[Live Panel] Diversity Statements in Academia
Вставка
- Опубліковано 22 кві 2024
- Join Heterodox Academy for a special virtual event on From Rhetoric to Reality: The Past, Present, and Future of Diversity Statements in Academia.
We’ve witnessed the rise of DEI statements and their outsized role in faculty and staff hiring in academia over the last decade. As their use continues to be challenged, what does the future hold for DEI statements in academia? This live discussion will feature Heterodox Academy's President, John Tomasi and esteemed guests Randall Kennedy of Harvard Law School and Brian Soucek of UC Davis Law School as they explore the history of diversity statements in higher education, today's DEI landscape, and what it means for the future of faculty hiring.
Only registered attendees will have access to Q&A with panelists during the event. Register and join the discussion: us02web.zoom.us/webinar/regis...
Brian “doesn’t understand how dei statements that focus on actions rather than beliefs is problematic. The problem is if you don’t belief that racism and sexism need to be the top concern for every decision in every department, then you probably don’t have a lot of actions in line with that belief. What should matter is your teaching, research, and university service.
Yeah, I was a bit lost with his statement. Actions and beliefs often go hand and hand.
Correct. Ironically asking for "actions" is also horrible. Because who is going to assess those "actions"? It may as well be that you are in lockstep with the ideology being thrust forward and not academics. Many of the examples cited belong in a teaching dossier, and don't actually have much to do with making the school a more welcoming place (as they had to get there in the first place).
Please listen to 1:00:50. This is where Randall Kennedy stoked the knockout punch. He is sick of Brian’s BS.
And no, diversity statements DON’T address merit.
Kennedy is kicking their ass. He has a full brain.
The fact that an institution’s DEI statement requirements come from the faculty is little consolation when nationwide the faculty lean left:right more than 20:1.
We’re not asking what you think; we’re asking what you do. That is both less and more onerous than a simple ideological statement. Less onerous because, in theory, you are not forced to espouse an ideology you disagree with, but more onerous because now you have to go beyond merely espousing an ideology and actually enacting it.
If someone does not agree that diversity is a pressing issue, or that it is but can’t or shouldn’t be rectified with crude solutions, requiring them to come up with proposals on which the progress of their career depends is hugely burdensome. What’s more, we are extremely uncomfortable, psychologically, when forced to perform an action which we do not support - we feel the implicit belief is imposed on us.
I cannot stress enough that these are exceedingly obvious points, and only the intellectual contortions of a humanities professor (or totalitarian bureaucrat) could obscure them. The progressive left is so resourceful at finding micro aggressions and systematic oppression, but when the shoe is on the other foot they are painfully literal-minded.
Two parts stood out to me as revealing Soucek’s ideology. Shortly after the 44-minute mark he defends an academic screening process based only on anonymised DEI and research statements. When Tomasi questions why a diversity statement would even be relevant at such a stage, Soucek says, “Only if you assume that diversity statements have nothing to do with academic merit”. Soucek has redefined academic merit, traditionally understood as the pursuit of knowledge, freedom from bias, etc, to include action towards diversity. Academia may well benefit from diversity, but to locate the responsibility for advancing diversity at the heart of what it is for an individual to have academic merit is an appalling corruption of what most people understand by the term.
At the 58-minute mark, Soucek says, “Let’s say that both of us think that greater inclusion is a valid and admirable aim for our university to advance. If so, then we need ways of advancing it, and if so … we should be rewarding work that achieves that aim, and to reward it you have to ask about it.” In one smooth, logical move we go from a general desire for diversity to DEI statements determining if you can even get employment. And if you criticise Soucek’s endpoint, he jumps straight back to the initial premise and says, But I thought we agreed that diversity is to be welcomed. He cannot seem to recognise that there are competing values and differing beliefs about how and to what extent diversity should be promoted. Accepting his premise does not mean accepting his conclusion.
And, of course, Soucek is promoting only the most sanitised of DEI systems. Randall Kennedy mentions others that clearly do demand espousals of belief, and for undergraduate applications it’s even clearer. I come away feeling very pessimistic. That ideology is now embedded at the centre of elite academia, and although I can imagine a minor reversals, I feel it’s here to stay.
On a final note, I thought Kennedy’s haranguing demeanour was very unhelpful and in conflict with the ‘HxA Way’, the principles of good debate described at the start of the video.
I gave the initial comments a dislike because of their violation of the conversation’s principles, that is, intellectual humility, and even civility.
You can guarantee that a candidate whose action statement applies to all students and collaborators, not being tailored to specific victim classes, will not be hired.
It's communist bungling as is it's nature. The point isn't that it's exactly Communism. It's the bungling that comes with communist intuitions. Communist intuitions are basically the narcissistic investment in human error.
Perhaps Communist intuitions inevitably lead to narcissistic investment in human error b/c "truth" becomes whatever everyone else is having, instead of a process of winnowing everyone's models with contrary thought, values, evidence until hopefully someone's is good enough to allow us to navigate into the future.
Brian is a disgrace, what a bunch of evasive doubletalk