Category: DEI matters

A “progressive” phrasebook

January 11, 2026 • 11:20 am

Anna Krylov called my attention to this articl at the site The Gadfly, which appears to be run by Frederick Alexander—someone I’ve never run across before. His article gives ten phrases associated with wokeness, four of which I really detest. I’ll put them all below the screenshot (click it to read the article), and perhaps you can guess which four curl the soles of my shoes.

Alexander’s phrases are in bold, and all of his words are indented. My few comments are flush left. He begins with an introduction about how the burgeoning of DEI after George Floyd’s death in 2020 has led to embedding certain phrases in woke language. Some of them are well familiar to me, while others are not.

Part of the intro:

It’s tempting to look back on those events as if they were a curious aberration, a moment of hysteria brought about by lockdown cabin fever. Today, it’s common to hear that “woke is dead” – and it’s true that many DEI programmes have been shut down or rebranded. The finger-wagging sanctimony has been toned down a few notches, too.

But what remains is the language: a distinct and unmistakable lexicon with a long half-life. This is the fallout from a blast we thought was long behind us. DEI no longer marches through institutions with a fanfare, but it operates as background radiation. Wave the Geiger counter over policy small print or the latest HR initiative, and you’ll hear the familiar crackling of progressive orthodoxy.

The language has insinuated itself into corporations and public bodies across the Western world, becoming almost invisible through constant repetition. Phrases that sound benign on the surface mask a cold system of enforcement that continues to reward fluency in Newspeak while punishing dissent. Taken together, they form a closed moral system – one that begins with empathy and ends with coercion.

Here are a few phrases you’ve probably heard before.

You can read Alexander’s full explication at the site; I’ll give just a sentence or three that he says about each one. And I’ll add my own short take:

1.) “We’re on a journey.”  The world’s most overused corporate metaphor is also a favourite of institutions haemorrhaging money on failed DEI initiatives. Bud Light went on a journey with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney in April 2023 and ended up in corporate hell. The brand lost its spot as America’s top-selling beer, two marketing executives were put on leave, and the whole debacle cost a billion dollars in lost sales

That one I’m not familiar with, nor am I familiar with #2:

2.)  “Bringing your whole self to work”. Silicon Valley invented this one. The idea was that workers would bring their creativity and passion to the job. Instead, they brought their politics and personal grievances.

It turns out there’s only really a problem if your “whole self” doesn’t align with “correct thinking”. Don’t bring your whole Christian self to work – the one who opposes abortion or thinks polygamy is a bad idea. That won’t go down too well. Think national borders might be a good thing? That whole self had better stay away, too. A gender-critical whole self? Don’t be silly. Best put all those whole selves back in their box, or wave your career goodbye.

3.) “Brave conversations. . . We’re talking about “courageous dialogue” with your line manager following an apparent “microaggression”. Turns out you need more training in how to think and when to declare your pronouns.

These conversations tend to begin with an admission of privilege, followed by an acknowledgement of harm, and conclude with a commitment to growth. Actual conversation – the kind where people disagree and minds change – never happens. That’s the wrong sort of bravery. The proper kind is where you confess to thought crimes you didn’t know existed.

I haven’t heard that one, either. Where have I been? After all, I’ve been on campus for decades.

4.) “Educate yourself”.  This is a phrase professional activists and scolds deploy when they can’t defend their position. It’s the go-to for transforming intellectual laziness into moral superiority.

What “educate yourself” really means is this: read the approved texts so as to arrive at the conclusions I agree with – what we used to call indoctrination. Any other outcome is seen as proof of moral and intellectual deficiency.

I’ve used #4 myself, but only when faced with obtuse commenters who make arrant misstatements, usually about evolution. And I don’t use it too often, though of course all of us in academia have heard it used in exactly the sense that Alexander means.

5.) “Psychological safety.” Today, it means an environment where nobody can disagree with progressive orthodoxy without being invited to an HR struggle session. The safest spaces, it turns out, are wherever difficult questions are never asked. Feeling “unsafe” is now what happens when we challenge someone’s views on immigration or question whether men can become pregnant. JK Rowling has spent years being told her defence of women’s spaces makes trans people “unsafe”.

Of course we’ve all heard of “safe spaces,” which is apparently what “psychological safety” means. I’ve never heard that term used, though.

6.) “Lived experience.”  This one refuses to die, which is a tragedy because few ideas on this list have wrought so much chaos and misery as the idea of “lived experience”. A phrase that transforms subjective feelings into unassailable truth, lived experience is invoked again and again to shut down “problematic” questions like “why are you trialling experimental puberty blockers on children as young as 10?”

This is how clinicians at Tavistock were silenced when they raised concerns about rushing children into medical transition. They were told they were “invalidating young people’s lived experience” of gender identity. Evidence-based medicine lost to feelings-based ideology. The Cass Review finally reintroduced rigour, but only after a decade of children used as test subjects.

Or consider Iranian women protesting forced veiling. Western feminists have dismissed them while deferring to the “lived experience” of those women who defend the hijab as empowerment. When evidence becomes inconvenient, personal testimony is invoked as epistemological authority, leaving empirical reasoning nowhere to go.

Several times this one has appeared on my “words and phrases I detest” posts (I need to make more of these). First of all, it’s redundant, since all experience is lived. (Is there such a thing as “unlived experience”?) But, more important, it suggests an alternative form of personal truth, a form that is fundamental to wokeness, is derived from postmodernism, and is explicitly antiempirical.

7.) “Equity, not equality”. Equity used to refer to the value of shares issued by a company. Now it refers to equalising outcomes rather than opportunities. The switch transformed Martin Luther King’s dream into its nightmare opposite.

That’s a terse entry but a true one.  One has to be careful not to mistake the terms.  The problem with ensuring equity is that different groups may have different preferences, which will create inequities despite equal opportunities. Therefore, if you see uneqaual representation of groups, you have to suss out the causes before you start mentioning bigotry, misogyny, and other causes based on prejudice.

8.) “Decolonizing the curriculum.” “Decolonising the curriculum” is largely about treating Western knowledge as inherently suspect because it’s Western. Ideas are judged not by whether they’re true but in terms of their provenance. Plato or Locke are “problematised” rather than argued with. Rejecting classical liberal principles in favour of progressive ones is “challenging power”.

In short, “decolonising the curriculum” is a licence to swap scholarship for grievance. It tells students what they’re meant to feel about the civilisation that built the university they’re attending.

That’s a strong statement, but again largely true.  Certainly non-Western material is unduly neglected in some courses, more often in the humanities than the sciences, but beware of calls to “decolonize” an entire curriculum, particularly in STEMM.

9.) “Be an ally.” Allyship used to mean supporting a cause. Now it means performing endless penance for demographic characteristics you can’t change. The progressive ally must publicly confess privilege, declare solidarity, and accept instruction from activists without question.

It’s the “without question” part that bothers me. I am in agreement with the aims of many “progressive” causes, but don’t necessarily buy into the whole ideology or bag of tactics that go along with them. I prefer just to state where I agree or disagree rather than saying, “I’m an ally” or telling someone else to be one.

10.) “Impact over intent.” A lesser-known phrase, these words ensure your guilt is inescapable. It doesn’t matter what your intentions are; only how others feel about your actions. What’s that you say? You meant no harm? Irrelevant. Someone felt harmed, and that’s all that counts.

I’ve not heard that exact phrase before, but I’m well familiar with what it means and how it would be used. Two examples are the suspension of Professor Greg Patton for saying a Chinese word that sounded superficially like a racial slur, and the firing of an art-history professor at Hamline University who showed her students (with warnings) two famous Muslim paintings that depicted the visage of Muhammad.

I don’t have much to add to what Alexander and I have said above, but wanted to add Alexander’s pessimistic ending, noting first Alexander’s arguable claim that the phrases are the provenance mostly of the privileged.

. . . . much of the language persists because the people who use it pay no price for the harm it causes. HR directors still have jobs and diversity consultants still bill by the hour. The costs are absorbed by those with the least ability to navigate the new moral codes.

A decade from now, these phrases will sound dated, and eventually they’ll fade away. But others will take their place – a vocabulary already incubating in universities and carrying the same assumptions.

This is how ideology colonises institutions in a post-religious age: through a moral language that redefines virtue, reshapes norms, and renders dissent unspeakable long before it becomes the object of cancellation.

Note the emphasis on the moral certainty of the progressive ideologues, something we’ve talked about recently.

“Citation justice”: turning science into social engineering

October 21, 2025 • 10:30 am

This proposal promoted by “progressive” scientists on how to change the scientific literature is not new. But it may hang around for decades, as it’s also being pushed on young people by scientific societies. It may even persist in the coming years when we have a Democratic President and Congress (fingers crossed).

Up until recently, the normal way to write a paper is this: when you make a statement of known fact, or refer to previous literature, you cite the most important, comprehensive, or relevant papers in parentheses after your assertion An example: “Humans are animals” (Sanders 1856; Jones and Kirkman 1940; Cel-Ray and Tonic, 1956).

The “progressive” scientific ideologues want that changed, as the first article below (just published by the Heterodox Academy and written by Erin Shaw, a woman researcher for the Academy) describes. Instead of citing papers you think best support your statement, one is supposed to cite papers written by people from marginalized groups (usually people of color or women) as a way of bringing equity to the field. This practice is called “citation justice”.

But there are several problems with this practice. Here are a few:

1.) “Citation justice” does not advance science, but is a form of social engineering, turning the scientific literature into a form of affirmative action. It values ethnicity or gender above merit or readers’ knowledge of the field. As Shaw says at the end of her piece:

Engaging with a variety of ideas, texts, and research from an array of scholars across the field is essential to the spirit of the academy and scholarship itself—not to mention necessary for knowledge production. It should be second nature for academics to wade deeply into the literature of their disciplines. As Erec Smith observed last year regarding Nature Reviews Bioengineering’s reasoning for requesting citation diversity statements, “… thoughtfully choosing references and giving sufficient time to survey an entire field is already considered a significant part of scientific research, academic discourse, and critical thinking in general. If scientists are not doing this, the problem isn’t that they are biased; it’s that they are bad scientists.” References should be included in an article because of the ideas within them, not because of the skin color or gender identity of the writers.

Much like DEI statements in faculty hiring, citation diversity statements function as another ideological filter that forces academics to contort themselves and their professional pursuits into ideologically palatable shapes. In explicitly asking authors and reviewers to consider the demographic characteristics of cited sources (and tally them up for presentation), these journals jeopardize the scholarly rigor of scholars and of the journals themselves, which, for better or worse, are the cornerstone of scholarly dissemination.

2.) This practice is often justified, as noted in Shaw’s piece, by saying that minoritized groups are under-cited relative to the quality of their published work.  Well, one can’t dismiss that out of hand, but before you go changing the practice of citation, you need to document your claim (this is, after all, science). And I can’t find any evidence that published research by minority groups is cited less than it should be. Also, undercitation is supposed to reflect bigoty, but that too has not been demonstrated and, as those of us in science know, departments are falling all over themselves to hire women and minority scientists and accept them as grad students. If you are indicting “structural racism” as the cause of this phenomenon, which is implicitly the case, then you must show that.

3.) Even if you are committed to this practice, how do you know which authors are to be moved up the citation scale? Well, women may be told apart by their names, though authors are often listed by initials.  And imagine what you’d have to do to show undercitation: determine whether a paper should be cited but was not. I haven’t found any literature supporting that (I may have missed some), but without that data one has little empirical justification for initiating “citation justice”. One can’t just show that minoritized authors are under-cited relative to these authors’ publication rate; rather, one has to show that their papers are as good as or better than papers that ARE cited. This becomes even more difficult when one realizes that most scientific papers are never cited at all, or cited maybe once or twice, regardless of authorship.

4.) How do you determine whether a paper is by someone in a minority group? Shaw notes the problem:

Prompting scholars to consider author demographics as they develop their reference lists threatens scholarly rigor. Instead of grappling with the complexity of arguments, theories, and data presented by fellow researchers, academics may find themselves Googling photos of scholars they might cite to see if they can (literally) get more diversity tallies in their reference list to appease the journal. Consequently, the actual accomplishments of scholars, many of whom may have indeed worked very hard to overcome obstacles, risk being tokenized by identitarian orthodoxies.

5.) Inequities in citations may reflect inequities of output, perhaps caused by discrimination in the past that has prevented minorities or women from going into science. But the tweet below shows that a paucity of publication may be more to blame than bigotry:

But of course citation justice is supposed to remedy citation inequities, whatever their cause.

6.)  There are other groups that are said to be oppressed, like people who are disabled or “neurodiverse”.  How would one ever find these? Or is the search limited only to women and scholars of color? Shaw’s conclusion is this:

In theory, citation diversity aims to broaden representation; in practice, it reduces scholarship to a superficial numbers game. True intellectual diversity emerges when scholars engage deeply with the best ideas, wherever they originate—not when journals ask researchers to audit the demographics of their bibliographies. If the goal is to advance science, then intellectual rigor, not ideological conformity, must be the guiding principle.

Again, click the screenshot to read:

I’ve given above some of the problems with “citation justice”.  But the article above also documents journals that recommend it. I’ll give a few quotes:

Nature Reviews Psychology editors ask authors to describe how they “explore[d] relevant studies from a diverse group of researchers (including but not limited to diversity in gender, race, career stage and geographical location) before writing their first draft.” The editors suggest these optional citation diversity statements are a way that “scientists can demonstrate their commitment to DEI through actions that are not mandated by institutions or subject to institutional control.” In other words, authors are expected to remain steadfastly committed to the same principles that the federal government is attempting to aggressively quash within universities.

Nature Reviews Psychology’s decisionto encourage citation diversity statements appears to be the latest in a small yet noteworthy movement to embed equity goals explicitly in the scientific publishing process. Several papers have advocated for the practice, and a small number of journals have adopted optional citation diversity statement requests as a part of their article submission processes. Nature Reviews Bioengineering, a sister publication of Nature Reviews Psychology, may have served as an early pilot of the citation diversity statement with Nature after it adopted such a policy in 2023.

The Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) was an early adopter of citation diversity when, in 2021, editors integrated an optional citation diversity statement into the article submission process for its four journals, Annals of Biomedical Engineering, Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering, Cardiovascular Engineering and Technology, and Biomedical Engineering Education.

BMES editors followed the suggestions of citation diversity advocates to straightforwardly ask authors to tally up diversity points. Authors opting into the diversity statement are asked specifically for “the proportion of citations by gender and race/ethnicity for the first and last authors” and “the method used to determine those proportions and its limitations.”

BMES even provides detailed instructions on how proportions should be presented: “The proportions of authors by gender should be divided into four categories based on first/last author combinations: woman/woman, man/woman, woman/man, and man/man. Race and ethnicity proportions should similarly be divided into four categories based on first/last author combinations: author of color/author of color, white author/author of color, author of color/white author, white author/white author.” This numeric scheme raises many unanswered questions about target proportions, cross-cutting identities, and whether authors are deciding which scholars to reference based on perceived demographics rather than scholarly ideas and data presented in their papers.

The practice is spreading into other scientific areas, most distressingly into my own field of evolutionary biology. An article in The College Fix describes an entire session on citation justice at a (2024) Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology in late July, which brought together the American Society of Naturalists, European Society for Evolutionary Biology, Society of Systematic Biologists, and Society for the Study of Evolution:

“We recognize that we have the responsibility to engage critically with the ideologies and guiding ethics behind our theory and our research and we strive to engage with decolonial practices and methods that have been put forward by indigenous scholars,” said Queen’s University graduate student and self-described “settler” scientist Mia Akbar in her introduction of a symposium she co-organized on “The Politics of Citation in Evolutionary Biology.”

“We’re very committed to trying to make space for voices and perspectives that have been erased by dominant science,” she added.

Haley Branch, a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, while giving a presentation titled “Ableism as foundation for evolutionary biology,” voiced concern over how the “axiological assumptions” of evolutionary biology are built off of a “white, heteronormative, Christian, Western, male framework.”

I now see that ableism has made it into the list of factors to be considered when citing papers.  But Christianity and “heteronormativity”?  Are we supposed to cite more non-Christian and gay authors? And how would you know? This suggestion is invidious.

At any rate, here’s the Nature Reviews Psychology paper, which you can access by clicking on the screenshot below:

A quote:

. . . . scientists can demonstrate their commitment to DEI through actions that are not mandated by institutions or subject to institutional control. For example, in a Comment in this issue, Carolyn Quam and Teresa Roberts describe how researchers can move scholarship away from narratives that perpetuate societal biases by writing inclusively. Inclusive writing is an iterative, multi-step process that aims to ensure that scientific writing (including review articles, grant applications and literature-review portions of original research reports) does not centre privileged identities as optimal and normative. Quam and Roberts provide an example of an inclusive writing process for a paper they wrote about language development, illustrating that inclusive writing need not be limited to research that is explicitly about marginalized groups or diversity. Importantly, although inclusive writing is an individual act, it can inform systemic change by influencing scientific norms.

At Nature Reviews Psychology, we are now explicitly encouraging authors to take up one of the steps involved in inclusive writing discussed by Quam and Roberts: diversifying citation practices.

The number of citations a paper receives does not necessarily reflect the quality of its research. However, citations can influence a researcher’s career through speaking invitations, grants, awards and promotions. Thus, representation in reference lists has important consequences for representation in science: if citations are systematically biased against, for example, female authors, then female authors will have CVs or grant applications that are less competitive than those of their male counterparts. Moreover, a systematic citation bias against women means that the field is not properly benefiting from their scientific contributions.

To address such citation biases, we are encouraging authors to explore relevant studies from a diverse group of researchers (including but not limited to diversity in gender, race, career stage and geographical location) before writing their first draft. We are further encouraging them to include a citation diversity statement in the article to acknowledge these efforts (see here for an example from one of our sister journals) and to make others aware of citation imbalances.

Note that they add geography and career stage to the list as well as gender and ethnicity. It’s hard enough to write a paper when you know your research area, much less having to look up the age, ethnicity, gender, geographical location, and able-ness of an author.

And the Nature paper gives this as a peroration:

Part of the stated mission of Nature Reviews Psychology is to represent the diversity of psychological science and all those who consider themselves psychological scientists. We act with this mission in mind when we consider who we invite to write and review for us. We are now asking authors to participate in our mission by actively thinking about who they are citing, which will ultimately improve the diversity and quality of the science we publish.

The last paragraph explicitly equates (citation) diversity with quality of the papers that employ citation diversity. That is an assertion with absolutely no evidence to back it up. But it doesn’t need evidence because the editors are dissimulating here: they are not interesting in increasing the quality of science, but in promoting “equity” among scientists.

Science is best served not by using it as a tool to advance DEI, but as a tool to advance our understanding of nature.  If you want to engage in DEI, by all means do so on your own time, not in your scientific publications.

Further, it’s stuff like this endeavor that may have contributed to America’s declining trust in both academia and science. I have no proof for the causation of these phenomena, but I doubt that people would trust science more if they knew it was being used for social engineering in a “progressive” way, not to help us understand nature.

h/t: Luana

Should academia practice “political DEI” and hire more conservatives?

June 3, 2025 • 9:30 am

The Atlantic article below, by staff writer Rose Horowitch, points out a fact the whole world knows: academia in America comprises nearly exclusively faculty of a liberal persuasion. Conservative professors are as rare as hen’s teeth. This has led to a dearth of political argumentation pitting Left versus Right, since the Right is hard to be found. It’s also led, as Horowitch says, to a decline in respect for academia. But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Click the headline below to read, or find the article archived here.

First, the data:

Between 30 and 40 percent of Americans identify as conservative, but conservatives make up only one of every 10 professors in academia, and even fewer in the humanities and most social-science departments. (At least they did in 2014, when the most recent comprehensive study was done. The number today is probably even lower.) Of the money donated by Yale faculty to political candidates in 2023, for example, 98 percent went to Democrats.

This is a relatively new degree of such imbalance:

Academia has leaned left for as long as anyone can remember. But for most of the 20th century, conservative faculty were a robust presence throughout the humanities and social sciences. (In 1969, for example, even as anti-war protests raged across campuses, a quarter of the professoriate identified as at least “moderately” conservative.) But their ranks have thinned since the 1990s. At the same time, moderate and independent professors have been replaced by people who explicitly identify as liberal or progressive.

Here’s the claimed inimical effect of this imbalance on the reputation of colleges and universities:

Conservative underrepresentation has also hurt higher education’s standing with the country at large. Polls show that Americans, particularly on the right, are losing trust in universities. A Gallup survey taken last year, for example, found that Republican confidence in higher education had dropped from 56 to 20 percent over the course of a decade. Respondents attributed this in part to perceived liberal bias in the academy.

Why the dearth of conservatives? Horowitch adduces data that some of it may be due to a lack of good candidates, but there also seems to be a bias against hiring conservatives:

Opinions differ on the precise extent to which conservatives are being excluded from academia versus self-selecting into nonacademic careers. But they clearly face barriers that liberal and leftist scholars don’t. Professors decide who joins their ranks and what research gets published in flagship journals. And several studies show that academics are willing to discriminate against applicants with different political views. One 2021 survey found that more than 40 percent of American (and Canadian) academics said they would not hire a Donald Trump supporter. Then there’s the fact that entire disciplines have publicly committed themselves to progressive values. “It is a standard of responsible professional conduct for anthropologists to continue their research, scholarship, and practice in service of dismantling institutions of colonization and helping to redress histories of oppression and exploitation,” the American Anthropological Association declared in 2020.

“Professors will tell you straight up that people who hold the wrong views don’t belong in universities,” Musa al-Gharbi, a sociology professor at Stony Brook University who studies progressive social-justice discourse, told me. “That’s the difference between viewpoint discrimination and other forms of discrimination.”

If this is the case, then the dearth of conservatives is not due solely to a lack of meritorious conservative candidates, but is in part due to bias.  And that has caused several universities, including ours, to try to bring in conservative speakers,= and to develop new programs that allow right-wing voices to be heard:

Some university leaders worry that this degree of ideological homogeneity is harmful both academically (students and faculty would benefit from being exposed to a wider range of ideas) and in terms of higher education’s long-term prospects (being hated by half the country is not sustainable). Accordingly, Johns Hopkins recently unveiled a partnership with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a center-right think tank, designed to inject some ideological diversity into the university. Steven Teles, a political scientist who wrote a widely discussed article last year for The Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Why Are There So Few Conservative Professors?,” is one of the faculty members involved with the partnership. The institutions will collaborate on a number of efforts to integrate conservative and heterodox thinkers.

So we have an odd situation in which both sides are behaving counter to their reputations. Conservatives, who have generally opposed affirmative action, now favor it—for professors with conservative viewpoints.  In contrast, the progressive Left, which is often opposed to turning academia into a meritocracy, now wants a meritocracy because conservatives are often seen as lacking academic merit.

But there are other issues to consider.  The First Amendment, for example, bans the government from restricting speech based on its content. This would seem to prevent universities—at least state universities—from restricting the hiring professors of merit just because they espouse conservative views. (Note the admissions of anti-conservative bias above.)  Further, universities are generally forbidden to hire professors based on race, creed, degree of disability, and so on.  The University of Chicago’s 1973 Shils report, for example, notes this (my emphasis):

There must be no consideration of sex, ethnic or national characteristics, or political or religious beliefs or affiliations in any decision regarding appointment, promotion, or reappointment at any level of the academic staff.

And there’s an elaboration of this at the report’s end, which includes this:

In discussions and decisions regarding appointments, promotions, and reappointments, appointive bodies should concentrate their consideration of any candidate on his qualifications as a research worker, teacher, and member of the academic community. The candidate’s past or current conduct should be considered only insofar as it conveys information relative to the assessment of his excellence as an investigator, the quality of the publications which he lays before the academic community, the fruitfulness of his teaching and the steadfastness of his adherence to the highest standards of intellectual performance, professional probity, and the humanity and mutual tolerance which must prevail among scholars.

This would seem to ban even considering political beliefs and stances as a criterion for hiring (or promotion).  In Chicago, at least, we cannot redress the imbalance between Right and Left among faculty by preferentially hiring on the Right.  That also amounts to discrimination of hiring Left-wing faculty, itself a violation of Shils.

Nevertheless, a faculty almost entirely comprising liberals is a faculty not conducive to meeting an important mission of the university: promoting fruitful discussion between those having opposing views on issues. It’s not like all conservatives are lunatics: there are many, some of them here, who are eloquent and make arguments worthy of consideration.  Further, even if you are on the Left, you should agree with John Stuart Mill’s claim that you cannot defend your own viewpoint very well if you don’t know the best arguments of the other side.

But if that side is missing, what do we do?

I have no solution here, at least not one that doesn’t violate the Shils report.  One solution is what the newly-established Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression (a free-speech discussion site) is doing: bringing in speakers of divergent views and creating new fora, all designed to promote discussions and debates.

But is that an adequate substitute for having faculty members on different sides of an issue? Conservatism, after all, is not like creationism. Creationism is a debunked set of scientific claims and need not be debated on campus (though I wouldn’t oppose such debates). In contrast, conservatism is a widely represented set of political views, many of which can be rationally defended.

So, my question to readers (actually two questions):

Do we need more conservative faculty members in American colleges and universities?

If so, how do you propose to do it without violating the law or academic freedom?

Nature endorses DEI big time

March 23, 2025 • 11:20 am

Well, I don’t mean the entire journal Nature, but one strongly-written op-ed (Nature 639, 548), though I have absolutely no doubt that Nature adheres to its view. And the view of the author, bioethicist Arthur Caplan, is that despite Trump’s threats to withhold federal money from universities that maintain DEI programs, we have to push back hard on this initiative, for DEI is simply wonderful: a boon to science and society.  All of that, of course, is debatable, and, sadly, Caplan makes a number of assertions about DEI without a single reference to support them.

Click below to read his short piece (I hope you can see it):

Caplan strives to be clever by beginning with the hypothesis that had social media and grants been around in the days of Galileo, he would have been censored and lost government money. I laughed so loud! (Not!) At any rate, here’s Caplan’s view of what we must do with DEI, which he never defines:

More scholars must push back. The idea that scientists can keep doing what they know must be done to incorporate DEI into their work while adjusting terms to fit the demands of bigoted autocrats bent on hobbling science is to whistle loudly past a graveyard of avoidable error, continued financial cuts and censorship. That diversity matters to science is a truth — albeit one that has only recently begun to be accepted and applied.

But the “DEI” that many universities use, and which many of us object to, is much more than the statement, “All people, regardless of identity, religion, sex, able-ness, and so on, will be treated equally.” Who could object to that?

No, the DEI that Trump is trying to weed out is the ideological form of DEI. It is the assumption that there are different truths for different groups that are more or less equal; that adjudicating these truths is done by seeing which groups are more powerful; that there is a certain “progressive” ideology around sex and gender; that society (and science) is to be framed as a battle between the oppressor and the oppressed; and that “equity”–the representation of identity groups in proportion to their occurrence in society–is a goal we all must strive for, because inequities surely reflect ongoing bigotry.

Yet Caplan conceives of “DEI” in other ways, some of them bing okay. Here are two:

First, clinical and social-science research requires diversity to be valid. Genomics has established that different groups of people respond differently to drugs and vaccines. The individuals recruited to and participating in clinical trials must be representative of those who will use those treatments in real life. Attention to DEI allows researchers to identify differences in safety and efficacy between groups early on in the testing process.

Likewise, social scientists are well aware that understanding behaviour and implementing desired change requires studying populations besides white, Western, university psychology students — the group from which psychologists have mainly sourced participants for decades. This is the case whether researchers seek to overcome vaccine hesitancy, prevent self-harm, improve reading skills, change recycling habits or prevent obesity.

And I’m prepared to believe this one, though again no references are given, as it makes some sense and there are arguments that support it (one here). But the evidence seems thin:

 . . . .  diversity in the scientific workforce brings a multitude of ideas, approaches, perspectives and values to the table. Thinking outside the box matters in tackling all manner of problems in artificial intelligence, engineering, mathematics, economics and astrophysics. Diverse minds can find connections and patterns, provide perspectives and draw conclusions that might not occur to a group of less-inclusive researchers.

To me, the above aren’t problematic, but we all know that the “D” in “DEI” refers to race or sex, not viewpoint or studying different groups in anthropology. And then Caplan treats on more problematic ground:

Second, research has shown again and again that DEI matters when it comes to providing health care. A diverse and representative health-care workforce improves people’s satisfaction with the care that they receive and health outcomes, especially for individuals of colour. When Black people are treated by Black doctors, they are more likely to receive the preventive care that they need and more likely to agree to recommended interventions, such as blood tests and flu shots.

There are no references given here, and I’d like to see them. Remember the widely-publicized report that black newborns have higher mortality when treated by white doctors than black ones? It was attributed to racism, but later discovered that the effect was entirely due to white doctors having to deal with infants of the lowest birth weights, and hence having higher mortalities (see here and here).  People are simply too quick to impute all disparities to racism, and this is another of the big weaknesses of DEI.

Finally, there are two other contestable reasons why Caplan sees DEI as admirable:

Second, research has shown again and again that DEI matters when it comes to providing health care. A diverse and representative health-care workforce improves people’s satisfaction with the care that they receive and health outcomes, especially for individuals of colour. When Black people are treated by Black doctors, they are more likely to receive the preventive care that they need and more likely to agree to recommended interventions, such as blood tests and flu shots.

A DEI-oriented workforce improves learning and outcomes for all. Many veterans seeking mental-health care or rehabilitation after trauma specifically request a psychologist who is a veteran. Attention to DEI helps to ensure that health-care providers’ opportunities to learn are not missed, and that problems facing rural communities, minority ethnic groups and those with rare diseases are not neglected.

Again, I’d like to see the references. Maybe there is some literature out that that I just don’t know about.  But I will say this: satisfaction with health care is one thing, but health outcomes are another. Does DEI improve healthcare, degrade it because it erodes merit, or have no effect? But really, these two scenarios have little to do with DEI save that people like to be treated by people who look like them. That’s a form of tribalism, and isn’t so bad; but the ultimate arbiter of DEI here is whether choosing doctors or psychologists by identity rather than merit gives better outcomes than prioritizing (or at least giving heavy weight) to identity. After all, there are plenty of psychologists who are already veterans, so is there a need to prioritize “veteran status” when admitting someone to training as a psychologist?

In the end, Caplan goes back to DEI as it is actually used in universities: the version that derives from postmodernism with all the new trimmings. He bawls that we have to support it, implying that now that Trump is in power, it’s especially important to defend DEI:

Scientists, their funders and their professional societies must follow in Galileo’s perhaps apocryphal footsteps and speak up about DEI’s crucial role in science. They must urge patient-advocacy organizations, environmentalists and other citizen groups to declare that they don’t want their or their children’s health and well-being jeopardized by the bad science that a lack of attention to DEI will produce. They must emphasize DEI in their publications whenever the denial of its relevance to a scientific issue is demanded by political inquisitors.

These are dangerous times. Scientists globally must stand together for sound science and resist bigotry, bias and hate. If science is to honour one of its core values — a commitment to the truth wherever it might lead — scientists must stand up when DEI matters. Galileo’s story should remind us all: the only way forward is speaking truth to power.

Back to Galileo again!  I stand for good science and against bigotry, bias, and unwarranted hate. But when does DEI matter? Show me some cases and some data, and I’ll decide whether or not to stand up. To me, the only kind of DEI I now support at the university level is the principle that “all people must be treated equally despite their immutable identities.”

NYT and Bloomberg refuse mention high-quality study showing that DEI training has counterproductive results

March 10, 2025 • 10:00 am

One of the most odious forms of censorship in modern science. or in any discipline that produces empirical results, is to simply ignore the results of or even refuse to publish a study simply because it gives results you—or a journal or a newspaper—don’t like because they go against current ideology.

We’ve seen this before when Johanna Olson-Kennedy’s multi-year, federally funded study on the effects of puberty blockers was held back by the authors from publication because it didn’t give the results that the authors wanted. Instead of blockers increasing the mental well-being of children in a two-year study, there were no palpable improvements (I don’t know if there was a control group as the study hasn’t been published). As the New York Times reported:

In the nine years since the study was funded by the National Institutes of Health, and as medical care for this small group of adolescents became a searing issue in American politics, Dr. Olson-Kennedy’s team has not published the data. Asked why, she said the findings might fuel the kind of political attacks that have led to bans of the youth gender treatments in more than 20 states, one of which will soon be considered by the Supreme Court.

“I do not want our work to be weaponized,” she said. “It has to be exactly on point, clear and concise. And that takes time.”

How duplicitous and craven can you get? And given that it was taxpayer money that funded this study, don’t we (or the NIH) have the right to demand that it be published? Of course Olson-Kennedy had an excuse: she said that no improvements were seen because the kids were “in really good shape when they came in.” But earlier she had reported that one-quarter of the same group was depressed or suicidal when the study began! Something is fishy, and I think it’s the odor of mendacity. Publish the study and let us see for ourselves!

Now we have another case, with two media organizations—this time including the NYT—ignoring a study on the inimical (yes, inimical) effects of DEI training on intergroup harmony. Both articles are from late last year.

The first article below, from Lee Jussim’s “Unsafe Science” Substack site (click headline), is really a repost of something written by Colin Wright for his own Substack site. Lee planned to write something on this study but, as he says below, he deferred to Colin (second headline, click to read):

From Lee:

This post was written by Colin Wright and originally appeared at his Substack site, Reality’s Last Stand. It is on our research on the negative consequences of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion pedagogy and rhetoric based on ideas promoted by Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo (whose work was quoted exactly in our experimental manipulations). I was planning to do a post on this, but his was so good, I had little to add. Lee

. . . and an excerpt from Colin’s original.  As you can see from what’s below, the study was shelved by two organizations, certainly because it didn’t show that DEI training increased “inclusion”.

From Colin’s piece (bolding about the craven behavior is mine):

In a stunning series of events, two leading media organizations—The New York Times and Bloomberg—abruptly shelved coverage of a groundbreaking study that raises serious concerns about the psychological impacts of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) pedagogy. The study, conducted by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) in collaboration with Rutgers University, found that certain DEI practices could induce hostility, increase authoritarian tendencies, and foster agreement with extreme rhetoric. With billions of dollars invested annually in these initiatives, the public has a right to know if such programs—heralded as effective moral solutions to bigotry and hate—might instead be fueling the very problems they claim to solve. The decision to withhold coverage raises serious questions about transparency, editorial independence, and the growing influence of ideological biases in the media.

The NCRI study investigated the psychological effects of DEI pedagogy, specifically training programs that draw heavily from texts like Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist and Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility. The findings were unsettling, though perhaps not surprising to longstanding opponents of such programs. Through carefully controlled experiments, the researchers demonstrated that exposure to anti-oppressive (i.e., anti-racist) rhetoric—common in many DEI initiatives—consistently amplified perceptions of bias where none existed. Participants were more likely to see prejudice in neutral scenarios and to support punitive actions against imagined offenders. These effects were not marginal; hostility and punitive tendencies increased by double-digit percentages across multiple measures. Perhaps most troubling, the study revealed a chilling convergence with authoritarian attitudes, suggesting that such training is fostering not empathy, but coercion and control.

The implications of these findings cannot be downplayed. DEI programs have become a fixture in workplaces, schools, and universities across the United States, with a 2023 Pew Research Center report indicating that more than half of U.S. workers have attended some form of DEI training. Institutions collectively spend approximately $8 billion annually on these initiatives, yet the NCRI study underscores how little scrutiny they receive. While proponents of DEI argue that these programs are essential to achieving equity and dismantling systemic oppression, the NCRI’s data suggests that such efforts may actually be deepening divisions and cultivating hostility.

This context makes the suppression of the study even more alarming. The New York Times, which has cited NCRI’s work in nearly 20 previous articles, suddenly demanded that this particular research undergo peer review—a requirement that had never been imposed on the institute’s earlier findings, even on similarly sensitive topics like extremism or online hate. At Bloomberg, the story was quashed outright by an editor known for public support of DEI initiatives. The editorial decisions were ostensibly justified as routine discretion, yet they align conspicuously with the ideological leanings of those involved. Are these major outlets succumbing to pressures to protect certain narratives at the expense of truth?

You can see the study below (click to read it); I’ve quoted the first page with a précis of the methods and results.  Note that this study did have a random control—the usual method where one group reads material designed to produce the desired results (in this case by Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo) while the control group reads “neutral” material.  Any sources of the funding are not given the relatively short (23-page) report, so I don’t know if it was done using taxpayer money. The text has plenty of bar graphs that tell the tale (I won’t include them here).

They don’t pull any punches with the title.

Here’s the summary; bolding in the last paragraph is mine. The total sample was 423 undergraduates

Given both the lack of rigorous research on diversity initiatives and the documented potential of DEI efforts backfiring, a better assessment of the efficacy and effects of contemporary diversity training is warranted.

This study focused on diversity training interventions that emphasize awareness of and opposition to “systemic oppression,” a trend fueled by the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement and popularized by texts such as Ibram X. Kendi’s, How to Be an Antiracist. 10 While not representative of all DEI pedagogy, “anti-racism” and “anti-oppression” pedagogy and intervention materials have seen widespread adoption across sectors like higher education and healthcare. Yet this pedagogy lacks rigorous evaluation of effectiveness, particularly with respect to reducing bias and improving interpersonal/inter-group dynamics.

The prominent “anti-oppressive pedagogy” in DEI programming can carry perceived rhetorical threats for those whose politics or other beliefs run counter to the fundamental premises of the critical paradigm from which the pedagogy derives. Programming may reflexively cast members of so-called “dominant” groups or those who disagree with “anti-oppressive,” “anti-racist,” or modern-day “anti-fascist” framings as oppressive, racist, or fascist.

The studies reported herein assess a crucial question: Do ideas and rhetoric foundational to many DEI trainings foster pluralistic inclusiveness, or do they exacerbate intergroup and interpersonal conflicts? Do they increase empathy and understanding or increase hostility towards members of groups labeled as oppressors?

Across three groupings—race, religion, and caste—NCRI collected anti-oppressive DEI educational materials frequently used in interventional and educational settings. The religion-focused interventions drew on content from the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU), commonly used in sensitivity training on Islamophobia. For race, materials featured excerpts from DEI scholars like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. Caste interventions featured anti-oppression narratives from Equality Labs, one of the most prolific training providers for caste discrimination in North America.

Rhetoric from these materials was excerpted and administered in psychological surveys measuring explicit bias, social distancing, demonization, and authoritarian tendencies. Participants were randomly assigned to review these materials or neutral control material. Their responses to this material was assessed through various questions assessing intergroup hostility and authoritarianism, and through scenario-based questions (details on all demographic data, survey questions, essay conditions, responses and analyses can be found in a supplementary document to this report).

Across all groupings, instead of reducing bias, they engendered a hostile attribution bias (Epps & Kendall, 1995), amplifying perceptions of prejudicial hostility where none was present 11 , and punitive responses to the imaginary prejudice. These results highlight the complex and often counterproductive impacts of pedagogical elements and themes prevalent in mainstream DEI training.

One addition from the study:

It is beyond the scope of this research to evaluate DEI training writ large and our work therefore, should not be taken as evaluating the efficacy of an entire industry.

Yes, that caveat almost a given. But this isn’t the first study to show that DEI training doesn’t do what it purports to do.  But this one is a fairly comprehensive study, and any discussion of the efficacy of DEI training should take its results into account. Pity that the NYT or Bloomberg ignored it.

Nature Human Behavior is back, this time touting “allyship”

February 24, 2025 • 12:15 pm

In the summer of 2022, the journal Nature Human Behavior put out a notice that it could reject articles that were “stigmatizing” or “harmful” to different groups, regardless of the scientific content. The problems with this stand, which were immediately called out by Steve Pinker, Michael Shermer, and others, is that what is seen as stigmatizing or harmful is pretty much a subjective matter, and, as Pinker tweeted:

I think the journal and its editor were taken aback by this and similar reactions to their statements, and on Day 2 of our USC conference on Science and Ideology in January, the Chief Editor of the journal, Stavroula Kousta, walked back their statement a bit in here 24-minute talk (go here to here her talk; it’s the first one on the video).

But the walking-back didn’t mean that Nature Human Behavior was becoming less woke. Indeed, it just published a ridiculously repetitive and trite paper about how science needs “allyship” to produce a “diverse, equitable, and inclusive academia.” It’s not that STEM isn’t seeking a diversity of groups and viewpoints—though, inevitably, “diversity” in their sense means “diversity of race or sex”—but that this article says absolutely nothing new about the issue. What the journal published now is a prime example of virtue-flaunting that, in the end accomplish nothing.  You can read it by clicking on the screenshot below (it should be free with the legal Unpaywall app), and you can get the pdf here.

The piece begins with the usual claim of “harm”: the same issue that the same journal discussed before:

In academia, despite recent progress towards diversity, biases and microaggressions can still exclude and harm members of disadvantaged social groups.

The person who sent me this article wrote “No citations are given for this claim about bigotry and discrimination at the most liberal, open, welcoming institutions that have ever existed in human history. Amazing.”

The article then gives these figures, which are baffling because one would expect younger women to drop out more rather than less frequently. But they may be correct; I am just not sure that they reflect misogyny:

Such patterns of marginalization are not specific to students. Among US faculty members, for example, women are 6%, 10% and 19% more likely to leave each year than their men counterparts as assistant, associate and full professors, respectively.

I suspect that these departures have little to do with ongoing “structural bias” against women academics, not only because no instances of inbuilt structural bias are actually given, but also, at least for women, a big and recent review by Ceci et al. found either no bias against women’s achievements in academic science or a female advantage—save for teaching evaluations and a slight difference in salary, about 3.6% lower salary for women.   However, the authors do not dismiss the possibility and importance of bias against women.

At any rate, if you haven’t heard come across this advice about “allyship” before, and are an academic, you must be blind and deaf. I’m not going to reprise the paper for you, as you’ve heard it all before.

I’m assuming that well-meaning people agree with me that marginalized scientists should be treated just like everyone else.  But how many times do we need to hear that? At any rate, this paper rings the chimes again, singling out six areas where we’re told how to behave. These are direct quotes.

1.) Listen to and centre marginalized voices.

2.) Reflect on and challenge your own biases (I guess you determine them by taking an “implicit bias” test, a procedure that’s been severely criticized

3.)  Speak up to include and support disadvantaged groups

4.)  Speak out against bias when it happens

5.)  Advocate for institutional initiatives to promote equity and inclusion

6.)  Dismantle institutional policies and procedures of exclusion

#4 and #6 are no-brainers, though, speaking personally, I don’t know of any institutional policies and procedures of exclusion in biology.  The rest are ideological statements assuming that everyone except for the marginalized is biased, and that the way to achieve inclusion is to promote “equity” (do they even know what “equity” means?) And, of course, the entire program reflects the tenets of DEI, which are on the chopping block in the U.S.

Now this article isn’t as bad as ones on feminist glaciology or ones maintaining that Einstein’s principle of covariance supports the view that minorities have an equal claim to objectivity..  No, it’s just superfluous, a farrago of what decent human beings already do, misleading assertions about bias, mixed with patronizing advice that we already follow. It accomplishes nothing save further erode the credibility of editor Kousta.

Here’s the conclusion:

For allyship to be effective in academia, it must be grounded in a deep commitment to DEI. This means recognizing that allyship is not a one-time event, but an ongoing process of learning, reflection and action. Moreover, it needs to go above and beyond symbolic or superficial acts (performative allyship) to demonstrate substantial and meaningful support that is recognized as beneficial by those it is meant to serve (substantive allyship). It is noteworthy to understand and accept that we will make mistakes along the way. No one is perfect, and as explained above, allyship requires a willingness to engage in humility and self-reflection. When mistakes are made, it is important to listen to feedback from disadvantaged groups, take responsibility for any harm caused, and commit to doing better in the future.

In conclusion, everyone can engage in allyship and work to challenge and dismantle systemic bias, creating a more just, equitable and inclusive academic community for all.

At least they used “equitable” properly, meaning “treating people fairly.”  But couldn’t the whole article have consisted of just that sentence?

“Competency standards” for New Zealand pharmacists released: guess what they emphasize

February 23, 2025 • 10:30 am

If you think you’re beleaguered by political correctness in America, just thank your lucky stars that you’re not living in New Zealand.  There you are increasingly surrounded by demands that you abide by the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, but, worse, you can be demonized or fired simply because you think it’s outdated and there needs to be court-mandated interpretation of what it means, or, worse, adopt a New Zealand Constitution.

For in that country, which I love, virtually area of endeavor is subject to Equity Demands and Diktats that you respect indigenous “ways of knowing.” Today the subject of discussion is pharmacy, which is being rapidly colonized by this ideology. But note the bit about real estate at the bottom.

An anonymous New Zealander sent me this article from The Breaking News site in that lovely but increasingly benighted land.

You can verify Kennedy’s claims by going to the official pharmacy standards site (click on link to get pdf).

As you can see from the top headline, it’s a bit of a rant, but everything that Mr. Kennedy says about the pharmacy standards is true.

First, the aim of the Pharmacy Council is a general one: to help all New Zealanders. From pp. 3-4 of the second document:

Through skilled and safe practice, pharmacists contribute to better health outcomes for New Zealanders. We aspire to have pharmacists operate at the top of their scope of practice and to not only be competent and professional in their roles but to continually work towards being the best pharmacist they can be.

. . . . The purpose of the Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Act (HPCAA) 2003 is to protect the health and safety of the public by providing mechanisms to ensure that health practitioners are competent and fit to practise their profession.

So consideration #1 should be merit: the quality of service provided by pharmacists.  However, if you look at the first three “domains” of competence (there are seven), you see this:

Yep, the very first thing in which you must be competent as a pharmacist is understanding the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi (“Te Tiriti o Waitangi”), which of course says nothing about pharmacy. The treaty simply guaranteed the indigenous Māori their lands, gives them all the rights of British citizens, and places governance of the indigenous people to England.  There are several versions of the treaty, not all Māori tribes signed onto it, and it’s used to justify all kinds of stuff which are not in any of the texts but fall under a recent interpretation “Māori are to get at least half of everything.” That includes having their ways of knowing taught in science classes.  And remember, just 17.8% of New Zealanders are Māori, while 17.3% are Asians (67.8% are of European descent.  Somehow the Asians got left out of the pharmacy standards.

So once again the most important aspect of “competence” you need as a New Zealand pharmacist is respect and understanding of the Treaty, along with deference to the indigenous people.  Extreme deference.  The first four paragraphs below are Kennedy’s take (and his bolding), while the rest are word-for-word from the second source above.

Unfortunately the Pharmacy Council NZ has gone all woke and racist and apparently now thinks that practicing safe, competent dispensing of medicine and advice depends on a deep knowledge of 27 different aspects of Maori customs, beliefs, traditions, practices, superstitions, intergenerational historical trauma, familiarity with mana whenua and kaumatua, the Treaty of Waitangi, structural racism and colonisation and many other alleged Maori-related issues – such is the depth of knowledge required by pharmacists of Maori culture, beliefs and Te Reo etc. etc., that it would seem that every pharmacist who achieves all these competencies that are totally, completely, categorically, undeniably and irrefutably unrelated to safe dispensing of medicines will have earned a Bachelor’s degree in Maori Studies!

This is racism on steroids, the woke, totally unnecessary, unwarranted imposition of irrelevant culture and beliefs on a professional group whose sole focus should be on the safe practice of pharmaceutical medicine!

The Minister of Health needs to stamp down immediately on this repugnant, racist, woke over-reach by the Pharmacy Council and weed out any of the incompetent and/or radical members of the Pharmacy Council!

Following is the list (from page 31) of the essential competency standards for all pharmacists, according to the Pharmacy Council: [JAC: as I say below, I’ve put in italics everything that seems to me completely irrelevant to competence as a pharmacist]

● being familiar with mana whenua (local hapū/iwi), mātāwaka (kinship group not mana whenua), hapū and iwi in your rohe (district) and their history,

● understanding the importance of kaumātua,

● being familiar with te Tiriti o Waitangi and He Whakaputanga o te Rangatiratanga o Nū Tīreni,

● advocating for giving effect to te Tiriti at all levels,

● understanding the intergenerational impact of historical trauma,

● understanding of the role of structural racism and colonisation and ongoing impacts on Māori, socioeconomic deprivation, restricted access to the determinants of health,

● being familiar with Māori health – leaders, history, and contemporary literature,

● being familiar with Māori aspirations in relation to health,

● developing authentic relationships with Māori organisations and health providers,

● having a positive collegial relationship with Māori colleagues in your profession/workplace,

● being proficient in building and maintaining mutually beneficial power-sharing relationships,

● tautoko (support) Māori leadership,

● prioritising Māori voices,

● trusting Māori intelligence,

● be clinically and culturally confident to work with Māori whānau, [JAC: family groups]

● understand one’s own whakapapa (genealogy and connections),

● have a basic/intermediate understanding of te reo Māori, [the language; and most Māori themselves don’t understand it]

● have a basic/intermediate understanding of the tikanga and the application of tapu (sacred) and noa (made ordinary),

● be familiar with Māori health models and concepts such as Te Pae Mahutonga9 and Te Ara Tika10,

● have a basic/intermediate understanding of marae (community meeting house) protocol,

● be confident to perform waiata tautoko (support song),

● be proficient in whakawhānaungatanga (active relationship building),

● integrate tika (correct), pono (truth), aroha and manaakitanga into practice,

● be open-hearted,

● be proficient in strengths-based practice,

● be proficient with equity analysis,

● practice cultural humility,

● critically monitor the effectiveness of own practice with Māori.

Only 1 out of 4 standards (7/28) seem to me at all relevant to competence in pharmacy, and I’m being generous.

Now I can understand that there should be a section in pharmacy school about “indigenous medicine” so that pharmacists can understand where a local is coming from if they want an herb rather than an antibiotic. But most of this statement It is simply irrelevant fealty to the indigenous people; a form of virtue signaling or “the sacralization of the oppressed.”

I needn’t go on, as you can see that most of the requirements for competence in this section are irrelevant to the aims of the Pharmacy Council.  Poor New Zealand!

But wait! There’s more!

Lagniappe: New Zealander loses realtor’s license for refusing to take Māori-centered DEI training. Click on the link to go to the New Zealand Herald article:

An excerpt:

Janet Dickson, the real estate agent facing a five-year ban for refusing to do a Māori tikanga course, has lost a court bid to block the threatened cancellation of her licence.

Today, the High Court turned down her request for a judicial review of decisions about agents’ professional development requirements, which required her to take a 90-minute course called Te Kākano (The Seed).

The module focused on Māori culture, language and the Treaty of Waitangi and was made compulsory for all real estate agents, branch managers and salespeople in 2023.

Agents who do not complete professional development requirements risk having their licences cancelled. People whose licences are cancelled cannot reapply for one for five years.

. . .She has called real estate work a vocation and a calling, citing her Presbyterian values. In her court case, she said the course’s references to Māori gods sat uncomfortably with her own monotheistic Christian belief.

She labelled the course “woke madness” in a Facebook post and vowed to fight “to make sure this doesn’t happen to anyone else”.

She told the court she considered the course would not add any value to the performance of her real estate agency work.

Poor New Zealand!