The Yale Problem Begins in High School

> I take it from this comment that you don't work in nursing

Correct

> or know anyone who does

Incorrect

> There is an active movement to get more men into nursing, though I don't follow nursing statistics closely enough to characterize its success.

Enlighten me.

> But in a classroom setting, the students should feel free to debate the composition of the moon.

No, they shouldn't, and I'll follow-up as to why below.

>Very quickly, the proposal that the moon is made of Vince Foster would be dismissed as false. This is critical thinking in action.

Given sufficient rhetorical skill and sufficiently many appeals to "open thought" or "questioning assumptions" or "viewpoint diversity" - in short, various forms of postmodern denial of the external world and the strict rules for reasoning about it - a sufficiently motivated student or professor will manage to make "the moon is made of Vince Foster" the center of attention.

We are living in the same world, with the same academic institutions, which was fooled by the Sokal Hoax, and we are also dealing with the human psychology of social proof, in which giving time and energy to considering an idea in-detail is considered evidence for the idea's truth (rather than evidence for its vagueness or logical complexity).

We cannot allow academia to be consumed with discussions over whether gravity is a social construction, especially not because right-wing partisans feel that only mostly owning the field of economics means that academia is engaged in conspiracy against them.

> Eating a burger with shit in it will likely kill you.

Preferences for death or risk of death are not exactly unknown, so, while that may be true, it isn't sufficient to establish the universal preference you've offered it to support.

> Should I have said cyanide instead to get the point across?

No, for the same reason. The problem isn't the example, the problem is that the point is wrong; whether or not one believes that an absolute morality exists (in whatever sense of "exists" makes sense for morality), you aren't going to any of its contents through universally-extent preferences, just as you won't for food, because preferences aren't universals.

I don't see any more subsequent examples. He appears to cite other people who claim to have data showing there's a "social justice problem", but if his citations have such data, he doesn't present it.

There's nothing wrong with what is being said here. Except that there are just as many "climate" issues that woman and people of color have to face, if not more. This person is cherry-picking discussions about race and gender and saying "it's horrible that climate issues are making it difficult for these white/male students from participating" but the same level of outcry doesn't exist even though in almost every other field you can say the same kind of thing: "it's horrible that climate issues in computer science are making it difficult for these students of color" and the same people are silent.

And I realize I am doing a form of derailing right now, because the matter at hand is white boys being heard. But we're actually talking about white boys being heard during advanced discussions of race and gender. And honestly I feel a little bit the same about it that I feel about girls being heard during advanced discussions of parallel CPU architectures. I wish there were more women who were in those discussions, but I don't think the solution is "just let them participate even if what they say is totally ignorant".

Frankly, most white boys are not skilled enough to participate in discussions about race and gender. It's not that there's anything inherently wrong with them, the pipeline is just letting us down completely. Most of us get almost no education in race and gender, while girls and people of color get it for free just because of their gender or race.

The solution in my mind is the same as the solution to getting more women and other disenfranchised groups into computer science. Everyone just needs to take a little bit of responsibility for the part of the pipeline that's one step upstream from them. You can't just have boys who have never thought about what colonialism actually feels like diving right into university-level gender politics classes. But as a university professor I think you can support summer programs for teenage boys to help them do really basic level gender analysis stuff so that when they do get to college, they can actually participate meaningfully with the girls, and not be seen as second-class citizens just because they have less direct experience.

We shouldn't think of these boys as "bad gender theorists" we need to broaden our understanding of what gender theory is, and make sure we are creating opportunities for disenfranchised novices to get involved.

But this naive affirmative action approach OP is advocating, of "just make sure the boys participate equally" is not taking the problem seriously. Proper affirmative action requires you to get in and take responsibility for your recruitment process and the social issues surrounding it.