Outlaw Universities: Discrimination in Academia

Fake Nous ^ | January 10, 2020 | Michael Huemer

[karpov]

Probably everyone in the academy knows that affirmative action is widely practiced: racial minorities (except Asians) and women are commonly given preference in hiring and admission decisions at American universities. I would guess, however, that some academics — and many more non-academics — are unaware that typical university hiring practices are blatantly illegal. So I’m going to talk about that for a while, in case you find that interesting.

Job advertisements commonly say things like that the university rejects discrimination, supports equal employment opportunity, and considers all applicants “without regard to” race, sex, religion, etc. What they actually mean by this is that they only discriminate in certain specific ways. E.g., they don’t discriminate against blacks or Hispanics, but only against whites and Asians. They don’t discriminate against women, only against men. And so on. (This sounds to me like a rather Orwellian use of “equal opportunity”. But what do I know? I’m just some crazy libertarian philosopher.)

I think pretty much everyone in the academic subculture knows this. I don’t know if this is widely known outside academia, though.

Here are a couple of examples:

Example 1: the University of California

This was in the news recently. The University of California, in 8 of its 10 campuses, requires all job applicants to submit a “diversity statement” explaining how they will add to the “diversity” of the faculty. You can read about it on the UCLA site: http://ucla.app.box.com/v/edi-statement-faqs

Great — they want diverse viewpoints! Maybe they’re finally going to add some differing ideological perspectives to the chorus of left-leaning professors, right?

Well, if you think that, I have some bridges to sell you. The requirement is obviously designed to help exclude whites, men, and non-leftists. Here, you can read about some of the results achieved at UC Berkeley: https://ofew.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/life_sciences_inititatve.year_end_report_summary.pdf.

[karpov]

Huemer concludes that since

(1) the universities want to discriminate

(2) there are more applicants than tenure-track positions

(3) hiring criteria are inherently subjective

that it is impossible to stop racially biased hiring. He may be right, and that is an argument for ending federal funding of universities.

[AJFavish]

http://allanfavish.com/index.php/affirmative-actionracial-preferences

[cloudmountain]

Those profs are tenured and can't be fired.
Their egos might or might not be inflated but they all know that they can say or write anything they want and get away with it.
So, there is, without doubt, some profs who are POSITIVE that their ### doesn't stink.

[Grampa Dave]

This may be of interest to you.

More of the bs going on in California’s so called higher education as per our communications.