Category: DEI matters

In light of protests, UNC Chapel Hill cuts diversity funding and beefs up security funding

May 15, 2024 • 10:30 am

“Defund the police and fund DEI,” were common cries on campuses in the last few years. But, in at least one case, the funding directions have suddenly reversed.

As NBC News reports, this happened at the flagship campus of the University of North Carolina (UNC): UNC at Chapel Hill.  As I’ve reported, this was only the second university in America (after the University of Chicago) to adopt official institutional neutrality on ideological, political, or moral issues. (This is the equivalent of Chicago’s Kalven Report.) Sadly, while the school has adopted neutrality, it’s still violating it in several ways. So we can say that UNC Chapel Hill talks the talk, but still doesn’t completely walk the walk.

Curiously, the violations of Kalven UNC enacted involve just those that are now endangered for lack of funds: mandatory antiracism policies, including DEI initiatives. Click the headline below to read:

An excerpt:

North Carolina’s public university system considers a vote on changing its diversity policy, the system’s flagship university board voted Monday to cut funding for diversity programs in next year’s budget.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Board of Trustees approved a change that would divert $2.3 million of diversity funding to go toward public safety and policing at a special meeting to address the university’s budget. The board’s vote would only impact UNC-Chapel Hill’s diversity funding, which could result in the loss of its diversity office.

The vote to shift more funding to public safety comes as continued pro-Palestinian protests on UNC’s campus have resulted in several arrests in recent weeks. The budget committee vice-chair Marty Kotis said law enforcement has already been forced to react to protests, but they need more funding to keep the university “safe from a larger threat.”

“It’s important to consider the needs of all 30,000 students, not just the 100 or so that may want to disrupt the university’s operations,” Kotis said. “It takes away resources for others.”

It’s ironic that this tradeoff is apparently happening because of college protests (DEI was on the way out in many places before the war, anyway), for many of the protests are fueled by the DEI mentality, which sees Israel as a land of white colonialist oppressors. And yet the police are needed to ensure that the protests don’t produce any violence to people or university propertly. (To be sure, there has been almost no physical danger from either side, although Jewish students did attack the encampment at UCLA, and that may have followed a Jewish woman being stepped on and kicked by protestors.)

There’s more:

Last month, the statewide board’s Committee on University Governance voted to reverse and replace its DEI policy for 17 schools across the state. The change would alter a 2019 diversity, equity and inclusion regulation that defines the roles of various DEI positions — and it would appear to eliminate those jobs if the policy is removed.

The full 24-member board is scheduled to vote next week on the policy change. If the alteration is approved, it will take effect immediately.

Many of us have called for an end to diversity offices and diversity statements at colleges and universities on several grounds, including that of ineffective programs and compelled speech. But I’ve also argued that at least a few people in each school should be tasked with investigating and enforcing prohibitions against bigotry as well as harassment in the workplace.

h/t Jay

MIT’s banning of diversity statements now official

May 6, 2024 • 10:00 am

The other day, taking as my source the publisher of the MIT-centered satirical site The Babbling Beaver, I reported on the Beaver’s claim that MIT had become the first major university to ban diversity statements. Although the site is snarky and not every assertion it makes is true, the publisher affirmed that this one was.

But because of the site’s satirical overtone, several miscreants wrote me that there was no confirmation that the DEI claim was true (I did have some confirmation, but it was confidential). One such miscreant even started his email with “What are you doing with your blog, Jerry?”, a sentence that is both uncivil and inaccurate (this is of course not a “blog,” but a “website”).

But the important thing is that the Beaver’s claim is indeed true: MIT has banned diversity statements. It’s confirmed in the article below by John Sailer at Unherd (click headline to read):

From Sailer:

On Saturday, an MIT spokesperson confirmed in an email to me that “requests for a statement on diversity will no longer be part of applications for any faculty positions at MIT”, adding that the decision was made by embattled MIT President Sally Kornbluth “with the support of the Provost, Chancellor, and all six academic deans”.

. . .This is momentous. The pushback against diversity statements has succeeded almost exclusively at public universities in red states, encouraged or enacted by lawmakers. Conservative states such as Florida, Texas, and Utah have passed laws banning diversity statements at state universities. Some appointed state university leaders, such as the University of North Carolina Board of Governors, have also barred the practice.

The decision at MIT is different — reform from within, prompted by a university president alongside deans and provosts, at a private institution.

It’s very possible that more private universities, and state universities in blue states, will eventually follow MIT’s lead for one basic reason: a significant number of faculty from across the political spectrum simply cannot stand mandatory DEI statements. Last month, Harvard Law School’s Randall Kennedy — a self-described “scholar on the Left committed to struggles for social justice” — described the general sentiment: “It would be hard to overstate the degree to which many academics at Harvard and beyond feel intense and growing resentment against the DEI enterprise because of features that are perhaps most evident in the demand for DEI statements.”

I’d say a statement by “an MIT spokesperson” is evidence enough that the school has deep-sixed diversity statements.  I’ve always opposed them because they constitute compelled speech (your statement has to be “progressive” or it won’t fly), and because if they’re used to show that you’re socially committed, well, there are other ways of doing stuff for society besides furthering DEI. For example, you could work at a soup kitchen for the poor, or tutor illiterate adults, both activities that I have done but wouldn’t give me DEI credits.

But MIT’s getting rid of such statements is, as Sailer said, “momentous.”

The College Fix reports it, too (click below to read), but all it does is repeat what it’s in Sailer’s article as well as in the Babbling Beaver article. Nothing new there.

MIT abandons use of DEI statements

May 4, 2024 • 11:45 am

DEI statements are affirmations made when you’re applying for college admission, university jobs, or even science-society grants, recounting to the authorities your philosophy of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” your history of DEI activities, and how you will implement DEI initiatives if you get the admission/job/grant.  I have posted quite a bit about them (see collection here), and object to them because they are not only compelled speech and are often completely irrelevant to what you’re applying for, but also ignore the fact that there are many ways to make contributions to society beyond enacting DEI. (For example, what about a college applicant who has taught illiterate adults to read?)  And I think many institutions are eliminating them. For one thing, some of them may violate the recent Supreme Court decision on race-based admission. Now MIT has joined the statement-eliminators.

The top headline in the screenshot below, which really is true, needs to be promulgated widely, as MIT is doing all it can to keep it quiet. So pass it on, repost it, or whatever.

Because this report originally came from The Babbling Beaver (a website that satirizes the mishigass at MIT, much like the Onion but better), my friend Jay Tanzman, who sent it to me, wasn’t sure whether it was true or false (click to read):

Here’s the entire article, and you can get an idea of its snark, a snark that makes one wonder if the ditching of DEI statements is genuine. But it is! There is of course snark, like the “carrying water for Hamas” bit, but the kernel of the article is true.

Quietly, in the dead of night, with neither announcement nor fanfare, MIT President Spineless Sally Kornbluth did the right thing. She banned the use of DEI statements for faculty hiring and promotions, across all schools and departments at MIT. In order not to rile up the Wokies, she left it to the Beaver to get the word out.

A private anonymous faculty poll revealed that about two-thirds of MIT’s professors hate the damned things. Merit lives, despite the fact that supporters have been largely hiding under their desks afraid to fight back.

About one in twenty faculty polled believe “DEI activities are as important as research and teaching in evaluating candidates.” It’s time to track those people down and show them the door. That’s precisely how MIT got saddled with a race-grifting chancellor totally unqualified for the job, along with a party-pack of radical progressive humanities professors that have been driving MIT’s culture into the ditch.

It remains to be seen whether individual departments will continue training their graduate students how to fill out these loyalty oaths when they seek academic positions elsewhere. One would think ChatGPT could do a bang-up job.

Reaction has been muted, most likely because DEI true believers have been too busy carrying water for Hamas. Or maybe they’re beginning to see the writing on the wall as the whole country wakes up to the damage DEIdeology has done to our college campuses.

And so, the pendulum swings. May it keep on swinging until sanity is restored.

Jay then wrote to the publisher of the piece, who replied with a statement that I can put on this site. Note: the pejorative characterization of MIT’s President is the publisher’s, and I know almost nothing about Sally Kornbluth.  Below the asterisks is Jay’s comment, with the BB publisher’s statement doubly indented:

********************

I asked the Publisher if the story was true, and the Publisher replied that it is. Specifically, the Publisher replied:

“It’s true. MIT has banned DEI statements. We have multiple confirmations, including one from President Spineless Sally Kornbluth herself. Alas, she didn’t have the courage to announce it. As far as I can tell, this report from the Babbling Beaver is the first publication to mention it.”

In a second email, the Publisher elaborated:

“Even better, let me give you a quote from an “Officer of the MIT Free Speech Alliance.

“The MIT administration has advised the departments that were requiring DEI statements to stop requiring them and to stop using this kind of information. This has just recently been disclosed to the faculty, but a general announcement to the students is not planned.”

“The MIT Free Speech Alliance is gratified that one of its key recommendations on putting an end to compelled speech on campus has been adopted.”

And please share the Babbling Beaver piece widely. Someone in the mainstream press needs to pick up on this story. It’s a real crack in the dam.

I then asked the Publisher if I could share this information with you [Jerry] in case you wanted to report it on your website, and he replied:

“Yes. The Babbling Beaver is a big fan of WhyEvolutionIsTrue. This story needs to get out.

***********************

So that’s the report: another crack in the dam.

An indictment of DEI for being “prescriptively racist”

April 29, 2024 • 11:15 am

This article by Erec Smith was first published in the Boston Globe, where you can find an archived link here, but has also been published unpaywalled by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank where author Erec Smith is a research fellow (he’s also “an associate professor of rhetoric and composition at York College of Pennsylvania, and cofounder of Free Black Thought”).

Smith’s thesis is that DEI is racist because it rests on prescribing “approved ways” that black people should behave and think, ways that he instantiates by giving two quotes. The first is a now-deleted tweet by Nikole Hannah-Jones:

And from President Biden:

“If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, you ain’t Black.”

That, says Smith, is “a statement that implicitly prescribes how Black voters should think.”

Smith developed this take because as a black kid in a white school he was expected to “act black,” yet when he moved to a mostly black school he was criticized for “acting white”—speaking “white English” and so on.  DEI, he avers, practices “prescriptive racism” by expecting black people to have the opinions that other “progressive” black people have, so that there is an approved and proper way of Thinking While Black promoted by DEI. Smith also criticizes right-wing racists for their past practice of criticizing “uppity Negroes” who didn’t act like black people should, though we don’t see much of that these days.

When Smith got to college and then became a faculty member, he saw this same tendency in DEI, except that the “uppity Negroes” are now those blacks who don’t conform to the prescribed progressive ideology. You can think of some “uppity” blacks, including people like John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, Coleman Hughes, and Thomas Sowell, all worth reading or listening to.

Click to read:

I’ll give a few excerpts:

Unlike traditional racism — the belief that particular races are, in some way, inherently inferior to others — prescriptive racism dictates how a person should behave. That is, an identity type is prescribed to a group of people, and any individual who skirts that prescription is deemed inauthentic or even defective. President Biden displayed prescriptive racism when he said “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, you ain’t Black,” a statement that implicitly prescribes how Black voters should think.

. . .prescriptive racism casts a broader net, disadvantaging people for not abiding by a long list of things a Black person shouldn’t do. A prescriptive racist may not mind that a Black person has a master’s degree, but he may scoff at the sight of a Black man watching the Masters — especially if Tiger isn’t playing. A white prescriptive racist would look at a Black person speaking standard English the way a Black person would look at a white person wearing a dashiki. Lest you think that last statement is mere speculation, I have met several people who have voiced derision and irritation upon hearing standard English come out of my mouth. My use of language was an affront to their expectations and sensibilities.

Many prescriptive racists are often people of the same minority group. A Black person lambasting another Black person for acting in ways deemed racially inauthentic — for example, speaking in dialects coded “white” — is engaging in prescriptive racism.

And how it enters DEI:

And prescriptive racism is not just a social phenomenon; it is now being institutionalized. More and more, it is erroneously labeled diversity, equity, and inclusion, and it is winning out over initiatives more in line with the civil rights movement and classical liberal values like individuality, free speech, reason, and even equality. It is becoming policy in academia, corporate America, and even the military. To put it another way, contemporary DEI is prescriptive racism.

In academia, I’ve found, Blackness is a role, a “pre‐​script,” to which Black people are expected to conform if they want to be accepted or, sometimes, acknowledged at all. A Black scholar cannot simply study and write about Plato; she has to write about Plato from a Black perspective. Nobody shows much interest in a Black graduate student drafting a dissertation on American Transcendentalism that isn’t focused on its relevance to the Black experience. In this sense, applying for graduate school or a professorship is akin to auditioning for “Black person” in some live‐​action role‐​playing event.

I hadn’t realized the expectations outlined in the second paragraph, but I’m sure they’re true, for nearly every black academic I know of is engaged in writing about the connection between their discipline and “blackness”. (This also applies to “studies” programs, in which white people also conform to DEI expectations by imbuing scholarship with ideology approved by DEI.)  What is clear is that DEI is racist in expecting groups to behave in certain approved ways and to hold certain approved views. John McWhorter, for instance, has not done that, and he’s suffered for it. As he says, he’ll never be invited to another linguistics meeting nor get an invitation to speak about linguistics at another university.  What a pity for such a smart guy! But that’s what you suffer for thinking independently—for being “heterodox.”

One more quote on “political blackness”:

Political Blackness made much more sense several decades ago. Both Malcolm X and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. could have been construed as politically Black. Why? Because, when these men lived, whether Black Americans were gay or straight, Islamic or Christian, working class or middle class, none of them could sit at the front of the bus in the Jim Crow South. However, in this third decade of the 21st century, the efficacy of political Blackness has waned significantly. Though things are not perfect and racist environments still exist, policy changes have afforded Black Americans opportunities and resources traditionally denied them. As a result, “the Black experience” has become so varied that the use of “the” is questionable.

The idea of an indefinite abject oppression that justifies essentialism and political Blackness does not reflect reality. The facts that roughly 80 percent of Black Americans are working class or higher and that the number of Black immigrants has skyrocketed (strongly suggesting that the United States isn’t a fundamentally anti‐​Black country) are just two of many things that illustrate this. But activists who still want power must fabricate an insidious specter of oppression, and an essential victimhood has to be prescribed, whether they are homeless or Oprah Winfrey. If you are a Black American who does not abide by this prescription, be you liberal or conservative, you are seen as weakening the political power of Black Americans.

The inherent paradox of contemporary social justice is the essentialism that says “you are bad if you stereotype other people, but you are also bad if you don’t.”

Smith goes on to say that he and others have founded a new organization to combat prescriptive racism:

I and a few others have cofounded Free Black Thought, a nonprofit newsletter and podcast representing “the rich diversity of Black thought beyond the narrow spectrum of views promoted by mainstream outlets as defining ‘the Black perspective.’” We come from a classical liberal standpoint, meaning we believe people should be treated as sovereign individuals and not deindividuated members of a group. In other words, we’re sticking it to the prescriptive racists.

The “free” in Free Black Thought is both an adjective and a verb. We want to promote thought free from the tyranny of prescription, which means we publish and promote a wide array of ideological points and artistic expression, highlighting Black artists and thinkers typically neglected in mainstream media. But we also seek “to free” Black thought by offering alternatives to K‑12 curricula informed by critical social justice, like BLM in Schools and Woke Kindergarten, to let schools know that other ways to promote true DEI do exist.

Another sin laid at the door of DEI, which I’m hoping is on the way out. Note that I said “hoping”, not “predicting.”

Facing accusations of antisemitism, Harvard adds a “Jewish graduation” to its panoply of identity-group ceremonies

April 6, 2024 • 9:30 am

Yes, I know that Harvard University has one big graduation for all undergraduates and grad students (I went to it when I got my Ph.D. in 1978; Alexander Solzhenitsyn gave the commencement address in a famous speech that called out the West for its “spiritual degeneration”).  At that time, there was but one “identity” ceremony that included everyone. E pluribus unum!  (One small exception: people who got their Ph.D.’s in different fields had separate degree-granting ceremonies.)

I’m not sure when this changed, but now Harvard has many different graduation ceremonies for different identity groups. And, of course, they are organized by the DEI office. Here’s this year’s panoply of “identity ceremonies” listed by the conservative National Review:

Harvard University’s Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging will once again host “affinity celebrations” at its 2024 commencement, according to documents obtained by National Review.

Harvard plans to hold a “Disability Celebration,” a “Global Indigenous Celebration,” an “Asian American, Pacific Islander, Desi-American (APIDA) Celebration,” a “First Generation-Low Income Celebration,” a “Jewish Celebration,” a “Latinx Celebration,” a “Lavender Celebration” — which refers to LGBT students — a “Black Celebration,” a “Veterans Celebration,” and an “Arab Celebration.” The university will also hold a central commencement ceremony for students of all backgrounds.

. . . . The only publicly available mention of affinity celebrations on any Harvard website is published on the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences’ page. The note does not mention the specific events or groups recognized, simply describing them as “student-led, staff-supported events that recognize and celebrate the accomplishments of graduates from marginalized and underrepresented communities.”

“Desi-American” means people whose ancestry is Pacific Islander, Indian, Bangladeshi, Pakistani or other Asians, identity groups that may not be so fond of each other! Is there any oppressed group missing here? The “First Generation-Low Income Celebration” puzzles me, as the two features don’t necessarily go together, and of course immediately upon leaving the ceremony the graduates have abandoned that identity.

There was one notable group missing at Harvard last year, and you can guess which one it was. That’s right—the Jews!  But now, facing a federal Title VI civil rights investigation for a campus climate of antisemitism, and the fracas around the “Jewish genocide” hearing in Congress that in the end brought down Harvard and Penn’s Presidents, the school decided it had better do something to effect some climate change, though not in the way that the antisemitic Greta Thunberg would favor.

Frankly, I think these separate graduations are ludicrous and, in the end, purely performative. Do they move society forward? No.  Are they divisive? Probably, in that they continue the obsessive academic focus on identity.  “Identity politics” isn’t inherently bad—after all, it was the impetus behind the Civil Rights Movement of the Sixties. But these days, fostered and promoted by DEI offices, it has gone way too far, making someone’s identity, based on features they can’t control, the most important aspect of their persona. This is why Steve Pinker, who’s at Harvard and laid out in the Boston Globe a five-point plan for fixing Harvard that includes this recommendation:

Disempowering DEI. Many of the assaults on academic freedom (not to mention common sense) come from a burgeoning bureaucracy that calls itself diversity, equity, and inclusion while enforcing a uniformity of opinion, a hierarchy of victim groups, and the exclusion of freethinkers. Often hastily appointed by deans as expiation for some gaffe or outrage, these officers stealthily implement policies that were never approved in faculty deliberations or by university leaders willing to take responsibility for them.

An infamous example is the freshman training sessions that terrify students with warnings of all the ways they can be racist (such as asking, “Where are you from?”). Another is the mandatory diversity statements for job applicants, which purge the next generation of scholars of anyone who isn’t a woke ideologue or a skilled liar. And since overt bigotry is in fact rare in elite universities, bureaucrats whose job depends on rooting out instances of it are incentivized to hone their Rorschach skills to discern ever-more-subtle forms of “systemic” or “implicit” bias.

Universities should stanch the flood of DEI officials, expose their policies to the light of day, and repeal the ones that cannot be publicly justified.

It is, as I said, Harvard’s DEI office that creates these identity-based graduations, reinforcing the malign atmosphere Steve describes in his first paragraph. Am I happy that Harvard, under the gun for antisemitism, now includes a Jewish ceremony? No, of course not: it’s disgusting—pandering to both Jews and DEI in general. It is, after all, DEI that, by fostering a climate that sees Jews as white oppressor colonialists, fosters antisemitism.

This conclusion isn’t rocket science. One Jewish student is quoted in the National Review about the issue:

For some, like Harvard Divinity School student Shabbos Kestenbaum — who spoke about the situation on the ground at his school during a House Education and Workforce Committee roundtable in late February — the addition of a separate celebration for Jewish students simply perpetuates the underlying dynamics driving antisemitism at Harvard.

“Rather than acknowledge the harmful ways in which Harvard DEI has contributed to campus antisemitism, the university further marginalizes individuals into groups of race, ethnicity, and religion,” Kestenbaum told National Review. “Harvard DEI is simply out of control.”

One way to stop this, as Steve suggests, is simply to disempower DEI.  Perhaps colleges can keep on staff a few individuals to whom one can bring complaints of bigotry, but there should be none of the training, propaganda, and divisivenesss that DEI sows on campus.  Even at the “free speech” University of Chicago, our climate is permeated by DEI, which sends me announcements of events on a nearly daily basis.

Op-ed in Science: Expand DEI in STEMM fields

March 29, 2024 • 10:45 am

The battle continues between truth (or merit) and social justice, exemplified in John Haidt’s famous lecture at Duke on the two types of approaches to education, continues. This time it’s in an article in the new Science urging expansion of DEI initiatives in STEMM fields (science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine).

The article is by Shirley Malcolm, whose associated bio is this:

Shirley Malcolm is a senior advisor and director of the STEM Equity Achievement (SEA) Change initiative at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, the publisher of Science), Washington, DC, USA.

Since the AAAS funds a whole unit on “STEM Equity Achievement Change,” it’s not surprising that they’re defending DEI at a time when the Supreme Court has banned race-based admissions and DEI is waning everywhere—not just in academic but in the corporate world. Malcolm says she’s explicitly fighting back against this tendency/

Click to read.

None of us want a country where there is bigotry against women or members of different ethnic groups, and all of us want a country where everyone has equal opportunity to rise as high as they can (the latter is far harder to achieve).  We want a country where the net for positions is cast as widely as possible, to get talent wherever it lies and to make sure that everybody’s in the net.

But this is not DEI.  To me, DEI stands for extreme forms of affirmative action, and I generally oppose it for the  reasons below. Malcolm’s quotes are indented.

1.)  It favors not equality of opportunity but equity: the proportional representation of all groups in a population in an endeavor—STEMM in this case. This is made explicit in Malcolm’s article:

STEMM should ideally benefit all of society. However, this will not happen until the country creates a STEMM community as diverse as the population it should serve.

This neglects the view that different groups may have different preferences; for example, it’s likely that in medicine women tend to go into “people oriented” fields, like pediatrics, family medicine, and OB-GYN, while most surgeons are men.  This appears to be due not to salary differentials but to preference, and is seen in countries, like those of northern Europe, which have the highest ratings for gender equality. (In fact, in more gender-equal countries, women are less likely to go into STEMM, for reasons probably connected with the freedom to exercise preference and make career choices.) Which leads us to the second problem.

2.) Differences in equity are imputed by DEI to systemic racism, not to differences preference or merit. Over and over again, we find that underrepresentation of groups are not due to people trying to keep others out of their fields, but to the fact that preference has controlled people’s movement into fields, or different groups are over- or under-represented because of differences in merit. Here we have Malcolm touting “inclusion and respect” as an important aspect of STEMM firled

The success of STEMM is measured not only by publications and head counts of underrepresented groups in STEMM fields but also by creating a culture of inclusion and respect.

3.) Systemic racism/sexism is said to have reduced equity in different STEMM fields, but there’s precious little evidence for that. In fact, STEMM fields and departments are desperate to hire minorities and women, which, because of affirmative action, actually now have an advantage in entering STEMM.

4.)  Because identity trumps merit (something not good for science), differences in merit are to be either effaced or reduced using with strong affirmative action. For example, standardized tests have been largely eliminated, DEI statements prevail in hiring and promotion (and, in covert forms, in college admissions essays), and “holistic” admissions are used to circumvent legal bans on sex-based or race-based hiring.

Instead of using these stopgap measures that result in more equity, but at the expense of the quality of science produced, we should be working (in society, not in science) on bestowing equality of opportunity from birth. That’s a hard problem, of course, but solving it ensures that the quality of scientists is the overweening criterion for evaluating them (of course there’s teaching and service, too). And everybody wants science to be the best it can, especially, of course, when it comes to medical science.

The emphasis on merit as opposed to identity has been embodied in the University of Chicago’s Shils Report, which states this:

 The Shils report dictates that faculty at the University of Chicago must display distinguished performance in each of the following criteria when being considered for promotion:
  • Research
  • Teaching and Training, including the supervision of graduate students
  • Contribution to intellectual community
  • Service

“Promotion” also includes hiring. We do not use DEI statements when hiring (though some departments try to do it on the sly), so that hiring as well as promotion is based on the criteria above, but mainly, because new professors don’t have a record of service or teaching, on research and contribution to the intellectual community.

I won’t bore you by quoting Malcolm at length, because it’s simply a boilerplate defense of DEI neglecting all the points above. The only remotely cogent point she makes is this:

For example, one study reports that women researchers in the United States are more likely to make innovations that benefit women as a whole but are less likely to participate in commercial patenting. Their relative absence is a loss for women and for the world economy. Critics imply that DEI promotes mediocrity, whereas research shows the exact opposite.

The link indeed shows what Malcolm says, except she doesn’t mention that the innovations are “patents for biomedical innovations”, but of course those reflect a sex-ratio bias inherited from the old days. and, more important, there is no bias in hiring, promotion or funding grants of women these days. As I said, departments are competing fiercely for good female talent, and the proportion of women in biomedical research is increasing. It will increase up to the point where representation reflects female merit and preference—I suspect this may be more than 50%.   And this will happen naturally, so long as there’s no systemic misogyny, something that no biologist I know has seen. Here’s a table of recent Ph.D.s conferred in various fields: look at biology and at “health and medical sciences; the latter is 71.4% female!

In the end, the invidious effects of DEI, with its misguided emphasis on equity and systemic racism, and its devaluing of merit in favor of social justice, is not good for science.  And yet the AAAS itself, and the journal Science, has been ideologically captured, as have nearly all scientific organizations. As Luana Maroja and I predicted, the nature of science has already changed in the past five years, and may be almost unrecognizable in another ten:

And because it’s “progressive,” and because most scientists are liberals, few of us dare oppose these restrictions on our freedom. Unless there is a change in the Zeitgeist, and unless scientists finally find the courage to speak up against the toxic effects of ideology on their field, in a few decades science will be very different from what it is now. Indeed, it’s doubtful that we’d recognize it as science at all.

We were accused of hyperbole for saying that. And yet it’s happening, as scientific journals have science articles increasingly replaced by statements like the above, by “invited” papers on progressive issues and bias, and by ideologically-based papers accepted to reinforce a preferred ideology.

And the new science, needless to say, will not produce as much understanding of the world as science that leaves ideology at the door of the lab.

The National Institutes of Health adopt possibly illegal tactic of using “diversity statements” when funding new positions

March 15, 2024 • 11:30 am

Yes, this is an op-ed from the Wall Street Journal, but if you neglect all of their op-eds, which of course lean right, it will still be your loss.  Click to read (it’s archived here). It shows that the NIH—and not for the first time—is requiring diversity statements to hire researchers, a requirement that may well be illegal.

Click to read:

Here are a few paragraphs on what’s happening at the NIH:

Thanks to a grant from the National Institutes of Health, Cornell University is able to support several professors in fields including genetics, computational biology and neurobiology. In its funding proposal, the university emphasizes a strange metric for evaluating hard scientists: Each applicant’s “statement on contribution to diversity” was to “receive significant weight in the evaluation.” [JAC: note that every applicant has to submit a DEI statement.]

It might seem counterintuitive to prioritize “diversity statements” while hiring neurobiologists—but not at the NIH. The agency for several years has pushed this practice across the country through its Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation program—First for short—which funds diversity-focused faculty hiring in the biomedical sciences.

Through dozens of public-records requests, I have acquired thousands of pages of documents related to the program—grant proposals, emails, hiring rubrics and more. The information reveals how the NIH enforces an ideological agenda, prompting universities and medical schools to vet potential biomedical scientists for wrongthink regarding diversity.

The First program requires all grant recipients to use “diversity statements” for their newly funded hires. Northwestern University suggests it will adapt a diversity-statement rubric created by the University of California, Berkeley. It isn’t alone. A year ago I acquired the rubrics used by the NIH First programs at the University of South Carolina and the University of New Mexico, which I discussed in these pages. Both used Berkeley’s rubric almost verbatim.

That rubric penalizes job candidates for espousing colorblind equality and gives low scores to those who say they intend to “treat everyone the same.” It likewise docks candidates who express skepticism about the practice of dividing students and faculty into racially segregated “affinity groups.”

Berkeley’s rubric is dire, and I’ve described it before (see also this statement by FIRE). It requires you first to give  your understanding of what diversity is and your philosophy of,it then your background in promoting diversity (Ceiling Cat help you if you don’t have one), and then finally tell your you will promote diversity in your positions. You’re scored separately in each area, and the three scores added up to give a total.  Remember, diversity is construed as racial or gender diversity, with race being most important, and if you start talking about “viewpoint diversity,” you might as well forget about the job.  Likewise, you fail if you espouse Martin Luther King’s philosophy of “colorblindness.”  King became passé a long time ago.

Here’s how Sailer described a similar rubric for USC and UNM in an earlier piece:

The South Carolina and New Mexico rubrics call for punishing candidates who espouse race neutrality, dictating a low score for anyone who states an “intention to ignore the varying backgrounds of their students and ‘treat everyone the same.’ ” Applicants who are skeptical of DEI programming might choose to describe their commitment to viewpoint diversity. This too runs afoul of the rubrics, which mandate a low score for any candidate who defines diversity “only in terms of different areas of study or different nationalities but doesn’t mention gender or ethnicity/race.”

The rubrics likewise punish candidates for failing to embrace controversial diversity practices. They recommend low scores for candidates who “state that it’s better not to have outreach or affinity groups aimed at underrepresented individuals because it keeps them separate from everyone else, or will make them feel less valued.” These affinity groups exemplify a new kind of segregation, but expressing that view could imperil an applicant’s career.

Because of a lower funding rate of black than of white or Asian scientists applying for grants, the NIH tried in 2021 to remedy this by boosting grant ratings of minorities by asking them to tick a box specifying their race. The plan was that even if a minority applicant’s grant score fell below the funding range, the ticked box would give them a boost, allowing program officers to leapfrog the minority grants back into the range where they might be funded. (This would be, of course, at the expense of researchers who had higher grant scores.)

But as Science reported just a month later, this plan failed and the NIH was forced to eliminate the magical box:

The National Institutes of Health has yanked a notice from three NIH institutes that aimed to encourage grant proposals from minority scientists. Researchers who saw the notice as a way to help bridge a funding success gap between Black and white scientists are dismayed by the move.

. . .Some observers hoped that if the notice were expanded across NIH, it could help raise success rates for Black scientists. But earlier this year, NIH’s Office of Extramural Research (OER) barred more institutes from joining the notice because it was “confusing” and institutes already had leeway to fund “outside the payline” to “bring in diverse scientific perspectives,” the agency said.

NIH rescinded the notice “for clarity in communications,” an OER spokesperson says. “We decided that issuing a general notice that encompassed all NIH better communicated our intent.” That new notice, issued 25 October, encourages applications from underrepresented groups, but won’t enable researchers to tag their applications.

It wasn’t rescinded solely for “clarity in communications,” as you see, but likely because it was unfair and probably illegal. Yes, it’s great to encourage members of underrepresented groups to apply for grants, but handing out money preferentially to such groups prioritizes identity over merit—and in the crucial area of biomedical sciences. (Actually, two papers published in 2019 and 2020 in Science showed that there appeared to be no gender or racial bias in reviewers’ scores of NIH grants, and also that funding rates for minorities were lower largely because they applied in areas having lower funding rates (see also this 2020 paper).

At any rate, DEI statements, which may be a way to hire based on race, could be illegal for that reason alone (Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits race-based hiring). They could also be illegal on First Amendment grounds, since the way they’re judged involves a form of compelled speech, which is also illegal. Finally, the Supreme Court’s recent ruling against affirmative action in college admissions could and likely will also be applied to race-based hiring of faculty and race-based awarding of grants.  There’s a note to this effect at the top of an NIH program statement from last July:

Note: Summarized here is the most recent NIH Advisory Committee to the Director (ACD) discussion of UNITE. However, it is recognized that the recent Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) decision regarding affirmative action may be at the front of consciousness. NIH adheres to federal law and does not make funding decisions based on race. NIH awaits further evaluation and interpretation of the SCOTUS decision to determine whether there is the need to modify any current policies or practices.

“May be at the front of consciousness”? What does that mean? “We have to find ways around it?”

The only question is whether these DEI statements are used as a proxy for race, as they well could be. But even ifr they aren’t, they’re probably still illegal. To see why, read my colleague Brian Leiter’s article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “The legal problem with diversity statements,” which has the subtitle “Public universities can’t make hiring decisions based on political viewpoints,”

What’s the matter with American universities?

March 7, 2024 • 10:15 am

I was sent this article from The Economist (as usual, authors’ names aren’t given), and I’m not sure whether that site leans right or left.  Nor do I really care, except that people might tend to dismiss its argument and its data on political grounds. And, as usual, that would be a mistake.

The thesis here—and I’ll show data—is that American universities are going downhill in many ways: bigger bureaucracy, less respect from the public, grade inflation, lazier students, declining in world rankings, and so on. Some of these contentions are new to me, but the article does paint a picture of a system going downhill. I’ll show the data and the Economist‘s indictment below.

Click to read the headline, or find the article archived here.

Excerpts from the piece are indented.  First, their thesis:

But thoughtful insiders acknowledge that, for some years, elite universities, particularly those within the Ivy League, have grown detached from ordinary Americans, not to mention unmoored from their own academic and meritocratic values.

In theory, these difficulties could promote efforts to correct flaws that are holding back elite education in America. But they could also entrench them. “America’s great universities are losing the public’s trust,” warns Robert George, a legal scholar and philosopher at Princeton. “And it is not the public’s fault.”

This is accurate: other surveys show that public trust in American institutions of higher education is waning. And this despite the article’s claim that elite universities, at least, are getting richer and richer, both because tuition has risen so rapidly and because universities are now managing their endowments in a riskier manner. That new style of management has paid off since the stock market and real estate have boomed in recent years,

What this has done is created a two-tier system of universities: the “elite” ones, where everyone aspires to go, and the rest of the pack, which hasn’t changed that much:

All this has opened a chasm between America’s top-ranked colleges and the rest. A mere 20 universities own half of the $800bn in endowments that American institutions have accrued. The most selective ones can afford to splash a lot more money on students than the youngsters themselves are asked to cough up in tuition, which only makes admission to them more sought-after. Acceptance rates at the top dozen universities are one-third of what they were two decades ago (at most other institutions, rates are unchanged). Lately early-career salaries for people with in-demand degrees, such as computer science, have risen faster for graduates from the most prestigious universities than for everyone else. Higher education in America “is becoming a ladder in which the steps are farther apart”, reckons Craig Calhoun of Arizona State University.

Despite this, the reputation of elite universities has dropped, especially compared to Chinese ones, whose scholars are producing relatively highly-cited scientific papers. Two figures from the paper. These changes in research reputation are small, but they are all negative for the elite U.S. universities:

Same for highly-cited scientific papers; the Chinese are booming here while American papers are falling:

Now I don’t really care that much about whether other countries are doing okay or booming in scientific papers compared to the U.S., as science is a worldwide endeavor and, as I’ve said about this trend, “a rising tide lifts all boats.” But I care more about the reputation of elite universities, largely because I went to one for my Ph.D. and worked at one for 3 decades. I would care if the top American colleges stopped providing quality education, though maybe that’s just snobbery on my part. And of course the reduction in highly-cited papers is a side effect of a relative degeneration of quality education in the U.S.

But perhaps that’s just compared to China, and we’re doing as well as ever. But that doesn’t seem to be the case, either. Here are some of the factors that the article points out are dragging down our top universities.

Bloated bureacracy.  If you work at one of these schools, you’ll have noticed this:

As challenges from abroad multiply, America’s elite universities are squandering their support at home. Two trends in particular are widening rifts between town and gown. One is a decades-long expansion in the number of managers and other non-academic staff that universities employ. America’s best 50 colleges now have three times as many administrative and professional staff as faculty, according to a report by Paul Weinstein of the Progressive Policy Institute, a think-tank. Some of the increase responds to genuine need, such as extra work created by growing government regulation. A lot of it looks like bloat. These extra hands may be tying researchers in red tape and have doubtless inflated fees. The total published cost of attending Harvard (now nearly $80,000 annually for an undergraduate) has increased by 27% in real terms over two decades.

The next item explains much of the bloat:

The expansion of DEI initiatives. This is another thing you’ll have noticed if you work at an elite school.  But it’s happening pretty much everywhere. As you probably know, Florida just passed a law, largely in response to the Supreme Court’s banning race-based admission, getting rid of the DEI programs in state universities. In some places, like Michigan, the bloat—and salaries devoted to DEI—is stunning. DEI officials in Michigan colleges can earn more than $200,000 per year. From the article:

More often blamed are administrative teams dedicated to fostering “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (dei). They have grown in size as the number of administrators of all kinds has increased. They have an interest in ensuring that everyone on campus is polite and friendly, but little to gain from defending vigorous debate. In theory they report to academic deans, says Steven Pinker, a psychologist at Harvard and a member of a faculty group committed to defending academic freedom; in practice they move laterally from university to university, bringing with them a culture that is entirely their own. Critics of dei departments insist these offices have helped soak campuses with unsophisticated “woke” ideologies that depict complex problems as simplistic battles.

Changing admission policies favoring equity over merit.  This itself may be changing, as in the last several weeks schools like Dartmouth and Brown have reinstated the use of standardized tests like the SAT as requirements for application. (In many places they became optional or were, as in California, not wanted at all.)  Reducing the importance of standardized tests was originally done to boost equity of minority groups, but that wasn’t often admitted by colleges; “holistic” admissions were simply said to be better judges of future success, and schools boasted that there was no tradeoff between merit and equity.. But this is not the case—SAT scores remain the best predictor of academic success as well as admission to good graduate schools. I’m hoping that the pendulum will swing back towards merit again, though I still favor a form of affirmative action: preferential admission of minorities when they are just as qualified as nonminority applicants. From the article:

In theory the Supreme Court’s decision to outlaw racial preferences last year should encourage posh universities to junk admissions practices that are even more irksome—such as favouring children of alumni. Instead many have made their admissions criteria even more opaque, potentially damaging universities’ meritocratic pretensions further. At the start of the pandemic, most stopped requiring applicants to supply scores from standardised tests. Now hard-to-evaluate measures such as the quality of personal statements are having to carry more weight. For some institutions that has proved unsatisfactory: in recent weeks Dartmouth and Yale announced that they will require standardised test scores from applicants once again. They are the first Ivies to do so.

Lowering of standards.  The article implies that students are getting lazier with time.  Over the three decades I taught here, I can’t really vouch for that, at least in undergraduate evolution class.  Because of my lack of experience in more than one class, I’ll just reproduce what the article says, though of course grade inflation everywhere is real and has been amply documented. Nowadays everyone gets As, which of course reduces the value of even calculating grade-point averages. (Putting the median grade in a course on students’ transcripts would help with this.)

Universities stand accused not just of tolerating small-mindedness among their students, but of perpetuating it. One theory holds that, if elite universities worked their students harder, they would have less time and energy to fight battles over campus speech. Between the 1960s and the early 2000s the number of hours a week that an average American student spent studying declined by around one third, notes Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank. Yet grades do not seem to have suffered. At Yale, the share of all grades marked “A” has risen from 67% in 2010 to around 80% in 2022; at Harvard it rose from 60% to 79%.

Boards of governance (trustees, etc.) have become too weak to enforce a climate of excellence. I know nothing personally about the University of Chicago’s Board of Trustees, but at least at Harvard the Board of Overseers’ spinelessness was a major factor in prolonging the kerfuffle about ex-President Claudine Gay. The Overseers first denied charges of plagiarism, threatened the New York Post for trying to publish those allegations, continued to deny them, and then, after the outcry—largely prompted by Bill Ackman—grew too loud, finally asked Gay to resign. Further, the Harvard Overseeers, who are nearly wholly responsible for putting in place policies like freedom of expression and institutional neutrality, have done almost nothing on this account. In the Boston Globe, Steve Pinker called for Harvard to reform itself in five areas, and there’s now a group of professors at Harvard to apply pressure on the administration to behave properly. Fingers crossed.

From the article:

University boards appear especially weak. They have not grown much more professional or effective, even as the wealth and fame of their institutions has soared. Many are oversized. Prestigious private colleges commonly have at least 30 trustees; a few have 50 or more. It is not easy to coax a board of that size into focused strategic discussions. It also limits how far each trustee feels personally responsible for an institution’s success.

Furthermore, trusteeships are often distributed as a reward for donations, rather than to people with the time and commitment required to provide proper oversight. Universities generally manage to snag people with useful experience outside academia. But many trustees prefer not to rock the boat; some are hoping that their service will grant children or grandchildren a powerful trump card when it comes to seeking admission. Too many see their job as merely “cheerleading, cheque-writing and attendance at football games”, says Michael Poliakoff of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, an organisation that lobbies for governance reform. And at many private universities the way in which new trustees are appointed involves cosying up to current ones or to university authorities. Outsiders can struggle to be picked at all.

There’s a lack of political balance on faculties. Everyone knows that university faculties are almost completely on the Left side of the political spectrum. Look at this plot:

And it’s even more skewed at elite universities:

A second trend is the gradual evaporation of conservatives from the academy. Surveys carried out by researchers at ucla suggest that the share of faculty who place themselves on the political left rose from 40% in 1990 to about 60% in 2017—a period during which party affiliation among the public barely changed (see chart 3). The ratios are vastly more skewed at many of America’s most elite colleges. A survey carried out last May by the Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, found that less than 3% of faculty there would describe themselves as conservative; 75% called themselves liberal.

One possible reason is that the definition of “liberal” has changed: that American politics in general have become more right wing, so that more centrist professors will now identify themselves as being far left or liberal. But I don’t think that’s true. Further, the article claims that conservatives have been forced out of academia or aren’t even being hired in the first place.  I don’t know the reason, but it is true that at least in elite universities, there is groupthink that demonizes conservatives. (Remember how Judge Duncan was treated at Stanford Law School?)

But I still think schools would benefit from increasing the diversity of political opinions, because sometimes conservatives have some good arguments, and at any rate without opposition from the other side, liberals have no way to test or hone their ideas. I would personally would benefit from more conservatives in my school, even though I identify as a classical liberal.

Given these problems, the solution is clear; do the opposite of what’s causing them. Pare down DEI, get better boards of trustees, put more emphasis on merit in admissions, require students to do more, somehow curb grade inflation (that seems nearly impossible to me!), hire more conservatives, and inculcate students with more information about free speech (we’re doing that here; see below). The return to an emphasis on merit seems to me the most important, but of course “progressives” define merit in ways that differ from how the term was used historically.

Here are a few suggestions in two paragraphs, with both Lukianoff and Ginsburg (head of the University of Chicago’s Forum to promulgate free expression) being liberals.

Better for universities to heal themselves. Smaller, more democratically selected boards would provide better oversight. More meritocratic admissions would improve universities’ standing. Greg Lukianoff of fire wants to see campuses stripped of bureaucrats “whose main job is to police speech”. Instead universities should invest in programmes teaching the importance of free and open debate, argues Tom Ginsburg of the University of Chicago, who runs a forum designed to do just that: “If your ideas aren’t subjected to rigorous scrutiny, they’re not going to be as good,” he explains.

Reformers would also like more people in the political centre, and on the right, to make careers in academia. No one thinks this will happen quickly. But college bosses could start by making it clear that they will defend the unorthodox thinkers they already have on their payrolls, reckons Jim Applegate, who runs a faculty group at Columbia University that aims to promote academic freedom. They could discourage departments from forcing job applicants to submit statements outlining their dei approach (one study a few years ago suggested this was a condition for a fifth of all university jobs, and more than 30% at elite colleges). Lately these have looked less like honest ways of spotting capable candidates and more like tests of ideology.

h/t: Jean