The rise of universities’ diversity bureaucrats (2018)

It&#x27;s unfortunately tough to have a discussion about this too. Any criticism of justice&#x2F;equity&#x2F;diversity&#x2F;inclusion (JEDI) bureaucracy gets strawmanned very quickly, and the critic labelled as simply a bad person. Example: the VP of the American Mathematical Society wrote a short piece (op ed?) in 2019 describing the requirement that new university faculty hires write <i>diversity statements</i>, and the scoring of that statement according to a rubric, as a &quot;political litmus test,&quot; and she got roasted for it. Folks called for her resignation, and said the AMS shouldn&#x27;t have published it. I was attending a JEDI workshop as a grad student to get a <i>diversity certificate</i> at the time, and the facilitator only reacted with disgust, and we never honestly discussed it.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ams.org&#x2F;journals&#x2F;notices&#x2F;201911&#x2F;rnoti-p1778.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ams.org&#x2F;journals&#x2F;notices&#x2F;201911&#x2F;rnoti-p1778.pdf</a>

DEI is all the rage right now. My company&#x27;s last big survey had some question which stated &quot;I feel like I can be myself at work.&quot; The score wasn&#x27;t as nice as folks would have liked, and apparently what HR took from that is &quot;we&#x27;re not doing DEI hard enough.&quot; Which is a pretty unfortunate set of blinders to have on. DEI is probably one of the more narrow reasons these days that someone might not feel that they can be themselves at work.

Universities are projecting a ~20% decline in their total addressable market [1] starting about 10 years from now. Talk with any decision maker at a tuition-dependent institution for more than 10 minutes and they&#x27;ll bring up this topic.<p>Many of the USA&#x27;s colleges and universities cannot afford a 20% decline in tuition dollars. They will collapse under the weight of fixed costs and higher unit costs, even with substantial cuts to faculty and staff. The only path toward survival for many of these institutions is to increase the size of the pie, and the WASP demographic is saturated.<p>In Tech, DEI is an HR and Recruiting department. In Higher Ed, DEI is also -- primarily, even -- a sales and marketing department. An existentially important one. I&#x27;ve heard a few different college presidents discuss it very explicitly in those terms.<p>--<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.insidehighered.com&#x2F;digital-learning&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;online-trending-now&#x2F;second-demographic-cliff-adds-urgency-change" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.insidehighered.com&#x2F;digital-learning&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;online...</a>

DEI is a juice box for handing out cushy jobs to political hacks. Any organization that puts DEI as its core mission is headed for mediocrity.<p>Protecting people who can do the job but need a little help for whatever reason is one thing. Forcing companies to hire a bunch of people who will not contribute to satisfy DEI quotas so they can meet ESG goals and qualify for discount financing is a whole other thing. The government is basically outsourcing social programs by forcing businesses to hire people.

<i>&quot;Robert Martin of Centre College in Kentucky, a co-author of the study, says the real reason for the growth in spending is that administrators want to hire subordinates, thereby boosting their own authority and often pay.</i>&quot;<p>Ah, there&#x27;s the problem.

This post will start off sounding like I am not very liberal, but I am <i>very</i> liberal.<p>There is one question a diversity authority needs to answer:<p>&quot;If you want a larger amount of people from a small pool of viable candidates, how do you do that without lowering the bar?&quot;<p>Stated differently, if 1 in 100 university graduates earning a software engineering degree are black, but you want your company&#x27;s demographics to match the population demographics which is 15 in 100, how do you get closer to 15 in 100 without accepting unqualified candidates or without having the average black employee under perform the average employee as a whole?<p>Any diversity bureaucrat that fails to answer that question is absolutely unqualified and is a detriment to the institution they are a part of.<p>There is one harsh reality that needs to be understood: Affirmative action and diversity initiatives (&quot;C&quot; level diversity focused staff) are functionally reparations.<p>The American public has robbed entire classes of people of wealth, and therefore their ability to pay for competitive advantages, like private school, which other people can afford. This results in not just systemic disadvantage, but generational disadvantage.<p>I don&#x27;t think generational disadvantage can be solved without efforts like affirmative action, but the packaging that diversity bureaucrats are selling is one that requires proportional response, and therefore foments backlash.<p>Diversity bureaucrats try to use power, rather than justice, to achieve their goals. &quot;We will fire you if you disagree&quot; is using power. &quot;Reparations are the right thing to do. Offering opportunity to those we have taken them from&quot; is justice. The difference is subtle, but important.

I get a lot of surveys these days where the first questions are about identity. This sends the message that the thing they care about most is your racial and gender identity. But it may also bias the rest of the survey outcome. This possibility is why surveys used to only ask these questions at the end. But now it&#x27;s more important to virtue signal up front, even if it means introducing bias.

<i>Bureaucrats outnumber faculty 2:1 at public universities and 2.5:1 at private colleges, double the ratio in the 1970s.</i><p>It has to be asked though, did student:teacher ratio stay constant during this time? Because if it&#x27;s risen (i.e. professors about the same, but more students,) then a case could be made that the bureaucrat increase corresponds to more students. Why should bureaucrat count correlate to professor count?

&gt; Diversity officials promote the hiring of ethnic minorities and women<p>I&#x27;m genuinely curious if ethnic minorities and women are underrepresented among university faculty&#x2F;staff. I would have guessed &quot;no&quot;, but this statement implies otherwise.

How do we fund high-rigor alternatives to university that have strict limits on administrative hires?

I actually can envision, new universitys being founded on purely meritocratic and scientific basis, having only &quot;hard&quot; research based topics and succesfully distance themselves from the &quot;relgious&quot; education base.

Luckily, where I work (one of my jobs anyway), if someone can&#x27;t do the job, they get booted. Regardless of gender or colour.

This topic is covered on this weeks episode of the Economist&#x27;s Checks and Balance podcast, which covers US politics. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economist.com&#x2F;checkspod" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economist.com&#x2F;checkspod</a><p>It&#x27;s a great podcast, strongly recommended.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newdiscourses.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;04&#x2F;dei-explained-new-discourses-bullets-ep-1&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newdiscourses.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;04&#x2F;dei-explained-new-discours...</a>

Working at a USA based company and having to deal with DEI sounds like a nightmare. Inadvertently racist? Purposefully racist? I honestly don&#x27;t care.

Zero interest rate phenomenon.

tragedy

&gt; By B.S.<p>[...]<p>&gt; The era of Donald Trump seems to have strengthened the diversity bureaucracy’s belief that students’ feelings must be protected.<p>This article is very weird. I realise that The Economist isn&#x27;t just journalism, but also editorials and that every article is very open about its slant. The constant use of the deragotory &quot;bureaucracy&quot; and &quot;bureaucrat&quot; plus the use of a pseudonym of the author indicates that whoever wrote this has an axe to grind and is afraid to publicly grind it. It&#x27;s obvious what the author thinks: diversity is bullshit, white male professors should be able to speak without fear, too much money is being used to scare white male professors.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong, though. Unlike B. S., I am not telling you what to think. I am just remarking how odd it is to see such a slanted article.

Learn Mandarin, no country can survive this long with such weakness.<p>Our enemies are salivating while our Generals are getting sex changes.