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MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions

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Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions

#651

Post by justinclift »

fsckboy wrote: post #574
justinclift wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For that, does "asians" mean people from the middle of asia (ie middle east), or people from south east asia (ie oriental)? Asking because the term has different meanings in say the UK (asian -> from middle east) vs Australia (asian -> from south east asia).

> people from south east asia (ie oriental) it is actually more common from the European and Middle Eastern context to call the (Turkish and Levantine and Arabian) Middle East "oriental"; in Israel, "oriental food" is hummus and felafel; the Orient Express train went to Istanbul. East Asian is the term for ... east Asians and of course the SE Asians you mentioned, and South Asian is the term for "India+Pakistan+" peo…

Wow, it's even more complicated than I realised. :)

Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions

#652

Post by bitcharmer »

kelipso wrote: post #480
WalterBright wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

STEM is something you gotta have some substantial internal motivation to do, such as doing it for a hobby. The kind of work I enjoy, you gotta really like it or it isn't going to work out for you. For example, I was taking machines apart when I was 7 trying to figure out how they worked. I'd break open resistors to see what was inside - just baffling grey dust. Eventually I took bicycles apart, then engines, then who…

Maybe decades ago when college students based their choice of majors on feelings or whatever that might have been true. Nowadays college students are much more practical. An obvious example is the rise in CS majors in the last decade. The notion of substantial motivation or hobby to go into STEM is absolutely ridiculous.

> The notion of substantial motivation or hobby to go into STEM is absolutely ridiculous.

You clearly don't have much exposure to the stem bubble. Overwhelming majority are passionate geeks.

Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions

#653

Post by lazide »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #487
GIFtheory wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first reaction to this news was, “fine, sounds like a silly requirement.” However, being a PhD graduate from a minority background, I really have to thank my advisor for the undergraduate outreach work he did, without which there is realistically a negligible chance I would have ended up with a PhD and a great research career. I don’t know what motivated him to do this work, but from a purely pragmatic perspective…

I once helped my advisor write a grant application and he put in some great outreach stuff in the DEI section of the app. What turns me cynical about DEI statements/sections is that after we won the grant, there was no money for that inclusion programming and nobody ever checked whether we'd really done it.

And that is the ‘performative’ part.

It’s similar to making everyone sort their recycling, and then just throwing it all in the same landfill when it actually gets to the dump.

Why not actually recycle?

And/or if we’re not going to actually recycle, why make everyone go through such a complicated song and dance and spend so much time on something that ends up not mattering?

Wait, this is a lot more applicable of an analogy than I was expecting.

Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions

#654

Post by ethbr1 »

mhuffman wrote: post #301
userbinator wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you really mean mortality as in "exercising the 2nd Amendment", or morality ?

I think they meant mortality as in the old guard that have power and use it to protect their point of view die off and are replaced with a new guard that does the same.

Definitely mortality.

For those unfamiliar with how org structures work in academia/tenure... (at least, assume this is still true)

Once attaining tenure, your promotion track focuses on faculty leadership positions.

These positions are selected by a combination of administration & faculty. It varies institute to institute, but strong candidates usually have backing from both.

These positions are almost always held by tenured faculty, as non-tenure is looked down upon for historical/political reasons.

Note: You only need to please 2 types of stakeholders: administration & faculty.

Ergo, the path to promotion becomes:

   - Make tenure
   - Politick with faculty colleagues
   - Politick with administration
   - Wait for someone to die
This leads to a weird bent where your bosses (faculty) are selected for their ability to navigate political winds and say the thing that most people agree with, moreso than being disagreeably brilliant.

Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions

#655

Post by kelipso »

bitcharmer wrote: post #652
kelipso wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe decades ago when college students based their choice of majors on feelings or whatever that might have been true. Nowadays college students are much more practical. An obvious example is the rise in CS majors in the last decade. The notion of substantial motivation or hobby to go into STEM is absolutely ridiculous.

> The notion of substantial motivation or hobby to go into STEM is absolutely ridiculous. You clearly don't have much exposure to the stem bubble. Overwhelming majority are passionate geeks.

Ha ha ha. I have a CS PhD and am friends with grad students in many other STEM fields. There are just as many who are "passionate", or whatever geeky losers who waste their life obsessing over minutiae want to be called, as there are people who are working on their degree for the sake of practicality. I would say the latter are in fact generally more successful.

Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions

#656

Post by kelipso »

refurb wrote: post #630
kelipso wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe decades ago when college students based their choice of majors on feelings or whatever that might have been true. Nowadays college students are much more practical. An obvious example is the rise in CS majors in the last decade. The notion of substantial motivation or hobby to go into STEM is absolutely ridiculous.

As a STEM student who actually did a STEM job (basic science research) you have to love it to make a career out of it. The pay isn’t fantastic and your career is basically doing the same thing (with more skill over time) for 30 years. With most of your work a failure. Even people who liked it often bailed. Programming is a bit different. You can make a lot of money, have varied jobs and just grin and bear it for the…

Have to agree the lower salary means you have to love it to spend years doing it. I moved to CS because of that mainly.

Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions

#657

Post by jimbokun »

skissane wrote: post #501
jimbokun wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I myself tend to avoid invoking the word, because I find it derails discussions from whatever the substantive topic was, into debating what that word means and the appropriateness of using it. This is the point I was trying to make.

I agree with you that it is best avoided whenever possible. However, I think the other points I made, that (a) some invocations of it are legitimate, and (b) it serves a useful purpose in labelling a real phenomenon, for which we don't have any widely accepted alternative label – still stand.

So avoiding using the word is a good heuristic, not an algorithm.

Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions

#658

Post by lazide »

lupire wrote: post #413
lazide wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s just being conspicuous that they’re doing the performatively ‘right thing’, something academia is quite familiar with. That way they can point to their statement anytime grant writers/sponsors need to show their respective stakeholders that they’re ’good folks’. Don’t worry, regardless they’ll still treat their grad students as terribly as the law allows (and a bit worse).

Did you know that prospective faculty also have to write a statement about their research, teaching, and service when they apply for a job? Is that also conspicuously performatively doing the right thing in those job responsibilities?

Do they have to actually follow through and deliver concretely on those things? With some expected concrete impact?

If so, then I wouldn’t consider them performative at least.

Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions

#659

Post by jimbokun »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #508
jimbokun wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't speak to the experience of being a non-white immigrant, but I've had other forms of this experience. It sucks to be in a job interview where you have a great skill set that matches the role and a lot of relevant experience, but it's clear that the only thing the recruiter cares about is that you could add gender diversity to a team. But this is the dominant strain of DEI thinking today, and why it's seeing…

> The over riding DEI principle is that every profession, every organization, every role, must somehow have exactly the demographic breakdown of the society as a whole. No it's not. That's a dumb strawman. "The over riding DEI principle" is not some guy that doesn't understand statistical variance, and doesn't accept any reason at all for fields to differ. But we should have a starting position of being extremely ske…

You start out disputing my claim…and end by reinforcing it.

Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions

#660

Post by jimbokun »

kenjackson wrote: post #543
jimbokun wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're a big university that is trying to serve the general public, reach students across all demographics, and produce research that is broadly applicable, not narrowly relevant to one segment of the population. A problem I've seen with this is the assumption that subjects like Physics or Chemistry or Mathematics are not broadly applicable, if it was a discovery or research by a white man. > We need to hire academi…

> A problem I've seen with this is the assumption that subjects like Physics or Chemistry or Mathematics are not broadly applicable, if it was a discovery or research by a white man. The science doesn’t know race. But determining which area to research can bias toward the benefit of certain groups.

Theoretically, yes.

But I see this more often assumed than demonstrated.

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