[codeecan]

> MIT told him it was canceling the lecture to “avoid controversy” after students and recent alumni demanded he be uninvited because he’d recently argued academic evaluations should be based on merit.

Damn, I assumed he said something racist maybe, but this is what the issue was about, I just lost all respect for MIT.

[rolandog]

I think that may be an over-simplification; the following paragraphs from the article clarify they are talking about admissions:

> He and Stanford University professor Ivan Marinovic had argued in a Newsweek op-ed published in August that current diversity efforts — known as Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion — at universities violated equal treatment.

> Instead, they proposed a framework called Merit, Fairness, and Equality where "university applicants are treated as individuals and evaluated through a rigorous and unbiased process based on their merit and qualifications alone."

In my opinion, the current system is put in place to try to address inequalities that the applicants outside of the educational institution had faced.

It's not a perfect solution, but I think that not having it in place may result in a student roster that would be increasingly conformed by the children of those who have benefited the most from economic inequality.

[esyir]

I would say fix this elsewhere.

If you think that the issue is economic inequality impeding their development, this sort of fix is at best a hack that draws fire in other ways, especially from those with egalitarian values.

An enforced racial criteria is the definition of systemic racism. It's literally a system around judging people on their race and doling out advantages on that race.

[LocalH]

There is this weird notion floating around the "identity politics" crowd that says that relying on merit is racist and prejudicial.

[dragonwriter]

> There is this weird notion floating around the "identity politics" crowd that says that relying on merit is racist and prejudicial.

No, that's not the idea.

The idea is that things some people characterize as “focussing on merit” actually focus on the outputs of processes influenced substantially by (direct and structural) racism and other non-merit biases as well as merit.

[thinkingemote]

And yet it was over eight years ago that GitHub removed their meritocracy rug. It's not weird, or new, nor limited to a fringe crowd, but embedded for years within Silicon Valley tech companies and YC startups.

[cowvin]

This is race related in the same way that saying "All Lives Matter" is racist. It's not about the words that are stated, it's about the context as well.

When people are protesting about racial injustice toward some minorities, saying "All Lives Matter" is dismissing their concerns. It's like when someone goes to the police department saying "You need to protect me from a murderer" and an officer goes "Yeah, we need to protect everyone from murderers." Yes, that's true, but that's not a very helpful response to someone asking for help.

Likewise, the whole academic evaluation based on merit dismisses the idea that our current "objective" means of academic evaluation may not be as objective as they should be when considering race. Yes, we should evaluate students based on "merit" but we need to reconsider whether our current methods measure "merit" accurately.

[l4yao]

So I'm trying to navigate the personal cognitive dissonance I'm facing after reading your comment.

Would you agree that "All Lives Matter" is racist because it's derisive of "Black Lives Matter" the proper noun? The sentiment that all lives are important is not racist, and it's also not mutually exclusive from BLM's message. If anything, they align right?

BLM is saying Black lives matter just as much as any other life. Black people should not be treated as second class citizens. They're not claiming Black lives matter _more_ than others.. that _would_ be racist.

A true merit based evaluation would be.. just that - based on merit and not racial background, sexuality, age, political affiliation, the clothes you wear, the food you eat, or even the schooling you've received. To give any group preferential treatment would be not based on merit.