Posted on 01/31/2020 10:22:10 PM PST by DeweyCA
Hiring people based on race or ethnicity is illegal but the University of California seems to have found a workaround (or a woke-around) to this problem. University of Chicago professor Jerry Coyne wrote a blog post last month about hiring within the UC system. He explains how it has become more focused on mining the content of mandatory diversity statements than academic qualifications:
A document from the University of California tells us how the system worked in six searches in the life sciences, and I find it a bit disturbing—disturbing because the ideology and social engineering is clear, because candidates, however good in scholarship, were eliminated if their diversity statements fell below a specified cutoff, and disturbing because the only kind of diversity involved was racial and gender diversity. But we know that that is what people mean when they talk about “diversity”. Ideological, class, and background diversity are irrelevant.
In this process, diversity statements were used at the outset of searches to eliminate candidates. There were two searches.
A.) Search 1 (“Cluster search”). Here five faculty lines were opened in the Life Sciences with no stipulation as to preferred sub-areas. Instead of departments vetting the candidates at the beginning, a committee was formed of 22 members from all departments in the Life Sciences. 993 applications were received, of which 893 were considered viable.
These 893 applications were then vetted for diversity statements alone, rating the statements in three areas: knowledge about diversity, track record in advancing diversity, and plans for advancing diversity if hired. The published Berkeley diversity-evaluation rubric was used, rating candidates on a 1-5 scale for each of the three areas, so that the minimum score was 3 and the maximum 15…
Only 214 of the 893 candidates (24%) passed muster here as having adequate diversity statements. These 214 were then passed on to the appropriate departmental search committees to create a short list for interviewing candidates (these are typically 3-6 candidates per job). In this search and the second one below, candidates were also asked to explain their ideas about diversity during the interviews…
It’s clear from the document that diversity was regarded at least as important as scholarship in these hires, though having a cutoff for diversity from the outset indicates that it was actually the most important criterion for a search to proceed further. No matter how good your scholarship, if you didn’t pass the diversity cutoff (a score of 11 in the second search), you were toast.
Coyne goes on to say that he supports affirmative action so he’s not objecting to the idea of increasing diversity per se, he’s objecting to a system which a) is selecting not just for diversity but for a specific ideological commitment to a narrow type of diversity, i.e. diversity of race and gender.
According to the rubric the hiring committee used to evaluate applicants a disqualifying score for “Knowledge of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” would be someone who seems “uncomfortable discussing diversity-related issues. May state that he or she ‘just hasn’t had much of a chance to think about these issues yet.'”
A mid-level applicant on this metric would “show a strong understanding of challenges faced by individuals who are underrepresented and the need to eliminate barriers, and be comfortable discussing diversity-related issues.”
But a person with a successful score would have, “Clear knowledge of, experience with, and interest in dimensions of diversity that result from different identities, such as ethnic, socioeconomic, racial, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and cultural differences.”
Coyne concludes: “the Berkeley Diversity Mavens have won. By hiring large numbers of deans and administrators whose job is to promote initiatives like the above, colleges like Berkeley have guaranteed that this kind of process will only get more onerous and more invidious.”
Responding to Coyne’s blog post, Hoover Institution fellow John Cochrane says the writing is on the wall for academics who want to have a shot at a job:
My friends (anonymous!) in the UC system report that the criteria are clear and the word is out: Don’t try to be clever. Don’t quote Martin Luther King, on judgement by content of character rather than color of skin. Don’t write vibrant essays on the importance of ideological, political or religious diversity. Don’t quote federal anti-discrimination law, the 14th Amendment, and the UC’s own statements of non-discrimination in hiring. Don’t write about class diversity, diverse experiences of immigrants, such as people born under communism in Eastern Europe or the amazingly diverse experience of the colleague you just hired who came from a small village in China. Don’t write about the importance of freedom of speech, or anti-communist loyalty oaths in the 1950s. Are you thinking of writing about your hilbilly elegy background, your time in the military, your support for gun rights and Trump, and how this background and viewpoint would enrich a faculty and staff that likely has absolutely zero people like you? Don’t bother. We all know what “diversity” means. And, heaven forbid, don’t express distaste for the project. The staff are on to all these tricks, and each of these specifically will earn you a downgrade.
If you want to work at a UC school the message from the hiring committee is simple: Get woke or go broke.
Super sicko. A bunch of racists “educating” our children.
Nowhere in the article is Field Marshal Janet Napolitano mentioned.
D I V E R S I T Y . . .
What a joke. 90% of the faculty on these campuses are died in the wool Leftists. A significant portion of them would likely help arm any students who want to launch an armed revolt against the United States.
They look the other way when Antifa groups get violent.
we need to take a fire-hose to our universities and start all over with staffing.
That’s the example of the state of Cartelfornia but it’s way worse than that. Even if hired outside that bubble of socially engineered multiculturalism/diversity if they don’t like you then you better believe they’ll stick a knife in your back via HR and seven other ways to Sunday to never hire again. Screw the references. Your goose is cooked.
There are no "fair standards" at universities to be violated. If you are a minority or a sexual pervert, you get preferential treatment.
How many gain entry by phony/bologna criteria and we pay for their tuition?
This is just wealth redistribution, to conceal the failure of assimilation and create a faux middle class among groups that can’t compete on merit.
It’s all fun & revolution with these colleges and their “professors” filling heads with mush and sending drones out to gum up the rest of the world.
Ha-Ha!
Nowhere in the article is Field Marshal Janet Napolitano mentioned.
Look at black athletes.
The majority of their SAT scores, grades, and academic achievements are not even CLOSE to university grade.
Back in the 1980s, when Proposition 48 was enacted, the media and black leaders were whining because 87% of those ruled ineligible because of SAT scores and grades were black.
Blacks Hit Hard by Proposition 48, Survey Shows (New York Times - 1988)
Back then, there was at least an attempt hold people to academic standards.
Today, it's all but a joke.
Now that you’ve mentioned Proposition 48, what I recall back then now seems quite ironic.
In the late 80’s, there were many after school specials, sitcoms and made for TV movies, whereas the story focused on a high school athlete being approached by college coaches.
He (all were as I remember) was a star, a good kid, a hero, loved, etc and would navigate personal life with the added lure of “making it big” dangled before him by predatory college recruiters.
Then, the discovery, our protagonist is illiterate and for some reason it’s everyone else’s fault but especially, those white guys from those colleges.
In the interest of transparency and disclosure, universities should clearly identify which parts of the school are subject to diversity and which parts of the school are free from diversity. Are the football and basketball teams chosen based on diversity? What about the dance teams or cheerleaders? What about the top ranking students in each school? The list is endless and the separations striking.
Yup. The "system" failed them. Not the parents. Not the students themselves.
It's ALWAYS someone else's fault.
Someone else is blame...especially......you know.
“Affirmative action” was supposed to be temporary
Yet Lori Loughlin is going to jail
“Affirmative action was supposed to be temporary”
Yes; tolls on the Garden State Parkway were, too. Both are still there because without them shortcomings would be exposed. At this point, “affirmative action” is a Black/Hispanic/woman tax on workers, employers, and consumers.
The structure of affirmative action itself guaranteed failure; the intended beneficiaries never caught up (or if they did, were still “protected persons”), and nobody wants to openly state the reality that to succeed you need X,Y, and Z - we’ll keep pretending having X and/or Y is acceptable. Lowering standards and mandating quotas haven’t helped anyone except a short-term financial fix for the recipients - which was the goal anyway (financial redistribution, and a façade of a viable middle class in some ethnic groups).
The permanence of the tax is what is driving others (sexual deviants, for example) to clamber aboard the “protected persons” wagon.
I am sorry, but if you support affirmative action in the broad ways it is practiced today, you’re trying to thread too fine a needle complaining that this particular approach to affirmative action is unacceptable.
Acceptable groupthink has already long been the way faculty are selected and promoted.
The whole system is rigged.
Not only can you have “accommodations” for taking the SATs, or are the SATs not required, or they are simply dropped as a criterion for certain groups, but once you get to college, it isn’t just athletes now who have “tutors” who can help them with their laughably easy coursework.
There is an “academic excellence” center that any student can go to to get “help” with any assignment in any class.
And requirements such as minimum grades for certain classes for majors, or actually attending certain classes, as simply bypassed by the departmental admins overruling any recalcitrant profs on appeal for the classes at stake. Such supposed standards are apparently only there for the ridiculously irrelevant accreditation bodies. Students are given a step by step guide for making such appeals in the syllabus they receive for every course.
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