[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.

[vanusa]

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.

So - how often do sexual harassment incidents occur such that the obvious line of report is to the instructor (as opposed to say, the department chair or an administrator)? Are you literally saying that, literally, every post doc should have (with 99 percent probability) been the recipient of such a report (on the basis of the handful of likely very small classes they've taught by that stage)?

And if the students did go to some other responsible contact person at the university, aside from the instructor (which is perfectly reasonable of course - maybe they don't want the instructor to know, because would distract from their ability to focus on their studies) -- I guess that post-doc shit out luck when applying for a position by your DEI board, because they have no sexual harassment reports under their belt?

Sounds patently unrealistic, of course. But this seems to be exactly what you are saying.

[ModernMech]

> So - how often do sexual harassment incidents occur such that the obvious line of report is to the instructor (as opposed to say, the department chair or an administrator)?

If incidents like this are reported at all, they are most often reported to instructors first. The reason is that the issues are quite sensitive, and often times students have a well-developed relationship with their instructors (in some cases it may be the only relationship with an adult on campus). They often do not know the chair or administrators, so the instructor takes the role of guiding the student though the process. Usually it means handing the issue off to someone who is more qualified, but it's important to be ready for when those students come to you.

> Are you literally saying that, literally, every post doc should have (with 99 percent probability) been the recipient of such a report (on the basis of the handful of likely very small classes they've taught by that stage)?

No, but a post doc should be aware of the high probability that something along these lines could happen with regularity when they become an actual professor. A post doc shouldn't sit there wide-eyed and slack-jawed when we ask them about these issues during an interview.

> I guess that post-doc shit out luck when applying for a position by your DEI board, because they have no sexual harassment reports under their belt?

No, expectations are calibrated based on the experience of the applicant. If we go by the Berkeley rubric, a candidate could score very well by:

- Comfort discussing diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging related issues

- gives some detail about specific strategies for effective mentoring

- Mentions plans or ideas but more is expected for their career stage.

So if you can comfortably talk about salient issues, have some experience mentoring students, and have some plans but maybe not concrete ones, you are in a solid position. I don't see this as unrealistic.

[MatteoFrigo]

> Or do you have examples of academic DEI offices trying to convince the world that "all white are racist".

Not that explicitly, of course, but let's go to https://diversity.berkeley.edu/rwle-books and click on "Anti-racism resources". We get to a google doc with a bunch of links, mostly broken or paywalled (so don't blame me for cherry picking).

Let's look at the first "Articles to read" https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/americas-r... From that document I learn that there is a "racial contract" in America "rendered in invisible ink", which everybody tacitly agrees with (or at least all whites).

"The Declaration of Independence states that all men are created equal; the racial contract limits this to white men with property. The law says murder is illegal; the racial contract says it’s fine for white people to chase and murder black people if they have decided that those black people scare them. “The terms of the Racial Contract,” Mills wrote, “mean that nonwhite subpersonhood is enshrined simultaneously with white personhood.”"

But don't worry, "the racial contract is not partisan". Still, we can always blame Trump: "“We can’t keep our country closed down for years,” Trump said Wednesday. But that was no one’s plan. The plan was to buy time to take the necessary steps to open the country safely. But the Trump administration did not do that, because it did not consider the lives of the people dying worth the effort or money required to save them." (The people dying are understood to be nonwhite from the context.) You can read the rest of this delusional tripe.

Let's move to another article https://thebolditalic.com/where-do-i-donate-why-is-the-upris... America is full of white supremacists: "There is also evidence that much of the destruction has actually been instigated by white supremacists. This is not new. White Americans have a long, storied history of violence and destruction in this country." The rest of the article is actually somewhat reasonable, except for the occasional incendiary statement: "That white people, for all of our heartbreak and solidarity in public, often still operate in this way under even the smallest private pressure, so calculated and with such total disregard for Black lives."

Look, I get it. There is a history of horrible things, in the USA and really everywhere in the world. It's good that activists are drawing attention to the problems of historically oppressed groups. And for sure I'll defend their right to say whatever they want. I like to think I have even helped a little bit to make the situation better. I can live with the rhetoric, and in fact I would love to be in a world where people speak more directly, because it is easier to reach agreement if people spit out all their concerns quickly. But this kind of rhetoric is divisive and the fact that DEI office promotes it does not help the problem that they (and me and you) are trying to fix. What impression does the applicant get after being asked to write a diversity statement and going to the diversity website?

Then people take this stuff literally and you get the "pearl" that I linked. I easily admit that the example is extreme, but not as extreme and as uncommon as you may think. I'll leave it at that.

Good luck. I'll stop replying since this thread is way past its expiration date.

[ModernMech]

> let's go to https://diversity.berkeley.edu/rwle-books and click on "Anti-racism resources"

One of the repeated oversights in these discussions is taking resources out of context. Just because something is available on the public web, doesn't mean it was designed for a public audience. The Berkeley rubric we've been talking about is the first example of that.

Here you're taking a reading list on the Berkeley diversity site which is described as:

  Read, Watch, Listen, Engage is a space where students, staff, and faculty can share books, podcasts, conferences, and more on E&I-related topics. 

So what we're looking at is a reading list Berkeley students and faculty use to share interesting books with each other. This is made doubly clear since as you noted, most of the links are internal Berkeley library links.

I think it bears noting that Berkeley is regarded as one of the most left leaning institutions in the country and maybe even world. I'm certainly not going to put myself in the position of arguing that some of the content you've linked to and quoted isn't divisive, or that Berkeley of all places isn't left leaning. But at the same time I would say the leftmost department at the leftmost university in the country should be as bad as it gets, right? I just don't see how a reading list is really convincing the world that "everybody is a white supremacist".

Honestly I know what you're talking about as far as this kind of perception that is spread, but I really don't think it's academic DEI offices that are the main culprit, although I think they're associated with it. And the reason I think that is because academic DEI offices can't make faculty buy into any of what they do, and our tolerance for having to do extra work is exactly zero. So the efforts they come up with don't go very far unless we actually want to do them. Like, if you're on a hiring committee and you think DEI statements are bullshit, you don't have to read a single one. You don't have to give any DEI aspect as single moment of consideration. You don't have to ask a single DEI related question. No one is going to force you to do anything.

But the more I think about it, the more I believe the problem is the move of DEI initiatives into corporate America. HR has far more power over employees than DEI departments do over faculty. I could definitely see them taking something that worked well in the academic model, and turning it into a Frankenstein in the corporate world. It also would explain the quite divergent point of view we both have of the same topic -- you're in the corporate world and have experienced all the worst aspects of DEI initiatives, I'm in the academic world and it's worked out quite well for us because it makes more sense here.

> What impression does the applicant get after being asked to write a diversity statement and going to the diversity website?

We can look at an actual Berkeley job posting and see what applicants see. Here's an advertisement for an assistant professor in physics:

https://aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF03085

The DEI letter is described as follows to the applicant:

  Statement on Contributions to Advancing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion - Statement on your contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion, including information about your understanding of these topics, your record of activities to date, and your specific plans and goals for advancing equity and inclusion if hired at Berkeley (for additional information go to https://ofew.berkeley.edu/recruitment/contributions-diversity).

If we follow the link to additional information, we find:

  Advancing diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging are responsibilities of all Berkeley faculty through their research, teaching, and/or service. As a public institution we expect all new hires to meet our equity and inclusion standards for excellence. These responsibilities are codified in both the UC Berkeley Principles of Community(link is external), and The University of California Regents Policy 4400(link is external)

The actual UC diversity policy is here:

https://regents.universityofcalifornia.edu/governance/polici...

And it's pretty anodyne, but it makes the case I've been making here: California has a diverse populations, Berkeley exists to serve Californians, therefore Berkeley must work to accommodate a diverse student body. Pretty straight forward.

The other link has the Principles of Community:

https://diversity.berkeley.edu/principles-community

These are the documents that the search committees would use as the basis for any DEI related decisions, as they have far more weight institutionally.

Okay, so let's bring it full circle. The job advertisement asks for a DEI letter. The DEI letter is supposed to address how the applicant will abide by Policy 4400 and the Principle of Community. I think the principles as listed above are quite different from the Berkeley diversity reading list, and I don't see why any candidate should have a hard time addressing these topics.

Let me ask you this: I don't presume to know what you believe, but would you find it objectionable to write a DEI statement arguing that freedom of expression and allowing diverse viewpoints on campus is important to diversity and a healthy ecosystem of ideas? I don't know how you feel abut that, but this would be a perfectly acceptable DEI statement according to all of the language laid out in the job advertisement and its linked content (as long as you also discuss how you work to advance freedom of expression).

> Good luck. I'll stop replying since this thread is way past its expiration date.

You too! :)