[ModernMech]

> It is clear that they won’t hire anyone who doesn’t express beliefs identical to their own.

That's not really what's going on here. First of all, you're not really understanding the faculty hiring process. The DEI aspect is just one of many considered, and the people who have most direct impact on the hiring process are the department and college dean, not the DEI office who produced this website.

Secondly, to the extent that DEI statements/rubrics are considered as part of the application, they are done so because they relate specifically to the job. It's a faculty's explicit purpose to teach and manage a diverse classroom. If you look at the rubric, the low scoring results would indicate an applicant has no working knowledge or experience in diversity. This is a job requirement because the student body is diverse. This is not a purity test or an ideological test. Notice the rubric says nothing about beliefs. This is about knowledge and experience.

Experienced teachers will be able to speak cogently about DEI issues, and they will pass this with no problem. Applicants who never taught anything, and who believe the job is to do research and treat teaching as an afterthought will not to well. That's just how it is. But it's not a litmus test or a purity test or an ideological filter. It's about ability to do the job as it's advertised.

[zozbot234]

The DEI aspect is "one of many considered", but the scoring rubric says that applicants who do not score above a cutoff on DEI issues will not be considered. It's in fact not scoring neutral "knowledge" of posited DEI issues but ideological belief in their relevance, and it scores "experience" in furthering DEI by matching the adherence of said 'experience' to an especially divisive and controversial approach, and demanding impact on teaching and research activities that ought to be protected from ideological bias per well-known academic norms of neutrality. The requirements are worded in a misleading manner that makes them appear like they're not demanding anything more than the status quo, but they absolutely are.

[ModernMech]

> but the scoring rubric says that applicants

Like I said, "the scoring rubric" is not the arbiter of the faculty hiring process. Neither is the DEI office. It's not just one of many things considered, it's quite minimal when stacked next to research experience.

That said, a cutoff here is entirely appropriate. Look at what the lowest scoring entries are on the rubric. They are characterized statements of this caliber as as "vague", "little expressed knowledge", "little demonstrated awareness", "seems to be not aware", "no specifics", "brief descriptions" etc. Why would a department want to accept a faculty member who communicates vaguely, with no specifics, and seem unaware of the salient issues? This isn't about "They don't believe the right things". It's about "They don't believe anything".

And anyway, you're giving the rubric more rigidity than it deserves just because it's presented as a rubric. It explicitly states this:

  These examples are offered as illustrative suggestions; they are neither exhaustive nor ironclad. They can be modified to fit the academic and disciplinary backgrounds of applicants in a particular search. Faculty members in individual units should use their disciplinary expertise to understand what examples are likely most appropriate for their particular department or search.

So really, this whole document is just a fancy way to frame a suggestion that you should really think hard about DEI issues on your application.

[db48x]

> So really, this whole document is just a fancy way to frame a suggestion that you should really think hard about DEI issues on your application.

This is exactly what we mean by an ideological test. Ideological tests are useful in certain circumstances, but dangerous in others. Churches want to hire people with faith, especially in leadership positions, and they certainly should ask their applicants about their faith. Should a non–religious public institution such as the University of California be using them to exclude all candidates that don’t follow a particular political movement?

It is especially ironic that they are using an ideological test that claims to test for belief in diversity in order to weed out all non–conforming beliefs, because it ensures that the University of California will never be a truly diverse place.

[ModernMech]

> This is exactly what we mean by an ideological test.

No, because it's not prescribing any ideology. What is the actual test? Can you point to it? Can you define the ideology? How can this be an ideological test if the language on the so-called test essentially says "This is all just a suggestion, tailor this to your own departmental needs."

DEI issues are a reality for instructors who teach diverse classrooms. There's no getting around this reality. The question posed to applicants is: how do they deal with these issues, specifically, in practice? The answer to this question is not prescribed in any way. Not by this rubric. Not by hiring committees. Wide latitude is given toward applicants and I can tell the people who are most against this practice are those who have read the fewest DEI statements, know the least about how the academic hiring process actually works,

Also there seems to be an unstated belief among people who are against DEI statements that issues relating to diversity do not manifest themselves in the classroom. The "ideology" is actually that diversity and inclusion are important to think about at all! To this I would say whether or not you feel they are important or real, they impact the classroom nonetheless. Good instructors have a plan and the experience to deal with these issues.

[MatteoFrigo]

> The "ideology" is actually that diversity and inclusion are important to think about at all!

(I appreciate you taking the time for this discussion.)

Yes, I fully agree that this is an ideology. This is where the problem is.

You presented (elsewhere) several examples of bad behavior that happens in a student body (racial slurs, sexual harassment, etc.) I think everybody agrees that this behavior needs to be "managed" and the professor needs to at the very least be prepared when this happens. One way to handle this situation is to offer incoming professors a pamphlet describing various situations likely to happen and suggestions on how to deal with them.

You cross the ideological boundary when you start labeling these issues as DEI, and this is where the animosity starts, including animosity from me.

What's so bad with using the DEI label? It's just a name, right? What's in a name? Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus, and all that.

The problem is that by now DEI is an industry that has convinced half the American public that the other half is racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. Under the name of DEI, I have been subject to all sort of indoctrination claiming that I am inherently racist, that I am unconsciously believing that women suck at math and I need to do something to fix this problem, etc.

The effect of this nonsense on workplaces is disastrous. You have black people here on HN saying, "I was getting along with everybody and now everybody thinks I am a diversity hire". I have been called a racist for suggesting that we (a cloud provider) have no right to know what customers are doing with the services we sell them. (I am racist because customers may use such services for "racist" causes.) Companies have explicit DEI goals, and I have seen at least one VP committing to meet with two "minoritized" employees per quarter in order to meet his bar for support for DEI. I can hardly think of anything more offensive than effectively saying "you are a black woman, I don't give a crap about you, but I need to spend 30m with you to get my bonus". And don't get me started with the impact of all this nonsense on hiring.

The bullshit level around women in tech is particularly ridiculous. Everybody believes that "science" proves that there is a bias against hiring women, and the DEI training provided this paper by Zingales et al. as a proof: https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/111/12/4403.full.pdf From a bullshit toy example where a bunch of students are asked to simulate hiring women for a simple math task, everybody is now inferring nefarious behavior in the real world. What's really funny about this paper is how they choose the specific task: "Although there is some evidence of a sex difference in mathematics performance (5, 6), which is shrinking over time (7), there is no sex disparity in performance on an arithmetic task such as ours (8)." [See Discussion section] So what these guys are really saying is: women can't do complicated math [5, 6], so we pick the trivial task of adding a bunch of numbers, which [8] proves that even women can do. The very article that complains about bias is predicated upon the fact that the bias is, in fact, justified and grounded in science.

I don't think I have to say that I regard all of the above as complete bullshit, both the paper and all its references. In my professional experience, the women I have interacted with were on average better than the dudes. But this is the nonsense that is sold as DEI these days. It doesn't solve any problems, and it creates needless tensions.

You seem to be under the impression that DEI is just a way to learn to deal with difficult situations. If you really believe this, maybe look outside your department?

[ModernMech]

> If you really believe this, maybe look outside your department?

I will definitely admit that I don't have much visibility outside of academia on DEI issues. I have visibility in my department, in my college and university, other departments at other universities, but not really the private sector.

I could definitely see a case where the private sector is now cargo-culting DEI efforts that originated in universities. Or that the DEI office is exporting their work, because that's their raison d'être. I could imagine this effort is misguided in some ways, if just for the reason that compared to employees, students are so much younger and less developed emotionally. Often they grow out of some of their worst behaviors by the time we graduate them. If you think about it, some of my students are as young as 16, most are 17-18-19. They are away from home for the first time in their lives, they are drinking, engaging in risky behavior, and they are at an age where they are susceptible of falling victim to diseases of the mind. As I said in another post, many of them are still developing a sense of what it means to treat others with respect and dignity.

Also I would say in the private sector, it's probably not right to require a DEI statement a condition of employment, for the reason that community service probably isn't a requirement of the job. In academia, because of the condition that community service is a job requirement, so it's more appropriate to talk about during the interview process.

One more important difference between academia and corporate America is that most DEI efforts in academia are completely optional for individual faculty, especially if they have tenure. The DEI rubric from Berkeley is a great example of this: here the DEI office is presenting a rubric that everyone is taking as hiring gospel and Berkeley, but when it comes to the actual hiring, this "rubric" is just a suggestion. Departments have the final say over who they hire, and hiring decisions are made democratically in most departments. Individual faculty make up the hiring committee, and the chair of the committee (a colleague, not your boss) can set their hiring practices that the committee find agreeable. Rather than the authoritarian model you find in corporate America, the academic model is more egalitarian. If you don't want to engage in any of this stuff, you really don't have to. There's the matter of getting past the DEI aspect of the application, but as I said this shouldn't be a problem for any faculty who actually has a concrete track record of service.

> Under the name of DEI, I have been subject to all sort of indoctrination claiming that I am inherently racist, that I am unconsciously believing that women suck at math and I need to do something to fix this problem, etc.

I think this is very unfortunate, but even if you believe you are free from a bias that women are bad at math, are you claiming that you are free from all biases? I think that would be quite a stretch. DEI efforts aren't supposed to convince you that you are racist, and they aren't supposed to claim that you suffer from specific biases, but they are supposed to make you aware that biases do exist in all people, and that we can counteract them by being aware of them.

So even if you aren't biased against women in math (great!), you still may have other subtle biases that you should be aware of. Biases are particularly important when you are in a direct position of power over the future other people, and therefore it's doubly important for professors to be aware of them. For rank and file employees, maybe the impact of biases is muted, which is another way I would say DEI efforts don't translate well from academia into corporate America.

> Companies have explicit DEI goals, and I have seen at least one VP committing to meet with two "minoritized" employees per quarter in order to meet his bar for support for DEI.

I would say this is a good example of where DEI in corporate America and academia diverge. In academia, we don't have a concept like this because DEI issues are ambient in our work. Having 1-on-1 time with minorities to meet some quota is quite misguided, and I can definitely see how overzealous DEI efforts can lead to such policies.

> The bullshit level around women in tech is particularly ridiculous. Everybody believes that "science" proves that there is a bias against hiring women

One of the thing you hear often about hiring women in tech is "We'd love to hire more women but we don't have enough applicants in the pipeline. Tell the schools to graduate more qualified women applicants, and we'll hire more women." Okay, well that's what we're doing. We're trying to increase the number of women applicant to tech roles, and I think what we're doing is working. Whether or not there's a bias against hiring women, there's definitely a gender imbalance in my CS classroom, to the tune of 90% men, 10% women. Through our DEI efforts, we have increased enrollment of women in our courses, and their outcomes are better than they've ever been. In fact, there were a number of tensions that existed before, and we've worked to alleviate them. Now, when these practices are exported and taken out of an academic context, I could definitely see that it could lead to unfortunate situations where things can be made worse. But that doesn't change the fact that student outcomes across both genders are up, enrollment of women in our program is up, and there are more women than ever who are graduating from our CS program and applying to tech roles.

> One way to handle this situation is to offer incoming professors a pamphlet describing various situations likely to happen and suggestions on how to deal with them.

This would be a helpful resource, but I still don't think it's unreasonable to ask applicants how they actually dealt with these issues in the past. And for senior applicants, they should have more than enough to talk about regarding their service and outreach efforts.

Also, to be clear, there's a big question mark around the best way to deal with various situations. It's very hard to distill things down to a pamphlet because the best practices here are still in flux and being researched. There is plenty of room for innovation in teaching methods.

> You seem to be under the impression that DEI is just a way to learn to deal with difficult situations.

Well, I've also seen the results in my department. We can see it from students who tell us they appreciate the efforts we are making. We can see it in student outcomes of certain demographics that are better than they were from before we started these efforts. Enrollments from underrepresented groups are up.

> (I appreciate you taking the time for this discussion.)

Heh thanks, you may be the only one. My karma certainly took a hit :P

[vanusa]

This is not a purity test or an ideological test.

It most definitely is - in that it plainly assumes that candidates are racist / sexist / binarist / faithist / shapeist / ablist / everything-ist trolls; ignorant of social issues, and completely unable to treat others with elementary respect and decency -- until and unless they swear and affirm otherwise.

[ModernMech]

> it plainly assumes that candidates are...

Again, as I stated in some other responses here (not necessarily to you), the rubric notes several times that it's a suggestion and a template, and that the various criteria are non-exhaustive and not "ironclad". I've never heard of an ideological test that opens itself up to multiple interpretations.

> until and unless they swear and affirm otherwise.

Have you been in a position to read many (or any) DEI statements? Many barely show awareness that community service is a job requirement of being a professor. The worst of the worst are just a series of vague platitudes strung together e.g. "I strive to treat all students with respect and decency"... okay. How? To what effect? How do you refine this process?

Many candidates can't speak with any specificity about their views on social issues that impact the classroom, and struggle to have a cogent discussion relating to the salient issues that arise in a classroom. These candidates are often newly minted Ph.D.s or post-docs with no teaching experience, who want a full time tenure-track job but regard the teaching aspect as a nuisance.

[vanusa]

Have you been in a position to read many (or any) DEI statements?

Thanks heavens, no.

I totally agree that you don't want to hire people for instructor roles who regard teaching as an afterthought or a nuisance. That's always been a "given" (even though obviously not always adhered to, in practice). And yes, in general you want to avoid the mostly mono- and bisyllabic types, and hire people who answer important questions with more than a single sentence fragment.

But to be clear: the practice of mandating diversity statements (with highly refined, and in places, what can only be described as ideologically charged evaluation criteria) is completely orthogonal to the simple matter of needing to hire teachers who actually can teach and want to to.

[ModernMech]

Okay, well what's your suggestion then? People are always very eager to say they treat everyone with respect and dignity, and they want to make everyone feel welcome and accepted in the classroom. But it seems like if we ask them "Okay, how do you make people feel welcome and accepted in your classroom? What specific practices have you put in place? How do you measure this impact? How specifically will you adapt in the future?" then that is very problematic for some people. They don't want to answer those questions. They'd prefer to leave it at "I treat everyone with respect" and leave it at that, which is a meaningless platitude.

> with highly refined, and in places, what can only be described as ideologically charged evaluation criteria

I will keep reiterating the point, but this again overstates the role the document released by the Berkeley DEIB office plays in the faculty hiring process. At all levels, individual departments and the college dean have full discretion on what searches are conducted and how applications are evaluated. Individual faculty members are free to fully disregard any and all DEI concerns when voting on a faculty hire.

Yes DEI statements are required in the application. No the DEIB office at Berekely doesn't have control over how that statement is evaluated. They have some thoughts, but they are just those -- impotent thoughts of the DEIB office to which you are ascribing far more weight than they deserve.

[MatteoFrigo]

I think you have answered your own question. If you want to know "how do you make people feel welcome and accepted in your classroom", just ask that. Tell people to write a statement of pedagogy or something, where they discuss the things you care about.

Your problem is the DEI label. Your DEI office is working hard to convince the world that all whites are racists, which leads to pearls like this one which just came out today: https://alex-hanna.medium.com/on-racialized-tech-organizatio... I was not on the receiving end of the rants of this particular person, but similar expressions of deluded ontology happened all the time. You appreciate that calling one's colleagues racist all the time is not conducive to a good working relationship.

Maybe DEI was a good thing in academia years back. That horse has sailed. In the same way as people have redefined racism from KKK to "anything that leads to unequal outcomes", DEI is now associated with "the world is racist", "everybody is a white supremacist", "white fragility", and all this stuff. The message that your DEI office sends is pretty clear.

I wish you to be able to retain control over the choice of your colleagues forever.

[ModernMech]

> Tell people to write a statement of pedagogy or something

We do in fact ask them to write a teaching statement, and they focus on pedagogy there. But we want them to address issues of diversity specifically (I think I made it clear in my other posts why), because we found if we don't, then they won't address the topic at all. If we ask a question during the interview like "How do you handle a situation where a student reports sexual harassment to you?", we don't want it to be the first time in their life a candidate has ever even considered the question. Requiring an DEI essay is a way of elevating the profile of a job requirement during the interview process; if a candidate has to spend some time writing a DEI statement before a phone screen, it makes focuses their thoughts and makes in-person discussions much more productive.

> Your DEI office is working hard to convince the world that all whites are racists, which leads to pearls like this one which just came out today

The article you link is quite a pearl, but you have to admit this is probably one of the more extreme positions, and I would say it doesn't really represent what we're talking about here (the Berkeley rubric). This is a post by a blue-haired sociologist about DEI efforts in corporate America, which doesn't really reflect hiring practices in academic departments (except maybe the Sociology department). I know that academia has a reputation as being a bastion of leftism, but it might surprise a lot of people to know that there is a degree of political beliefs across the university, and that not all departments are as left leaning as e.g. the Sociology department.

> DEI is now associated with "the world is racist", "everybody is a white supremacist", "white fragility", and all this stuff. The message that your DEI office sends is pretty clear.

At the same time messages sent by DEI offices are misread and misrepresented. Look no further than the Berkeley rubric in question. It clearly presents itself as a suggestion, a template, non-exhaustive, not ironclad, open for interpretation, available to be used (or not) by any departments. Despite this very clear and unambiguous language, some people interpreted it as "You don’t get a job without demonstrating tangible contributions to DEI in the past." No, that's just not what is happening in reality. We have hired plenty of new faculty who have very weak DEI statements. It's very rare for new faculty to have much of a track record of tangible DEI contributions. But they get hired anyway, because as I said, the perception of this document does not match reality.

Nonetheless, what you get is a bunch of people who have never read a single DEI statement in their life, have never been a part of a faculty search, have never applied to a faculty position, all talking about and repeating how awful and corrupted the process is by DEI statements. All the while no one can point to a practice of this DEI rubric being used in the way they fear.

So when you say that academic DEI offices are convicting the world that "all whites are racists" or "everybody is a white supremacist", I have to take a step back and pause. These are some pretty extreme, absolutist statements, so I have to ask are these hyperbole? Or do you have examples of academic DEI offices trying to convince the world that "all white are racist". Because I've seen a lot of communications from academics DEI offices, and it's not something they are likely to say. I know people in those offices and I'm sure they would disagree with the statement "everybody is a white supremacist". It's worth pointing out that the Berkeley rubric doesn't mention the words "racist", "racism", "white", or "supremacy" at all.

I will say that there's a lot of nuance in these issues. It's quite easy to go from a nuanced, qualified, well-reasoned, sourced statement to incendiary hyperbole by removing a few well-placed words. Often times you can take an outrageous statement that is taken as "everybody is a white supremacist", and trace its provenance back to something that is much more reasonable in context, that doesn't even closely resemble where it ended up (ever play whisper down the lane?)

> I wish you to be able to retain control over the choice of your colleagues forever.

We will. The economics work out that way.