Comment by arp242
8 months ago
So first they demand "Merit-Based Hiring Reform" and "Merit-Based Admissions Reform", and then it continues to demand "Viewpoint Diversity in Admissions and Hiring".
I can't even engage with these levels of cognitive dissonance. Or bad faith. Or whatever it is.
Never mistake a man's rhetoric for his principles.
If you genuinely cannot distinguish the two then that's about equally as bad as cognitive dissonance:
Phenotype diversity != Viewpoint diversity
The former is what current academia and DEI focus on, the latter is what the administration demands.
Does this simple logic need to be expressed in Rust for HN folks to wrap their mind around it?
the contradiction is that "viewpoint hiring" =/= "merit based hiring".
I think you should give better faith to the community instead of breaking the guidelines here trying to prove a point.
I have never been a "woke" person, but Trump really makes me doubt the meritocracy argument. If Trump was a black woman he would never get away with half the things he is doing now.
> If Trump was a black woman he would never get away with half the things he is doing now
If Trump were a black woman (or man), he would have never survived the release of the Hollywood Access tape and therefore would have never gotten elected.
Yes a black man can only (politically) get away with something less risque like smoking crack cocaine on video during an FBI sting:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/local/fbi-video-of-unde...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Barry
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As others have pointed out to you, "woke" is just from AAVE, meaning to be awake to the racial prejudices and social injustices of the world. Leadbelly used it at the end of his "Scottsboro Boys" [1] in 1938, and it likely was in use many years before that. Erykah Badu's "Master Teacher" also uses it prominently, which probably helped bring it out of AAVE into more mainstream use [2].
Anyway, that's all to say I find it sad and funny that people are all up in arms about being "woke" these days. It's like stating "I'd prefer to be ignorant".
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrXfkPViFIE&t=249s
[2] whole song is great, but I forgot about this second section of the song: https://youtu.be/Dieo6bp4zQw?si=fCPJpWIbQV_g5yx3&t=203
> "woke" is just from AAVE, meaning to be awake to the racial prejudices and social injustices of the world.
Yes, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is a democracy that serves the people of Korea.
Sometimes expressions have meaning beyond what advocates for the related concepts claim. For example, as I’m sure you are aware, ‘woke’ viewpoints repeatedly advocate for racial discrimination in American universities.
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You have come to the realization that systemic racism exists, and it grants privileges to the dominant socioeconomic groups. Congratulations, you are now "woke"!
That's what the term originally meant, before it was turned into a strawman for "anything I don't like" by the conservative media machine and weaponized to divide people.
> If Trump was a black woman he would never get away with half the things he is doing now.
It sounds like you're aware of the present reality of race and how it impacts how one is treated in America just for being who they are.
> I have never been a "woke" person
I have news for you!
Edit: to be clear, I'm certain you don't match the the adversarially bastardized caricature of what a "woke person" is, but it sounds like match the original, well-meaning definition.
It's not cognitive dissonance, or bad faith. Of course.
If you let Harvard do "merit-based hiring", they'll move a little in the direction of actually complying with employment law, but not much. If you institute a regime such as the one that existed for race and sex for decades (i.e., if you don't have "enough" black people, you need to show how your recruitment pipeline means that's necessarily the case, like not enough get the required type of degree), you'll get much better compliance.
>If you institute a regime such as the one that existed for race and sex for decades
Do you really think this administration is doing anything close to that?
Frankly no. I don't think they actually care in the way that equal outcomes was baked into what it meant to be Blue Team for a while, and the bureaucracy ("deep state") is against them, especially in Massachusetts, and I don't think they're competent enough.
Harvard admitted it needs to "...broaden the intellectual and viewpoint diversity within our community..."
This is a no-brainer considering only 2.3% of their faculty identifies as conservative.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/5/22/faculty-survey-...
How is this a no brainer? How many of their faculty identity as believers in a flat earth? Are we concerned about that viewpoint being underrepresented as well?
Well, 2.3% of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences. I would bet that, say, the business school has a slightly different makeup…
We're talking about going from 2.3% to maybe 13%. And this isn't a reflection of attitudes among people who are potentially employed there, it's a reflection of overt, rigid filtering on the basis of political beliefs.
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And I bet that the % of their faculty that identify as flat earthers is even more egregious!
So pick one or the other: having a broad representation from many walks of life is important or it's not. You can't mix or match depending on which group you like.
And that is what I'm commenting on. I'm not a fan of Trump's "war on DEI" but if it was applied with some consistency I could take it as a genuine difference in viewpoints. That would be okay. But the movement is railing hard and vitriolic against anything with even a whiff of "DEI" while applying wildly different standards to themselves. This is hard to take as a genuine difference in viewpoints.
Conservatives will make observations such as "the most educated people are almost never conservative" and they will conclude that it's not their ideology that may be on shaky grounds, but rather the concept of education itself.
"Most American academia" !== "most educated people" (much less so if taken globally).
Many Americans would be seriously surprised by the balance of left and right at continental European universities. It is nowhere near as one-sided. And Asian universities are a completely different world.
Generalizing from the extremely lopsided ratios in academia of the Anglosphere to the global educated class is somewhat unreliable.
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> This is a no-brainer considering only 2.3% of their faculty identifies as conservative.
That's true now. It wasn't always true. From: https://www.aei.org/articles/are-colleges-and-universities-t...
- In 1989-1990, when HERI first fielded this survey, 42% of faculty identified as being on the left, 40% were moderate, and another 18% were on the right.
- in 2016-2017, HERI found that 60% of the faculty identified as either far left or liberal compared to just 12% being conservative or far right
Now you say it's 2.3% conservative.
The universities argue they haven't changed, it's the politics of the right. I'd say they are correct as the right now to disavows and ridicules the output of universities on things like climate change, tariffs, vaccines, health, voter fraud in US elections ... well it's a long list. It wasn't like that 30 years ago.
The universities are supposed to be intellectual power houses fearlessly seeking out fundamental truths and relationships, regardless of what the people in power might think of their discoveries. Both sides of politics once celebrated that. Now one side wants to control what types of thought the universities allow, demanding they monitor, snitch, report, and police the on ideas the conservative base don't like. That's directly opposed to how Universities operate. They allow and encourage all types of thought, but insist they be exposed to a torrent of opposing thoughts so only the soundest survive.
Frankly, I'm amazed 2.3% still identify with a mob that clearly wants to undermine that. I'm guessing it will drop to near 0% now.
> Now one side wants to control what types of thought the universities allow, demanding they monitor, snitch, report, and police the on ideas the conservative base don't like. That's directly opposed to how Universities operate.
Seriously?
American conservatives are increasingly not grounded in facts and reality. This isn’t partisan, it’s just an observation of reality. I used to identify as a conservative, but they have become less and less grounded as a party.
that’s the faculty of arts and sciences—is this administration going to mandate university economics and business schools —which likely lean heavily capitalist—demand ideological diversity and bring in more communists?
Are conservatives a protected class now? We need DEI to make sure we hire enough conservatives in our company so we look super diverse
You make it sound like modern conservatives possess the intellectual rigor and career achievements required to meet Harvard’s hiring bar.
I am against admissions discrimination so I disagree. Conservatives should get into schools based on merit.
Do they ask for your political ideology on the Harvard application?
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Yeah what Harvard definitely needs is more faculty who will defend sending people to Salvadoran prisons without due process. /s