Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mandatory DEI statements are becoming the norm in academic hiring

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 407 posts

Re: Mandatory DEI statements are becoming the norm in academic hiring

#201

Post by hotpotamus »

rayiner wrote: post #91
wonderwonder wrote: post #30

This is the sort of thing that confounds me. It proports to be anti racist but it's the opposite, it treats minorities as a special lesser class that require protection from everyone else. It's the civil rights movement in reverse. It's already started bleeding into the workspace with mandatory training and verbiage that essentially says anything you do in your interactions with a minority if they accuse you of anyth…

> Another issue is that Asians while less in number than most other minorities are treated as white by DEI. Asian kids stand to be hurt the most by this. They want asian kids to view themselves as oppressed minorities (e.g. the California ethnic studies curriculum). They make thinly veiled accusations that our cultural traits (keeping our heads down and not complaining) is an effort to uphold white supremacy. But whe…

I have a really hard time trying to sort through the victim olympics of this statement to determine who wins the gold here. White is a slippery definition though - on that much I suppose I can agree. Ricky Ricardo would never have been allowed to be shown married to a white woman on TV back when his show was airing if Cubans weren't considered white too. Jews sort of come and go from being white as well, but I don't know the factors that determine that.

Re: Mandatory DEI statements are becoming the norm in academic hiring

#202

Post by thwayunion »

adamsmith143 wrote: post #25
shadowgovt wrote: post #5

> Professor Halley believes these innovations are “forced speech and viewpoint discrimination in the First Amendment context” That's an interesting viewpoint and I'm not sure how it squares with a university's First Amendment right to freedom of association. After all, they're at liberty to grant tenure to whomever they think is worthy of it, by their own criteria. If they think that a tenured physics professor's vie…

I think we'll find a pendulum effect where schools that lean far into DEI are going to lose out on top students, grants, researchers, etc. They'll have to readjust and swing back into pedagogy because it will be very clear that if e.g. UC Berkeley is training students in DEI and not as much focus is spent on the actual subject matter their students won't start great companies, they won't get PhD's at other top school…

> top students, grants, researchers, etc.... Nobel Prizes

LMAO. If you're hiring top-tier researchers there's enough cut-throat competition for revenue that DEI statements are marginal and everyone agrees no one gives a shit about Service (DEI is service). I'm sure there's an exception here or there, but even in those cases... Harvard/MIT have thousands of qualified candidates for every spot, and any of those people would do the job well. In a very real sense, Harvard/MIT/etc. pick who wins as much as the other way around.

> It's a guaranteed death spiral for them.

No, it's EXACTLY the other way around.

The schools where DEI statements matter the most in hiring may or may not even have an office of sponsored research (aka not even enough grant revenue to bother budgeting for a secretary or accountant to help with paperwork). They depend on tuition dollars.

Their student base is declining by as much as 20% in 2025 due to a collapse in birth rates after 2008, and they NEED to increase the size of the pie or they will die. The easiest way to do that is to recruit non-WASP students, since the WASP demographic is already college-saturated. Enter DEI. It's about $$$, not Ideology.

Ie, the reason many institutions are requiring DEI has more to do with the fact that they're terrified they will run out of money and blink out of existence if they don't manage to start recruiting non-traditional student demographics between now and 2030, and right or wrong (imo wrong btw) they think DEI focus in faculty is crucial to recruitment of certain degraphics: https://www.capturehighered.com/how-to-climb-higher-eds-impe...

Re: Mandatory DEI statements are becoming the norm in academic hiring

#203

Post by x86_64Ubuntu »

eat wrote: post #160

I wonder how much the appearance of these daily anti-DEI stories on the front page of HN has to do with this recession and workers' propensity to look for convenient scapegoats in the face of recent massive layoffs. Certainly looks to me that there's a lot of fear and anxiety out there that's being pointed in some... interesting directions. Don't direct that fear and anxiety upward in the org chart though, wouldn't w…

In defense of HN, the audience has been staunchly "libertarian" and all that entails for years. So being anti- something that seems to threaten the social power hierarchy is the norm. Before the every-day-anti-DEI posts, it was an Elon-fest were folks would tout "free speech" and other stuff. After Elon got Twitter and his free-speech absolutism turned out to be a disposable talking point, the HN audience largely moved on.

Re: Mandatory DEI statements are becoming the norm in academic hiring

#204

Post by Dig1t »

astrange wrote: post #62
wonderwonder wrote: post #30

This is the sort of thing that confounds me. It proports to be anti racist but it's the opposite, it treats minorities as a special lesser class that require protection from everyone else. It's the civil rights movement in reverse. It's already started bleeding into the workspace with mandatory training and verbiage that essentially says anything you do in your interactions with a minority if they accuse you of anyth…

> I worry about my kids if this keeps escalating. I dislike Desantis for many reasons but ended up voting for him specifically for this reason and a couple of other cultural issues. He's not going to do anything about it. He's going to start a few fights to get press attention, then give up on it as soon as they stop paying attention, since he's just running your state government as PR for a presidential campaign. (Y…

Welp, we have 2 choices, the person who SAYS they are against it, and the person who is an advocate for it. The only option we have is to vote for the person who at least says they are going to do something about it. That's just how American politics goes.

Re: Mandatory DEI statements are becoming the norm in academic hiring

#205

Post by wonderwonder »

cmh89 wrote: post #107
edgyquant wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>worry about my kids if this keeps escalating. I dislike Desantis for many reasons but ended up voting for him specifically for this reason and a couple of other cultural issues Yep. There’s likely going to be a huge blowback to all of this and the supporters will write it off as the country being full of racists. At this point I no longer care. This is draconian stuff.

[flagged]

Guess the majority of Puerto Ricans and Cubans that voted for him are confused as well?

Re: Mandatory DEI statements are becoming the norm in academic hiring

#206

Post by throwawaysleep »

eat wrote: post #160

I wonder how much the appearance of these daily anti-DEI stories on the front page of HN has to do with this recession and workers' propensity to look for convenient scapegoats in the face of recent massive layoffs. Certainly looks to me that there's a lot of fear and anxiety out there that's being pointed in some... interesting directions. Don't direct that fear and anxiety upward in the org chart though, wouldn't w…

Companies pretend to be sorry they are screwing you. DEI is proud to screw you.

Companies are dispassionate, like elephants and insects. You are worthless to a company.

You are hated by DEI people.

Re: Mandatory DEI statements are becoming the norm in academic hiring

#207

Post by cmh89 »

wonderwonder wrote: post #198
cmh89 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, the quality of life affluent white people in Florida is pretty great, especially when the US government bails you out after every big storm. Not everyone is an affluent white person though.

Pretty confident you could swap out the name 'Florida' with any of the 50 states and your statement would be true. Why is it an exception if it's true in Florida?

Because there is more to quality of life than the economy. My point is that you can vote on outrage on non-issues because the state caters to your needs while leaving thousands of others behind.

Re: Mandatory DEI statements are becoming the norm in academic hiring

#208

Post by xyzzyz »

jrm4 wrote: post #179
xyzzyz wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with the state banning books from public schools. No sane person would object from banning literal hardcore pornography from school libraries. It would be ridiculous to suggest that the state must allow the librarians to stock pornographic magazines on school library shelves. Same goes, for example, for books glorifying murderous regimes like Nazism or Communism. Since the government…

This is painfully wrong. There is absolutely everything wrong with THE STATE banning books from public schools. The state's job is to set up and maintain a structure by which localities etc. can more-or-less self govern their methodology of education and handle things like content, and e.g. fire your hypothetical school person who's glorifying Nazism. And the actual state should only be getting involved in deeply ext…

You are describing a theory of governance that has no bearing on the reality of today’s America. Over 20th century, it has been clearly and definitively established that not only the state, but also federal government have every right to interfere in the local schools. In fact, any legal authority of local schools to self govern stems directly from the state’s authority. This is unlike, for example, the states’ rights issue, where the states authority to govern comes from their individual sovereignty, and is not derived from authority of federal government.

You are, of course, very much aware of this: indeed, this is seen clearly where you write “more or less”. You clearly agree that the state and federal governments have every right to interfere, and set up limits on what decisions the local government can make about its schools.

Moreover, you agree that the state should only be getting involved in “deeply extreme cases”. Well, guess what: there is no objective way to specify what is “deeply extreme”. In fact, DeSantis and his supporters will tell you that the books being curated away are, in fact, “deeply extreme”. You are of course free to disagree, but that’s the point: your objection is not at all about the right of the state government to do the thing it is doing (you believe that the government should totally be able to do exactly what DeSantis has done), only about the contents of the decision, which is to say, whose ox is being gored. Why don’t we discuss that, instead of engaging in silly discussions about the extent and limits of governance, which in today’s America have been, for better or worse, definitively settled with practically zero chances of being changed any time soon?

Re: Mandatory DEI statements are becoming the norm in academic hiring

#209

Post by xyzzyz »

cmh89 wrote: post #184
xyzzyz wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with the state banning books from public schools. No sane person would object from banning literal hardcore pornography from school libraries. It would be ridiculous to suggest that the state must allow the librarians to stock pornographic magazines on school library shelves. Same goes, for example, for books glorifying murderous regimes like Nazism or Communism. Since the government…

>There is absolutely nothing wrong with the state banning books from public schools. When it's entirely politically motivated, there is. >No sane person would object from banning literal hardcore pornography from school libraries. I Conflating Desantis culture war nonsense with actual pornography is a bad faith argument. >ndividual parents, of course, are free to disagree, and they can show their children whatever th…

> When it's entirely politically motivated, there is.

Banning books glorifying Nazism is also very much politically motivated. Do you think it would be wrong?

Anyway, doing politically motivated things is the whole point of democracy. The entire idea of it is that we elect the government to do things on our behalf. It is absurd to suggest that government shouldn’t take “politically motivated” actions: that’s what we elect them to do.

> If Florida was still a democracy, I might agree with you. Desantis voter disenfranchisement and voter suppression programs have effectively ended that.

Please stop with the election denialism. Yeah, DeSantis totally stole the election, man.

Re: Mandatory DEI statements are becoming the norm in academic hiring

#210

Post by cmh89 »

Dig1t wrote: post #197
cmh89 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Everyone bans books. Sorry, I should have been more clear. Desantis is banning books for political reasons that have nothing to do with the education of children. > I think there needs to be a question of merit about what is taught, no? I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Experts on children's education are not calling for these politics-based book bannings.

A huge number of parents object though, which is why Desantis has so much support. Graphic depictions and descriptions of gay sex are of dubious educational value to a large portion of parents.

I'm sure they do, just like they were outraged by critical race theory being taught in elementary school.

I'm not arguing that Desantis is a bad politician. He understands how to create a boogeyman and then get people outraged over it better than any politician alive.

Post reply on HN