[GIFtheory]

My first reaction to this news was, “fine, sounds like a silly requirement.” However, being a PhD graduate from a minority background, I really have to thank my advisor for the undergraduate outreach work he did, without which there is realistically a negligible chance I would have ended up with a PhD and a great research career. I don’t know what motivated him to do this work, but from a purely pragmatic perspective, if professors know that performing such duties helps them get promoted, perhaps it’s not a bad policy, as long as inequities exist in academia. There are so many other pressures on young faculty, outreach may be something that is hard to justify spending time on unless you have to do it in some sense.

[Gimpei]

I think this is a good point. I wonder how useful diversity statements are for accomplishing this task. It just seems like cheap talk to me. More useful would be to reward people in tenure review for outreach to minorities.

I’m from a minority, just not one that is recognized as such in the convoluted system that is racial politics in the US (I am of Iraqi descent). But if I were in the shoes of someone who should be benefiting from DEI policies, I’d be pissed off with how it’s shaken out. Seems like a whole lot of empty, performative symbolism with negligible actual change. Things like DEI statements read like box ticking to me, allowing administrators to say they’ve “tried” without doing anything. Same goes for sensitivity trainings, and flashy renaming of, for example, master to main. The singular focus on symbolism has not done anyone any favors apart from a few semiotics professors, although I wonder if they’ve been chastened by how little their favored policies have accomplished.

[Fomite]

One of the things it does do is separate people who treat it as a box checking exercise from the people who approach it seriously.

[jack_riminton]

Such is the nature of bureaucracies, whatever is easy to measure will become the measure

[eli_gottlieb]

I once helped my advisor write a grant application and he put in some great outreach stuff in the DEI section of the app. What turns me cynical about DEI statements/sections is that after we won the grant, there was no money for that inclusion programming and nobody ever checked whether we'd really done it.

[lazide]

And that is the ‘performative’ part.

It’s similar to making everyone sort their recycling, and then just throwing it all in the same landfill when it actually gets to the dump.

Why not actually recycle?

And/or if we’re not going to actually recycle, why make everyone go through such a complicated song and dance and spend so much time on something that ends up not mattering?

Wait, this is a lot more applicable of an analogy than I was expecting.

[pradn]

It's also a way to compel action across all professors, not just professors from historically-underrepresented groups, who would likely be bearing the brunt of the work.

[dgfitz]

Perhaps you were simply evaluated against your noggin and not your skin?

Edit: what are the arguments against this?

[noobermin]

This comment does not make sense in reply to this question...where did they say anything about evaluation, the point they made is the difference it made is their advisor doing outreach.

[dgfitz]

I made the mental leap of “the advisor reached out because they saw the potential” which I assumed… was assumed.

[kelipso]

No it's not on an individual basis, outreach work means something more like the professor talked to a group of students about their work and what they can do to join their lab for a phd. There are lots and lots of undergrads who don't know a thing about graduate school.

[nsagent]

In this case, "outreach" means [1]:

  the extending of services or assistance beyond current or usual limits

  | an outreach program

[1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/outreach#dictiona...

[lazide]

they very well might have been evaluated based entirely on their abilities alone.

A toxic element of DEI is that now they have to always wonder (as does everyone else) if it was done because of their skin color/gender/race, regardless of what their mentor says. Because it very well may be true as well.

[thewanderer1983]

Just like the justice system. People should be assumed innocent until proven guilty. DEI and more broadly CRT are toxic because minorities, like all humans have faults and these ideas promote minorities to assume discrimination instead of faults. Therefore not helping these individuals improve their faults. This also promotes division and hatred in society. Overall net negative.

[achenet]

to be fair, I don't think yelling at someone for their flaws is very effective at fixing them.

My reasoning can be summed up as "look at prison recidivism vs Skinner's work on positive reinforcement".

[OJFord]

> Edit: what are the arguments against this?

I happen not to agree with them, but leaving that aside they're often that Ok fine, it's a pipeline problem^, but the solution is to address that at every stage, not just the beginning.

(^meaning for example schoolgirls aren't sufficiently interested and encouraged into STEM so university applications are low, so admissions are low, so graduations are low, so job applications are low, so offers are low, so employer gender ratios are low)

[WalterBright]

STEM is something you gotta have some substantial internal motivation to do, such as doing it for a hobby. The kind of work I enjoy, you gotta really like it or it isn't going to work out for you.

For example, I was taking machines apart when I was 7 trying to figure out how they worked. I'd break open resistors to see what was inside - just baffling grey dust. Eventually I took bicycles apart, then engines, then whole cars. It was just foregone that I was going to engineering school.

[dangerlibrary]

I get very little joy from programming. I never program outside of work - I hike, climb, work on my house, raise my kids. But it pays the bills and I can do it, so I've put in the time to learn enough to be worth paying a salary.

When I was a kid I wanted to be a paleontologist. Then I wanted to be a smoke jumper. Now I'm a staff engineer.

Not everyone gets to do what they love. Some of us are just following the money.

[kelipso]

Maybe decades ago when college students based their choice of majors on feelings or whatever that might have been true. Nowadays college students are much more practical. An obvious example is the rise in CS majors in the last decade.

The notion of substantial motivation or hobby to go into STEM is absolutely ridiculous.

[refurb]

As a STEM student who actually did a STEM job (basic science research) you have to love it to make a career out of it.

The pay isn’t fantastic and your career is basically doing the same thing (with more skill over time) for 30 years. With most of your work a failure.

Even people who liked it often bailed.

Programming is a bit different. You can make a lot of money, have varied jobs and just grin and bear it for the money.

[kelipso]

Have to agree the lower salary means you have to love it to spend years doing it. I moved to CS because of that mainly.

[WalterBright]

> The notion of substantial motivation or hobby to go into STEM is absolutely ridiculous.

Pretty much all the ones I know that are good at it love it. Just like musicians and athletes.

Sure, there are those in it for the money. They're usually the tweeners.

> Nowadays college students are much more practical.

I'm not so sure about that. There's a large number of math avoiders in college, and when they graduate discover their degree is worth a minimum wage job.

[mtlguitarist]

Okay but the difference is that being a mediocre athlete or musician means that you're unemployed, whereas you can be a totally mediocre programmer and make well into the 6 figures. My friends who are professional musicians know far more about their craft than even the most motivated engineers I've worked with, and they make less money than the worst paid engineers I've met. I've casually played guitar for almost 20 years and been programming less than half that time ane I can't even think about going pro without a massive dedicated effort.

[saagarjha]

That's because those don't pay you money. I know plenty of excellent engineers who couldn't care less about computer science.

[bitcharmer]

> The notion of substantial motivation or hobby to go into STEM is absolutely ridiculous.

You clearly don't have much exposure to the stem bubble. Overwhelming majority are passionate geeks.

[kelipso]

Ha ha ha. I have a CS PhD and am friends with grad students in many other STEM fields. There are just as many who are "passionate", or whatever geeky losers who waste their life obsessing over minutiae want to be called, as there are people who are working on their degree for the sake of practicality. I would say the latter are in fact generally more successful.

[jasonm23]

To go into a subject, with no foundation, no motivation and no interest. How is this a set up for success?

I mean, sure, people can go into any subject, but... if they're to succeed?

[semi-extrinsic]

As a society we have purposely shaped the way we do STEM so that it can be carried out by an army of employees trained to do relatively simple tasks. It is much better for a company to hire 15 people to do one thing, than to hire one brilliant person to do the same.

The extra cost is just passed on to the consumer, and you gain predictability and managerial prestige.

As an example, Amazon had twice as many people working just on Alexa as there are employees total at JPL. And JPL designs, engineers, builds and operates dozens of groundbreaking spacecraft, including several space telescopes, Mars rovers, and the Voyager programme. JPL needs people with substantial internal motivation, Amazon et al. do not.

[WalterBright]

> As a society we have purposely shaped the way we do STEM so that it can be carried out by an army of employees trained to do relatively simple tasks.

I see no purposeful force "shaping" this.

> It is much better for a company to hire 15 people to do one thing, than to hire one brilliant person to do the same.

They would hire the one brilliant person if they could. The trouble is finding them.

Also, brilliant is not the same thing as enjoying the work.

[avs733]

perhaps he wasn't. clearly we are at an impasse

Maybe put some value and engage with someone's articulation of their personal experience as opposed to simply dismissing it because it does not comport with your world view.

[dgfitz]

What did I dismiss?

By all accounts they sounds quite successful as well as appreciative of their undergraduate advisor.

Engage in their experience? See above. Should I have snuck in there somewhere “nice job kind gentle person, you succeeded” or something?

What world view is that?

[gotoeleven]

Not to be flippant but the saying "when you're robbing peter to pay paul, you can always count on the support of paul" comes to mind. Maybe you really are a super qualified researcher that is doing great work, but all I see as the result of this DEI stuff is sinecures and make work jobs and generally lower standards across the board. (e.g. the former harvard president, or the current press secretary)

I dont think anyone would have a problem with DEI if it was about identifying unrecognized talent and making sure it got the proper attention. Thats not what it is right now.

[jimbokun]

How was the outreach aimed at you different than the outreach aimed at any other students?

[nsagent]

It's not about treating students differently. Rather it's about where you spend your limited resources for outreach.

For example, during my PhD I did outreach in both elementary and middle schools where teachers said there were skills gaps they needed help with. The demographics in some of those schools happened to be such that 80-90% of the students were black and brown.

[EnigmaFlare]

That's not really DEI. That's just targeting schools with skills gaps, and it might have turned out to be mostly white. To be DEI, they'd have to be chosen because of ethnicity, gender, etc.

[nsagent]

DEI is applied broadly, for example here's a list of demographics targeted for DEI from one of Biden's executive orders [1]:

  The initiative will advance opportunity for communities that have historically faced employment discrimination and professional barriers, including: people of color; women; first-generation professionals and immigrants; individuals with disabilities; LGBTQ+ individuals; Americans who live in rural areas; older Americans who face age discrimination when seeking employment; parents and caregivers who face employment barriers; people of faith who require religious accommodations at work; individuals who were formerly incarcerated; and veterans and military spouses.

[1]: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...

[scarmig]

Unsurprisingly, "poor people" are not targeted for help.

[EnigmaFlare]

Nor "people who are doing badly at school".

[jimbokun]

I think if more DEI efforts were expressed as programs like this, there would be a lot less backlash.