Comment by hn_throwaway_99
12 days ago
This is the part that is so frustrating to me, and not just with regards to tariffs. It's that I see the extremes being so laughably bad (though not necessarily equally - I'm not "both sides"-ing this), and more ludicrously bad is that I've seen positions that don't follow these extremes as being derided now as "centrism". E.g. before the administration's attack on higher education, I do believe a lot of elite universities had completely jumped the shark with their ideological purity tests like required DEI statements. And importantly, there were thoughtful, measured criticisms of these things, e.g. https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2024/02/10/jon-haidt-goes-aft....
But the administration attack is so ridiculously egregious and demands an even worse, government-imposed ideological alignment, that making logical arguments in this environment feels almost pointless.
> making logical arguments in this environment feels almost pointless.
Unfortunately this is the culmination of social media as a controversy machine, that promotes the worst arguments.
> ideological purity tests like required DEI statements
Example?
There's a controversy industry that cherry picks the worst examples of student-politics excess in these regards and then carefully conflates it with university policy.
As well as the sad truth that as soon as you take away "DEI" requirements the segregationists come back and purge the library, delete all the black Medal of Honor recipients from the website, etc.
At UC Berkeley, over 75% of faculty applicants were rejected solely based on reviewing their diversity statements: https://thehill.com/opinion/education/480603-what-is-uc-davi... Rather conspicuously, Asians had the highest rate of rejection, followed by whites. Latin applicants had the second highest pass rate, Black applicants had the highest. The diversity statements were not anonymized (as in, the reviewers could see the ethnicity of each applicant when reviewing their diversity statement).
Diversity statements were widely suspected of being a smokescreen for racial preferences. Much like the "personality score" Harvard used to curate its desired racial makeup in its student admissions.
If you’re basing your understanding of the subject based on one anti-DEI activist’s misinterpretation of policies he doesn’t actually know anything about, who didn’t talk to anyone at those schools (even critics of the policy), and who very likely misread statistics and intentionally misrepresented processes, then you are not getting a fair picture. This piece you linked to is a mess of unsubstantiated statements. Several of the links are broken but the one that is still around does not say what he says, so I wouldn’t trust any of the rest of his summarization either.
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On top of that even the official guidelines are ridiculous. Statements along the lines of saying that people should be treated equally regardless of skin color are officially grounds for rejection.
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> Example?
I literally linked an article in my comment that had an overview, but here is a more specific one that addresses diversity statements in particular:
https://reason.com/2022/09/30/mandated-diversity-statement-d...
> As well as the sad truth that as soon as you take away "DEI" requirements the segregationists come back and purge the library, delete all the black Medal of Honor recipients from the website, etc.
This is literally my exact point. There absolutely should be a rational place that denounces both these diversity statement ideological requirements and the egregious memory-holing that the current administration is implementing.
So… an incident not involving a university in any way is your example of universities jumping the shark?
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> Example?
Diversity Statements Required for One-Fifth of Academic Jobs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43692945
20% isn't so bad; the way it's usually portrayed in the media it sounds more like 90% of posts require such statements
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Tangential comment, but I now see people adding disclaimers reiterating their political affiliation to their posts regularly and I want to say that you shouldn't have to justify bilateral criticism. It doesn't imply equal magnitude, and it's only taken that way by bullies in dogmatic bubbles.
I don't mind getting some extra clarity on where someone is coming from.
Your rationality here will surely be flagged. Over apologizing is the new norm to avoid being canceled for dissenting opinions.
The commenter is right that you shouldn't have to state those kinds of beliefs, but pragmatically this is a message board that invites all sorts of responses. Those additional notes are an attempt to head-off annoying and wrongly-based counter-responses built on assumptions that shouldn't have been made. But just because they shouldn't be doesn't mean they won't be.
Your comment evoking a victim complex on the other hand I find a far more annoying element of online discourse.
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I couldn't agree more and worry that even if the country makes it out of this period in one piece the well will have been poisoned on a lot of these topics. We should have big initiatives to make government more efficient, and reduce the national debt, and get back to merit-based processes. But after so much bloviating and fake initiatives that claim to do those things, but actually do the opposite, it's going to be a tough sell to make a real push in the foreseeable future.
You’ve been conned if you think overactive DEI was anything more than a minor annoyance in 99% of American universities. Did some people overdo it in a destructive way? Of course. But it wasn’t anything that was going to lead to major problems. The problems come from the folks who can’t just roll their eyes and move on but instead feel personally attacked and hold a permanent grudge instead of realizing that they themselves probably weren’t all that special.
Harvard and UNC lost lawsuits about their DEI programs in admissions being illegal racism.
That doesn't counteract the point being made.
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> and more ludicrously bad is that I've seen positions that don't follow these extremes as being derided now as "centrism".
You can't stake out a position without getting called some name somebody invented to denigrate that position. Welcome to modern politics on the internet.