Category: diversity

Princeton’s President makes bogus arguments that diversity and academic excellence are compatible

February 14, 2024 • 11:30 am

The article below, by the President of Princeton, just appeared in the Atlantic.  (Christopher Eisgruber has been Princeton’s President for 11 years.)  The title clearly implies that college diversity (and the implication is “racial diversity”) is not at all in conflict with excellence.

This is a message that, of course, the Progressive Left wants to hear, but when I read the article, I found it deeply misleading. It turns out that excellence at Princeton has not been maintained by admitting more racial minorities, but by allowing certain barred classes, like Asians, Jews, and the impecunious, into the school.  As far as the evidence goes for racial groups, yes, there is a tradeoff between excellence and diversity, and we know that for several reasons that I’ll mention below. One that we know well that colleges are omitting indices of merit, like SAT and ACT scores, as ways to increase equity, for racial minorities (save Asians) don’t do as well as whites (including Jews, which are seen as “white adjacent”).

This does not mean that colleges shouldn’t strive for more racial diversity, but I think they shouldn’t do it by substantially lowering the merit bar of admissions. There are other ways, like casting a wider net among prospective students, or, for equally qualified students, give the edge to minorities. But to imply that there’s no tradeoff between academic excellence and ethnic diversity (not including, of course, Jews and Asians, known to be overachievers) is to purvey a lie. But it is of course a lie in the service of “progressivism”.

It’s hard to imagine how the Atlantic could accept an article whose arguments are explained by the conflation of causation with correlation, as well as with cherry-picked examples or recent trends in grade inflation and selectivity. But let’s look at the argument.

You can click on the headline below, or find it archived here.

First, many American colleges either implicitly or explicitly have eliminated standardized tests (or made them optional) as criteria for admission, and yet, as I’ve written several times (e.g., here and here), SAT scores correlate better than anything else, including high school grade-point averages) with academic success in college. The reason they have done away with the tests, or made them optional, is to increase racial diversity, concentrating on blacks and Hispanics, who do worse on these tests.  Increasingly, medical schools are also ditching the once-required MCAT admissions tests for the same reasons, and Graduate Record Examinations, or GREs for graduate schools, are being deep-sixed for the same reasons.

But of course this isn’t mentioned by Eisgruber, nor the fact that Princeton itself did away with required SAT and ACT tests; apparently they’re now optional in the school’s “holistic admissions” process. And, as I’ve posted before, making them optional, or omitting them, actually hurts diversity! But misguided colleges don’t seem to realize that.

But here are the four main arguments Eisgruber giv; I’ve characterized them and put them in bold. First, though, his thesis:

A noxious and surprisingly commonplace myth has taken hold in recent years, alleging that elite universities have pursued diversity at the expense of scholarly excellence. Much the reverse is true: Efforts to grow and embrace diversity at America’s great research universities have made them better than ever. If you want excellence, you need to find, attract, and support talent from every sector of society, not just from privileged groups and social classes.

He’s right about how to achieve excellence—finding talent where you can—but this is not the same thing as saying that there’s no tradeoff between excellence and (ethnic) diversity and that you must reduce merit-based admissions if you want to increase diveristy. What the above says is that the more widely you look around, the more likely you are to find talented people. But again, that’s not people will read this article. Now, on to Eisgruber’s arguments:

He points to a few examples of ethnic minorities at Princeton who have been successful.

Not surprisingly, the first example is a Chinese-American, Fei-Fei Li.  But Asians, like Jews, are overachievers for what I think are largely cultural reasons, and that’s why Ivy League schools used to have Jewish quotas and why Harvard, until recently, had “Asian-American” quotas.

He then names one black person, one poor person, and one white but economically deprived person (Mark Milley) who became successes after attending Princeton.  Again, this proves nothing, for Eisgruber is making a general statement, and picking out one example from each of three minority groups proves nothing.

Princeton is academically better than it was in the middle of the last century because it began admitting public-school students and women.

But again, this proves nothing other than widening the pool of applicants that might contain meritorious students will allow more of those students to enrich Princeton. Once you begin at least considering public-school students and women, you suddenly have a whole large group of people from which to pluck the talented. But again, this says nothing about Eisgruber’s implied thesis: that admitting more minority students in general will not reduce “excellence” (presumably construed, though not defined, as graduation rates, grades in college, and success after college).

. . . Princeton’s history is illustrative, not because it is special but because—in this respect, at least—it isn’t. At the beginning of the 20th century, Princeton had a reputation as “the finest country club in America”—a place where privileged young men loafed rather than studied. When asked early in his Princeton presidency about the number of students there, Woodrow Wilson reportedly quipped, “about 10 percent.”
Half a century later, when the university began admitting public-high-school graduates in significant numbers, it sought to reassure alumni that the newcomers would not displace more privileged but marginally qualified children. The Alumni Council published a booklet declaring that Princeton would admit any alumni child likely to graduate. As evidence, it boasted that the sons of Princetonians were overrepresented not only in the bottom quartile of the class but among those who flunked out.
The Alumni Council’s brochure spoke about Princeton’s sons because, of course, the university did not admit women to the undergraduate program until 1969, thereby turning away roughly half the world’s excellence. That was only one of many unfair and discriminatory distinctions that American universities embraced at the expense of excellence.

Eisgruber also maintains that concerted efforts to obtain black students didn’t occur until the 1960s, but of course he doesn’t tell us how they fare at Princeton relative to Asian, white, or Jewish students (I guess the latter are counted as “white”). He also notes that Princeton had Jewish quoteas untyil the 1950s:

People who accuse universities of “social engineering” today seem to forget the social engineering that they did in the past—social engineering that was designed to protect class privilege rather than disrupt it. At Princeton and other Ivy League universities, anti-Semitic quotas persisted into the 1950s. Asian and Asian American students, who now form such an impressive part of the student body at Princeton and its peers, were virtually absent.

So now that there’s more “diversity” of Jewish and Asian-American students at Princeton, and the classes are doing better, does that prove that diversity is compatible with excellence? I don’t think that’s what Eisgruber means in his title. As New York Magazine says, and Harvard admitted, accepting Asians only by merit would result in “too many Asians”:

Harvard itself found in a 2013 internal study that, if it admitted applicants solely on the basis of academic merit, its share of Asian American students would explode from 19 percent to 43 percent.

No, no, we mustn’t have that! This is why, of course, Harvard discriminated against Asians by lowering their “personality scores,” and this is what the Supreme Court found when it banned race-based admissions. And, of course, blacks and Hispanics with the same indices of merit as Asians or whites are admitted much more often via affirmative action.  Again, this shows the conflict between merit and ethnic diversity.

Opening up admissions to poorer students increased excellence. 

With help from charitable endowments funded by grateful alumni and friends, Princeton and other leading research universities have also dismantled financial barriers that in the past discouraged brilliant students from attending. Contrary to what readers might infer from the endless stream of articles about debt-ridden college grads who become baristas, America’s elite research universities now offer financial-aid packages that make them among the country’s most affordable colleges. At Princeton, the percentage of students on aid has risen from about 40 percent in 2000 to 67 percent in the most recent entering class, covering low-, middle-, and even some upper-middle-income students. The average scholarship exceeds the tuition price.

The elimination of barriers to entry coincided with two other changes: students’ increased willingness to travel for an outstanding education and improved informational tools that colleges could use to assess the quality of students (and vice versa). The result, as documented by the Stanford University economist Caroline Hoxby in 2009, is that student bodies at America’s best colleges and universities are significantly stronger academically in the 21st century than they were in the 1980s or ’90s. By 2007, she reports, America’s leading colleges were “up against the ceiling of selectivity” defined in terms of academic credentials, not acceptance rate: Further improvements to the quality of the student body would be so refined as to be invisible.

Again, all that’s happening here is the advent of “need-blind admissions,” which we practice at the University of Chicago. If you don’t prevent impecunious students from attending Princeton—I was one of those, by the way; I couldn’t apply to Princeton, my first-choice school, because my family couldn’t afford it—then of course you increase the chances of finding students with good grades and high SAT scores.

Finally, over time, the degree of “excellence” of Princeton students has increased. This correlates, says Eisgruber, with an increase in diversity. 

Princeton’s internal data show striking changes consistent with Hoxby’s more general findings.  Princeton’s undergraduate-admission office has long assigned academic ratings to all applicants based on their scholarly accomplishments in high school, with 1 being the strongest and 5 being the weakest. In the late 1980s, Academic 1s made up less than 10 percent of the university’s applicant pool and less than 20 percent of our matriculated class. Indeed, if you plucked a student at random from the Princeton University student body in 1990, the student was as likely to be an Academic 4 as an Academic 1 (but unlikely to be either: Academic 2s and 3s made up half the class).

 

In recent years, by contrast, Academic 1s have constituted roughly 30 percent of the applicant pool and about 50 percent of the matriculated class. Princeton’s academic excellence has increased substantially across every segment of its undergraduate population.

Here we have the classic example of confusing correlation with causation. And there’s a double causation: standards for admissions have increased overall, which has raised the “rank” of admitted students, and the grade-point averages of students in college (presumably one index of “academic excellence” of Princeton students) has ballooned due to grade inflation.  At the same time, Princeton increased its ethnic diversity.  This is no evidence that the latter caused the former.

So there we have it, a pastiche of misguided or erroneous arguments, made by a guy who is a President of an academic powerhouse, to “prove” that you needn’t sacrifice academic merit for diversity. It’s all wrong, and it’s embarrassing—embarrassing for both the Atlantic and the hapless Eisgruber.

So how do we test whether diversity really is compatible with excellence?  There are two ways, and I’ve already mentioned them both:

  1. See if lowering the bar for merit of admissions (i.e., eliminating SAT scores) affects academic excellence and achievement. We already know it does because of the correlation of SAT scores and other standardized tests with academic achievement.  If Eisgruber were right, why are schools like Princeton getting rid of mandatory test scores, or making them optional? There’s only one reason, and it shows that Eisgruber’s thesis is wrong.
  2. Follow students of black or Hispanic ethnicity through college and see if their achievement (or post-college success) is negatively correlated with their minority status. I believe this is also the case, though I don’t have the data at hand. (I believe this is true for medical schools as well.) But if it is the case, it shows that there is a tradeoff between merit and diversity.  That is surely the case, and it’s one of the Great Lies of Wokism.

All the evidence I know of goes against Eisgruber’s contention. Why didn’t the Atlantic editors point out these simple problems? Because, of course, Eisgruber’s flawed conclusion happens to comport with the dominant narrative of “progressive” liberalism.

Two final points. I’m saying nothing about genetics or inherent abilities here, for I think that differences in achievement between racial/ethnic groups is cultural. (The genetic data simply aren’t in.) All I’m saying is that, given differences in qualifications and achievement among groups, Eisgruber’s thesis is wrong.

Second, I’m not saying that colleges should give merit 100% priority over diversity. That is a judgment call about whether, as Jon Haidt puts it, you want “Social Justice University” or “Truth-Finding University.”  But Haidt also notes that you can’t have both, and in this abysmal piece of analysis, Eisgruber takes issue with that. I have always said that I prefer some form of affirmative action, and I stick by that, but I’m not pretending that substantial increases in equity can be achieved without lowering overall “excellence.” There are other ways, though they’re slower. One of them is giving children from different groups equal opportunity at the outset. American doesn’t seem to have the dosh or the will to do that, but that’s what it will ultimately take to comport merit with diversity.

Bari Weiss on why DEI must be dismantled

December 19, 2023 • 9:15 am

In this 20-minute video, Bari Weiss makes two points. First, the testimony of the MIT, Harvard, and Penn Presidents before a House committee was antisemitic and reprehensible, and reflects a widespread lack of “moral leadership” in universities. Second, this moral leadership requires the elimination of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives in higher education.

Weiss points out what was really reprehensible in the Presidents’ testimony, which was their arrant hypocrisy in having a history of enforcing lesser violations of speech codes, not the fact that their speech codes apparently called for First Amendment-style freedom of speech (I’m not sure that they do). Insofar as such codes should reflect the First Amendment, then, yes, calling for the genocide of Jews is allowed in most cases, though the courts’ interpretation of the Amendment deems such speech impermissible on some occasions, like promoting predictable and imminent violence. (And of course real violence violates all university behavior codes. But you can’t start enforcing freedom of speech right at the moment that it’s calling for genocide of Jews.

In that sense, then, the Presidents were right in answering “it depends” when asked whether their speech codes permitted calls for genocide of the Jews. It’s unfortunate that their answers were given in such a  wooden and stiff way—probably the result of coaching by lawyers—and that adherence to institutional neutrality may have prevented them from expressing their own personal opinions, though in such a forum I think that giving their personal take would be okay. And, of course, they all have to fix their speech codes so that permitted speech not only comports with how the courts construe the First Amendment, but that speech regulations are enforced uniformly.

Where Weiss goes amiss, I think, is when she pronounces that Liz Magill and the other Presidents really did “do something wrong.”  What was that? Magill, says Weiss (and presumably the other Presidents, though they’re not mentioned here), failed in this way (7:53):

“failed the very basic duties that [Magill’s] role and responsibilities required of her, because the job of a university president is not merely to point out the basic Constitutional rights of student to scream for a violent uprising against Jews or anyone else—and of course the students have those legal rights—but is pointing out obvious legal rights why we have university presidents? Is their job simply to remind us that people are allowed to shout terrible things,  and that the First Amendment protects them from doing so?. . .

“The job of a university president is not merely to point out what is and isn’t legally permissible.  The job of a university president is to offer leadership—intellectual leadership, of course, but also moral leadership.

“. . . Can anyone look at these three people and say that they offer the kind of inspiring leadership and moral clarity that the country so desperately need at this moment. I think that those questions answer themselves?”

Weiss offers as her remedies “committing to  intellectual freedom, not ideology. . hiring based on merit. . .doing away with double standards based on speech”, and not sending your kids or checks to schools that betray truly liberal values.

This is all good stuff, except that if one expects college presidents to exert moral clarity leadership by condemning speech that they find reprehensible, or making political pronouncements—something that Weiss implies but doesn’t state directly—then that violates an important principle for promoting free discourse: intellectual neutrality. That is, schools should not make any official pronouncements on moral, ideological or political issues.

That principle, which is the opposite of universities providing “moral clarity,” is embodied in the Kalven Principle of the University of Chicago, a principle embraced by only two other of the several thousand American colleges.  We should not expect college Presidents to condemn Hamas or offer similar “moral leadership” as part of their regular jobs, for that violates institutional neutrality, chilling the speech of those who disagree.

You can’t fix a free-speech problem by placing more limits on speech. (Those limits, of course, will change over time, and are largely subjective.) The administration of the University of Chicago has made no public pronouncement on the morality involved in the Middle East war (see here for our statement), and we’ve come to no harm because of that.

Real moral leadership should be exercised by getting university to adopt those principles that promote the functions of a university: teaching, learning, and the free discourse that promotes these things. The other day I described Steve Pinker’s Fivefold Way: five principles that, if adopted by a school, can create the kind of climate that Weiss wants. These five are free speech, institutional neutrality, the prohibition of violence (already in place and already illegal), viewpoint diversity, and disempowering DEI.

These last two principles have not been enacted, but are necessary for The Good University.  Weiss doesn’t mention viewpoint diversity, but at 11:58 she does begin her clarion call for dismantling DEI, for she argues it imposes an injurious ideology on universities.  Pinker shares her views, as do I: DEI is divisive, sucks up lots of money without producing results, reduces viewpoint diversity, is racist in some ways, values ethnicity above merit, and quashes dissent.  Those are not liberal principles.

Here’s what Pinker said about DEI in his Boston Globe op-ed, as of the five parts of his Fix the Universities plan (I’ve given a screenshot since it’s impossible to cut and paste):

With the exception Weiss’s call for university presidents to exercise “moral clarity and leadership”, then, her discussion is eloquent and correct. I hasten to add that she doesn’t really specify how “moral leadership” is to be exercised.  The best way is to put in place and then adhere to the five principles outlined by Pinker.

Will that happen? I’m not confident that universities will launch policies of institutional neutrality, start dismantling DEI, and begin enforcing viewpoint diversity.  Very few are moving in even one of these three directions. But they’ll never do so unless people like us press for these changes.

 

h/t: Rosemary

Cal State Fullerton job: almost a parody of DEI requirements

September 18, 2023 • 11:30 am

Whenever someone asks, “Is wokeness growing or abating?”, I always say “growing.” True, more people are speaking up against “wokeness” (which I loosely define as performative “Social Justice” that accomplishes virtually nothing), but yet it’s still spreading quickly through American institutions.  In fact, it’s spread so widely that it almost seems like a parody of itself, so much so that it’s often hard to tell wokeness from satires on wokeness.

Here’s one example: a job advertised in the Chronicle of Higher Education for an “assistant professor of literacy” at California State University at Fullerton (CSUF). The relevant department is “The Department of Literacy and Reading Education.”

Click below to read the ad (and weep):

The entire ad involves the University patting itself on the back for being diverse and promoting diversity, and the diversity requirements (including a detailed statement that’s probably illegal) far outstrip all other professional qualifications.

Excerpts from the ad (emphases are mine)

The Department of Literacy and Reading Education at California State University, Fullerton, invites applications for a tenure‐track assistant professor position in foundations of literacy (PK-12), as well as literacy leadership, with appointment to begin Fall 2024.

California State University, Fullerton (CSUF) is a minority-serving institution and an affirmative action and equal opportunity employer. CSUF is firmly committed to increasing the diversity of the campus community and the curriculum, and to fostering the Guiding Principles of Social Justice as well as an inclusive environment within which students, staff, administrators and faculty thrive. Candidates who can contribute to this goal through their teaching, research, advising, and other activities are encouraged to identify their strengths and experiences in this area. Individuals advancing the University’s strategic diversity goals and those from groups whose underrepresentation in the American professoriate has been severe and longstanding are particularly encouraged to apply.

CSUF is committed to retaining all faculty and has established affinity groups you can join to support your success.

Yes, CSUF could serve minorities, but is that the same thing as being a “minority-serving institution”? Who knows? But the ad was posted about a week before the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action on the basis of race, and, at any rate, that form of affirmative action has been outlawed in California for a long time.

And what are the “Guiding Principles of Social Justice”? Ten to one this demands adherence to a specific ideology, a form of compelled speech that is also illegal.

“Affinity groups” are sex-specific or, more often, ethnicity-specific groups for say, only Hispanics, only blacks, only Asians, and so on. (It goes without saying that there are no “white affinity groups”.) The invitation for the candidate to join one of these groups presumes that the candidate should be from a minority ethnic group. That requirement is also illegal, but this is a sneaky way to practice affirmative action when hiring.

You can read the ad for yourself, and unless I miss my guess, most readers will find it very like a parody. Just for completeness, here are the requirements for applying. I’ve put everything referring to diversity, including the detailed requirements for a diversity statement, in bold:

Application

  • A complete on‐line application must be received by electronic submission to be considered. To apply, please visit http://hr.fullerton.edu/careers/Faculty.php, choose full-time faculty, search for position 529407, and provide the following required materials:
  • cover letter of application in which you respond to the required and preferred qualifications
  • curriculum vitae
  • teaching philosophy statement
  • Unofficial graduate school transcripts
  • statement on commitment to just, equitable and inclusive education (see below)
  • This statement provides the candidate’s unique perspective on their past and present contributions to and future aspirations for promoting diversity, inclusion, and social justice in their professional careers. The purpose of this statement is to help the department identify candidates who have professional experience, intellectual commitments, and/or willingness to engage in activities that could help CSUF contribute to its mission in these areas.Diversity is a defining feature of California’s past, present, and future. Increasing the diversity of our educators to better reflect the population of California is just one aspect of the College of Education’s dedication to just, equitable and inclusive education. Diversity refers to the variety of personal experiences, values, and worldviews that arise from differences of culture and circumstance. Such differences include race, ethnicity, gender, age, religion, language, abilities/disabilities, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, geographic region, and more.All College of Education students leave with a perspective that recognizes, honors, and respects the knowledge and strengths all learners bring from their communities and identities. This perspective is known as Just Equitable and Inclusive Education (JEIE) and is evident in all our programs. College of Education students use this perspective to make community-based assets an integral component of curricular and pedagogical development to enhance academic success. In this way, our students learn to value and draw upon students’ backgrounds not only to support them in developing skills leading to success in the broader society, but also as a mechanism to transform our schools and communities. We believe that all faculty and staff who work for the College must share these same commitments.The diversity statement should focus on your commitment to a Just, Equitable and Inclusive Education. The diversity statement will be assessed based on knowledge, experience, application, and expertise as it relates to JEIE. The strongest statement will have an emphasis on the intersectionality between JEIE and a social identity or marker (social class, race, gender, sexual orientation, language, etc.)This statement can take several different forms and should address at least one of the following
  • Your contributions to advancing principles focused on JEIE.
  • How you incorporate principles of JEIE into your instructional practices, your research and/or service activities.
  • How you have personally experienced JEIE.
  • Your experiences and/or qualifications that enhance your ability to work with diverse students, faculty, parents, and community stakeholders
  • a list of three references with relevant contact information

Of the 533 words in the list of candidate qualifications, 396, or 74%, refer to what they call the required “statement on commitment to just, equitable and inclusive education”.  This is just a fancy and duplicitous way of saying “diversity statement” without using those hot-button words. But then at the end they slip up and say this:

The diversity statement should focus on your commitment to a Just, Equitable and Inclusive Education. The diversity statement will be assessed based on knowledge, experience, application, and expertise as it relates to JEIE.

So it is a diversity statement after all! Note too that one of the job qualifications is this:

Demonstrated experience in anti-racist teaching and in the preparation of professionals who model and advocate for just, equitable, and inclusive education.

Tell me that this is not asking the candidate to conform to a specific form of ideological “antiracism”. (Hint: it’s closer to Kendi than King.)

Similarly, note that they’re clever in how they define diversity:

Diversity refers to the variety of personal experiences, values, and worldviews that arise from differences of culture and circumstance. Such differences include race, ethnicity, gender, age, religion, language, abilities/disabilities, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, geographic region, and more.

So you might think they’re simply looking for viewpoint diversity, which is fine. But I don’t believe them. They are looking for ethnic diversity, pure and simple, but can’t get away with saying it straight out, because it’s illegal. Note that they could simply say “ideological and viewpoint diversity” above without going into detail, but then they couldn’t mention ableism, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and all the things that make CSUF look virtuous.

Finally, I got this ad from Luana Maroja, and after I wrote the above I asked her for her take, which she gave me and allowed me to publish with her permission. Note that there is some overlap, but not too much, between her comments and mine.

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

Luana’s comments:

Here are my impressions (words in italics are copied directly from the ad):

“CSUF is firmly committed to increasing the diversity of the campus community and the curriculum, and to fostering the Guiding Principles of Social Justice”

What are the guiding principles of Social Justice?  This can mean many things – from “ungrading” courses to allowing people to express their opinions freely.

“Individuals advancing the University’s strategic diversity goals and those from groups whose underrepresentation in the American professoriate has been severe and longstanding are particularly encouraged to apply.”

Here they make clear that they are not really a “equal opportunity employer” as they state earlier.

In the qualifications section they implement more ideological biases, which don’t seem to be crucial to success in this current job (they appear instead to be ideological litmus tests):

“Demonstrated advocacy for, or experience working with intersecting social groups and communities historically underserved and marginalized by educational policies and practices”

“Demonstrated experience in anti-racist teaching and in the preparation of professionals who model and advocate for just, equitable, and inclusive education”

They initially dump the term “diversity statement” and replace it with “statement on commitment to just, equitable and inclusive education (see below)”  I guess this is possibly to distract people who are concerned with “diversity statements”. . . But then they forget to remove diversity statement further down (see below).

Notice that here they do not mention “diversity of political views“, which is one aspect which really enhances diversity which I am sure the college lacks:

“Diversity is a defining feature of California’s past, present, and future. Increasing the diversity of our educators to better reflect the population of California is just one aspect of the College of Education’s dedication to just, equitable and inclusive education. Diversity refers to the variety of personal experiences, values, and worldviews that arise from differences of culture and circumstance. Such differences include race, ethnicity, gender, age, religion, language, abilities/disabilities, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, geographic region, and more.”

Once again the emphasis is on identity politics:

“All College of Education students leave with a perspective that recognizes, honors, and respects the knowledge and strengths all learners bring from their communities and identities. This perspective is known as Just Equitable and Inclusive Education (JEIE) and is evident in all our programs.”

Finally, here they forget they should not be using the term “diversity statement” and don’t use the euphemistic term from earlier in the ad:

“The diversity statement should focus on your commitment to a Just, Equitable and Inclusive Education. The diversity statement will be assessed based on knowledge, experience, application, and expertise as it relates to JEIE. The strongest statement will have an emphasis on the intersectionality between JEIE and a social identity or marker (social class, race, gender, sexual orientation, language, etc.)”

So, overall this is such an over-the-top litmus test that one does not even need to read the whole ad to know that. It will discourage any non-woke or even white person to  from applying. It also reduces the pool of candidates, which is never a good idea as this might overlook talent.  And talent is really needed given how poorly minorities are doing in CA.

Why we can’t say “pipeline” any longer

July 9, 2023 • 1:15 pm

Here’s a short piece from the Journal of the American Medical Association Open that explains why we can no longer use the word “pipeline” when referring to the progress of human beings from birth until adulthood. The word is often used when discussing ethnic diversity, referring to a pipeline from birth to adulthood and its concomitants: college, jobs, and so on. If the pipeline is meant to include college and one’s achievements there, as well as jobs based on those achievements, the people who leave that career path are said to instantiate a “leaky pipeline.”

Now we are told that we can no longer use the “pipeline” simile, because it’s not inclusive. But on the other hand “American Indian” is a term that’s okay again!

Click to read:

I’m just going to quote from the short piece and make one or two brief remarks.

For many years, the term pipeline has been used metaphorically by researchers and policy makers to refer to the progression of students advancing toward a science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) degree or a career in medicine. Past criticisms of the term pipeline highlight how students, especially those from historically excluded backgrounds, such as American Indian, Black, and Latino/a individuals, “leak” out of the “pipeline” for a variety of personal, social, financial (economic), or cultural reasons. For American Indian and Alaska Native individuals, the term pipeline is especially offensive. More specifically, this term is pejorative for communities where pipeline projects in the US threaten sacred homelands and water supplies. Many people will recall the resistance of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and their allies to the Dakota Access Pipeline. Recently, a new pipeline project impacting racially marginalized residents, including Black and low-income residents, living in the Southwest Crossings neighborhood of Houston, Texas, highlighted the continuing practice of divestment and displacement faced by these communities.

. . . .In place of pipeline, the term pathways has come into favor by many, including the AMA and the Association of American Medical Colleges. Pipeline implies that there is only 1 entry point and 1 exit, and frames career development as a passive process in which individuals are commodified as a resource to be delivered as a final result. Pipeline leaves out the contexts, complexities, and variations of the myriad pathways students may take in education from elementary and secondary school, through higher education, and on to a STEM or health professions field. Pipeline connotes extraction, transport, and removal from community, rather than investment in and nurturing of people and resources in place. Since many historically marginalized or minoritized racial and ethnic groups of students may take nontraditional or divergent career pathways, it remains critically important to use the more inclusive, accurate term of pathways. Use of pathways for this purpose communicates respect for students’ choices, agency, and career exploration.

Note first that the term “American Indian” is used. More on that in a second. What I am wondering here are two things. First, has anybody besides these three privileged authors ever objected to the use of the term “pipeline”—which is reserved for intellectual discussion of academic and social achievement—as insulting to their community? If so—and I do follow these things—I’ve never heard it.  Second, do the authors seriously believe that replacing “pipeline” with “pathway” is going to improve society? How, exactly, will that happen?  Are some “American Indian” and “Alaska Native” individuals who previously refused to discuss career achievement because the discussion involved the p-word, now going to participate eagerly with the new, improved word “pathway.”

I don’t believe it. what we have here is exactly what the authors decry in the next paragraph: “performative allyship”!

Equity, diversity, and inclusion efforts have been challenged by performative allyship and the persistent lack of commitment to equitable access from institutional leadership. Proclaiming representative diversity as the end goal establishes dominant cultural norms of tokenism, deficit framing, and devaluation of historically excluded students and their communities. The messaging must evolve to value diversity as a shared value that benefits individuals, communities, institutions, and ultimately, patients. Using pathways terminology can help move beyond representation to inclusive excellence. Medicine as a profession must decommodify the language around workforce development challenges and focus on the power of diversity and inclusion to enhance and improve medicine, primary health care and health equity.

But the authors’ entire article is an example of useless language policing—”performative allyship” from three privileged academics and physicians.  As for the rest of the paragraph above, it is so badly written that I am not sure what they are trying to say except that they are in favor of more diversity and less oppression.  Oh, and that medicine will improve when we substitute “pathways” for “pipeline”.  If you believe that, well, all I can say is, “Show me the data.”

One more point. For years now, the term “Indian” or “American Indian” has been considered pejorative itself, like saying “Negro” instead of “African American” or “black”.  Now it’s apparently back again:

Allies who do not identify as American Indian or Alaska Native, including influential medical educators, researchers, clinicians, authors, and journal editors in the US, should update their language with preference for the terms American Indian or Alaska Native.

The updating by the Language Police happens so fast that I can’t keep up with it.

Conor Friedersdorf on why mandatory diversity statements for academic hires are both wrong and hypocritical

July 9, 2023 • 11:00 am

Several readers sent me the article in The Atlantic below by Conor Friedersdorf, who regularly criticizes woke statements and initiatives in that popular magazine, and is thus on the road to being demonized as an alt-righter or even a Nazi. But, as usual, he takes a heterodox but eminently reasonable stand on an issue regarded as almost taboo: requiring academics to produce “diversity statements” (“DEI statements”) when applying for jobs or promotions. Click the screenshot to read, though it might be paywalled:

Friedersdorf begins by mentioning the case of John D. Haltigan, which I’ve discussed twice before (here and here). Haltigan wanted to apply for a job in the psychology department at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and, represented by the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation, argued that the required DEI statement at UCSC would violate his First Amendment right as it would be compelled speech.  Haltigan is asking the courts for an injunction that would allow him to apply without a DEI statement, knowing that his own statement would render him unhire-able from the outset. I wrote this before:

As I wrote in a previous post, Haltigan didn’t actually apply for the job, because he realized that his own statement would never pass muster with the faculty. But he did write and publish the statement that he would have used had he applied. It wouldn’t have passed muster, though, because it included stuff like this:

I believe that the use of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statements in evaluating candidates for positions in higher education and academia are anathema to the ideals and principles of rigorous scholarship, and the sound practice of science and teaching.

As Friedersdorf notes, this “is the first major free-speech challenge to a public institution that requires these statements.”  He muses about what would happen were it upheld by courts: everybody would require one, and they aren’t a violation of the Supreme Court’s ban on affirmative action for college admissions. But I think that if this case works its way up to the Supreme Court, DEI statements would be banned as violations of free speech. And that would be a good outcome, for I think that DEI statements are indeed a violation of free speech. As Freidersdorf argues, they act by “chilling” speech—by forcing applicants to hew to a particular interpretation of DEI, and that interpretation is not a King-ian “colorblind one”. (For more information, see my colleague Brian Leiter’s article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, “The legal problems with diversity statements.”

What surprised me about Friedersdorf’s piece were two things. First was the pervasiveness of DEI statements in American college hiring:

UC Santa Cruz’s requirement is part of a larger trend: Almost half of large colleges now include DEI criteria in tenure standards, while the American Enterprise Institute found that 19 percent of academic job postings required DEI statements, which were required more frequently at elite institutions. Still, there is significant opposition to the practice. A 2022 survey of nearly 1,500 U.S. faculty members found that 50 percent of respondents considered the statements “an ideological litmus test that violates academic freedom.” And the Academic Freedom Alliance, a group composed of faculty members with a wide range of political perspectives, argues that diversity statements erase “the distinction between academic expertise and ideological conformity” and create scenarios “inimical to fundamental values that should govern academic life.”

Second, I was surprised that the University of California system is still using DEI statement to weed out applicants before evaluating their academic credentials. Some colleagues at UC schools have told me that this is no longer the case, but I presume Friedersdorf checked the data before writing the following:

Perhaps the most extreme developments in the UC system’s use of DEI statements are taking place on the Davis, Santa Cruz, Berkeley, and Riverside campuses, where pilot programs treat mandatory diversity statements not as one factor among many in an overall evaluation of candidates, but as a threshold test. In other words, if a group of academics applied for jobs, their DEI statements would be read and scored, and only applicants with the highest DEI statement scores would make it to the next round. The others would never be evaluated on their research, teaching, or service. This is a revolutionary change in how to evaluate professors.

This approach—one that is under direct challenge in the Haltigan lawsuit—was scrutinized in detail by Daniel M. Ortner of the Pacific Legal Foundation in an article for the Catholic University Law Review. When UC Berkeley hired for life-sciences jobs through its pilot program, Ortner reports, 679 qualified applicants were eliminated based on their DEI statements alone. “Seventy-six percent of qualified applicants were rejected without even considering their teaching skills, their publication history, their potential for academic excellence, or their ability to contribute to their field,” he wrote. “As far as the university knew, these applicants could have well been the next Albert Einstein or Jonas Salk, or they might have been outstanding and innovative educators who would make a significant difference in students’ lives.”

At UC Davis, 50 percent of applicants in some searches were disqualified based on their DEI statements alone. Abigail Thompson, then the chair of the mathematics department at UC Davis, dissented from its approach in a 2019 column for the American Mathematics Society newsletter. “Classical liberals aspire to treat every person as a unique individual,” she wrote. “Requiring candidates to believe that people should be treated differently according to their identity is indeed a political test.”

People at Berkeley and Davis have told me that disqualification based on DEI statements is no longer used, but perhaps they were referring to their own departments. It’s odious, though, to prioritize these statements above everything else, and Friedersdorf says why.  The statement about doing other stuff to help society rang true to me because I spent a great deal of time as an associate and full professor being an expert witness testifying in criminal trials about the use of DNA evidence, helping public defenders—one of the great institutions of our justice system—and working for free.  I could have doubled my income taking cases (some people offered me $400-$500 per hour), but I always did it for free (except for airfare and hotel fees), so that my views could not be challenged on the grounds that I was profiting from them.  And I never worked for the prosecution, because public defenders need to be supported as the only bulwark poor people have to get justice.

But I digress: here’s why DEI statements are “anti-pluralistic”:

Mandatory DEI statements send a message that is anti-pluralistic. I believe that diversity and inclusion are good. I do not think that universities should reward advancing those particular values more than all others. Some aspiring professors are well suited to advancing diversity. Great! The time of others is better spent mitigating climate change, or serving as expert witnesses in trials, or pioneering new treatments for cancer. Insofar as all academics must check a compulsory “advancing DEI” box, many will waste time on work that provides little or no benefit instead of doing kinds of work where they enjoy a comparative advantage in improving the world.

And mandatory DEI statements send the message that viewpoint diversity and dissent are neither valuable nor necessary—that if you’ve identified the right values, a monoculture in support of them is preferable. The scoring rubric for evaluating candidates’ statements that UC Santa Cruz published declares that a superlative statement “discusses diversity, equity, and inclusion as core values of the University that every faculty member should actively contribute to advancing.” Do academics really want to assert that any value should be held by “every” faculty member? Academics who value DEI work should want smart critics of the approach commenting from inside academic institutions to point out flaws and shortcomings that boosters miss.

This is a long article, which not only recounts the history of DEI statements but suggests ways that they might even be made acceptable. But I don’t think they should ever be used, and in the end I think the author agrees, claiming that the free-speech costs are higher than the benefits of diversity statements (does any research show that candidates with higher DEI statements make better professors?):

The costs of mandatory DEI statements are far too high to justify, especially absent evidence that they do significant good. Alas, proponents seem unaware of those costs. Yes, they know that they are imposing a requirement that many colleagues find uncomfortable. But they may be less aware of the message that higher-education institutions send to the public by demanding these statements.

And here are five of the costs (words are Friedersdorf’s). The first one probably encompasses the biggest mistake that people are making with respect to all aspects of college. Increasingly, colleges are no longer a place to learn, to teach, and to get excited about learning, but a place where you are molded into a person who will improve society. That of course will change depending on which authorities define what is “an improved society”!

1.) Mandatory DEI statements send the message that professors should be evaluated not only on research and teaching, but on their contributions to improving society.

2.) Mandatory DEI statements send the message that it’s okay for academics to chill the speech of colleagues. 

3.) Mandatory DEI statements send a message that is anti-pluralistic. I believe that diversity and inclusion are good. I do not think that universities should reward advancing those particular values more than all others. 

4.) And mandatory DEI statements send the message that viewpoint diversity and dissent are neither valuable nor necessary—that if you’ve identified the right values, a monoculture in support of them is preferable. 

5.)  Demanding that everyone get on board and embrace the same values and social-justice priorities will inevitably narrow the sort of people who apply to work and get hired in higher education.

So why, in the title, does Freidersdorf say that mandatory diversity statements are hypocritical? Because they are supposed to promote diversity, and presumably diversity of viewpoints and ideologies, yet are being used to create conformity and stifle dissent. Or, as the author says,

. . . mandatory DEI statements are profoundly anti-diversity. And that strikes me as an especially perilous hypocrisy for academics to indulge at a time of falling popular support for higher education. A society can afford its college professors radical freedom to dissent from social orthodoxies or it can demand conformity, but not both. Academic-freedom advocates can credibly argue that scholars must be free to criticize or even to denigrate God, the nuclear family, America, motherhood, capitalism, Christianity, John Wayne movies, Thanksgiving Day, the military, the police, beer, penetrative sex, and the internal combustion engine—but not if academics are effectively prohibited from criticizing progressivism’s sacred values.

Supreme Court rules against affirmative action at Harvard and UNC

June 29, 2023 • 9:45 am

You didn’t have to be a genius to predict this one, especially if you paid attention to the Justice’s statements during the hearing. By a vote of 6-3, and strictly along political-spectrum lines, the Supreme Court struck down race-bace admissions at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. The three dissenting justices were Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor, with the majority including Chief Justice John Roberts and associate justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.

Click to read, though I found a partial version of the article archived here. It’ll be interesting to read the full decision, to which there’s a link below.

The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina were unlawful, curtailing affirmative action at colleges and universities around the nation, a policy that has long been a pillar of higher education.

The vote was 6 to 3, with the court’s liberal members in dissent.

The decision was expected to set off a scramble as schools revisit their admissions practices, and it could complicate diversity efforts elsewhere, narrowing the pipeline of highly credentialed minority candidates and making it harder for employers to consider race in hiring.

More broadly, the decision was the latest illustration that the court’s conservative majority continues to move at a brisk pace to upend decades of jurisprudence and redefine aspects of American life on contentious issues like abortion, guns and now race — all in the space of a year.

The decisions, though coming down to the same thing, apparently differ in the methods that the judges saw as discriminatory.  UNC didn’t use the “holistic” admissions procedure at Harvard, which the school defended vehemently (as did two appellate courts), but which used bogus “likeability” scores to discriminate against Asian Americans. (That these were mendacious was revealed by showing that the lower scores of Asians were given only by admissions officers who hadn’t met the applicants, not by those who actually interviewed them in person.)

The two cases were not identical. As a public university, U.N.C. is bound by both the Constitution’s equal protection clause and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars race discrimination by institutions that receive federal money. Harvard, a private institution, is subject only to the statute.

In the North Carolina case, the plaintiffs said that the university discriminated against white and Asian applicants by giving preference to Black, Hispanic and Native American ones. The university responded that its admissions policies fostered educational diversity and were lawful under longstanding Supreme Court precedents.

The case against Harvard has an additional element, accusing the university of discriminating against Asian American students by using a subjective standard to gauge traits like likability, courage and kindness, and by effectively creating a ceiling for them in admissions.

From the Wall Street Journal:

“Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. “The student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race. Many universities have for too long done just the opposite,” he wrote.

The court’s three liberals dissented. Society “is not, and has never been, colorblind,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “The Court ignores the dangerous consequences of an America where its leadership does not reflect the diversity of the People.”

Lee Bollinger, Columbia University’s president, expects five years of chaos before higher education fully adjusts to the new legal landscape, as committees and task forces—already in place at many schools—explore ways to employ income levels, socioeconomic factors and other race-neutral factors to maintain diversity.

Although long expected, the decision still was a shock to academia. “Nobody really believes it’s going to happen, even though all the evidence is right in front of you,” Bollinger said in an interview this month.

. . .But at oral arguments, several justices focused on another passage in O’Connor’s 2003 opinion, where she noted that minority enrollment had increased in the 25 years since the Bakke case.

“We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary,” she wrote.

The majority opinion in that case from a generation ago, Grutter v. Bollinger, didn’t say preferences could continue until “you’re satisfied that diversity has been achieved or something vague like that,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh told UNC’s lawyer. “It said 25 years in there.”

The Harvard and UNC decisions, 237 pages long (and bundled), can be found by clicking on either of the screenshots below.  which go to one pdf:

A lot will have to change, and even though schools may be in shock, they should have expected that this would happen and prepared for it. For prepare they will, trying to find workarounds that are legal. What exactly is legal will require a close reading of the decision.

Your take?  One thing that nobody should be is surprised.

Schools are already issuing letters reassuring everyone. Here’s Harvard’s (I left off some of the signatures):

 

The legality of diversity statements

June 1, 2023 • 12:00 pm

This piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education discusses an issue we’ve taken up here before: is it legal to require applicants for university jobs to submit DEI statements? The piece gives both sides of the argument, although I’ve long thought that such statements should be always be illegal on two grounds: they are irrelevant for nearly all academic jobs, and they violate the First Amendment because they’re a form of compelled speech.

When I first wrote about this, I thought that someone with standing should bring a lawsuit against a public university (such schools must adhere to the First Amendment), as diversity statements are a form of compelled speech as well as viewpoint discrimination, forcing applicants to voice certain approved political beliefs.

Now that lawsuit has been brought. As the article notes:

John D. Haltigan, the plaintiff, is being represented pro bono by the nonprofit Pacific Legal Foundation. He is arguing that the University of California system’s use of diversity statements in hiring violates the First Amendment and represents unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination. Haltigan wants to apply for a tenure-track position in the psychology department at the University of California at Santa Cruz and is asking the court, among other things, for an injunction that would allow him to apply without submitting a diversity statement. The university system has required diversity statements in applications for tenure-track positions and promotions since 2018.

As I wrote in a previous post, Haltigan didn’t actually apply for the job, because he realized that his own statement would never pass muster with the faculty. But he did write and publish the statement that he would have used had he applied. It wouldn’t have passed muster, though, because it included stuff like this:

I believe that the use of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statements in evaluating candidates for positions in higher education and academia are anathema to the ideals and principles of rigorous scholarship, and the sound practice of science and teaching.

Haltigan’s own “colorblind” statement would of course have led to his being rejected for the UCSC job, but he published it on a blog, and it was on those grounds that the Pacific Legal Foundation is representing him in a lawsuit.  Whether this gives him “standing” is not clear, but what is clear is that it will be hard to find somebody who can convince a court that they didn’t get a job because their diversity statement didn’t pass muster. That is what’s required to win such a suit.

Click to read: it’s free:

The Chronicle is fair in giving the pros and cons of requiring diversity statements.  First-Amendment arguments can be used for jobs in government, which include academic jobs in public universities, but it’s not clear whether private universities can require DEI statements if they still take federal funds. And even if they can require those statements, in my view they shouldn’t, for every college, public or private, should have policies that adhere to the First Amendment.

Three professors make the argument that diversity statements aren’t legal; one (Leiter) is my colleague at the U of C law school:

Public universities have a First Amendment right to have their own values and mission statements, said Zach Greenberg, a senior program officer with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which has warned that diversity statements could be used as political litmus tests. But colleges may not force students or faculty members to adhere to values and mission statements, Greenberg said, “if they’re in political terms.”

“So, a university may say that we are antiracist, we believe in DEI, but we also welcome those with opposing views,” Greenberg said. A university can even encourage faculty to share those views, as long as it doesn’t cross the line into compelling them, he said.

While private employers are generally allowed to practice viewpoint discrimination, public universities, like other public employers, typically cannot discriminate based on political beliefs. “A public university can’t require its faculty to have certain beliefs,” said Brian Leiter, a professor of jurisprudence and director of the Center for Law, Philosophy, and Human Values at the University of Chicago, who has been a vocal critic of diversity statements. “No matter how laudable one thinks the beliefs are, it’s not allowed. And that’s just true of any public employer. There are very narrow exceptions.” Courts have ruled that government can base hiring decisions on political viewpoints only in very limited cases, such as political appointments, Leiter added.

But do diversity statements require a particular political viewpoint? Keith E. Whittington, a professor of politics at Princeton University, said that diversity statements, as they are commonly used in academe, “definitely run afoul of these kinds of viewpoint discrimination concerns.” For example, Whittington pointed to evaluation rubrics from the University of California system that downgrade applicants who say they treat every student equally. The rubric used by the University of California at Santa Cruz, for example, gives applicants less credit if they describe “only activities that are already the expectation of our faculty such as mentoring, treating all students the same regardless of background, etc.”

But giving less credit to “color blind” applicants violates the First Amendment by privileging political statements that promise a form of affirmative action in academia. While schools can have policies for mentoring ill-prepared applicants, they cannot refuse to give jobs to professors who simply promise to afford everyone equal opportunities to learn.

There’s really only one one viewpoint given that touts the legality of diversity statements, and I don’t find this very convincing:

Brian Soucek, a professor of law at the University of California at Davis, has argued that diversity statements can be constitutional, if used correctly. He previously served as chair of a systemwide committee on academic freedom for the University of California that provided input for the university system’s latest recommendations on the use of DEI statements.

Soucek recommends that in order to avoid infringing on academic freedom, faculty members, rather than administrators, should determine how to judge applicants. In order to avoid comparisons to loyalty oaths, he recommends that colleges ask what applicants “have done or plan to do, not what they believe, when it comes to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion in their field.”

And regarding viewpoint discrimination, Soucek argues that the central question is not whether applicants are being judged on their viewpoints, but whether those perspectives are relevant to the position in question. An immigration-asylum clinic, for example, could legitimately ask about an applicant’s views on immigration, Soucek said, but it would appear to be constitutionally problematic if a law school asked an applicant for a bankruptcy professor position about immigration.

In Haltigan’s case, Soucek said, the University of California at Santa Cruz is hiring for an assistant professor of developmental psychology to enhance the program’s “long-established strengths in studying the lived experiences of children and youth from diverse backgrounds.” According to the job posting, the department seeks candidates whose research explores areas such as “cultural assets that promote healthy development in the contexts of inequities related to gender, ethnicity/race, social class, and/or sexuality” and “conditions and practices that leverage the psychological strengths of children from historically underserved backgrounds in the U.S. or other countries.”

For that particular position, Soucek said, “it would seem especially strange for somebody to come in and say, ‘I believe in colorblindness and refuse to see people’s race or ethnicity.’”

But I think Souchek is stretching it, for he’s giving an example that has been confected so that only those with a politically correct view of DEI could even apply for the job.  The immigration-asylum clinic isn’t as relevant simply because if the hired person does the job expected, there is no reason to deny him the job because he privately holds the “wrong” views about immigration.  There are plenty of people who can keep their political views out of their jobs.  The one requirement that holds for all job is simply is that people should be treated equally and fairly regardless of immutable characteristics like race, gender, disability status, and so on.   That’s simple adherence to civil rights law.  And even in the case of the “developmental psychology” job, what they should be looking for is people who can best deal with a variety of children. Do they really need to quiz applicants about their private views on race, gender, and sexuality?

But the worst part of this “pro-statement” argument is this. If people adopted Soucek’s rationale, it would result in job descriptions being tailored to those people holding the “proper” DEI views, or, indeed, views on any political or ideological issue that the school likes. I can imagine even biology jobs being tailored this way. But that would tilt all of academia towards the currently dominant ideology—exactly what we don’t want to do in a university, where free and open discussion is the order of the day.

The Leisure Fascists take over the American Physical Society, recommend no more booze at physics meetings

May 17, 2023 • 1:00 pm

The Pecksniffs aren’t satisfied with policing the language of science, but now want to regulate our behavior, too. And, by god, they’ve gone too far this time, for they want to put the kibosh on our BEVERAGES.

In the latest American Physical Society News (click on screenshots below), one author urges people to not drink alcohol at physics meetings. Not just that, but she seems to want alcohol banned at scientific meetings.  In this she’s bucking the tide, for, as the author notes, a Nature report last year showed that over two thirds of scientists think that alcohol should not be banned at scientific meetings.

Nearly 1,500 scientists participated in the online poll, which began on 20 December as part of a Nature story about reconsidering the role of alcohol in the scientific workplace (Nature 600, S86–S88; 2021). When asked whether alcohol should be banned at scientific conferences, 68% of those who responded to the self-selecting poll said no, 26% said yes and 6% were not sure.

That is, for every scientist who wants alcohol banned at scientific conferences, 2.6 scientists want it to stay. The democracy has spoken.

You can probably guess the reasons why Dr. Vriend wants it banned. First guess, then read the APS News article by clicking below:

Yes, you were right. I’m sure you guessed because “alcohol promotes bad behavior and harassment”, but did you know it also makes meetings less inclusive?

Here are the author’s reasons:

Many years ago, when I was a young graduate student in mechanical engineering and geophysics, I presented my first poster at an important conference. I was stationed at my poster, excited for discussion, when a colleague approached me with a beer in hand. I could smell alcohol on his breath, and he had clearly had too much to drink. For an hour, he loitered at my poster, asking inappropriate questions — and blocking my ability to talk to others, including potential collaborators or future postdoctoral advisors. I was deeply uncomfortable and uncertain what to do.

My story might feel familiar to many young scientists, and data confirms the relationship between alcohol and inappropriate behavior. Alcohol is linked to loss of inhibition, and research indicates that alcohol increases the risks of harassment, including in professional settings. A 2007 study found a significant association between the number of heavy-drinking male employees and a culture of gender harassment against women in a workplace. Of course, alcohol does not cause bad behavior on its own — any perpetrator is solely responsible for their actions — but its role as a risk factor is clear.

I’m prepared to believe all that, which is offensive behavior, and of course no woman (or person) should be subject to such harassment. But a simple conference statement that “harassment is prohibited and will be punished if it’s persistent and unwanted” (all conferences have these now), should suffice. Then someone could have gotten the guy off the scene.

Scientists are adults, adults drink, and people should be prepared to deal with drinkers.  In fact, science meetings are much safer than bars, for scientists are almost universally against harassment and there are plenty of people around to stop it, as well as ubiquitous conference policies to intervene and, if need be, show the harasser to the door.

Remember that scientific meetings are places not just to learn science, but to meet old friends and colleagues, schmooze, socialize after hours, converse and relax. Alcohol facilitates that, and not in a trivial way. It’s much easier to schmooze with someone you want to talk to by inviting them for a drink than just walking up to them. And alcohol might even facilitate scientific conversations since it lessens inhibition (people might, for example,  lose their fear of asking stupid questions!)

And, most important, you don’t have to drink if you don’t want to.

In the poll above scientists have clearly weighed the risks of drinking versus the benefits—and have voted for booze. I vote with them. (Remember, too, that many meetings are in hotels and you simply cannot stop people from drinking there. If there’s no hotel, people will repair to the bar.)  I have no beef with people who have personal reasons not to drink, nor would I stop them from trying, like Dr. Vriend, to persuade others not to drink. But taking the booze out of meetings is taking a lot of fun, as well as social lubrication, out of meetings, and it takes some chutzpah to do that.

It helps, though, if you can claim, as the author does, that banning booze helps promote diversity and a welcoming environment!

As scientists, though, it is not only our responsibility to do good research and advance our field, but to support the next generation of scientists. Science is more diverse now — in age, gender, sexual orientation, race, cultural background — than it was for millennia; we are moving away from the cliché of the cigar-smoking, whiskey-drinking clique of mostly white male scientists. I am not the only person not drinking alcohol — more than a third of US adults don’t, perhaps for religious or cultural reasons, or perhaps simply because science has shown that alcohol is not healthy. Still others may be uncomfortable drinking in work settings because they are struggling with alcohol abuse; after all, nearly half of US adults who drink, drink too much, according to a 2018 study published in the Journal of Substance Abuse.

Alcohol in professional events can stymie efforts to create a welcoming community, and scientists and students of all generations deserve better. In academia, as well as in the business and nonprofit spheres, we senior scientists are responsible for inviting young, diverse people into the field and making them feel comfortable and confident. We are responsible for upholding professional conduct and setting the right example for the younger generation.

I respectfully disagree, especially about associating booze with “cigar-smoking, whiskey-drinking clique of mostly white male scientists”.  (It’s always open season on white males, but of course cigars are banned at meetings and what’s on tap is usually beer and wine, not whiskey).  I know few scientists that fit that bill, and, in fact, Vriend is creating a sexist stereotype, but one that seems okay to most people, though it’s not.  The dragging in of white males here is a gratuitous slur, and has absolutely nothing to do with her argument, except that drunken males harass women more than the other way around. And what does being “white” have to do with it? Alcohol use and abuse is not a monopoly of white people.

There’s also the sly implication that “young diverse people” (read: blacks and Hispanics) won’t feel as welcome if there is booze afoot.  What evidence is there for that?

In the end, I guess, the only way to be welcoming and inclusive is to make everyone conform to a strict code of straitlaced behavior. Is that diversity? This article demonstrates, more than anything, that the woke are puritanical. Remember H. L. Mencken’s famous definition of “puritanism”: “the haunting fear that some one, somewhere, may be happy”.

And I’m curious why the APS would publish this.

h/t: Luana