggle also to name an Indian or Chinese or Russian historical scientist. This reflects a White Western English bias in educational system imo. Also my own responsibility to do something about as well.
Or maybe they might say something like in order to diversify our reading we will be bringing books by black authors into the curriculum, authors like Maya Angelou.
But I doubt they would say your kid needs to read a book by a black author.
Because then I guess the kid could just choose the read The Three Musketeers, which actually I would think that a kid choosing to read that had their head on right but probably that is not what the teacher is hoping for.
No, they absolutely are talking about people like this, they say that kids needs to read books by black authors, then the teachers reads this and adds books because the authors are black:
> The push to modernize reading lists is challenging traditional definitions of literature. Surprise: Not everyone is happy about it.
maybe the teacher finds appropriate authors who also happen to be black.
Teacher Organization: Kids should be forced to read books by black authors.
Parent Organisation: I don't think you should do that, it isn't a good way to pick books.
Teacher Organisation: We are doing this to fix a historical problem, your pushback is just because you don't want your kids to read books by black authors, stop being such racist bigots! I really hate racist parents! Society shouldn't tolerate people like you!
What makes this conversation more real than the other one, which you claimed happens often. Does that one not happen often after all?
I’m just looking for the real world basis of this model conversation you have written for us here. What has given you this perception? Facebook? Twitter? Your personal experience with teachers associations (which ones)? Your friends and family?
It was not specified in this part that the books added by the teacher were written by people of any particular racial profile, although that is probably the case it is not certain given that writers such as Ursula K. LeGuin were white but often had non-white protagonists.
Edit: Can you give a single case where teachers first didn't pick a book because the author was black but instead that it made the most sense to use that book, and parents still complained in the past 5 years?
You presented a specific conversation. Did you hear that conversation personally? If not, who told you this conversation happened or where did you read about it happening? I’m not doubting you, I just want to get more hard facts into this thread.
You said that teacher associations have “often” written this into their “agendas” so it’s not a conspiracy theory. What are these associations and do you have a copy of these agendas into which they have written this? Since it happens often and it’s written down, you should show us and we can have a more substantive discussion about what they actually wrote versus your interpretation of what they wrote.
There is plenty, this article gives a good view, apparently people have been pushing for things I claimed for 50 years according to this article. I have no reason to believe all these "racists" described here aren't just people who push back against these movements. I'm not saying that such movements aren't warranted, however I would not say that people who are against them are racist. There is a huge leap between "I don't want to read a book just because it was written by a black person" and "I refuse to read any book written by a black person no matter what the book is about".
> It’s been more than 50 years since literacy experts first stressed the need for more diverse books in the classroom, and yet reading lists look surprisingly the same as they did in 1970.
People happily label pushback to such movements as "racist parents" and similar. I believe that people pushing back against movements shouldn't get rejected by society, this is the controversial part.
What you’ve linked is not saying “we must read these authors because their skin is black”. It is saying “their black skin has caused them to live a life different from other authors, which has caused them to write something different from other authors, and we want to know about that.”
Based on our back and forth here, it seems you have presented a conversation you claim happens “often” that you’ve neither heard personally nor can cite an instance of it. This conversation is a strong caricature of teachers calling parents “racists” for not agreeing with their book choice.
Meanwhile the evidence you’ve linked to shows nothing of the kind. TFA doesn’t support it, nor does the article you linked.
What the Harvard article says is that the topics contained in literature written by white men who are now dead are not relatable to a diverse classroom. Unsurprisingly, people write what they know, and as is true with all people, straight white male people don’t know a whole lot about the lived experience of people who are not them e.g. gay, black, and women etc. One way to get this perspective is to read books by authors in those demographics.
Again, this is not the same as saying “we must read these authors because they are black.” There are many black authors who are not being suggested, and it’s not black authors to the exclusion of everyone else. What they have to say in their books is how the books get chosen. We are talking about content, not color. Does the color of the author change the content? Yes. And that’s the point, but it’s not racist to recognize that and want to learn from it.
So again I ask: where is the conversation between parents and students that you’ve heard often happening? I really want to know the answer to this and It’s concerning you are evading that question.
Right, and the parents aren't saying "I refuse to let kids read any books by black authors", they are saying "don't put books into the curriculum just because the authors are black". I know the way I presented them wasn't 100% accurate, but I'd argue that it is way more accurate of their position than their representation of the parents position.
Now, the point isn't which of those sides are right. The point is that one side here argues that the others should get rejected by society since their position shouldn't be tolerated. I believe that side shouldn't do that. I believe the people who argues like that are way more damaging to society than the side they are arguing against.
But that is about banning topics, not being upset because your kid came home with a book by a black author. I agree that is bad, but that wasn't what this discussion was about.
> (Funnily enough I don't see such massive pushback when teachers set kids the objective of reading a book with a European author, or a book written over 100 years ago...)
Yeah, some of the pushback will be motivated by racism, but labelling all pushback as racism wont do you any favours.
Perhaps a small minority of parents picketing the first black kids to arrive at their kids' school, did so out of sincere belief that race had no more place in determining catchment areas than admissions (and the whole all white status quo from carefully drawn districts was just something they incidentally sought to protect), but anybody arguing that the real intolerance wasn't the people pushing back against black kids arriving at their kids' school but the people who suggested the pushback was mainly driven by racism would obviously be arguing in bad faith...
Let me tell you my point of view. I am an educator, and so I have bigger stake in this issue than most here on HN, who I would think are by a large majority in the tech field. I don't know what your profession is, but could you imagine if you found out what you say is happening between teachers and parents were happening in your field? You would want to know exactly where that was happening, right? Because as a person in this field, you would have some power and authority in that community to affect real change. To stamp out that behavior. Right? That's where I am at now. If what you're saying is true, I'm really upset by that, because it reflects directly on my profession and myself, and I'd like to use my position to stop it from happening.
So when you tell me that a conversation is happening like you described, I want to know specifics. What organizations, what teachers? I'm trying to understand if this is a perception you have of the issue through the lens of social media, or if you have actual knowledge since you wrote a specific conversation down that you said happened many times. I was wondering if this conversation was rooted in your experience, or if you had some other source as the basis for this conversation. I'm eager to get to the actual substance because then we can see where the nuance lies.
For example, as proof of your assertion that teachers are choosing books for racist reasons, you linked to a source that shows just the opposite -- that books were chosen because they provide perspectives not present in the existing curriculum. You further claimed that parents are saying "don't put books into the curriculum just because the authors are black", but your own evidence shows that is not happening. So maybe this is where the discrepancy lies. One group has a misperception about the motivations of the other. That's something we can work to solve.
So where is the evidence it is happening? What is leading you and others to claim it is? Because again, as an educator, I want to attack that directly. I can't attack that with vague anecdotes. You don't like it either, right? Help me help you.
If that were so there wouldn't need to be education in the first place.
Change comes kit and parcel with learning and experience. Just learning _how to learn_ to truly grasp arcane and rigid topics is difficult in it's own right. E.g. learning to challenge your own intuition and recognizing when you're using heuristics to take cognitive shortcuts.
Buffing out the rough edges to ones thinking and practice of a skill is exactly what education is designed to do which is why I find Rorty's writing here lazy and uninteresting. The question of "how much education should be required to function in a society and what should its content be" is more than fair. Its the tone of thos piece as if the discovery of education presenting a friction point for others is profound and paradoxical which I find vapid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance#Discussio...
I have a hard time imagining that that's what Popper meant.
It is in no way a real paradox.
What makes one paradox real while another is not?
So, given "This sentence is false" it seems to me that there must be assumptions behind it that cause us to perceive it as a paradox.
Interested in your thoughts, if you wish to say more.
They're excommunicating a lot more than just those:
Diversity Statements Required for One-Fifth of Academic Jobs - https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/2021/11/11/study-diversity-...
The purpose of the DEI statement during hiring is not to filter out straight white cis males. It is to filter out people who haven't put sufficient thought into incorporating diversity into their teaching practice, no matter who they are. This is important to universities because professors necessarily encounter a diverse classroom. Issues of race, gender identity, and sexual orientation are important for a professor to consider so that they may create a safe learning environment for all students. This does not limit intellectual exploration in any way - it relates to discharging the duties of teaching, not the content taught.
Sometimes these issues can feel abstract, but in the classroom they are concrete, and I want colleagues who have thought these things through. It does not matter that you are a straight white cis male, and judging by the makeup of our faculty, it's not an impediment for them getting hired.
Please be honest. What happens if they do put "sufficient thought" into it, but come to the wrong conclusions? What if they didn't put any thought into it at all, and just parrot various "diversity is strength" talking points, and their contributions to diversity are limited to ethnocentrism, such as a Latino candidate working with the Latin American Student Organization, helping their co-ethnics?
> Issues of race, gender identity, and sexual orientation are important for a professor to consider so that they may create a safe learning environment for all students.
Those statements require much more than just competence in making a "safe" environment (Isn't that the job of campus security? What kind of safety do you expect professors to provide?). From the open letter of Abigail Thompson, professor of mathematics at UC Davis:
Why is it a political test? Politics are a reflection of how you believe society should be organized. Classical liberals aspire to treat every person as a unique individual, not as a representative of their gender or their ethnic group. The sample rubric dictates that in order to get a high diversity score, a candidate must have actively engaged in promoting different identity groups as part of their professional life.... Requiring candidates to believe that people should be treated differently according to their identity is indeed a political test...The idea of using a political test as a screen for job applicants should send a shiver down our collective spine.... - https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/201911/rnoti-p1778.pdf
You have to recognize that for educators, these topics go beyond a political nature and into a practical matter. We in academia are trying to sell a service (a college "experience"), and our students are customers of this service. The idea that "the customer is always right" applies here.
For instance, if you have the belief that men and women should not be educated in the same classroom together, or that women should not be educated at all, that's a political opinion. If you want to be a teacher, that opinion turned into practice could be problematic for our business because >50% of our customers are female. So that's what we are interested in -- actions, not beliefs. Your deepest opinion of their presence in the classroom is immaterial; what is important though, is how will you make our female students feel welcome in the classroom? Because they are our paying customers, and your political opinion of their presence in the classroom is irrelevant after they hand over their tuition dollars. They have a right to be there as much as anyone else, and we want you as a teacher to make our customers feel welcome, safe, and that they belong. It's not political, it's business. Customers who feel welcome and safe in our classrooms donate money to us and send their children to us. Customers who feel marginalized and antagonized transfer and don't send their kids to us. It's good business to be inclusive.
Same goes for black students. You may have the political opinion that black students should not be in the classroom with white students. Again, this political opinion does not matter to us, because we actually have black customers in our classrooms. What is the practical action you will take to make our black customers feel welcome and happy about the purchase of our services? The answer to this question usually would involve an empathetic view of what black students are looking for in education, the challenges they face, and the solutions that may overcome those challenges. Notice that your personal political opinion of their existence in the classroom doesn't factor into that discussion.
One more, maybe more contemporary example: you may have the political opinion that there are only two genders and that trans people are a made up concept. This opinion is immaterial, because we have actual trans students in our classrooms. You may think they are completely insane and that they are living in a fantasy and you refuse to address any trans person by their chosen pronoun. But as a practical matter they have put down a large sum of money to learn in our classrooms, and they would prefer to be addressed by their chosen pronouns. So as an employee, are you going to disrespect our customers, or will you treat them with the respect they are asking for and address them using the gendered pronoun they are most comfortable with? Again, your personal political opinion doesn't really factor into that answer.
> (Isn't that the job of campus security? What kind of safety do you expect professors to provide?).
Intellectual safety. Learning new ideas can make people feel vulnerable and uncomfortable, which is expected. But learning in an antagonistic environment is difficult: imagine trying to learn the intricacies of e.g. functional programming when your peers and instructors are telling you that you don't matter and your idea of your own personhood is a delusion. Suddenly your homework assignments and exams don't mean that much when you're not sure if you're insane or sick. So to get the course content across, we first have to provide a safe environment where the things we say get heard instead of drowned out by lower-level needs like personal safety, a sense of belonging, and sense of self esteem. Only then does actual learning occur.
So the job of a teacher is not just to put on power points and talk about a topic for an hour twice a week. It is also to create an ideal learning environment for all our customers. This also includes managing interpersonal conflicts. Campus police don't really manage that either.
> From the open letter of Abigail Thompson, professor of mathematics at UC Davis:
Prof. Thompson's letter is problematic in a couple ways. For starters, she tries to liken the current diversity statements to anti-communist hysteria in the 1950s. The issue with this is that the anti-communist movement asked professors to sign letters disavowing an ideology and association with a group. Setting aside this is obviously in violation of the first amendment, that's not even close to what's happening with DEI statements. They are essentially saying "We have a diverse student population. What concrete experience do you have working with a diverse student population?" This is completely different from the Red Scare because, I will reiterate again, teaching a diverse student body is part of the job description for a professor. Community service is also part of the job description for a professor. Therefore if you're applying for a job, you have to show you are qualified irrespective of your personal beliefs. No one is asking you to disavow your group membership and personal beliefs. No one is checking if you're a card carrying member of the Republican party or that you watch Fox News or associate with other conservatives.
Secondly, she's really overstating how these statements are used in the selection process. I mean, maybe it's different at the Math department at UC Davis, but where I'm from there's really only two kinds of candidates: entry level assistant professors and already tenured senior professors. Entry level assistant professors are fresh out of gradschool, newly minted Ph.Ds. They have been in the higher ed. system anywhere from 8 to 15+ years. If they don't have anything to demonstrate community service, and if they haven't put any thought into the emotional needs of their students, that's a problem. Not because of their political ideology or group membership, but because that's the job description. Moreover, the bar is pretty low at that point. It's really not a high hurdle to talk about your community service experience. If you really have nothing to say here along the lines of "Here's some evidence that I can work well with others in my community to make it a better place", that's a red flag. Senior professors will be chosen based on their research record first and foremost. I can't think of any situation where a senior researcher with a stellar publication track record would be filtered out of a search due to a lackluster DEI statement. Our number 1 question for these people is, what is your H-index? Seriously, there's way too much weight placed on this thing.
Finally, she says that this is a political filter because it is a reification of the classical liberal ideology. I think the implication here is that it will filter out anyone who isn't a classical liberal. She says that the DEI statements require candidates to "demonstrate their knowledge and experience" as part of their professional life, but then pivots very quickly to the idea that the DEI statements require certain beliefs. What one believes and what one is required to do professionally are completely different things. The Red Scare was about what one believes. DEI statements are about one's professional record on issues of DEI in a profession that requires such interactions. So in practice you can believe whatever you want, which means that this isn't really a filter of ideologies but of experience. For instance, in my department I know of 0 classical liberals including me. I don't know everyone's political leanings, but of the ones I do know they span the political spectrum. It's not much of an ideological filter, in my experience, is what I'm saying.
At the end of the day, the DEI statement is answering the question: what will you do for our necessarily diverse student body? It's not asking if you believe a diverse student body is a good thing. It's not asking you about your personal beliefs or political leanings. It's not asking you to sign a pledge. It's one aspect of a job application intended to make sure you are qualified to discharge a critical duty of the job to which you're applying. That's it.
I hope you've read this far an you find this post insightful. It's my honest opinion. One thing I'd be interested in knowing from you is: how many DEI statements have you actually personally read? I'm just wondering because you made a statement about what's involved in those statements, so I was curious if you had any first-hand experience, or if you're going by what Prof. Thompson wrote in the link you provided.
That’s rhetorical, DEI statements are absolutely about pledging a particular type of political alignment and a university would get absolutely skewered if it got caught optimizing for student body count over diversity.
Was there a big problem with professors instituting sex- and race-segregated classrooms, that necessitated filtering them out with diversity statements? There must have been, since in one instance, a pool of 893 candidates was narrowed down to 214 only on the basis of how convincing their DEI statements were [1].
Imagine that - a full 76% of candidates were some kind of segregationists (that's the kind of person you claim DEI statements are meant to exclude, right?). And that's in academia, in California - the most liberal of the most liberal.
> how many DEI statements have you actually personally read?
None. But I have read one set of rating criteria [2]. Candidates that merely do "what is already expected of staff" [3] regarding diversity (I.e. what you claim is the goal of DEI statements) are given the lowest scores.
[1] https://ofew.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/life_sciences_...
[2] https://ofew.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/rubric_to_asse...
[3] Only mentions activities that are already the expectation of faculty as evidence of commitment and involvement (for example, "I always invite and welcome students from all backgrounds to participate in my research lab, and in fact have mentored several women. [..] Describes only activities that are already the expectation of Berkeley faculty (mentoring, treating all students the same regardless of background, etc).
This search was unique, both in scale and in intent ... Limiting the first review to contributions in DE&I is itself a dramatic change of emphasis in the typical evaluation process which generally focuses on primarily on research accomplishments.
Secondly, I will also tell you that filtering down applications from 893 to 214 on the basis of a robust diversity statement is not surprising. A lot of people treat it as a cursory exercise and devote no real effort to it. It's not hard to spot these. And ~24% seems like a reasonable ratio based on my experience. One of the issues with academics is as they are being brought up through the Ph.D. system, they do not place a large emphasis on DEI activities at all. So it's easy as a Ph.D. student if you're not careful to devote 100% of your time to research and very little to DEI related activities. And as I've said in another post, DEI issues are important discharging the actual job duties of a professor. I'm going to keep emphasizing that because it can often get lost, giving way to the idea that this whole DEI thing is orthogonal to professorship. It's not.
Third, this looks like it was a special search process directed for the specific reason's stated in the document. This kind of experimental and one-time thing is typically separate from the normal hiring process.
> But I have read one set of rating criteria [2]. Candidates that merely do "what is already expected of staff" [3] regarding diversity (I.e. what you claim is the goal of DEI statements) are given the lowest scores.
What [2] is saying would be the lowest score isn't really what I was saying in my post. The document characterizes low scoring DEI statements as "vague", "little expressed knowledge", "little demonstrated awareness", "seems to be not aware", "no specifics", "brief descriptions" etc. A vague DEI statement should score low on the rubric.
The "Only mentions activities that are already the expectation of faculty as evidence of commitment and involvement" is because a lot of people will say something along the lines of "My experience with DEI is that I tutored a black/Hispanic/female/Muslim/blind person" or "I've taught in diverse classrooms". That's not what we're looking for. We want specific examples of practices that you have implemented in your classroom and mentorship that demonstrates an understand of the issues faced by educators who teach diverse classrooms. It's not interesting to anyone that you taught a diverse classroom. We all do that. How did you teach it? What specific teaching methodologies did you deploy and why? What was the specific outcome of those teaching practices? How did you adjust them? These are all basic questions that yes, probably 75%+ of applications cannot answer.
Look at how the the rubric characterizes top scoring DEI statements: "clear knowledge", "aware", "comfort", "understands", "discusses", "consistent track record", "roles taken were significant and appropriate", "identifies", "clearly formulates", "convincingly expresses". The bar is not super high here. You just have to demonstrate a clear understanding of the issues, show examples of actual instances where they mattered to you as a teacher, and talk cogently about the subject. It's not hard, and yet indeed, many fail because they don't take it seriously as a job requirement. Many aspiring faculty think the job of being a professor is 100% research, and that's just not the case and really never has been.
And anyway, even if you only do the minimum expectation you can still score a 12/15, so not exactly the "lowest" scoring. The lowest scoring would be if you do the minimum, and also are vague and express little knowledge of the field and have no track record. That sounds reasonable to me.
> And that's in academia, in California - the most liberal of the most liberal.
I mean, we're talking about Berkeley here. It's one of the top schools in the world. The applications will come from all over including totalitarian regimes like China and Iran where I imagine there's not a lot of emphasis on DEI. Applications aren't restricted to Californians.
[0] https://facultyinnovate.utexas.edu/drafting-diversity-equity...
Anyway, let's talk about your link. First of all, let's give some context as to what exactly this document is and how it's produced. This was probably written by the very people you have in mind as a DEI woke liberal activist professor. Looking at the bios of the people at the bottom, that's the impression I get. That's why you are reading the "dog-whistling" but I would call it virtue signaling. Because it's there. It's the kind of document people in this community will show off to one another as a model DEI initiative. But that doesn't give this document any real weight in the hiring process. I'll explain why.
Frist, everything that's written here isn't really required for the hiring packet. It even says:
To aid you in writing your DEI statement, we have provided brief descriptions of five different topics to consider addressing in your statement below. There are no requirements that you must address all of these topics, and you are not limited to only discussing these perspectives. Your statement should reflect the relative importance of these issues to your work and reveal your personal commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
> they want them to make diversity, equity, and inclusion a core part of teaching, research, and the candidate's personal life. A professor researching, for example, graph theory who merely creates a respectful classroom environment and treats students and research associates without distinction based on their identity doesn't meet these criteria.
But I don't see exactly where this document is implying that. Do you have that impression based on this document or based on something else? Because the document for example says this about research:
If your research addresses issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion, describe them here. If you work with marginalized populations in your research, explain how your research advances knowledge and addresses equity in different communities. Describe how you respectfully engage in that research and how you honor those communities in your scholarship.
As for their personal life, again I don't see the basis in this document to support that. The document says:
Highlight your service and mentoring experience. If you have examples of serving on committees, participating in community outreach, or volunteer work, describe them here. Share some of your accomplishments or lessons learned from those experiences. If you have mentored underrepresented students, explain what you have learned from those relationships and how you will continue mentoring others.
Finally as far as teaching goes, this is the one where I will say yes, it's completely acceptable and indeed required to integrate DEI practices into teaching. That's the job. The authors of the UT document agree with me, as the language in this section is not qualified with an "if":
Describe how you create inclusive and equitable learning environments for your students. You may describe frameworks you utilize when designing courses and assignments. Explain some of the teaching strategies you use to make your classroom accessible and inclusive.
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Okay, so that's the content of the article. But then there's the separate issue of how the DEI statement is used in the hiring process. I think maybe if you understand how the process works, you will see exactly where and how the DEI statement factors in. Here's how it works at my institution, and it works like this in many other places. We are by no means unique.
First of all, the people who wrote this UT page and their counterparts have little to no sway on the hiring process itself. The hiring process is conducted by the department, usually by a committee of professors appointed by the department chair. The committee requests permission to hire from the dean. The dean grants the permission to conduct a search and an ad is posted. When the application deadline listed on the ad passes, the application packets are collected and distributed to the committee members. The committee will rank the applications by any criteria they deem appropriate. It can be completely arbitrary. They don't even have to look at the DEI statement. They invite top candidates to a phone screen. Usually on this screen they will ask some DEI related question related to teaching because it is part of the job. After all interviews are conducted the committee will rank the candidates and choose who will be offered an on-campus interview. The ranking, again, is done in an arbitrary way by the hiring committee. 99% of the discussions I've been involved in focus on the merits of the candidate's research agenda.
During the on-campus visit, the candidate meets with faculty members outside of the committee over a 2 day period. The candidate's application packet is distributed to the rest of the faculty in the department. The candidate will meet with someone from the DEI office. This is usually to explain to the candidate the University's commitment to DEI. It's not an inquisition into the personal beliefs of the candidate, or a filter, or a purity test. The candidate will then have meetings with maybe a dozen or so faculty members, during which they can discuss any topic whatsoever. Usually the topic discussed is the candidate's research. They can discuss DEI topics or not. At some point the candidate will give a research presentation, and they will meet with the dean and department chair.
After all candidates have been interviewed in this way, the faculty convenes to vote on whether to extend an offer. A discussion commences wherein members may voice support or concern. Concerns usually revolve around the likelihood of a given research agenda to attract funding from top funding agencies, and which classes in the curriculum the candidate could teach. After the discussion the decision is taken to a vote. If the vote passes, a recommendation is taken to the dean. The dean makes the final decision (100% of the time in my experience they side with the faculty, but I'm sure there are reasons candidates have been rejected by the dean), and an offer is presented to the candidate as far as salary and startup package. After a period of negotiation the candidate accepts or rejects the offer and so concludes the academic hiring process.
Now, where does the DEI statement play into it? The DEI office doesn't have much sway. The content of the DEI letter isn't prescribed. Well, for us there's no official mandate to consider it. Others implement some kind of mandatory scoring system that was alluded to in another post. But at the end of the day the decision to hire/pass is typically a democratic process left to the department faculty, who are granted the agency to vote however they see fit, by whatever criteria.
Anyway, I've spent a long while typing this out, so I hope you can see I'm not trying to be disingenuous or mislead you in any way. I'm telling you my honest and candid first-hand experience of how DEI statements are used in the hiring process for University professors. I understand it's not quite what you imagine it to be, but it’s not a lie. And in fact if it were what you implied in your original post, that it was akin to signing if a pledge to join a political party, I would be the first in line to oppose that.
What else is new?
https://www.etymonline.com/word/erudite