[anotherhue]

I had a flight of fancy recently where I thought I might try lecturing. I saw the below as required 'Qualifications' on a CUNY [0] posting for "Distinguished Lecturer - Curriculum & Teaching, Computer Science Education" [1]. I will leave it to you to determine if the qualifications they seek would lead you to believe your child would benefit from being under the instruction of such a person. Edit: See comment below, this particular institution has specific goals.

  MA Degree in Computer Science, Educational Technology, Education, or a closely related field; earned doctorate preferred but not required

  Expertise in computer science educational pedagogies

  Experience with outreach and community engagement

  Demonstrated commitment to social justice, multimodal learning, anti-racist pedagogies, multilingualism, and culturally and linguistically responsive and sustaining pedagogy

  Ability to collaborate in recruiting students for graduate programs

  Demonstrated ability to effectively teach adults in college level education programs in various modalities including in person, hybrid, synchronous and asynchronous modalities

  Experience with outreach and community engagement which are seen as important for developing the Computer Science Education Program at Hunter College.

  Demonstrated knowledge of computer science K-12 learning standards and curricula

  Experience integrating issues of diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility in teaching, scholarship, and service

  Experience teaching in classrooms, educational settings and communities with culturally diverse populations including multilingual learners

  Evidence of excellent written, oral, organizational, and interpersonal communication skills

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_University_of_New_York

> The City University of New York is the public university system of New York City. It is the largest urban university system in the United States

1: https://cuny.jobs/new-york-ny/distinguished-lecturer-curricu...

[alistairSH]

I take it you find something wrong with these requirements? They look roughly "correct" to my eye.

Experience in field... Can't teach something you don't know yourself]

Experience with educational pedagogies... Some background in education is good

Recruiting for graduate programs... sure, sounds like a thing a uni would want

Teaching diverse student body... this is an urban uni with a large non-white population (25% Black, 30% Hispanic) and massive number of first-generation college students (45%).

Experience teaching remote, hybrid, etc.... that's a requirement in 2023

[anotherhue]

To be clear, I'm broadly supportive of inclusion, but my surprise was at the balance of 'actual technical knowledge and ability' and 'community outreach / admin / political agenda fulfilment'.

If I think about university choice as 'hiring' a professor to teach my child, I would review their qualifications, and this isn't what I personally would want to see -- though as others have pointed out this is not a technical college so maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree.

[alistairSH]

That's fair enough - this list is unsurprising at CUNY, given its mission and student body. The same list at BigStateU could be a little off-putting, though I tend to believe most of the "woke" requirements are made in good faith. I've read plenty of accounts of minority students who attended top-notch unis (some Ivies, some premier state schools) and felt completely out-of-place for myriad reasons. Colleges should put guardrails in place to ensure these students are successful.

[jimbokun]

Is there evidence that the techniques used for effectively teaching white students, are not effective for teaching non-white students?

Are the brains of people from different races really that different?

[hgsgm]

Looks like impossibly excellent qualifications, except maybe one of them if you are "anti-woke".

CUNY is a haven for low-wealth non-white people who appreciate being included in opportunities for advancement.

[ethbr0]

Agreed. It's a bit ridiculous to pull a qualifications list from a college that's declared purpose since before 1900 has been mass education, irrespective of sex, race, religion, or ethnic background.

If parent wants to make the point I think they're trying to make: pull a collection of * Institutes of Technology's hiring policies.

Using Hunter College/CUNY is like pointing to Kentucky Fried Chicken as an example of how restaurants are serving too much fried food.

Maybe. But the mission is advertised -- if you choose to walk through that particular door, what you get shouldn't be a surprise.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_College

[anotherhue]

I didn't actually know that, thank you for highlighting it.

[ethbr0]

Neither did I! Not my part of the country.

And I am sympathetic to your point -- there's a lot of excesses and not-functionally-relevant requirements in academia these days.

But NYC has a lengthy and altruistic history of charity/nonprofit educational institutions for those who have been denied access at one time or another, and this just happened to be an example of that.

I would be fascinated to get a meta analysis of tech school faculty requirements, 1940 - 2023, though. Honestly can't guess if they've drifted or not.

[zmgsabst]

Sounds tragic.

They went from promoting equality for a hundred years to promoting fashionable anti-Asian racism and misandry.

I hope they find their way again.

[galangalalgol]

I suspect anti-wokeness is probably part of the complaint, but completely apart from that I find it odd they have teaching staff responsible for some of these tasks. I would want my professors to be a bit more outgoing than the point at the board and tap foot until they get to go back to researching types, but having them go recruit people is a full time job (or should be) and so is making good tests and lessons. Grading tests is also ridiculously time consuming if you use good tests. My reaction to those qualifications is "do you have any other employees or only teachers? How much time do you expect me to spend on all these jobs?".

If it is just a weed out for teachers that don't care about their students success or understand the variety of challenges some of them face, I think they could have done that in a better way than suggesting "if you really care you'll do three full time jobs to help these young adults".

[anotherhue]

The faculty/administrative numbers are startling to me, but I expect typical in most institutions.

  Academic staff 19,568

  Administrative staff 33,099

  Students 275,000

From their wikipedia page

[Dig1t]

“Anti-racism” specifically is the most racist idea ever. The guy who coined it (Kendi) regularly says that current racism is the only way to make up for past racism.

“The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” -Kendi

So yeah if being anti-woke means you don’t want to participate in a culture of hateful discrimination, then yeah anti-woke sounds normal here.

[newswasboring]

I think I am at least an average participant in woke culture. I spend at least a third of my life online (outside remote work etc). I have never heard anti-racism defined like that. Are we sure this is a widely accepted meaning? Maybe it is on college campuses.

[jimbokun]

Are you unfamiliar with Kendi? I thought he was something close to "required reading" for anyone aligned with woke thinking.

[newswasboring]

I am not familiar with any required reading for being woke. For me its just a realization that our systems are not perfect and there are ways to improve them and make them more accessible. You can get to this position by just looking around you (if you are not part of the dominant socio-economic group). Its quite obvious. Whenever someone mentions names to me, I just let it pass through me. What is important is the argument.

edit: spelling mistakes

[ethbr0]

As an engineer who generally supports anti-racism (and -sexism) ideas, I figured it was broadly understood that anti-racism (as a goal) was racist (as a definition).

You can't add 0 to -5 enough times and get back to 0.

[Dig1t]

Honestly that's fine, but let's be clear that you are saying that you support racism.

To get this professor job you are saying you are okay with being openly racist.

Until pretty recently this was considered a bad thing by most people, and many kind, sane, people are not going to be okay with that as a prerequisite for getting a job.

[dahart]

Your language seems hyperbolic and inflammatory to me. You are conflating discrimination with racism, and also conflating positive discrimination with negative discrimination.

Affirmative action is not racism, even though yes it is intentionally a type of positive discrimination. It’s also out in the open and temporary and more fair, as opposed to cultural racism that it hidden and systemic and permanent and hurting people unfairly.

Getting stuck on the existence of discrimination is a way to lose sight of the goal. The goal is to battle systemic cultural racism & sexism that laws have been unable to fix for more than a hundred years, by trying to adjust outcomes temporarily in favor of the people who’ve been unfairly excluded, only until we have evidence that systemic discrimination is mostly gone. In the mean time, there is still a ton of evidence that the bad kind of discrimination is still pervasive and durable. If you don’t want affirmative actions of any kind because you can’t get past the discrimination, then how do you propose to fix racism? Note people have been trying for centuries and unable to do it without some kind of balancing offsetting positive discrimination to counter the known measurable negative discrimination. Do nothing has already failed. So what’s your solution?

[Dig1t]

>you are conflating discrimination with racism

The definition of racism is "discrimination based on race". Despite recent attempts to redefine racism as something that only white people are capable of, this is how most normal people understand the term.

By using the term any other way you are obviously intentionally ignoring the fact that the term meant "discrimination based on race" for decades.

"positive discrimination" is still just discrimination based on race, i.e. racism. Defining discrimination as "positive" is just a convenient way to tell yourself you are not being a bigot.

To put it another way: if you did not hire a candidate because they are white or asian, say, because you hate white/asian people, the action to not hire them is exactly the same as the "equity" case where you chose not to hire them because of their race but because you are doing so in the name of "equity".

In the end you are just arguing for equality of outcomes instead of equality of opportunity. We have already seen where society ends up if we allow open discrimination (whether or not you define it as "positive" or "negative"), it's not very good. Equality of opportunity does not freeze the status quo, look at the asian population for an example: asians 150 years ago were stuck building railroads, now they are richer by far than any other ethnic group. They got that way by working hard and making use of our myriad _equal-opportunity_ employment laws.

[ethbr0]

Yes, I support tactical racism to decrease the amount of systemic racism.

Not sure why, assuming you're also an engineering type, this would be a surprising statement. That's how change works.

Anything shy of that (e.g. egalitarianism) is simply freezing the status quo after it's already been massively tilted.

[anonymousDan]

I don't really understand what your issue is. This is specifically looking for someone interested in CS Education/Pedagogy (i.e. the science of teaching Computer Science), as opposed to a specialist/researcher in a particular CS topic (e.g. distributed systems, mchine learning etc).

[dsfyu404ed]

Sounds like they're looking for a career academic who happens to have a CS undergrad and not a CS professional who can teach and work in an academic environment.

[anotherhue]

Based on the salary range, you're probably right.