A math professor who objects to diversity statements

we seem to have a tendency towards polar vortices of worldviews

First past the poll voting with primaries encourages (forces) politicians to go to the extremes. Ranked choice voting can reduce extremism. It’s also cheaper for tax payers as it eliminates expensive and wildly discriminatory/disenfranchising runoff elections.

Well, 'slippery slope' is a logical fallacy. The issue here, more precisely, is that without something to push against the US is inculcating ideas into the next generation of leaders that make ex-Soviets think "wait a second, this looks like home!".

It isn't a slope, this is literally rebuilding the dangerous parts of authoritarian bureaucracy - people who can't think and are then given unearned and easily abusable power over others by an objectively dumb system. The US is already there (as I like to point out, about half the US economy is government spending these days - that isn't a free market, it is some sort of mixed open-command economy); it is only a question of how far the ripples reach.

While I largely agree with what you said, about

there is this tendency of social activists towards conformance and centralization in the direction of authoritarianism

I don't think that's the case, actually. I suspect the tendency actually comes from liberalism, i.e. notion of individual freedom. If we are to give people individual freedom, then we are going to be neglectful of the power they attain as groups. This is easily observable in the economic sphere, where the rich people are getting richer under liberalism, and as you note, we are oblivious to the plight of losers.

Another problem that you note is that the conflict is treated as two sides. In my personal political philosophy, there are 4 basic (sets of) moral values:

1. Value of human being itself (this gives ideology of humanism, rejection of which can be considered to be extremist), i.e. rejecting harm to humans, accepting humans as they are, forgiveness

2. Value of individual freedom (this gives ideology of liberalism, which is inherently neither left or right, usually considered "center"), i.e. most individual rights, rights to freely socially organize, ability to act independently to society

3. Value of human equality (this gives ideology of progresivism/socialism, which is the core of the "left"), i.e. this includes democracy, the idea we should collectively all have equal rights in society, we should all have fair access to economic resources, also strong moral universalism (also in this context, this also includes DEI)

4. Value of culture and our shared past (this gives ideology of conservativism, which is the core of the "right"), i.e. we should preserve existing (social) structures and culture through institutions, we should have property ownership, and we should have authorities in place to preserve the potentially harmful changes in society

It's pretty easy to see that all these values are logically independent, people do however largely share all of them. However, each person sees the world from a slightly different perspective on each issue, moral dilemmas tend to occur where there is a disagreement.

For example, the tendency of society towards centralization and authoritarianism is just an expression of value (4). It happens more or less independently of values (2) or (3) (neither of them really values time, unlike (4)), although the proponents of (2), being by nature more permissive, oblivious to any social institutions and not defining the desired end result, tends to allow it to happen much faster (this is also called paradox of tolerance).

So while I agree when you write:

It seems the war between camps means that anyone trying to promote a more subtle or intricate message is shunned or ignored by both sides.

I don't think there are just 2 sides, there are at least 4 big sides, see above; however, treating problems as 2-sided is often practical in terms of acquiring political power.

I do however take slight issue with:

But the first challenge would be for the left to acknowledge the need for freedom and the right to acknowledge the need for average people to exist without fighting for scraps.

You're saying, people who value (3) need to acknowledge (2) and vice versa. I agree with this idea (that was actually why I developed the above philosophy, to understand these contradictions), but the practical reality is different than what you wish. Most of the left is more accepting of liberalism than liberals are accepting of the left (historically, at the French revolution, the liberal ideas were part of the left, while the right was only values of (4), like there should exist nobility). And in fact, the Western societies are now so heavily tilted towards values of (2) that the centrists proudly think they can ignore (3) completely. In fact, ignoring (3) by liberals is dangerous and historically led to concentration of power and fascism (which is an extreme of (4)), and that's what we observe (that's why anybody who wants power goes after (3) sooner before they go after (2) - often by falsely adopting (3) as an ideological goal, because individuals are harmless, it's the ability of groups to organize through shared value of (3) that is a dangerous antidote to concentrated power).

Most leftists can also easily see through what DEI is being promoted honestly, as being true to values of (3), and what is just an ideological BS (and whitewashing) designed to attain power. I mean, if corporations (true for many academic institutions as well) really wanted DEI, they would promote more democracy in the workplace (and transformed the corporations into cooperatives, for example). Claudine Gay affair is a nice practical example of these institutions (and their masters) showing true colors.

I hope more left-leaning people will pick up on the danger of this slippery slope.

They already spent the last few decades objecting to Joseph McCarthy. Denunciation of his evil, and celebration of his downfall to the "Have you no shame?" speech, was an element of modern leftist canon.

If they couldn't recognize what was happening every time they mentioned his name, they never will.

So I have to conclude that this is not just a left problem

In America, the conservative movement drove fealty to ideals and invented cancel culture. It wasn’t leftists insisting our money trust god or that small children pledge allegiance.

The left adopted it because people were committing suicide because of the systematic hate and discrimination.

The religious right wing invented it because their feelings were hurt if everyone didn’t believe in their same sky fairy and preferred economic religion.

I don't know. I recall listening to conservative thinkers discuss the left. I'm not talking about alt-right or hard-right bozos, I'm talking about Thomas Sowell and Bill Bennett. They consistently used words like "opponent" or "opposition" when describing fellow Americans with differing worldviews. Then they dive into the ideas.

While I don't recall, for example, President Obama or President Clinton saying things like "enemy" or "evil" when describing fellow citizens, we do have candidates and mainstream press using much harsher and more negative terms. I started watching a video from the self-avowed "left" discussing what the left ought to know about the right (pushed by the algorithm). The expert being interviewed was a professor of some sort, and in his very first answer he used the phrase "fight the enemy" and "understand the enemy" when describing how to deal with half the population of fellow citizens who disagreed with his ideology.

Hillary Clinton's memorable "basket of deplorables" is another. Don't get me wrong. Ten years ago, you wouldn't hear that kind of rhetoric from conservatives. But conservatism has been swallowed by alt-right Trump-style populism. I try to tune out the rants coming from the far right, so I imagine there are plenty of examples coming from awful sources. But this "enemy" rhetoric should never come out of the mouth of anyone respectable when speaking of their own countrymen or countrywomen.

I think I agree with you in that it is "not just a left problem" but there seems to have been a predominance of this "kill the enemy" rhetoric coming more from the left for many decades, than from the right. Part of the reason for this is that so many of the leftist playbooks like Rules for Radicals or Marxist strategy papers from Engels include "destroying the enemy" (encompassing eliminating morality, eliminating traditional family units, and fomenting violent revolt). Playbooks on the right, traditionally, have included understanding the rhetoric of the left, analyzing its ideas in terms of economics and personal freedom, and using debating tactics to "win" arguments.

I have to conclude that this is not just a "both sides" problem, but that one side spends a lot more of its energy on pushing toward the extremes.

So there is this tendency of social activists towards conformance and centralization in the direction of authoritarianism. But on the other side, total denial of any systemic social problems that results in increasing inequality leaving more and more people fighting for scraps as monopoly powers increase.

Basically, from both ends of the spectrum here comes the tendency of concentrating and monopolizing power politically or economically. We are losing agency as individuals actors in the society.

I'll support your theory when I hear, even one time, a DEI leader mention poor white people. I grew up in a home with a mother who was an alcoholic and drug addict, and who had a parade of abusive boyfriends. There were times we didn't have electricity or water because it was turned off. We never had a telephone in the house or a working car.

I studied Math in college. Literally every single other math major I knew had parents who were in the top 10% (or higher) in wealth. Every single one. About 1/4 of the majors went to the same magnet high school in the richest county in the state. Several of them had parents that were university professors. There was NOBODY remotely like me. I had to join the Army Reserve to even be able to afford to live and go to school since I had no family help whatsoever. DEI aggressively works against people like me, because I'm a heterosexual white male. I grew up eating government peanut butter and free school lunch and waiting for the day the foodstamps would come because then there might be some food in our house instead of none, but I'm told that I'm "part of the problem". They would very happily push candidates that come from wealthy backgrounds and have parents that are rich or professors so long as they aren't white or asian or jewish. There are many programs to back-door people that are black or hispanic into PHD programs (google pre-phd programs for under-represented), but when I tried to talk to and advisor about such a program they literally laughed at me - again because I'm white and a male which means I'm "part of the problem".

This is a very thoughtful and sensible reply, but it's going to get lost in the storm and that is a shame.

Personally I've always thought that a lot of these issues boil down to intentional misreading or lack of understanding of things unsaid. As an example, a whole bunch of people, for some reason, took "Black Lives Matter" to mean "Only Black Lives Matter", as if that was said or as if that was the point.

In your example with Einstein, to me it would be perfectly valid for Gould to have said "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. We should seek to find and develop those people." But of course I would worry that those same people who took umbrage with the example of BLM would assume that it would be done at the expense of others, or that it would be done to exclusively benefit in a zero-sum way the unheralded, unfound geniuses in Gould's example.

I run a small startup, fifteen people, and yes, I believe in diversity in hiring and team composition. If all things are equal, then I will hire the person that brings a diverse perspective to my team, not on basis of identity but on basis of opinion, basis of experience, and basis of perspective. I will not pursue that diversity at the expense of hiring the best candidate, and I suspect my perspective is shared a lot more than people think, solely because the "If all things are equal" part is unsaid and it is simply too easy for the cynic or bad-faith arguer to assume otherwise.

Consider that a diversity statement is a way to evaluate if the applicant has even given a moment's thought to the fact that Gould raised, by seeking to cultivate talent among folks otherwise shut out of the top tier of academia.

But that isn't the job of a professor, they are there to cultivate the talent of people who are already privileged enough to be a part of academia.

Gould's statement is empty - there is no way to quantify it, so everyone assigns their own value to his statement. You may think its more than X,000,000, I think its 0.

Who is right?

So now it's you and me arguing past each other because there is no way to agree. And millions of other people who have to manage it.

And yes, it does matter what the number is, because that is what is being done to justify X seats into many workplaces and universities. There is always a cost for training + development, and all of it can go to waste at any time.

The question is whether diversity statements accomplish the stated purpose. The people best equipped to write a good diversity statement are those who come from privileged, educated backgrounds and are familiar with the specific conceptual framework and jargon of DEI and social justice. It's less likely that someone who comes from a working class or non-Western background is going to be fluent in these concepts. If the goal is to hire more of those people, are DEI statements helping or hurting the goal? This is an empirical question.

The recent case involving Yoel Inbar at UCLA provides evidence that DEI isn't just about measuring a candidate's ability to teach and mentor people from diverse backgrounds. There is also a component of signaling commitment to a specific political ideology. I would suggest listening to the interview he gave below, where it's pretty clear that even though he's critical of DEI statements, a stance which ultimately caused him to lose a job offer at UCLA, he's still in favor of diversity and social justice. (Interview starts at 41:30)

https://verybadwizards.com/episode/episode-263-free-yoel

These days, with the omnipresence of internet, most people have access to most books/courses/materials/tutorials/etc if they want to, also mathematical abilities develop pretty early in life. You want to add diversity? Base it on egalitarianism as well. And by the way most top tier universities already cover all the tuition fees without a diversity statement involved, so if a person is truly a mastermind, there's no way they are left out.

We need to call "diversity" for what it really is: Discrimination.

You must consider an individual's race, gender, sexual preference, and other immutable factors in contexts that have absolutely no bearing upon the bigger matter at hand. That is racist and sexist, that is discrimination of the purest order.

And before someone accuses me of "white supremacy" or "patriarchy" or other buzzword nonsense: I'm Japanese-American, I'm Asian; I'm a "minority". I'm male, but more importantly a man as in mankind.

And no, do not dare call me a "POC". I'm an American man of Japanese heritage. Simple as that.

There is absolutely no reason why being White or Asian means they need to get inferior treatment and vice versa; there is absolutely no reason why men must be treated inferior to women and vice versa.

There is absolutely no reason why anyone must be treated inferior or superior to anyone else for reasons that do not concern their character or capabilities.

No, you’re wrong. Belief in “diversity” is the belief that many different groups/identities can contribute, and that none are strictly “best”. DEI is an effort to include more groups in institutions, in order to benefit from the mixing of ideas that results.

I still don't know what "diversity" means. The modern use seems to mean that a person is inherently more valuable if they have less common appearance attributes, regardless of their character or the soundness of their beliefs. The problem with inverting bias discrimination is it tends to promote identity-based entitlement rather than accomplishment-based pride. Identity-based entitlement is a universally unhealthy outlook. My view is any group that needs help should have support and resource groups for them while the bar should stay simple, consistent, and high for all. Without this principle, society will unravel and technological leadership will founder.

PS: I saw an academic department with unwitting ideological and morphological homogeneity that couldn't see their hiring and selection biases. It wasn't done with malice, but most PI's hired people who looked like them because the dept chair was so hands off that there was no leadership conferred, i.e., blinding resume or CV details. The dept chair was rarely in and basically just a salesman and occasional figurehead.

Targeting class diversity naturally gets you racial diversity anyways.

Not only that, the opposite doesn't. There are fewer black kids than white kids who grew up in affluent / middle class families, but not so few that you couldn't fill every diversity slot at an elite university with them.

Which defeats the proper purpose of the program. You're supposed to be giving opportunities to people who didn't have them and bringing different perspectives into the student body, not further advantaging the most privileged subset of the people who can check the important box on the form who grew up in the same neighborhood as the other elite students.

We got told to accept a less promising candidate for an internship program based on their "racial diversity". It was discovered later on that their wealthy father knew the CEO from when they both went to Harvard. Our DEI program had just given an opportunity to a child of a privileged background, apparently based on the color of their skin, and this was something we were meant to be proud of and totally wasn't nepotism. After that I've refused to engage in DEI schemes which don't consider class, and there are few which do.

It seems a bit silly to ask academics to enhance DEI initiatives. These are initiatives created by administrators to solve issues that administrators have caused.

Some suspect they’ve gone too far and want to make sure they won’t be the only ones holding the bag. “Look, they signed the papers too and all agreed to participate, don’t blame just us”.

The issues DEI tries to solve run far deeper than being caused by administrators.

Thanks,i agree its best to look at it directly.

But i do wonder what lines like "Clearly formulates new ideas for advancing equity and inclusion at Berkeley and within their field, through their research,..." mean

What does it mean for a math professor to advance diversity through their research?

Like i could maybe get it for the arts or even some social sciences, but what does that look like for math?

I think we can call that an ad hominem attack:

"This person sounds like other people I don't like. Therefore I don't like him."

It was a norm in Soviet Union that to advance academically you had to produce work that somehow endorsed communism. It was very good if you were able to put some citations of Lenin or Marx into your completely unrelated work at minimum or better to produce complete body of work that somehow academically promoted communism even when you worked as mathematician.

Of course many people understood that it is all bullshit but had to play along to have a meaningful academic career. Of course any obvious political dissent was observed and punished.

Therefore I think that it is not about what may or may come next but first about the clear absurdity of this forced ideological conformity itself.

But he is quite specific in fact and I'll recommend to read it and think about it.

The U.S. (and the West more generally, to some extent) has its own history of enforced ideological conformity, viz. the Red Scare. It's not something that's inherently limited to Soviet Russia or Maoist China, it has happened here before. The concern is thus quite justified if only on that basis - and yes the ideological basis of the McCarthyist Red Scare was somewhat different to the current trends, but this does not really alter the underlying dynamic.

That pattern is not in evidence here. He seems very level about the whole thing, and much different than your caricature:

“ At the same time, the stakes were never nearly as dire as those in the society he’d left. As he put it, “Unlike in the Soviet Union and today’s Russia, it appeared that no one was sent to a labor camp, prison, or psychiatric ward. Another big difference with the Soviet practices was that to have the support of a few colleagues was often enough to stem the tide.””

He explicitly says he is concerned that it is sloppy, damaging thinking, but does not claim an analogy to the Gulag.

The mistake here seems to be the somewhat naïve suggestion that the Soviet Union only took its path because the wrong people happened to find their way into leadership, rather than recognising that attempts at coërced ideological purity always seem to follow the same path historically no matter how well intentioned the ideology might have been.

Some patterns are so self-evident and prophetic that the end results are axiomatic. In tech, one example is “let’s add encryption backdoors so the Good Guys can Save the Children”. There is no doubt how that will end. In society, when a junior administrator can _force_ a greater mind to parrot The Message about the Current Thing (under the threat of removing their livelihood and making them radioactive) that heralds the end of free speech and free thought. Those who lived under a dictatorship know the pattern too well.

People born in Soviet Union are very good at detecting propaganda, because they learned to recognize what the system did to them. Americans have never learned this important skill. As someone born in a foreign country (not USSR though), I have a very well developed sense of when the government is lying to me. In my opinion, Americans are extremely easy to deceive.

“Even if one is required to say ‘I passionately believe that water would certainly wet us, as fire would certainly burn,’” he wrote in his resignation letter, “the routine affirmation of one’s beliefs as a precondition of making a living constitutes compelled speech and corrupts everyone who participates in the performance.”

An echo of how Rudyard Kipling was recently stripped out of Roald Dahl's Matilda because the idea that people might enjoy his literature has become offensive.

The referenced poem is, aptly enough, on the theme that reality will still be there regardless of what your ideology says.

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,

By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;

But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said:

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew

And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true

That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man

There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.

That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,

And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins

When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,

As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,

The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

(There are other verses: https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_copybook.htm )

I grew up in the Soviet Union, where people had to affirm their fealty to ideals

Well, a scary % of the DEI professionals I've come across also self-identify as communists, so not sure if they view that as a bad association.

> “the routine affirmation of one’s beliefs as a precondition of making a living constitutes compelled speech and corrupts everyone who participates in the performance.”'

Very well said and it serves as a corollary to Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

By making people affirm some belief, that affirmation itself becomes a target and ceases to reflect that belief in the real world. Even those who would normally act on that belief eventually twist it into an empty performance because they're forced to by their less scrupulous peers, just to keep their jobs.

Capitalism is also incompatible with meritocracy, otherwise how to explain that the children of rich people will have better education and socialization than the rest of the population? Do they have more merit simply because of the womb they came from? Are they better than an equally capable person born in an underprivileged neighborhood?

I am familiar with diversity statements by institutions, but what would a diversity statement from an applicant consist of, what would be expected? for example, declared alignment with the institution? or statements about one's own "diversity"? just trying to get a grasp.

Are they insisting on them for PhD applicants now too?

It's the Kendi school of everything is racism.

What makes you think only white ladies require these? That wouldn't be true of my school where that office is quite diverse. Are you saying that non-white people would never do something like racialize admissions and hiring? because I don't believe that

"Silence is violence" would fit in very well in George Orwell's "1984". If you're not proclaiming the party line incessantly, you're an enemy of the people.

The NLRB has come out against secret ballot elections:

https://www.mwe.com/insights/nlrb-abandons-primacy-of-secret...

Secret ballot means you vote your conscience. Open ballot means you vote the way the proctor tells you to, or else.

Interestingly enough, Jonathan Haidt is a proper full professor, unlike Tim Urban and Greg Lukianoff. I'm curious how he navigates the university culture.

On a completely opposite ideological side, back in times of Alfredo Stroessner's dictatorship in Paraguay (clearly fascistic, and I don't use that word lightly), any public officer making any public statement whatsoever necessarily had to include in such statement some kind of praise to the dictator, no matter the ocassion.

Commencement speech of the public university? Stroessner had to be praised.

Dedication of a school somewhere in the countryside? Stroessner had to be praised.

You were a general and were giving a talk to the troops? You had to include some praises of Stroessner.

This was mandatory and closely checked to test your alignment to the regime. You failed to do so? You were guaranteed to lose your position and maybe begin to be watched by the secret police and informants.

So I can very well relate to Barvinok's fears and experience.

It's still a thing in China when applying for PhD programs, at least in some Unis in Beijing. Idk if it occurs once you're already in, or just at the application.

Your fourth paragraph doesn’t make logical sense.

The title says he objects to diversity

I don't know if the title has been updated in the last 15 minutes, but the title currently says "A math professor who objects to diversity statements". Not "to diversity".

Cool I'll keep that in mind as my friend slowly dies from a hereditary condition but can't get disability because he's never been able to work. Glad things like healthcare and corruption are actually just little nuances.

Do American people generally place more value on the ability to call elected officials names, rather than having proper health care, and solving regulatory capture and corruption? Is such a stance wise?

Perhaps you lost a friend there, because he pushed for your opinion on a matter where you disagreed. Silence-is-violence-speak is meant to scare people to agree, and when they object, like you did, it is even more harmful.

Imagine two friends, with different opinions on a hot topic, leaving their opinions aside, not bringing it up, because they realize that it makes no difference. In the small world, in relations between people day to day, there is value in leaving politics out of interactions. This is fairly well established in the workplace, but I think it goes about social settings and friends too. If you push for someones opinion, be prepared to accept it as a legitimate opinion. Otherwise, don't ask for it.

I’ve been in that situation. In my experiences the person is looking for a fight and won’t back down until they find one. Even if you came out in support of Hamas it probably wouldn’t have been enough and they still would have gone off a rant. Some people are just filled with hate and can’t stand it when someone try’s to avoid being their target.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240113224328/https://www.theat...

"Diversity statements are akin to brainwashing techniques used by religious cults to out heretics."

I would strengthen this statement to say that it is a brainwashing technique, and is employed by a religious cult.

The only beneficiary of a forced apology is the authority figure's ego.