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.
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.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/opinion/how-dei-conquered-the-university...
[2] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/diversity...
> 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?
> 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.
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 by minority; white faces with vanilla backgrounds being the voices of authority on subjects they had no experience of.
That was the problem. This fixes aren't great.
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.).
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.
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 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.
Who gets to decide what "qualified" means? and what counts and what doesn't count as a qualification?
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
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 ?
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.
[1] https://mbb.yale.edu/news/mbb-radically-changing-how-we-sear... [2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6053906/ [3] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/darren-b...