Mandatory DEI statements are becoming the norm in academic hiring

This is the third or fourth front-page article on this topic in the last few days. I'm skeptical of basically everything about academic hiring, DEI included. But there's a concerted media blitz on this topic and the lack of quality conversation on HN reflects that the propaganda campaign is working.

Here's some nuance that I hope cuts through the mass media narrative-building machine:

First, it's not just stupid ideology. There are real economic incentives at play. I wrote a comment here on why Colleges and Universities view DEI as existentially important to their finances: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34672053

Second, value statements are nothing new in Academia. Many religious institutions require Faith Statements, and there are event Title IX carve-outs for these institutions when they receive federal funds [2]

Third, DEI statements are not all bad. Eg, when I applied to academic positions (none of which I took), my statement had everything to do with serving kids who arrived at college unprepared. Not a single mention or race, gender, etc. Instead of talking about starting "women in X" clubs or other BS [3], I talked about volunteering in public schools and gave anecdotes about how in my teaching I worked to keep kids in college who would've otherwise dropped out. Every place I applied said it was one of the best DEI statements they had seen.

My personal opinion: I am fully aligned with the criticism of DEI statements. Most DEI statements are cringe-worthy at best, I have no doubt in the heights of incompetence that can be found in university administration, and the entire uni hiring process is broken. But these statements can be used in a reasonable and responsible way at colleges who, in order to survive financially, NEED to start recruiting and retaining students who aren't in the "dual income upper-middle class parents with a 3.8GPA" mold. And, as an aside, if we're going to go after Loyalty Oaths in non-public-university academic hiring, let's start by eliminating Title IX carve-outs for religiously affiliated institutions.

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[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34672053

[2] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-34/subtitle-B/chapter-I/p...

[3] BS because they are often the sort of "I started/joined a club" thing that for most people amounts to zero actual effort put into helping individual students succeed.

>The way to fix that is obviously to bring in senior leadership

No. No, my goodness no.

The way to fix that isn't to continue to expand an already bloated bureaucracy that is uninterested in actual intellectual development. The way to fix it is to blow up the university system itself in this country.

One crucial detail to note with the research showing diversity improves company performance: Asians were categorized as diverse in these studies. But in all the DEI initiatives I've seen, Asians were either non-diverse and in some they were "negative diversity" and treated even worse than whites. So there's a mismatched between the definitions of diversity used in research and used in DEI discrimination.

It might help to speak of the specific alternatives created as a response to DEI. Would you care to share?

While some DEI policies are arguably discriminatory, many are not.

If you know that the general population is 20% race A, 10% race B, 30% race C, and yet your admissions are only pulling in 40% race C, 5% race B and 55% race A, you know something is wrong. Policies designed to keep your admissions closer to the general population would not count as discrimination because if everything is functioning correctly your distribution is going to at least resemble the gen pop distribution. Obviously it will never be a perfect fit, because various factors like location, education etc will influence your hiring pool.

A lot of people insist that trying to get your metrics to match reality is discrimination because they think it means someone who "doesn't deserve it" will get hired instead of them. The reality is that a biased pipeline might exclude you too, regardless of your gender or skin color, because a biased pipeline is probably filled with things like nepotism, people blackballing candidates off of Vibes(tm), hiring based on appearance, etc. For every time biased hiring benefits you, it probably hurt you 3 times and you might not have noticed.

The reality is that if you look at the raw DEI metrics for most large corporations they do not even vaguely resemble the general population. There's no rational excuse for that, you have to do something.