It’s not the job of faculty to enforce political will.<p>The university can have policies promoting one thing over another, but to encumber faculty members with that responsibility is a bit beside the point of being an educator.
Svetlana Jitomirskaya's letter [1] supporting Prof. Thompson is a worthwhile read. From that letter:<p>> <i>"I think that the often present push to increase percentage of women beyond what is currently reasonably warranted by merit, only multiplies the biases, is very damaging for the community’s perception of women as a group, and thus is very harmful for the climate. As one example, I was recently on a committee to select the winner of an important prize. It went to a female mathematician. I am sure that most people who don't closely know her or her work, when learning the news, thought “of course, they wanted to select a woman”. Yet her gender had zero influence on our considerations, there was no push on the committee, and she was selected from all the applications purely on scientific merit according to the prize criteria. The value of this well-deserved prize is not at all the same for her as it would have been if she was a man."</i><p>[1]: Pages 21-22 of <a href="https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/202001/rnoti-o1.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/202001/rnoti-o1.pdf</a>
A copy of this article is available on professor Matthias Felleisen's website: <a href="https://felleisen.org/matthias/Articles/loyalty.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://felleisen.org/matthias/Articles/loyalty.pdf</a>
How this article can exist without a reference to Catch-22 re: "The Great Loyalty Oath Crusade"!<p>excerpt: <a href="https://epic-site.com/catch-22-loyalty-oaths/" rel="nofollow">https://epic-site.com/catch-22-loyalty-oaths/</a>
I’m really struggling to understand the point of this article (except that it appears to hit one of the wsj’s hot buttons). He objects to his employer’s position on something based on free speech issues; he speaks out about it and some people agree with him and some don’t; and his employer supports his efforts to speak out against their own policy. Sounds like that’s how the system is supposed to work.<p>The fact is his employer is a corporation and it doesn’t want to reject swaths of prospective customers or employees. That all sounds pretty sensible to me. It also seems quite different from the anti-communist loyalty oaths of the 50s which he cites as precedent. In fact it’s rather the opposite, though he doesn’t object in those grounds (which I think would be a legitimate tack to take, despite my sympathy for these diversity programs)