MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions

but is there anyone that actually defends these DEI statements with a coherent argument, or can you point me to one online

There was a recent debate on this[1] and even the debater for the pro DEI statement side (that they could find) admitted that DEI statements that were just ideological pledges were wrong, and he was only in favor of statements about concrete things you did to advance the DEI agenda (eg. "I did a, b, and c in my previous position to enhance DEI in my department"). He argued that was justified because DEI (at least the principles, not necessarily the specific policies like affirmative action or whatever) were ostensibly things that the university cares about, and therefore they were fair game to ask for.

[1] https://opentodebate.org/debate/are-dei-mandates-for-univers... (it's a podcast but there's a transcript tab on the page)

There's a pattern that I see come up quite often, and it's really common with any discussion about things that involve diversity and inclusion efforts. I don't know if there's a specific term for it, but it happens roughly like this:

First, someone identifies an opportunity to improve diversity, equity, or inclusion in some way. DEI statements in academia, codes of conduct in open source projects, some rules around topics or specific language on a social media site, I'm sure you can name some other examples.

Now, this new thing may be a way to address the problem, or not. The problem it's trying to address might have been well understood or not. One way or another the idea gets some momentum.

Next, bigots get wind of the thing and start concern trolling and spreading FUD about it. Everything they say is carefully crafted with a veneer of respectability and plausibility. Any accusations are re-directed. There are people who are motivated and very skilled at making plausible sounding bad-faith arguments. The plausibility of course also convinces people might not intend to be making a bad faith argument, and so are authentic in their indignant responses to accusations of acting in bad faith. Still, the entire point of the arguments was ultimately to disrupt efforts to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion, and to uphold inequality. In some cases these bad faith arguments can end up being a vast majority of the discussion. They make up maybe 80% (not an exact figure) of the comments in any given HN thread about anything tangentially related to DEI for example.

The people trying to make a positive change who have been at it for a while are generally exhausted with trying to deal with the torrent of bad faith arguments, quickly recognize the pattern of them, and ultimately often end up serving as fuel for further bad-faith arguments.

In the end, it becomes nearly impossible to have a productive good faith discussion about whether the original idea is good or not, or how to improve it, because nobody can disentangle legitimate contributors and arguments from the torrent of bad faith actors who are ultimately just trying to disrupt the process. Meanwhile, communities that ought to be served by the initiative are often left standing around watching their value as people or rights to participate equally being thrown around as an abstract subject of ideological argument.

Without any better options, people double down on the original idea because it was at least made in good faith.

It might sound like all of that is an argument against DEI statements- after all, I just spent several paragraphs talking about why it would be hard to have a reasonable good faith debate about it. Still, I think that in this situation they serve a couple of useful purposes. First, I think that it moves discussions around concrete improvements away from a forum where they can be undermined by bad faith arguments and toward a form where individual authors of DEI statements can focus on concrete actions. It incentivizes action over getting mired in these bad faith arguments. If one is to write specifically about how they have or will work to improve DEI, then they necessarily must move past the bad faith and concern trolling arguments and pick some specific actions. Second, I think that it acts as a useful honeypot for people who simply can't act in good faith. If you can't identify any dimension at all along which you will work to improve DEI for any group, then it's hard to see how you can further that part of the mission of an organization. Finally, while it is virtue signaling, that doesn't necessarily need to be bad.

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, if professors know that performing such duties helps them get promoted, perhaps it’s not a bad policy, as long as inequities exist in academia. There are so many other pressures on young faculty, outreach may be something that is hard to justify spending time on unless you have to do it in some sense.

This is the premise:

There are outstanding systemic inequities at every level of American society. The threat these represent to our long term survival and prosperity are such that we are keen to at least acknowledge and mark our and our prospective collaborators’ efforts to improve the status quo.

Maybe you don’t accept that. Maybe it’s asking for a virtue signal in service of performative posturing. Maybe this requirement had adverse effects (evidently it has.)

But there is a through-line of coherent logic, and the total failure here may be cause for alarm.

is there anyone that actually defends these DEI statements with a coherent argument

When Richard Dawkins spoke at UC Berkeley in 2008, he argued that "raising awareness" about feminism by changing how we speak and think has changed society for the better. (In the same discussion, he seeks to do the same for children's freedom from their parents' religion.) There is no doubt that Western society has changed how it treats and speaks about women.

That said, Dawkins has in more recent years found himself opposing identity politics as they seek to change language usage and perceptions of gender.

A lot of things have "said purpose" and the "real purpose" because of which such absolutely kafkaesque things survive in organizations.

The said purpose of-course is to make sure that the candidate is "committed to diversity". We can argue all day on whether a statement is in any way good measure of it. It really isn't. I have helped people write such statements and we have always written it with cynicism and great contempt for the people who might actually read it.

But the "real reason" which such concept found a great foothold in modern American universities is that it kind of acts as top kill to get rid of potential people who might actually ask questions critical of various ideological positions that the university's internal bodies might have. You either want a radical zealot or at least someone who is willing to play along for his own career-maxing goals. What you don't want is someone who can call the emperor naked. Diversity statements are excellent way to achieve this as I have seen people write one line diversity statements such as 'I don't have one as I do not think diversity is important'. Such person IMO is more intellectually honest and would be a good addition to faculty position but will not be hired.

You are right that there is tons of resentment around the DEI BS that people have to go through. Tech companies have esoteric training problems with terms like "allyship" and "bystander effect" and all that which basically smells rotten to lot of engineers but they cynically complete those trainings any ways.

I was on the academic job market recently. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the process of writing my DEI statement was a valuable learning experience. For example, I read several interesting papers about randomized controlled trials testing the effects of various classroom interventions. I also have some more clarity about the relevant philosophical questions, both due to reading others' thoughts and due to being forced to articulate my own thoughts.

For those reasons, my feelings toward DEI statements are more positive now than they were before. Still, on balance, I think I'm inclined to favor removing DEI statements from faculty applications.

I'm not a big fan of mandatory DEI statements, but if I were trying to make a positive case for them, it might go something like this:

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. We need to hire academic staff who can leverage their own personal, intellectual and cultural background to help us become a "bigger tent", but also put themselves in the shoes of others unlike themselves in the course of their teaching and research.

To that end, part of our hiring criteria are based around evaluating your ability and willingness to help us fulfil that part of our academic mission. Please provide a statement explaining how you have demonstrated this in your career to date and how you'd continue to do so at the University of Utopia.

I dont like the DEI industry, but affirmative action is good. Slavery ended 150 years ago and its disgraceful that so many African-Americans still live zero wealth, poor jobs, with second rate schools and healthcare. Many/most corporate jobs really dont require a lot of unique skills, its good that employers have a preference to hire under represented minorities, hopefully it'll help improve society for all of us.

There are a handful of contexts where it makes more sense, like for a HR person potentially, without trying to bring ideology into it that's the place it makes sense since that's the place where you can actually implement the concepts.

There are contexts where it is mandatory but makes no sense, like NSF Fellowship Applications where they're asking someone who is just finishing an undergraduate degree and is proposing a research project that ends in a PhD -- who has effectively no influence on hiring or even culture really, and is supposed to focus on the technical aspects and personal aspects of who they are. There are things you can fit in there, but let's say the mandatory question is worded so confusingly that it is hard to even guess what to write about. What, you're going to hire people to assist you in your research under DEI principles when you have no control over the budget? It's just confusing for someone in that position.

Staff hiring? That kind of makes more sense honestly, trying to be non-ideological here. Those people can actually hire people and create a culture that is either DEI positive or not, whatever you believe about whether they should.

seemed very "1984" to me

In Australia, there was a recent introduction of "Acknowledgement of Country" at both the federal and state government level. Universities and other large institutions are also "doing their part". For example, in video call meetings with more than 'n' people, a manager will read out a statement for a minute at the start of the call acknowledging the "traditional custodians of the land upon which a meeting or event is to take place". In other words, the Aboriginals that white men largely wiped out over 200 years ago. See, e.g.: https://www.indigenous.unsw.edu.au/strategy/culture-and-coun...

So now, the descendants of those white men feel guilty and have to make a little speech before each meeting. It's the most dystopian bullshit I've ever had to personally participate in, ever.

This leads to some truly bizarre moments, like a recent meeting where half of the people were Indian subcontractors physically overseas, everyone else was a first-generation immigrant to Australia, and we had to acknowledge the traditional custodianship of the area by a tribe that was completely wiped out and no longer exists, not even descendants that might appreciate the gesture.

Similarly, in another meeting an "aboriginal elder" was chosen to speak because of their native heritage. That would be nice, except that this person was pasty white, blonde haired, blue eyed, and had freckles. Literally a white person making other white people feel guilty for something their common ancestors did!

The whole thing is an absurd farce played for political points, with no substance of any kind behind it. Actual aboriginals are no better off if in some city office a bunch of people in suits verbally self-flaggilate for sins committed hundreds of years ago by people that they might not even be descendants of. (Half the population is either a first or second generation immigrant!)

I wish there was some term that is the equivalent of "realpolitik", but for race relations, so that I can more succinctly express my disdain for this type of divorced-from-reality behaviour.

Applications for faculty positions typically comprise a CV, copies of 2-5 significant papers you’ve written, 3 letters of recommendation, a research statement, and a teaching statement. As I understand it, the DEI statement is supposed to go along with the last two.

Much of what is said about DEI statements can also be said about the teaching statement. At R1 universities like MIT, people are hired for tenure track positions based on their past (and future) research, and many teaching statements can be recitations of current hot topics (“flipped classrooms” “active learning” etc). But good ones (with evidence in letters of rec and CV) indicate that the candidate really has practiced what they propose to do in the future. To be clear, at MIT I’m sure a stellar teaching statement won’t get someone hired, but a patently false or over the top “I don’t care” one might give people pause.

As I understand, DEI statements are the same. If someone wrote “my philosophy is that we should perpetuate the structures of power and mediocrity created by focusing on wealthy pedigreed individuals rather than ability and potential found by looking in unusual places” that would raise eyebrows. Conversely, if they instead said “I TA’d for an international computational neuroscience summer school that gave opportunity to impoverished students from Africa and Asia”, people might think “That’s cool!”

But I think that most academics who are motivated by equity are not interesting in reading a ChatGPT DEI statement.

I do think that the conversation around this is really unfortunate. I find little philosophical difference between what people are looking for with DEI statements and what goes into college applications from HS students, but I hear fewer people advocating for getting rid of those essays.

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).

but is there anyone that actually defends these DEI statements with a coherent argument

hi! that would include me, and I would ask you to think about the following question at the moment: You are wondering if a widely utilized, and VOCALLY critiqued practice is supported by anyone...then why would it be continued to be practiced. Generally what I have found is there are two sides to this - one of which is just trying to do their job and one of which is trying to shout over those arguments.

I say that because when I talk with people like yourself who are asking sincerely, they kind of go 'oh'. I think you nailed the 'how to write a good DEI statement' articles are saying simply - this is required, here is how to do it. Looking more broadly, articles like that exist for most pieces of the academic hiring process simply because the process feels opaque and is steeped in traditions that are not well communicated. You can find them for things like the academic cover letter, the difference between resumes and CVs, research statements, teaching philosophies (which have nothing to do with philosophy), etc. The people actually involved in the DEI statement process not to talk about it, in part because they don't want to get screamed at by uninformed people and in part because they are busy.

Speaking personally, as an academic, DEI statements or some equivalent are as are many things - incredibly effective when used well and just taking up space when not. DEI statements are not, or at least not supposed to be, 'WHY IS DIVERSITY GOOD'. They aren't supposed to be that simply because anyone can write that and its useless for evaluation. We don't want some 1984 article of faith because its unhelpful to the actual goals of increasing equitable opportunities, which is still a big problem. What DEI statements are meant to be is more along the lines of 'here is how I practice inclusion' which isn't all that far removed from 'here is how I'm not actively an asshole'. That might trigger the same response from others of 'why' - but I (and others) think that's short sighted. The goal is to understand how you go about your work in a way that increase rather than restricts the opportunities of people of different identities. Academia has strong and tall power structures in classrooms, labs, etc. Making active efforts to hire people who are not going to use those power structures to reinforce a long history of racism and sexism is (from my perspective) the only way we can make history history. Someone who can identify why only using classroom examples about baseball or american football is an educational problem, and not do it, is beneficial to the overall enterprise because it (in increasing classroom equity) ensures equal opportunity and that we identify the best students - rather than the biggest sports fans. Bigger picture, they show not just things about DEI but about a much broader range of skills around engaging with people that are critical to effectiveness in all the roles a faculty member plays. We already fight that most graduate labs look very homogeneous. The problem isn't that they do, the problem is that those norms reduce opportunities for everyone.

To add some color, I'll give actual examples from DEI statements/conversations that help me do the job of hiring better:

* One candidate wrote in theirs about how title IX was unconstitituional and is unfair to men by giving spots to women who are bad at math. Great, you can have that opinion, but our school is going to flag you as a liability risk because we are legally compelled to comply with title IX

* Talked about their experience in a truly punishing lab environment as a person of color and how important that was to their success and 'tough love' as their mentoring style. Again, think what you want but we care and are evaluated in part by our completion rate for phd students - we also care about their well being and success and experience tells us this wouldn't.

* Last one got asked in an interview about initiatives to 'diversify' the participant pools in medical research to do more representative science. They saw it as a non issue, and then brought up several tropes about Black people in particular - including trouble being on time, holding still, following instructions and how that could negatively impact their research. Again, sure agree to disagree between them and me, but NIH cares and if you blow off NIH requirements you aren't going to get grants and aren't going to get tenure.

If you want to see how it works in practice, here are the rubrics I developed for my department to evaluate DEI statements (which are totally blinded as are all application materials): https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/3agby1zv572km6bjuiymd/Teachin...

I’m still looking for the single person who was offended by the use of master as the default git branch name. I never found them but everyone got to pretend like they were making a difference for a little bit.

These statements are the exact same thing to me.

My wife enjoys going to these struggle sessions on DEI for academics (she has a PhD in neuroscience). She’s of the opinion she hasn’t been oppressed and in fact has regularly given opportunity because of her sex, so when lecturers try to reason with her or she has to write these letters they don’t know how to respond. I’ve attended a few where they try to convince her she’s repressed and the entire room just starts arguing she is. Weirdest discussion to witness, especially when the real repressed folks are probably the janitors and security. Many never even had the opportunity to go to school

I think it would help to know what you think a coherent DEI statement would be.

DEI statements as you're hinting can be quite performative and full of pagentry and then things slowly drift back to how they were all along.

DEI as a field is new, and I find they are not given as much slack as non-DEI people figuring out something new and getting slack for taking risks and improving messaging.

I can try to find a few links that helped me understand more. One thing was the difference between DEI and EDI.

It seems EDI (equity, diversity, inclusion) in that order might be an updated revision that can help.

I don't know if it's just DEI, or other types of politics, but there seems to be a recent trend towards "you must say you agree with us, otherwise you are ostracized".

My personal opinion/observation is that as corporate and academic has trended towards less direct confrontation/arguments, this has resulted in a lot more passive aggressive behavior such as statements like these, some debatable "codes of conduct", etc.

I mean no harm when I say that it has always felt like a more "feminine" way of fighting and arguing vs "masculine" like physical or verbal arguing. Perhaps it's a result of more women in the workforce and leadership.

I'll take a shot at a strongperson argument...

DEI statements are important because they show individual awareness of historical inequities and current biases that form modern society.

In an organization that wishes to promote more equitable outcomes for society and its employees, ensuring that existing/prospective employees are aware of biases that might color their own judgement is useful in counterbalancing them.

As a consequence, a DEI statement at the time of hiring or promotion is useful in encouraging self-reflection and promoting DEI.

... that said, from a personal perspective (and with apologies to anyone working in HR), they seem like the typical "moderately good idea that's run through the HR cost center grist mill and comes out as the most unimaginative, milquetoast check box possible" implementation.

When we have all the infrastructure for an even more oppressive and intrusive total information awareness regime, DEIs are so far from 1984. DEIs are just dumb paperwork and formal procedure on top of the usual facade of hiring and promotion rigamarole

I don't know if or not this is "coherent," but my experience has been that the type of person to oppose something like this is more often than not the type of person we were trying to filter out anyway. There may be some false negatives of course, but in terms of keeping the klan from high positions in your institution, this sort of thing seems to work.

Not really the same thing but I worked for an organisation which had as a policy that every single team meeting had to have diversity & equality as a recurring item for discussion. 95% of the time this just meant the meeting lead saying "So...diversity - anyone got anything to say?" and then we moved onto the next item after a short silence. But every once in a while someone would raise something that might not have otherwise been brought up. It's a very crude instrument but it probably did get people to think a little more in that direction and maybe led to a little more awareness overall. The other standing item was health and safety which had a similar outcome.

There was a very simple reason for them: to hire more non-Asian minority faculty. Just as with SAT scores, if you evaluate candidates numerically, Asian faculty will take ~50% of the spots and Black faculty will take ~1% of the spots. But if you add a job requirement of "has helped do DEI woo for Black students" then it's a lot easier to justify hiring the Black candidate.

It’s easier to defend than you think. It’s enough to show that there was no proof of that they didn’t work at the time of introduction, and there was indication that it maybe worked. I definitely don’t have the knowledge to prove or disprove it. If there is no evidence now about its efficacy, it should be removed. Unfortunately, I’ve seen 0 discussions which mentioned any hard evidence. Even in this case, it was removed because of feelings according to the link.

But what if you disagree with the underlying political ideology of DEI, ie the mandating equality of outcome over equality of opportunity? That's apparently a political opinion you are not allowed to hold if you are going through those application processes (and I have seen the same in the promotion process of large corporations). Is that acceptable? Do I also need to be a registered democrat to apply? I think it is morally bankrupt and reminiscent of the hollywood blacklist days.

I can see a DEI program as promoting the social values of an institution. A position that I once had was this. If all ethnic groups have a bell curve of intelligence. All things being equal, the ethnic groups would have similar distributions of academic qualifications.

So if a particular ethnic group is disadvantaged in a quantifiable way. Then applying a factor to who is accepted into the academic programs. Would bring in people at the upper ends of the bell curve across the different ethnic/racial groups.

In other words, all things being equal across quantifiable ethnic/racial opportunity. This would bring in the top tier candidates across all ethnicities/racial groups. And if all ethnicities/racial groups are equal in intelligence. Then it would bring in the top tier candidates across *all* ethnicities/racial groups.

Remember the phrase "HR is not your friend?"

HR is also a hilariously complex set of rules and bullshit that isn't that easy to manage in large organizations. Separating out DEI specifically from HR allows companies and organizations the ability to have employees ensure that the obligations of companies regarding their legal obligation towards discrimination laws are met without interfering with core HR functions. Companies haven't been adopting DEI out of the goodness of their hearts. There's a direct financial advantage when you can prove to a court that you have provided direction on issues regarding diversity. It's just a collection of CYA, and their DEI statements are an extension of that.

support kids and young adults with extra classes, trainings

If that support is available to those who need it irrespective of race, sex, et cetera, sure.

Targeting underserved populations is one thing. Restricting access based on protected characteristics is illegal under any commonsense interpretation of the law.

I am almost certain that by 2100, the current worship of skin-deep diversity will be relegated to the cabinet of ancient curiosities, along with lobotomy, bell-bottom jeans and haruspicy [0], and people will worship something equally weird, but momentarily fashionable.

Diversity is not really a value. If it were, it would have been recognized as such millennia ago, because already the Egyptians and the Babylonians knew what mixed societies looked like. It is not as if American diversity is a new phenomenon, never seen before. Rome or Alexandria in 1 AD was very diverse, and so was India when Buddha was still a young and naive prince.

Real human values, virtues and vices don't change that much across centuries. You can still discern courage, truthfulness, sloth or compassion in stories written three thousand years ago and half a world away. Diversity as a pseudovalue is a modern fad of American origin, partly conjured into being by ancient American racial problems.

Even many American allies (Japan, Taiwan, Poland, Finland, Denmark, Turkey, Argentina, Israel etc.) don't bother to even pretend to worship at that DEI-emblazoned altar, so dear to the good professors of Berkeley. Countries with more distant political systems like the Arab sheikhdoms or China probably don't even understand what the word is supposed to mean.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haruspex

Were the intentions behind colonialism good, too, in your opinion?

By using DEI as a metric you end up doing the complete opposite of “optimal use of everyone's talent, irrespective of their colour, sex and/or identify…”

I had a dinner with someone directly affected by MIT's recent slashing of DEI. At one point they mentioned that they made sure a venue had chairless locations and shuttles with lifts for baby strollers. Someone else at the dinner said "for disabled people too, right?" The person who worked at MIT organizing events reacted like they had never once considered disability access. The term "inclusion" should not be co-opted to mean "exclusion".

"The path to hell is paved with good intentions"

I think the more important question is: are the intentions to get actual results, or just to sidetrack anything that would take actual effort with 'but we have DEI statements'?

I don't understand how this crap got into America of all countries

People might be surprised how dumb top universities can be. When everyone is biased to thinking they're the best, it pretty easily creates tunnel vision.

If you see yourself (or your group) as a victim it's easy to rationalize rather extreme measures to "fix" the world.

The intentions behind a lot of these things are good but the sensitivity of the subject has made it hard(er) to have a healthy discussion about these issues.

Decades of institutional discrimination.

I'm a white upper middle-class dude, and there used to be a time where it was only guys like me that got into prestigious schools, and had a chance at landing influential jobs - while others would either get silently rejected, scolded for trying, or simply laughed out of the office.

So while the intentions for DEI were good, the reality might be that they've regressed back to initial problem. Should some people be rejected, simply because they're overrepresented? And must your workers write/sign a statement that basically says "I, [name], hereby agree that discrimination is good if it is for the greater good."

Race is a distraction from the ultimate divide: class. IMO, every policy that wants to promote equality should revolve solely around class.

In every place on earth, richer upper-class people are more advantaged than those from the lower classes. Every social policy should focus on lessening that gap (I recognize that the gap can't be closed entirely).

I'm European too and I can assure you that non-white people are discriminated at the admission stage to top European universities. Not via race, but via name. It's well known that universities and landlords reject people because they have a Muslim sounding name.

We have DEI in Europe too, but here it's increasingly codified into law.

Yes, the US is obsessed over race. That's because Americans are traumatized. I agree it's not a good thing. However, diversity in university admission is a good thing. There are many different ways to have diversity. Diversity is not easy to achieve and since it's sensitive topic it's often not done right.

The American obsession with race is deeply rooted in historically having a large, enslaved underclass that was kept down using racial justifications and against which there is still measurable bias across all areas of life (hiring, police stops, criminal sentencing, etc.)

It’s not unique to America but it is a major differentiator from other countries.

A key thing to note is that many homogeneous countries are extremely racist but don’t notice it because it doesn’t hugely impact day to day life. A mot-so-malicious example of this is that when my brother went to Korea to teach English, the parents wanted him (a white man) instead of the Asian American who was born in America and also going to the same Ivy League school. Obviously there are much less fun examples of racism but that one was… interesting. In the US that level of open racial preference would have been considered socially unacceptable, especially among the upper middle class college set.

Which sort of goes hand in hand with the idea of white privilege. If I grow up dirt poor, with uneducated parents, in a rural dirt poor region where there wasn’t anyone except other white people in a 100 mile radius for me to be favoured over, apparently I’ve still benefited from some sort of systemic or inherent bias in favour of myself on the basis of race. Which apparently needs to be corrected and puts me at a disadvantage when applying to certain schools or jobs.

killer robots won't care about your race

that is not necessarily true... while i agree with most of your sentiment, this statement is specifically why I believe everyone is racist, and nobody knows how racist they are if they only live in a homogeneous place. "this" being not understanding that being race-blind also being blind to correcting disparate treatment.

Regardless, DEI went off too far in the track of identity politics instead of correcting all forms of socioeconomic disparity so wtv. I am not surprised that you could not see the best argument in all the noise and the chaos.

It’s not American - just leftists. It’s not race either - only blacks. It’s racial favoritism parading as racial equality.

Germans hate being associated with a Nazi movement they never stood for even though it was their country. I don’t want to be associated with this racial superiority either even though it is, in fact, my country.

I think the modern-day conflation of the philosophical notion of diversity with “diversity of skin color” / “racial diversity” is actually harmful. When we speak of diversity today we often imply a sort of supposed-deserved reparations toward the “minorities.” Obviously there are so many incorrect aspects of these assumptions, but many people in power, perhaps all, have accumulated guilt that needs an outlet.

Diversity, the platonic form, is about diversity of thought, opinion, and experience. It is about improving our ability as a group to solve the problems we face by introducing alternative perspectives and viewpoints. It has nothing to do with race or gender necessarily but demand for diversity greatly outweighs the supply and as with all measured things, measuring the number of “diverse” hires has ceased to be a meaningful metric. Granted, it never was a meaningful metric as such, but it has become actively harmful in modern day.

I think DEI as implemented is worse than this. It’s a calculated, prepared defense against the possibility of future bigoted behavior.

Corporate America (which increasingly includes universities whose primary business is endowment investment) don’t just want to wash away our past, they want to ensure they can keep operating business as usual.

DEI is insurance. Yeah the bad thing may happen but we paid for it before hand so we are insulated against further repercussions.

nearly everybody agrees that it's a good target to aim for

You mean nearly everybody agrees in your circle, because you can easily find strong opposition if you bother to look. And that’s after making saying the opposite out loud a career-ending offense in lots of places, kinda hard to not agree with it if you want to remain employable.

DEI exists in countries with no racist past. Does it make it aby better? Also DEI exists in places that were historically very diverse, like the Balkans (a mix of ethnic, culture and religions) and it did not help, actually, because it is highlighting the differences that we worked for hundreds of years to integrate. Fortunately there was no significant impact around here as people were wise enough.

You actually explained the need for DEI.

>Yet if some HR person would interview me, a white-skinned guy, and then my best friend, a black-skinned guy who has African/Japanese ancestry, I'd definitely be placed in the same "bucket" as the white Dutchies around me and my friend with the black Dutchies, despite him and I actually having identical experiences and mindsets and not really having anything in common with the Dutchies.

If they're putting you two in different buckets, how likely is it that it's to do something with one bucket and something else with the other? I imagine that, on average, the white-people-who-have-nothing-to-do-with-each-other bucket is going to fare better than the black-people-who-have-nothing-to-do-with-each-other bucket.

DEI is meant to counteract that. It's concerned with the initial surface-level nonsense because the initial surface-level nonsense, driven by socioeconomic and political structures and implicit bias, is what keeps HR et al. from being able to reach deeper and make conscientious calls vis a vis diversity of thought.

As an Asian, the DEI idea and how it was executed puzzled me as well.

Apple's first VP of diversity said [1]:

“Diversity is the human experience. I get a little bit frustrated when diversity or the term diversity is tagged to the people of color, or the women, or the LGBT.”

“there can be 12 white, blue-eyed, blonde men in a room and they’re going to be diverse too because they’re going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation.”

She had to resigned [2] for saying so. That really confused me, isn't what she said... true?

[1]: https://qz.com/1097425/apples-first-ever-vp-of-diversity-and... [2]: https://nypost.com/2017/11/17/apples-diversity-chief-lasts-j...

I identify very strongly with what you've written here.

A guy who studied at Eton and a guy who grew up in a rural village in Uganda couldn't be any more different regardless of whether they can both tick a Black African box on an application form.

The same is obviously true of a guy from a poor part of Glasgow vs. a guy who studied at Eton, regardless of whether both could tick a White British box.

It's so far from any reasonable sense of truth that I feel like I'm in some sort of bad acid trip whenever the topic comes up. To me, the act of trying to categorise people in this way is in and of itself horribly racist.

I guess what I'm trying to get at in this strange ramble is that ultimately DEI should be focused on diversity of thought, and not just superficial characteristics, yet it never works out that way.

I think you're missing the point of DEI. The advertised purpose of DEI is to counteract racism. It's easy to be sympathetic to that objective if you look at recent history. For example, watch a movie made in the US as recently as the year 1990, and you'll see a stark under-representation of anyone Black. It's hard to chalk that up to different education levels, because it's not like acting requires formal education. Let's face it, it was racism. And this racism pervaded every industry, having inter-generational effects that compounded over time. The idea of DEI therefore is to act as an opposing force.

My main problem with DEI is it's corrosive to the social fabric. To constantly remind people of ethnicity is not a good idea. It should not be front of mind all the time. A shared civic identity should be front and center. There's also an anti-egalitarian anti-individual aspect to DEI thinking that I dislike. And the third thing that puts me off about DEI is the people who run these programs seem to be over-represented by ideological extremists and racists. Black supremacism type ideas are tolerated in these circles when they should be resolutely discarded as ethnonationalist nonsense. It is hard to fully support it until they purge themselves of such personalities.

It's "DEI by photography". You need to see DEI when you look at a photo of a group of employees.

"This is, of course, understandable as an initial reaction, but my problem is that all the DEI shenanigans never get past that initial surface-level nonsense"

It is literally all only about the surface-level - the surface of the body, the skin color. Defining diversity by this single trait is the opposite of diversity in my opinion, which your story shows quite well.

There's a hegemony that controls vocally-progressive places like San Francisco, big tech companies, and universities.

People who espouse DEI also tend to espouse slogans like "psychological safety" and "bring your whole self to work." Unfortunately, those slogans are as thinly constructed as the Diversity example you called out: it's code for privileging particular groups of people who look trendy in recruitment materials and PR. If I actually brought my whole self to work, I'd be fired.

Ironically, people who are critical of such policies don't feel psychologically safe. They don't want to be prejudged to be assholes, who then don't get invited to parties or get managed out at work. So, people in predominantly progressive spaces don't say out loud that the emperor has no clothes.

When DEI was first introduced, its champions insisted Diversity would be broadly constructed - that it was about enhancing creativity and identifying blind spots. Instead, it too often really means "we want a token {black, gay, etc} {person, club, etc} because it's fashionable." Bring a totally different perspective and life experience but superficially look like the majority? "Sorry, that's not Diverse enough."

If these spaces actually welcomed diverse ideas (and skepticism in the scientific method sense), perhaps we could learn from the good parts of diversity and build a society that works better for everybody. Instead we get Affirmative Action dressed up in newer clothes and whispers to trustworthy friends "can I tell you what I really think?"

It's amazing how shallow is the "Americanized" DEI perspective when you look at your country of origin and its neighbors. Former Yugoslavia is, comparatively, not very large, but it contains a whole lot of very diverse groups, sometimes so that the "melting pot" occasionally starts throwing angry sparks around. But to them, you're all just... "white". And thus your life experience must be also "white" and "privileged", right? Right?

Sometimes I really want to take all those privileged campus kids and their little twitter accounts and throw them into a Total Perspective Vortex.

It isn't just modern news, people tend to be intellectually lazy on any topic they are emotionally invested in.

Just look at the fallout from Harvard professor Roland Fryer publishing a study (after hiring a second set of grad students to review the data because he was himself surprised by the results).

People didn't react logically, with proportionate arguments, reasoning or counter data. They reacted emotionally, forcing him to get police protection, suffering calls for his resignation, and worse.

An actual argument involves more annoying to fudge (and admittedly, harder to compile) data like frequency, normalization against population or historical averages, geographic localization, etc.

We've seen that even these aren't that hard to fudge. Selection bias, p-hacking, mobbing researchers who publish politically unpopular results as a deterrent, etc.

What you need is basically the opposite of that. Replication of controversial results in preregistered studies by independent researchers trusted to be honest by both sides of the controversy. Refuting results you don't believe to be true using evidence rather than silencing the original authors. A culture of good science.

How to get that is a different question.

I do not find the argument that “newspapers be newspapers” excuses this, when it clearly only goes one way, and very forcefully at that.

And therefore it would be extremely interesting to find the origin of this push. Is it systemic, i.e. always present in some form due to humans’s generous nature? Is it due to more people living in cities that we have to organize in such a way (DEI-Covid-Feminism-GW or ostracization)? Is it, as the conspiracy theorists say, a small group of influential people? Is it the Russians who sponsor those groupes to divide us?

In [1] there's:

> Like other recent live-action remakes—such as The Little Mermaid and the upcoming Snow White—some users accused the studio of "going woke" by modernizing the original story.

> They'll make the hunter an evil White man, Bambi's mom will be a message about incel rage and Bambi will also be black," wrote @NintendoFan729.

That's this Tweet: https://twitter.com/NintendoFan729/status/170756134256606837... – 5 likes, 641 views. From some random anonymous account with 322 followers and an average of about 5 tweets per day.

Yet here it is, cited in a major magazine, as evidence of ... something or the other.

[1]: https://www.newsweek.com/disney-modernized-bambi-remake-spar...

They don't do this already? Who would possibly object? Why would any student attend an institution that didn't require it?

Obviously I'm not in academia, but to most outsiders this is really obvious stuff.

- Embracing diverse viewpoints

If you read this as having some academics embracing Flat Earth viewpoints, it is obvious this will not happen. The devil is in the details, what does "Embracing diverse viewpoints" even mean? Science usually drives to unique conclusions, not diverse interpretations. How many correct and diverse viewpoints exist about E=m*c^2 ?

Committing to long-term, foundational research

Here I would respond that academics are prone to looking down on applied research, but it's also incredibly important. Think of new programming languages, new types of chips that will enable future computational workloads. New ways of using or optimizing existing technology... Or even empirical research to validate the effectiveness of current industrial practices (something people often don't do, or don't do rigorously enough).

Not all research needs to be "foundational". Not all applied research needs to happen in industry. Many academics would actually benefit from climbing down from their ivory tower more often.

As it is, a huge percentage of research happening in academic CS circles would probably call itself "foundational" but is actually very much divorced from reality and useless. Just people trying to increase their citation count with an incremental extension to some widely-accepted idea.

Does "external influences" include the American Communist Party? How about the Chinese Communist Party?

If everything is a priority/mandate than nothing is.

Most of those have been around for decades. Some of them are legal requirements, at least in some contexts. Some are required by research funders and similar organizations. Some must be included in a teaching statement, which became a popular requirement a decade or two before DEI statements. And all contribute to the administrative bloat everyone likes to complain about.

A declaration of support for those line items would be more impactful if it came from the university administration.

There is a huge difference between trying to counter institutional prejudice in order to improve the quality of the student body and work being done, and whatever you think a religious “pledge of allegiance” is.

A pledge to God?

The mishandling of DEI doesn’t invalidate the need to fix broken systems which fail to select the best people instead of those who score highest in easily gamed and inherently biased metrics.

If students uttered a DEI statement every morning in their homeroom classes over the Pledge of Allegiance to a flag, we'd all be in a much better place culturally.

That's a mischaracterization. No one is _for_ inequality. The opposition you speak of is _for_ race/gender blind meritocracy. Anyone with a little knowledge of economics understands that groups of people cut across any dimension will always have different outcomes; Russian Americans earn more than French Americans, Japanese Americans earn more than Fillipino Americans, taller people earn more than shorter people, etc.

No one thinks inequality is desirable. The opposition you speak of think it's unavoidable. And bad public policy will have effects that make the situation worse for everyone.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40267817.

Intelligence is largely hereditary (people's intelligence is generally unlikely to be significantly higher or lower than that of their parents).

So if the parents were high quality academic students, there's a far higher than average likelihood that the same will be true of their children.

(The same is true for athleticism, and no-one would be surprised or think it was unreasonable that LeBron's son was offered scholarships just for who his father is.)

Why can’t we be against both legacy admissions and DEI admissions?

Let’s eliminate all the forms of unfair bias.

Legacy makes a lot of sense from an admissions standpoint. Having rich/connected peers is the main point of harvard for everyone else applying. I think what people have a problem with with DEI is that it largely seems counter to their goals of maximizing prestige and career success of graduates.

The notion that any of us could ever *be equal* has always annoyed me at how obviously absurd it is but I’m glad to see this has been written about before. It’s like we’ve already descended into 1984 territory and we’re all spouting about “equality” because it’s the “right thing to do” even though we all know it’s not physically possible. Equal opportunities are not enough, or so it would be said, because history! Well.. the historical period I care about!

And then we all act shocked when someone turns to violence to force people to grapple with reality

Jesus Christ. What a dark story.

TL;DR - a dystopia where anyone with an "advantage" is "handicapped" to make everyone "equal". Advantages such as intelligence and beauty must not be used to let anyone get ahead.

It was adapted into a short film - 2081 - and it's very very good. It's free on this site: https://www.teaching2081.org/watch-the-film#form

To quote the link, and by golly does it seem germane to the topic at hand:

In the year 2081, the Constitution dictates that all Americans are fully equal and not allowed to be smarter, better-looking, or more physically able than anyone else. The Handicapper General's agents enforce the equality laws, forcing citizens to wear "handicaps": masks for those who are too beautiful, earpiece radios for the intelligent that broadcast loud noises meant to disrupt thoughts, and heavy weights for the strong or athletic. George and Hazel Bergeron have a 14-year old son named Harrison. He takes after his father, who is highly intelligent and physically strong. The government removes Harrison from his home. His parents are barely aware because of Hazel's low intelligence and George's mandated handicaps. George and Hazel watch a ballet on TV. Some dancers are weighed down to counteract their gracefulness and masked to hide their attractiveness. George's thoughts are continually interrupted by the different noises emitted by his handicap radio. Hazel urges George to lie down and rest his "handicap bag", 47 pounds (21 kg) of weights locked around his neck. She suggests taking a few of the weights out of the bag, but George resists because it is against the law. On TV, a reporter struggles to read a bulletin and hands it to the ballerina wearing the most grotesque mask and heaviest weights. She begins reading in her natural, beautiful voice before switching to a more unpleasant one. Harrison's escape from prison is announced, and a full-body photograph of him is shown. He is seven feet (2.1 m) tall and burdened by three hundred pounds (140 kg) of handicaps. George recognizes his son for a moment, before having the thought eliminated by his radio. Harrison storms the TV studio in an attempt to overthrow the government. He declares himself Emperor and rips off both his own handicaps and those of a ballerina, whom he chooses as his Empress. Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, enters the studio and kills Harrison and the Empress with two shotgun blasts. She threatens the musicians at gunpoint to put on their handicaps again. The TV goes dark. George, who left to get a beer and has returned, asks Hazel why she is crying, to which she replies that something sad happened on television that she cannot remember.

I was taught in high school that it was 6 million Jews.

Standard American public high school. Teacher was left-wing. We read Diary of Anne Frank, Night by Elie Weisel, Number the Stars, etc.

No holocaust denial going on.

Yes, the Soviets were excluded. So were the Prussians, who were the victims of both Nazi and Soviet genocides.

Nobody calls this holocaust denial.

Because the Holocaust can refer to either the Nazi's genocide of Jews or all the genocides carried out by Nazi Germany. Most often it is the former.

So to reframe this, if you ask people how many people died in the Jewish genocide they'll probably give you the figure of how many Jews died, yes. They aren't ignoring all of the other victims, they're giving you the statistic of what they thought you asked for.

This is no different than separating out the genocide of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire and the genocide of Greeks by the same regime.

Wait so your definition of Holocaust denier is not the person that denies that 6 million Jews were systematically killed by the Nazi Germany machine, but the person who believes in the Holocaust of the Jews, but does not include other atrocities perpetrated by Nazis on the European population?

Can you clarify?

And in your opinion, did these DEI statements ever have Jews in mind?

Germany and Russia both committed daunting atrocities during the war, killed millions of people, but it's unsurprising that people associate "Holocaust" with 6 million Jewish dead, because the Jewish genocide is where the label originated.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40267725.

It's an ideological statement that is part of a sociopolitical program in the US that seeks to indoctrinate young adults that are just entering the workforce or higher education. You are supposed to be ashamed of being a white, straight man and filter all moral judgement through the lens of race, gender, sexual orientation, etc., to the point where individual work, qualities and achievements takes a second place, if any place at all. It is an ideology that seeks equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity, a cultural Marxism that admits no dissent. Ask Google Gemini to make pictures of the Founding Fathers or Nazi soldiers and you will understand.

No, it’s a profession of ideological commitment. What you suggest would get a low to middling score.

Here’s a rubric that’s representative of others I’ve seen: https://www.nas.org/storage/app/media/New%20Documents/Rubric...

Note how saying you’ll “treat everyone the same” will get you penalized. How doing the things they want isn’t enough to demonstrate your commitment to their cause.

They want true believers, but will settle for people who are willing to let others control what they say and do.

During the red scare, there was a movement to try and force professors to sign loyalty oaths stating that they weren’t communist. Imagine that this went one step further: rather than signing a loyalty pledge, they required professors to compose their own loyalty statements. And that they would be judged on the ideological correctness of their statement. For instance, it wouldn’t be enough to pledge not to be communist; they would also had to pledge to be actively anti-communist. This didn’t happen during the red scare, but if you s/communist/racist, it is happening now.

You want us to acknowledge whether we're on the traditional tribal lands of Dan, Binyamin, Menasseh, Yehudah, etc?

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40270596.

Applicants for a desirable position are likely to come from the majority group of your region. So for a minority candidate to be selected they would not only have to be equal to the others - but better.

Your second sentence here doesn't actually follow from the first.

You really took a turn there by calling attention to their skin color. The interesting thing here isn’t that they look the same, but that they think the same.

The SAT thing was wild. I have no idea why people thought making the admissions criteria more opaque and fudge-able would help prevent bias and racism.

I saw the same thing at a company I worked at where they found at that Black people were getting lower performance ratings and there were people in the Diversity interest group advocating getting rid of numeric ratings so, you know, instead of knowing there was bias we would… not know? Like maybe it was a management psy-op or something but that was insane.

Its all well and good that MIT is now coming to it's senses, but they'd have earned much more of my respect if they had stood on evidence based approaches from the beginning.

Its easy to follow the crowd when popular opinion swings in a crazy direction. Its even easier to see the writing on the wall and be one of the first to swing back, claiming some kind of honor or bravery in doing so.

Its a win-win. Up front you don't get blasted for being racist because you don't fall in line, and on the back end you're held up as a hero when you respond to what everyone has already realized but few have adjusted to yet.

Quoting: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/mit-scraps-diversity-state...

The decision was made by MIT president Sally Kornbluth, with support from the school’s provost and six academic deans, a spokesperson told National Review on Sunday afternoon.

“My goals are to tap into the full scope of human talent, to bring the very best to MIT, and to make sure they thrive once here,” Kornbluth said in a statement provided to NR. “We can build an inclusive environment in many ways, but compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work.”

Just want to note that, currently, this is the highest comment in the thread which makes any direct references to the article we're all nominally discussing, and it's about 100 comments down. Have an extra upvote.

Seconded.

Futhermore, the counterexample cited, teaching adult literacy, seems like a good way of furthering equity and inclusion to me. This sounded like the author contradicting themselves.

The specific way you phrased that question makes me suspect you misinterpreted this as a banning of speech. Not at all. They're removing a class of required question from application forms. “The MIT administration has advised the departments that were requiring DEI statements to stop requiring them and to stop using this kind of information. This has just recently been disclosed to the faculty, but a general announcement to the students is not planned.”

Or are you asking what a DEI statement is in academia? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversity,_equity,_and_inclusi...

Unless I'm misunderstanding your question, the very start of the article seems to cover it:

DEI statements are affirmations made when you’re applying for college admission, university jobs, or even science-society grants, recounting to the authorities your philosophy of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” your history of DEI activities, and how you will implement DEI initiatives if you get the admission/job/grant.

A profitable company that lacks DEI is still a success

A company that loses money but has plenty of DEI is a failure.

DEI is not the factor that determines success or failure.

It is a tool that you can use but it makes no sense as a goal or target in itself. If your customer base has some attributes that aren't reflected in the staff, maybe hiring some will help you relate. The idea that your company must match the 'diversity' of the general public (in one country) is all backward.

Our policy is to not regard DEI as a metric of value

can you expand on what this means practically and how it differs from others?

We need you at every fortune 500 company.

Our company for a while would recap promotions every quarter and breakdown promation rates by race... it was awakward and antithetical to what they were trying to accompish. Had a weird undertone of calling out races for underachieving lmao

"Blacks are being promoted 20% less than whites. We are getting better but can do even more to promote the interests of blacks at the company"

I agree. I'm assuming that https://unherd.com/newsroom/mit-becomes-first-elite-universi... is true because otherwise they'd be fabricating quotes and that seems unlikely, although the site does have an ideological slant.

It's a little surprising that more publications haven't reported on it yet though.

That National Review article seems to be a rehash of it's reference from https://unherd.com/newsroom/mit-becomes-first-elite-universi... which claims to actually have been in communication with the university.

Wondering why there's no leaked copy of the email -- or was it promulgated by phone calls and announcements in the regular meetings?

I'm with you on this one. I take pride in being out of tune with pop culture, I much prefer to focus on my real-life relationships, tech, personal projects, etc. This DEI stuff seems to change so rapidly that I often have no clue whether something I said was OK or not OK in the eyes of the overlords. It's caused me quite a bit of anxiety, especially during the peak of it in June 2020.

Same and I keep up with some of subjects but the whole DEI feels like a minefield where any thing voiced can be used against you.

Example: you notice that corporate culture is a bit aggressive on the feedback which causes some negatives effects. Someone says that everyone should do some training to give more neutral feedback but I notice that also gives room to less articulated people voice less concerns as they fear they could be badly perceived.

Still, everyone around pretends that are no tradeoffs, just positive effects. I have no idea how to properly give that feedback to the organization as it will be probably be seen as odd/weird or even talking down HR work.

We already have a word for "STEAM": "Academia". Unless you don't consider, say, History an art or a science, in which case, why do you hate historians so much that you'd make up an acronym that basically means "not you specifically"?

The problem is making the mistake of being born white and male! The best thing I've learned from all of this is that it's literally free to identify as whatever you'd like, whenever you'd like, so if opportunities are being taken from you on the basis of race or gender, you should take advantage of that. No one can deny that you identify as that thing, since identifying as something is the literal exact same thing as being that thing. That's how I became a non-binary black lesbian woman!

Like when they opened up the "Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing" for non-binary and trans people... So men showed up and claimed to be non-binary to get access to something that was available to any other person except them. We need to continue seeing stuff like this until we fully choke out the idea of admittance based on anything other than "Is this person the best for the role?".

https://www.wired.com/story/grace-hopper-celebration-career-...