[ETH_start]

The rubric explicitly gives a low score to candidates who "state the intention to ignore the varying backgrounds of their students and 'treat everyone the same'".

It listed a number of other positions that it would penalize, with the totality of tbe effect being to actively downgrade the colorblind position, and reward DEI positions.

[lern_too_spel]

You do understand that the state is entrusted to fix problems in society and that having some pockets of society not contribute as well as other pockets is a problem, right? Pretending a problem doesn't exist ("ignoring their backgrounds") is not a good way to solve a problem. That is the error in that statement, not the "treat everyone the same" part, which is merely overly vague. If you treat everyone with the goal of trying to get them to succeed, this necessarily involves understanding the backgrounds of the people you're trying to help. Ramanujan didn't have a background in formal mathematical proof, but Hardy was able to get him to do great things by understanding his strengths and filling in the gaps.

Typically, the people against programs that attempt to solve these problems assume that some pockets of society are unfixable. Korea had a literacy rate of 22% in 1945. These people, had they existed in 1945, would have said, "Well, that's just the normal order of things. No need to try to fix it because you can't."

[ETH_start]

1. There are many different perspectives on how societal problems should be fixed. The preferred solution of social democrats, of racially discriminating in favor of some groups, has not been scientifically proven to be effective, let alone societally accepted as just. In fact, it is unconstitutional, as the Supreme Court recently ruled in connection to affirmative action policies at Ivy League universities. This is strictly outside the domain of science, yet being presented as science.

2. The job of science is to present the facts, not decide on social policy. It is the prerogative of the public at large, and their elected representatives, to decide policy. People in the scientific establishment do not have a mandate to push social policy outside of what the elected government has legislated.

[lern_too_spel]

> There are many different perspectives on how societal problems should be fixed. The preferred solution of social democrats, of racially discriminating in favor of some groups

This is not being proposed by the universities. You're attacking a straw man.

> The job of science is to present the facts, not decide on social policy

The job of a public university is not science but to serve society, just as with all other organs of the state. Doing science is just one of the ways that it does so.

[ETH_start]

I don't want to quibble on the specifics, but the rubric being encouraged by Berkeley is an example of the kind of analytical framework that is being favored in academia, or had been until very recently. It acts as an ideological filter. And yes, affirmative action manifested as racial preferences in hiring absolutely happened and was implicitly encouraged through the so-called equity lens.

As for the job of a public university, the job is to serve society through only one mechanism, and that is through the pursuit and transmission of scientific knowledge and truth.

It is not just another organ of the state that is free to serve society through political activism.

[lern_too_spel]

> As for the job of a public university, the job is to serve society through only one mechanism, and that is through the pursuit and transmission of scientific knowledge and truth.

The role of educational institutions is to educate. In the case of universities, part of that is educating how to do science. The state chooses how to educate to get the most impact for the educational dollar, and Californian voters, despite their many failings, are smart enough to understand that educating more people successfully yields better outcomes than educating fewer because each field gets to draw the top people from a wider population and more pockets of society developing talent earlier as a result of knowing it won't be wasted later. This is validated by the scientific method (with many studies showing that the intuitive result actually holds). The ideological filter being applied is to find those who are willing to do their jobs as required by the employers who have a mandate from the voters.

If the University of California system were only interested in further preparing the best prepared students, it would only accept students from mainland China. Why that is not in the best interest of California I leave as an exercise to the reader.

[ETH_start]

Having a mandate to educate people in California is not the same thing as having a mandate to politicize science or have racial discrimination in hiring. Also, having a mandate to educate more people is not the same thing as having racial preferences in hiring or advancing ideologies through scholarship.

Finally, I want to make the point that this is about federal spending. The whole article is complaining about the federal government cutting its spending for various activist fields and studies. If the people of California have a right to decide how their education spending is allocated, so do the people of the United States when they elect their federal government.