Comment by Braxton1980
6 days ago
>In what way is hiring faculty and and admitting students based on merit instead of their identity anti-education?
It's not. Calling universities and professors the enemy is. The government taking away funding because you want international students to adhere to an ideology is wrong.
>is your position that you get a better education from a professor who was hired because of their race instead of the quality of their scholarly work?
How do you rank the quality of scholarly work?
You ask other scholars in the field to read it and give their opinion on it. It’s this thing called “peer review” that is kind of the basis of all modern academic inquiry.
In the case of hiring, typically a committee of other professors in the department would evaluate candidates, not a bunch of DEI bureaucrats. They would read what the candidates have published and see if the arguments they make are sound, and look at things like # of citations that indicate how prominent the work is in the field.
I don’t know if you’ve ever met any academics, but I promise you they have no problems forming opinions about the quality of work of other people in their field.
Could different scholars from different universities rank people differently?
Sure. Research by definition deals with areas that are not settled, so different people can have different theories, and they might disregard scholars who don't like their preferred theory. On the other hand, some academics welcome debate and differing viewpoints more than most people.
Like, if you were a physics professor and you were applying to a department where everyone was a string theorist, and your position was that string theory is a bunch of bullshit, you might not get that job. Or you might, if your work is otherwise solid, you never know.
But that's a disagreement about physics, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to evaluate a physics professor on. It's not about how enthusiastically they endorse some ideological dogma that has nothing to do with physics.
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