The rise of universities’ diversity bureaucrats (2018)

https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2018/05/08/the-rise-of-universities-diversity-bureaucrats

by dgs_sgd • 3 years ago

257 256 3 years ago

lr4444lr• 3 years ago

Bureaucrats outnumber faculty 2:1 at public universities and 2.5:1 at private colleges, double the ratio in the 1970s.

It has to be asked though, did student:teacher ratio stay constant during this time? Because if it's risen (i.e. professors about the same, but more students,) then a case could be made that the bureaucrat increase corresponds to more students. Why should bureaucrat count correlate to professor count?

edgyquant2• 3 years ago

Because the job of schools as a business is to teach.

DaiPlusPlus2• 3 years ago

(With exceptions…) universities aren’t businesses though. Academic idealism does still exist.

karaterobot• 3 years ago

I was surprised to learn that, at the university I went to, each department paid the administration to use its own classrooms, and if some other party (say, a research lab) needed the room, they could just pay more. It turns out, teaching is not the main business of universities any more. They have a lot of revenue sources these days, and tuition is just one of them: research, athletics, and investments to name a few. Even considering only tuition, the quality of teaching is only one reason students pay to go to a brand name school: the logo on the diploma, the social connections, the job pipeline, the location, and so on also count. For me, it was an unintuitive and disheartening realization.

kevviiinn• 3 years ago

So the more income, from student tuition and higher enrollment numbers, that a university has then it just hires more bureaucrats instead of... more faculty to teach more students?

rmason• 3 years ago

If you wonder why the cost of college has exploded you just have to look at the meteoric rise in administrators in the past thirty years. The number of faculty has only risen slightly while administrators hired because of new government regulations has exploded.

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2011/08/28/administrators-ate-...

whitemary• 3 years ago

It's at least as much related to government subsidies and financial programs that exist as band-aids over the accreditation crises in the American labor market, a result of elite overproduction.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction

thaumasiotes3• 3 years ago

If you wonder why the cost of college has exploded you just have to look at the meteoric rise in administrators in the past thirty years.

A rise in administrators can't explain the rise in tuition. If you spike your manufacturing costs for a product, it's true that you won't be able to turn a profit without charging a lot more for it.

But it doesn't follow at all that you'll be able to turn a profit by charging a lot more for your product.

We see college tuition going up at the same time that college enrollment goes up. That is not a result of increases in the cost of providing college. Increases in the cost of provision would increase tuition and decrease enrollment.

The conclusion to draw here is that colleges have raised tuition prices because they can and the extra administrators are an effect of that (the money has to go somewhere), not a cause.

itemfid99• 3 years ago

The number of faculty has only risen slightly while administrators hired because of new government regulations has exploded.

The fine article directly refutes this assertion: "Universities say that a boom in regulations under Barack Obama’s administration increased the need to hire more bureaucrats of every kind. But one study found that for every dollar spent to comply with government rules, voluntary spending on bureaucracy totalled $2 at public universities and $3 at private ones."

ecshafer• 3 years ago

I don't really see why schools should need most of their bureaucrats personally. I know a few people who work in admin at schools and it seems their jobs mostly revolve around writing a few emails a day. A school need some groundskeepers sure, a small IT department, a secretary for a department probably, and a small general admissions / bursars / financial aid department. I would warrant all other departments could be cut as they are not within the primary scope of teaching.

kkylin• 3 years ago

This depends a lot on the school. A research university is going to have a lot of people that students never meet: accountants and lawyers to ensure compliance with federal regulation on grants, for example. The phrase "administrator" also gets thrown around a lot in these discussions without much attention to more nuanced differences, i.e., a VP or vice provost is a very different thing than staff who are not paid all that much. And some people classified as staff do teach -- boundaries aren't always that sharp.

This is not to say university bureaucracies are not bloated, but the bloat is multi-faceted and often grows in different directions for very different reasons.

mapierce25• 3 years ago

I think the point is that it's not simply the case that universities have lost sight of their purpose of teaching people, but have broadened the scope of their mission beyond teaching … or broadened the definition of teaching? Broadened their mission? Certainly made their mission less focused/clear. And this leads to bureaucracy. See Harvard's Mission Statement.

https://college.harvard.edu/about/mission-vision-history

chongli• 3 years ago

They need more bureaucrats because they’ve grown dramatically in scope. Schools used to be primarily about education. Now they’ve become Club Ed. A 4-year vacation paid for with unsecured loans. Full of gyms and climbing walls and aquatics complexes, libraries and recreation centers and football stadiums.

Where did all these buildings come from? Wealthy donors and government grants. What do all the bureaucrats do? They run all of these facilities, their maintenance staffs and kitchen staffs and counselling staffs.

This is the reason all these costs have gone up: nobody donates money to pay for bureaucrats. They donate the building and saddle the school with the maintenance bill. These are white elephants that do nothing for education. Schools like them though because they increase their marketability. Taken as a whole, these things are a huge liability for society because schools are in a zero sum game when it comes to competing for students.

analog31• 3 years ago

Do adjuncts count as faculty?

gallopingcomp5• 3 years ago

This is the real question. The sources that I dug up from a casual search seem to suggest this is the ratio of tenure-track faculty to administrators specifically.

Still a shame - universities need to treat their research and teaching staff better. But it’s not as simplistic as the picture being painted in a lot of places.

(And I wonder what the student-faculty and student-administrator ratios were and now are, too.)

rqtwteye• 3 years ago

At a minimum you should expect the bureaucrat/teacher ratio to be the same with increasing student numbers.

nonethewiser6• 3 years ago

Because professors directly add value to the education. Quite relevant as tuition costs rise.

mapierce25• 3 years ago

It's unfortunately tough to have a discussion about this too. Any criticism of justice/equity/diversity/inclusion (JEDI) bureaucracy gets strawmanned very quickly, and the critic labelled as simply a bad person. Example: the VP of the American Mathematical Society wrote a short piece (op ed?) in 2019 describing the requirement that new university faculty hires write diversity statements, and the scoring of that statement according to a rubric, as a "political litmus test," and she got roasted for it. Folks called for her resignation, and said the AMS shouldn't have published it. I was attending a JEDI workshop as a grad student to get a diversity certificate at the time, and the facilitator only reacted with disgust, and we never honestly discussed it.

https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/201911/rnoti-p1778.pdf

the_third_wave3• 3 years ago

Any criticism of justice/equity/diversity/inclusion (JEDI) bureaucracy gets strawmanned very quickly, and the critic labelled as simply a bad person.

Labelled as "A Witch" [1]

.. and she got roasted for it. Folks called for her resignation, and said the AMS shouldn't have published it.

And what do you do with witches? BURN THEM!

These D.I.E. apparatchiks are no better than the witch-hunters of yore. No better than those in the Monty Python clip [1] linked to here and a lot less entertaining at that.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2xlQaimsGg

lordgroff• 3 years ago

Those appratchicks are no better than Soviet appratchicks who had their own litmus tests of what was and was not acceptable. I'm not from Russia or the ex Soviet sphere but I did spend a large portion of childhood in a communist system in Eastern Europe and am still horrified that people don't seem to understand that this is exactly the kind of bullshit you had to deal with in that system.

No, you didn't get shot for dissent. No you didn't disappear. It was all much more bland and insidious than that, you were accused of a thought crime and that might kill your career. Conformity was the name of the game and I see increasing evidence that we're very much following this trajectory in North America. And it has that insidious quality too that you can't speak out against it because if you do you're clearly a racist/misogynist/homophobe/insert-bad-thing-hereist.

Manuel_D8• 3 years ago

At UC Berkeley, 76% of applicants were rejected on the grounds of their diversity statement: https://thehill.com/opinion/education/480603-what-is-uc-davi...

The suspicion is that inclusion of these diversity statements in the hiring process is a way to stealthily discriminate on the basis of race when it is ostensibly illegal to do so.

gamblor9564• 3 years ago

The opinion piece you cited made the mistake of citing its source.

It misrepresents what happened at Cal. Candidates were not rejected on the basis of their statement, which was merely one factor in scoring the 800+ candidates they interviewed.

wolongong942• 3 years ago

I'm unfamiliar with US colleges, but could this just be a scheme to allow wealthy or well connected people to get into positions without the grades part? It would otherwise be pretty easy to show unjust discrimination if it were only grades being considered, but an applicant's 'diversity score' could mean anything, and is arbitrary on purpose to justify approving just about anybody.

kova12• 3 years ago

It is not a suspicion, as suspicion would indicate there is a chance discrimination might not be happening; when d&i literally is discrimination, by definition.

anigbrowl3• 3 years ago

In other words, UC Berkeley rejected 76 percent of qualified applicants without even considering their teaching skills, their publication history, their potential for academic excellence or their ability to contribute to their field. As far as the university knew, these applicants could well have been the next Albert Einstein or Jonas Salk, or they might have been outstanding and innovative educators who would make a significant difference in students’ lives.

Welcome to the historical experience of numerous underprivileged people who were excluded through no fault of their own. But since DEI statements can be rewritten at any time, applicants are not stuck with the prospect of permanent exclusion.

I am not a fan of college administrators in general, nor of the heavy-handed bureaucratic approach described here. But administrators are looking for faculty who can produce more distinguished grads in the future, who might be 'the next Albert Einstein or Jonas Salk'. You could be an outstanding brain in your field, but if you're not interested in maximizing the search for undiscovered talent, are you likely to attract it to your school?

seanmcdirmid• 3 years ago

Note the above article is referring to job applicants, not student applicants. It lowers the severity of the finding a bit, but just a bit.

mock-possum6• 3 years ago

reading the guidelines for 'grading' those submitted diversity statements... I'm not sure I see what's so objectionable about them:

https://651d7eef-05d1-4785-8f04-93b49cc8d71f.filesusr.com/ug...

It seems like you are expected, as a staff member in a position to influence the diversity of your workplace and of the students whose educational experience you exercise power over, to do so in a manner consciences of issues of diversity, not even just in general, but in the specific context of your job.

I mean, just for instance, a low '1' rank is described as, among other things: (*my emphasis*)

Defines diversity only in terms of different areas of study or different nationalities, but doesn’t discuss gender or ethnicity/race. Discusses diversity in vague terms or platitudes. Does not provide any evidence of having informed themselves about diversity. *May discount the importance of diversity.*

I mean - yeah, I wouldn't want someone who fits that description being in charge of my education, or my kid's education - I wouldn't even want to be around a coworker who fits that description. I'm not even sure how well it would work trying to be friends with someone like that - I mean, in this day and age? How could you possibly excuse being so irresponsibly underinformed of such an important issue?

Compare that to a high '5' rank: (again *my emphasis*)

Clear knowledge of experience with, and interest in dimensions of diversity that result from having URM identities. This understanding can result from personal experiences *as well as an investment in learning about the URM experiences of those with identities different from their own* ... Comfort discussing diversity-related issues (including distinctions and connections between diversity, equity, and inclusion), both in writing, and in a job talk session and one-on-one meetings with students, staff, and faculty.

I mean - that sounds really good doesn't it? Why shouldn't that skill set make someone a more attractive candidate to hire? Isn't that all good stuff that we would all benefit from more people being well-versed in? Doesn't demonstrating that well-versedness indicate a willingness to put the work in, as required to help actively oppose systemic oppression and bigotry? (as opposed to merely paying lip service to an ideal?)

What would you rather see here?

opportune3• 3 years ago

I think framing DEI policies and initiatives as unassailable is what scares people more than the policies and initiatives themselves.

Of course, many people would react negatively to someone saying flat-out “diversity is bad”, especially because people with those opinions tend to be coming from a place where that’s a toned-down version of more abhorrent views.

But, people with more measured criticisms of specific policies get lumped in with the first set. So because it’s very hard to say “there is a better way to do this” or “this may not have positive systemic effects” or “this does not seem relevant in the context it appears in”, there are few checks and balances, and you get these instances where it’s clumsily shoehorned into things because nobody dared disagree.

I think for many people, this bothers them more than any specific thing.

Spooky233• 3 years ago

It’s just a new old boys network, except you get different types of infighting. Movements like this aren’t new and always burn out. Once the tribe in charge gets in trouble, it will move on to the next fad. 1990s diversity gave way to late 90s run everything like a business.

If you work in a huge bureaucracy like the University of California, if leaving isn’t practical, you just need to behave and hunker down and focus on what’s productive to you.

registeredcorn4• 3 years ago

I'm asking from a sincere position here, so I don't wish to come off sounding antagonistic, but could you explain why the statement "diversity is bad" is wrong?

From my own perspective, the idea of encouraging or endorsing something that hurts unity, cohesion, and understanding. I cannot think of a way in which diversity would not be a bad and damaging thing.

I have, of course, heard comparisons to things like species of dogs, "Mutts are healthier than purebreds", but people aren't dogs. Or the human immune system being able to fight of disease, "Being exposed to different diseases makes your immune system stronger", but people aren't diseases, either. It disturbs me when people are boiled down to those types of inhuman terms. Those types of analogies never really address the issue without comparing it to something that isn't the issue itself. It always seems to fall short. I've never heard of someone explain why encouraging intrinsic division wouldn't be a destructive thing.

I've heard some vague phrases like, "It's good to have different perspectives to appeal to different groups of people", but that seems to be a criticism against diversity, not encouragement for it. It seems to say that diversity is disunity; chaos. That it is a kind of confirmation that different groups do not understand each other at all, and can only communicate through some kind of manufactured means. It just seems like a position that isn't very well thought out.

Again, I hope it doesn't come off sounding some specific way. It seems like it's a topic that's easy to sound hateful on. I don't wish to seem such a way; I've never really understood what it was that people who endorsed diversity were trying to hint at. It's like there's some core concept that's never been said out loud, and there's just been a lot of assumptions built off of that thing that was left unaddressed. I'd really like to understand what that inner thing is.

fwungy8• 3 years ago

Same thing with covid. People with good questions that went against the narrative were lumped up with people spouting the most stupid and awful things. That's a propaganda technique.

wellthisisgreat2• 3 years ago

“diversity is bad”

Diversity is good. Protectionism and enforcement of artificial diversity is bad

Animats3• 3 years ago

framing DEI policies and initiatives as unassailable is what scares people.

The first rule of ___ is that you don't talk about ___.

onetimeusename• 3 years ago

The way diversity is implemented is bad. It gives power to people on the basis that they are aggrieved and have a higher moral status than others in the same position. So why should we assume that once those people are in, they would voluntarily choose to surrender their own power and status which comes from allegedly being aggrieved?

The whole point of DEI was supposedly to "equalize" things so once you are a beneficiary of a DEI policy, you should no longer be able to claim victim status. In fact, once they get in, they argue for even more grievance policies, power, and special treatment. Often that is specifically what the job is meant to do. What is the real end result of this in particular for universities which are gateways to power? It's not surprising that universities are where this battle is being fought and not fast food or retail jobs.

itwontworkwo• 3 years ago

How can you solve a distributed measurement problem when everyone trying to solve it has their own rulers with different scales?

This is why this social issue is unsolvable. Everyone has a different version of what is fair.

asdf_snar• 3 years ago

I like your formulation of this as a "distributed measurement problem", but I'm not sure I follow. Could you elaborate? Specifically, I'm not sure if you agree or disagree with the post you are replying to. Thanks in advance.

akomtu• 3 years ago

DEI bureaucrats are good at defending their turf. They've internalized the Lenin's playbook: never debate your opponents on public, as that may reveal flaws in your position and undermine your authority, instead silence your opponents, ridicule them and get rid of them later, when out of public sight.

If you were a medieval knight, you wouldn't say "it's unfortunate that our opponents, occupying that castle, shout us down whenever we attempt to discuss their position." Of course they shout you down: they compete with you for authority.

devwastaken• 3 years ago

The very question of "are we taking some DEI ideas too far?" is now censored in well known university systems. You cannot even ask questions without persecution, you are treated as a threat to humanity.

This is how I know this is about politics, power, and paychecks.

malandrew• 3 years ago

The only solution is to aggressively defund until there is only budget left for teaching.

rayiner5• 3 years ago

Example: the VP of the American Mathematical Society wrote a short piece (op ed?) in 2019 describing the requirement that new university faculty hires write diversity statements, and the scoring of that statement according to a rubric, as a "political litmus test," and she got roasted for it.

They are. And for the “diverse” people themselves they are a sort of minstrel show. The goal is to show off a superficial version of diversity in a way that’s pleasing to white people. For example if you’re Muslim, they want you to one of those Ilhan Omar intersectional Muslims, not one of those billion other Muslims who believes what Islam teaches to be true. Or if you’re Indian immigrant you’ll get a lot further writing about the need for “solidarity between black and brown people” than anything that maps onto how typical Indian immigrants view their experience as a minority.

crackercrews10• 3 years ago

Omar's colleague Ayanna Pressley made this explicit: "We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice" [1]

1: https://thehill.com/homenews/house/453007-pressley-democrats...

Animats3• 3 years ago

Today you have to say the right things to keep the political commissars happy.

red-iron-pine4• 3 years ago

People used to hang for insulting the king. Now private, 3rd party websites decide to remove your vanity AI sitcom project? Clearly the same thing...

lazyeye• 3 years ago

Otherwise known as a kafka trap:-

"A rhetorical device in which any denial by an accused person serves as evidence of guilt."

inglor_cz• 3 years ago

The situation makes sense once you start viewing DEI as a religious orthodoxy and its enforcers as the priestly class.

Heresy and heretics are usually extirpated with extreme prejudice, at least if they threaten the interests of the establishment. Fortunately the DEI bureaucrats at the universities cannot condemn people to death, but the big question is if the Western civilization can survive if its own sources of knowledge and truth are slowly converted into a secular equivalent of Pakistani madrasas, where articles of faith are mindlessly chanted.

Theocracies tend to become very ossified and ossified academy is worse than useless.

everdrive3• 3 years ago

DEI is all the rage right now. My company's last big survey had some question which stated "I feel like I can be myself at work." The score wasn't as nice as folks would have liked, and apparently what HR took from that is "we're not doing DEI hard enough." Which is a pretty unfortunate set of blinders to have on. DEI is probably one of the more narrow reasons these days that someone might not feel that they can be themselves at work.

version_five2• 3 years ago

I would say that the existence of those DEI programs is probably one of the biggest reasons people can't be themselves at work

peanuty12• 3 years ago

It's striking how much tech workers decry DEI on anonymous forums like Blind compared to the complete lack of dissent on workplace communications channels like Slack.

__float• 3 years ago

I don't understand. What specifically is "the existence of those DEI programs" preventing you from saying or doing at work?

GenerocUsername2• 3 years ago

Agree. As a white male, I have a very hard time being honest on these questionnaires because I know full well that giving good responses means they will lean in further to DEI, and giving bad responses they will lean in further on DEI...

In 2021 they had a slide on the town hall for 'Whiteness down 13%' and the black host said 'we can do better'...

Might as well pack up, clearly unwanted here.

rasengan0• 3 years ago

...said 'we can do better'...

20+ years in the same company, never heard this phrase spoken by HR until the DEI craze.

Now 'we can do better' is Newspeak for more surveys, townhalls, implicit bias training, more 'education' that cuts out working time in the limited hours.

Bureaucracy is a Pyrrhic victory.

Disclaimer: No disrespect or offense to Molossian descendants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molossians meant in usage of the term Pyrrhic

peanuty12• 3 years ago

In 2021 they had a slide on the town hall for 'Whiteness down 13%' and the black host said 'we can do better'...

Reminds me of the controversy at Pinterest a year or two ago when an Asian engineering manager asked how we could reduce the % of Asians in the engineering org (which was 68%).

greyhound_7• 3 years ago

Just stop filling them out.

kevin_thibedeau• 3 years ago

Another odd position was the removal of the "urban" award categories from the Grammys (a worthwhile change) followed by complaints that a certain race was represented by less than 50% of the nominees in the remaining categories.

mountainb2• 3 years ago

If I applied for some kind of corporate dispensation to openly pray the rosary at regular intervals and have a little shrine on my desk, would I be treated equally to an employee with a little trans flag display on their desk? Surely one is more socially acceptable than the other, but couldn't the simultaneous observance of both accommodations create an uncomfortable workplace environment for both of them?

If I were a Muslim with one legally recognized wife and two common law wives, could I bring all three of them to a corporate event and introduce them as my wives? Surely such an employee is also entitled to five prayer breaks, with facilities adequate to support the correct movements (this type of fact pattern has lead to much recent litigation and multiple 8-9 figure settlements).

If I were a practitioner of some version reconstructed Roman paganism, would I be permitted to perform the sacrificial augury ritual during a quarterly budget meeting? If not, why not?

Should Scientologists be permitted to administer e-meters to co-workers on company property during mealtimes and other breaks?

Should a Jewish employee be permitted to wear a Star of David flag pin to work if it causes offense to Palestinian employees working at the same facility? If not, why not?

Should a Black Hebrew Israelite be permitted to discuss popular documentary films produced by their co-religionists on religious topics with co-workers on company property, given that such beliefs are intrinsic to their religious identities, or should they be terminated for even mentioning content from such films because it can cause offense to others?

In practice our corporations require a sort of rainbow-neutered-prozac-addicted-egalitarian-Protestant-tinged secularism, but the expansive rhetoric invites a lot of limit-pushing behavior. It cannot possibly be stable, but I think all those fascinating contradictions help to explain why so many corporate employees eat so many pills every single day.

projectazorian2• 3 years ago

If I applied for some kind of corporate dispensation to openly pray the rosary at regular intervals and have a little shrine on my desk, would I be treated equally to an employee with a little trans flag display on their desk? Surely one is more socially acceptable than the other, but couldn't the simultaneous observance of both accommodations create an uncomfortable workplace environment for both of them?

Yes it would probably be permitted, but I think most people would know you are trolling, and I also doubt this hypothetical trans employee would really care much

If I were a Muslim with one legally recognized wife and two common law wives, could I bring all three of them to a corporate event and introduce them as my wives? Surely such an employee is also entitled to five prayer breaks, with facilities adequate to support the correct movements (this type of fact pattern has lead to much recent litigation and multiple 8-9 figure settlements).

Many corporate campuses have facilities available for use as prayer rooms, this isn’t that unusual. As for “this fact pattern has led to “multiple 8-9 figure settlements,” going to need a citation on that one

If I were a practitioner of some version reconstructed Roman paganism, would I be permitted to perform the sacrificial augury ritual during a quarterly budget meeting? If not, why not?

This is trolling, not going to bother to respond to this one

Should Scientologists be permitted to administer e-meters to co-workers on company property during mealtimes and other breaks?

Non-solicitation policies prohibit this sort of thing, which is one reason why most employers have them

Should a Jewish employee be permitted to wear a Star of David flag pin to work if it causes offense to Palestinian employees working at the same facility? If not, why not?

Permitted? Probably yes, if it follows the corporate dress code, but expressing opinions on controversial political topics at work often has informal implications for one career

Should a Black Hebrew Israelite be permitted to discuss popular documentary films produced by their co-religionists on religious topics with co-workers on company property, given that such beliefs are intrinsic to their religious identities, or should they be terminated for even mentioning content from such films because it can cause offense to others?

Non-solicitation would prohibit this (also again trolling)

TheOtherHobbes• 3 years ago

Your presentation is extreme, but it does highlight the fact that the race/gender definition of diversity is not particularly diverse.

For one thing it ignores religion and class.

But it also ignores a good few decades of research into personality disorders, which suggests that the people you absolutely do not want to hire are the Cluster B types.

A "diverse" workplace run by narcissists and sociopaths is going to be toxic and anti-productive no matter what the gender/race balance is.

golemotron• 3 years ago

My company's last big survey had some question which stated "I feel like I can be myself at work."

That might be the worst goal for any workplace. There are clearly parts of ourselves that have no place at work.

crackercrews10• 3 years ago

I was recently sent a survey whose questions all presupposed that DEI should be critical organizational goal. The questions only let you say that the organization was accomplishing its DEI goals, or was not doing enough. There was no way to suggest that the organization was spending too much time on DEI. I learned that the survey was created by an equity consulting company. They were paid tens of thousands of dollars for their bogus survey and equity audit.

fwungy8• 3 years ago

I always say they're doing a really good job so someone can argue that they don't need to keep pushing it more.

They are doing a good job. Why create a good product? That's difficult and failure is possible. Much more fun to work on the diversity stats, because quota hiring is an easy win at review time. Who cares if strategic hiring is bad? Big companies have enough process inertia that no one will know if the new hires are working out for years.

dragonwriter• 3 years ago

Most likely, the reason you were sent this survey is because the organization has already decided on its priorities, and was looking to evaluate its success at acheiving them, not questioning them.

at_a_remove2• 3 years ago

I recently received a survey from my local public library that was the same: are we doing enough diversity, or should we work even harder? No option for "too much emphasis on."

Macha2• 3 years ago

I don't think HR reading the answer they want to take away from the survey is necessarily limited to DEI either. My previous company had been formed by the merger of many acquisitions, and had a big company wide strategy around a product that only really mattered to the biggest unit. Imagine being at Beats' hardware division and being told that the important strategy for Apple is app store installation counts. (The example company wasn't Apple, but it was a similar example for the company). Sure, you could focus the entire business unit's work on an app to control the headphones and everyone could say they were focused on the company's primary objective, but it hardly seems the most important thing for Beats to do with their products.

They then included in their quarterly survey questions how connected people feel with that strategy. When the unrelated units scored quite poorly on this subject, they decided the reason was that the line managers had failed to educate their reports on the importance of this strategy enough, so started marking them all on how connected their reports felt and giving out educational material so people could understand the strategy, missing that people understood the strategy well enough, it just there was no meaningful connection to their business unit to understand.

anonymouskimmer6• 3 years ago

"My company's last big survey had some question which stated "I feel like I can be myself at work." The score wasn't as nice as folks would have liked, and apparently what HR took from that is "we're not doing DEI hard enough.""

Mine had a comment box for each question and for this one I just stated that it's wildly inappropriate to be your home self at work. You should be your work self at work.

twoifbyseat2• 3 years ago

Diversity officials promote the hiring of ethnic minorities and women

I'm genuinely curious if ethnic minorities and women are underrepresented among university faculty/staff. I would have guessed "no", but this statement implies otherwise.

mapierce25• 3 years ago

Yeah, they are. Very much among faculty of math/physics/engineering departments. But the reason is that much of the white male faculty were hired decades ago, when white men still dominated academia. Change is slow.

amateuring• 3 years ago

any proof for your assertions?

twoifbyseat2• 3 years ago

Very much among faculty of math/physics/engineering departments.

Are we sure women and minorities aren't overrepresented in other departments enough to offset this...?

crackercrews10• 3 years ago

A 2015 study shows women have a 2-1 advantage in hiring for professor slots. [1]

This is probably a recent phenomenon, but it shows the trend.

1: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/04/14/study-suggest...

hyperbovine2• 3 years ago

Among new hires, typically not. The gender balance is close to 50/50, and hiring committees bend over backwards to find qualified URM candidates. The key word being "qualified".

As a fraction of the overall department, yes, because anybody who hired in before ca. 2000 is basically a white or Asian male with almost no exceptions. So the demographics on paper still look pretty skewed, but it gets better with each passing year.

nonethewiser6• 3 years ago

How does less white or asian men constitute "better?"

nonethewiser6• 3 years ago

I'm genuinely curious if ethnic minorities and women are underrepresented among university faculty/staff. I would have guessed "no", but this statement implies otherwise.

Why would that matter? Did you think the goal was "equal" (what does that eve mean?) representation?

The goal is more of some people and less of others.

Animats3• 3 years ago

"Robert Martin of Centre College in Kentucky, a co-author of the study, says the real reason for the growth in spending is that administrators want to hire subordinates, thereby boosting their own authority and often pay."

Ah, there's the problem.

mapierce25• 3 years ago

That line was a flag for me. I doubt it's that simple, that admins are that corrupt. I think they're just basic: "Hire a new person to promote equity and inclusivity? That sounds great!" The good optics are irresistible.

opportune3• 3 years ago

This is a common argument for why many projects get bloated, not just JEDI. It has been mentioned as a contributing factor behind tech “over-hiring” in the past few years too.

I think that in large bureaucracies this will always happen. As a manager looking for career growth, the more headcount you get and the more scope you “manage”, the easier it is to make the argument you should be a Director/VP/whatever - or to get hired in your next job as such. Managing 10 people is being a line manager. Managing 50 people is being a director. If you can make the case for hiring more people to support all the initiatives you are working on, you may have just doubled your income.

In a smaller organization, people are usually more directly involved in the organization’s efforts and there is a more limited amount of funding for new things, so the only way you can empire build is by doing something that is very organizationally valuable (like making more money).

In government, academia, and huge corporations, you have massive amounts of money coming in, and most people’s work is far removed from why that money is coming in. Advancement and growth is mostly about being able to secure as much of that money for your department as possible.

drak0n1c• 3 years ago

And the fuel behind administrative bloat is the inflationary effect of federally guaranteed student loans compounded over decades. Why not increase tuition by a thousand dollars if the loan will cover it regardless?

jordigh• 3 years ago

By B.S.

[...]

The era of Donald Trump seems to have strengthened the diversity bureaucracy’s belief that students’ feelings must be protected.

This article is very weird. I realise that The Economist isn't just journalism, but also editorials and that every article is very open about its slant. The constant use of the deragotory "bureaucracy" and "bureaucrat" plus the use of a pseudonym of the author indicates that whoever wrote this has an axe to grind and is afraid to publicly grind it. It's obvious what the author thinks: diversity is bullshit, white male professors should be able to speak without fear, too much money is being used to scare white male professors.

Don't get me wrong, though. Unlike B. S., I am not telling you what to think. I am just remarking how odd it is to see such a slanted article.

at-w3• 3 years ago

The Economist has a policy of not using authors' names for any of their articles.

carlosjobim• 3 years ago

The Economist has used anonymous writing since the start.

crackercrews10• 3 years ago

I get a lot of surveys these days where the first questions are about identity. This sends the message that the thing they care about most is your racial and gender identity. But it may also bias the rest of the survey outcome. This possibility is why surveys used to only ask these questions at the end. But now it's more important to virtue signal up front, even if it means introducing bias.

phillipcarter• 3 years ago

Or it could be that they don't want incomplete demographic info that also biases results. Why do you assume it's virtue signaling?

crackercrews10• 3 years ago

Incomplete demographic info deprives surveyors of information about who said what. It doesn't affect the answers given to the substantive questions. Asking for demographic info up front can affect the answers people give to the rest of the questions.

And in answer to your question, I assume it's virtue signaling because it is all the rage these days. Did you miss all the black squares on Instagram?

newsclues• 3 years ago

https://newdiscourses.com/2022/04/dei-explained-new-discours...

plaguepilled• 3 years ago

How do we fund high-rigor alternatives to university that have strict limits on administrative hires?

10g1k• 3 years ago

Luckily, where I work (one of my jobs anyway), if someone can't do the job, they get booted. Regardless of gender or colour.

fwungy8• 3 years ago

DEI is a juice box for handing out cushy jobs to political hacks. Any organization that puts DEI as its core mission is headed for mediocrity.

Protecting people who can do the job but need a little help for whatever reason is one thing. Forcing companies to hire a bunch of people who will not contribute to satisfy DEI quotas so they can meet ESG goals and qualify for discount financing is a whole other thing. The government is basically outsourcing social programs by forcing businesses to hire people.

at-w3• 3 years ago

The government is basically outsourcing social programs by forcing businesses to hire people

Is the (US) government pushing this directly through financial incentives?

killjoywashere• 3 years ago

Yes:

* https://www.sba.gov/federal-contracting/contracting-assistan...

"Department of Defense requires approval of a formal justification if the 8(a) sole-source contract exceeds $100 million; all other federal agencies require approval for sole-source 8(a) contract actions that exceed $25 million." That is, you can help the government launder up to $100M per contract and no one even has to write down a justification. Buy whatever the government asks you to, resell it to them for a 10% mark-up, and you can get up to $10M. And if you think people aren't playing that game, I have a bridge to sell you, but actually to this other person, who will get 10% for just existing.

fwungy8• 3 years ago

If you take government money as a contract or a grant you must comply with their rules. These rules include diversity targets for race, gender, and disability.

faeriechangling• 3 years ago

The government is basically outsourcing social programs by forcing businesses to hire people.

It is absolutely not, the entire scheme is zero-sum, so it can't replace social programs. What is given to one is taken from another, and even if this has some mild redistributive effect which could potentially lessen the need for social programs, it's never going to have much of once because the vast majority of money is held by people who will never be impacted by DEI by design.

DEI is just classic rent seeking and political influence of private business. The character assassinations of its critics are again, a function of furthering rent seeking. It's a very old story.

boppo13• 3 years ago

Yep. Worst part is there's people pushing hard for the Fed to be an arbiter on DEI and climate. They've resisted for now, but it's not long until a power-hungry governor figures it out.

thwayunion• 3 years ago

Universities are projecting a ~20% decline in their total addressable market [1] starting about 10 years from now. Talk with any decision maker at a tuition-dependent institution for more than 10 minutes and they'll bring up this topic.

Many of the USA's colleges and universities cannot afford a 20% decline in tuition dollars. They will collapse under the weight of fixed costs and higher unit costs, even with substantial cuts to faculty and staff. The only path toward survival for many of these institutions is to increase the size of the pie, and the WASP demographic is saturated.

In Tech, DEI is an HR and Recruiting department. In Higher Ed, DEI is also -- primarily, even -- a sales and marketing department. An existentially important one. I've heard a few different college presidents discuss it very explicitly in those terms.

[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/blogs/online...

brailsafe• 3 years ago

Seems like the way Canada is handling its boomer problem

youainti• 3 years ago

This is why I read hn. Frequently there are people who know things that I don't which help me understand the situation better.

skymast• 3 years ago

Learn Mandarin, no country can survive this long with such weakness.

Our enemies are salivating while our Generals are getting sex changes.

gallopingcomp5• 3 years ago

Are you kidding me? Mainland China has the worst virtue-signaling bureaucracy that I’ve seen anywhere by far (and the corruption that came with it).

Administrative bloat (and the tyranny of corporations) is a problem, but don’t presume they (or DEI initiatives) weren’t invented to solve a problem, even if it’s just as a band-aid. Some kind of baby and bathwater thing seems to be going on here.

And, in any case, every extant country, every political faction, every institution is likely going to have some weakness at some point in time, because we are human beings and we fuck up a lot of things constantly. Something something iron law of oligarchy.

And, which generals are you talking about?

nonethewiser6• 3 years ago

Not really. DIE is rotten to the core. It's racism.

renewiltord2• 3 years ago

What we've discovered is that authoritarian countries frequently machismo virtue signal, and when the rubber hits the road they don't know how to fight.

I imagine that the real harm will be like in most of Southern Europe where once mighty nations languish as their economies labour under the weight of regulation and the population is mostly poor outside a few cities.

Their generals will fall to femboys and furries. But their businessmen can still win.

gallopingcomp5• 3 years ago

“The population is mostly poor outside a few cities” seems to have been a historical norm in most of the world, for one reason or another (regulatory capture / colonialism / decline of key industries / etc).

(And I wish we had more concrete data to critique instead of vague, monolithic enemies like “administrators” or “regulations” (typo), where each side simply fills in the blanks according to their own biases.)

shoo• 3 years ago

This topic is covered on this weeks episode of the Economist's Checks and Balance podcast, which covers US politics. https://www.economist.com/checkspod

It's a great podcast, strongly recommended.

plantain• 3 years ago

Zero interest rate phenomenon.

nonethewiser6• 3 years ago

Guaranteed loans

hayst4ck• 3 years ago

This post will start off sounding like I am not very liberal, but I am very liberal.

There is one question a diversity authority needs to answer:

"If you want a larger amount of people from a small pool of viable candidates, how do you do that without lowering the bar?"

Stated differently, if 1 in 100 university graduates earning a software engineering degree are black, but you want your company's demographics to match the population demographics which is 15 in 100, how do you get closer to 15 in 100 without accepting unqualified candidates or without having the average black employee under perform the average employee as a whole?

Any diversity bureaucrat that fails to answer that question is absolutely unqualified and is a detriment to the institution they are a part of.

There is one harsh reality that needs to be understood: Affirmative action and diversity initiatives ("C" level diversity focused staff) are functionally reparations.

The American public has robbed entire classes of people of wealth, and therefore their ability to pay for competitive advantages, like private school, which other people can afford. This results in not just systemic disadvantage, but generational disadvantage.

I don't think generational disadvantage can be solved without efforts like affirmative action, but the packaging that diversity bureaucrats are selling is one that requires proportional response, and therefore foments backlash.

Diversity bureaucrats try to use power, rather than justice, to achieve their goals. "We will fire you if you disagree" is using power. "Reparations are the right thing to do. Offering opportunity to those we have taken them from" is justice. The difference is subtle, but important.

seneca• 3 years ago

I think you're largely dead on. "DEI" programs are affirmative action dressed, along with an authoritarian undertone.

"Reparations are the right thing to do. Offering opportunity to those we have taken them from" is justice.

Couching reparations as inherently being just, which perhaps you didn't intend, is where I disagree with you. The idea of reparations is pretty contentious[1]. I think that very fact is exactly why these affirmative action programs have to be dressed up, and faux-support has to be forced, as much as it is.

[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/261722/redress-slavery-american...

cuteboy192• 3 years ago

The is actually a clique in leftist thought that bemoans the "diversity" framing for reparations. Because with diversity you have to advantage people who were never entitled to any kind of reparations. For example there is no reason for Latinos to recieve reparations (most of them are white after all). So these people would rather that only ADOS and NA people recieve any benefit from these schemes

boppo13• 3 years ago

For example there is no reason for Latinos to recieve reparations

Wasn't Cortez a big meanie or something? You might point out he had little to do with the USG, but the core DEI crowd doesn't care about that, just European colonizers.

Manuel_D8• 3 years ago

Actually, affirmative action likely suppresses the rates of Black students majoring in CS because it increases the rates at which they drop out of the major. Universities have good data on how likely a student is to graduate in their chosen field, and they know that the bulk of the Black student they admit who flag STEM fields as their preferred majors will not succeed but they admit them anyway to achieve the desired demographics. Absent affirmative action, these students would be attending less prestigious universities, but they would be graduating in STEM at higher rates. This is the research that explores the effect of affirmative action on majors: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6675032/

Some claim that racism inside the university is why Black students drop out of STEM. However, the rates of persistence in STEM for the same level of academic performance is the same for all races: a Black student with 700s on their SAT is as likely to succeed as a white or Asian student with 700s. A student with 600s or 500s is less likely to succeed, and equally so regardless of their race. But if you admit a lot more Black students with the latter scores, you can see how this will affect persistence rates.

qikInNdOutReply• 3 years ago

I actually can envision, new universitys being founded on purely meritocratic and scientific basis, having only "hard" research based topics and succesfully distance themselves from the "relgious" education base.

flippinburgers• 3 years ago

Working at a USA based company and having to deal with DEI sounds like a nightmare. Inadvertently racist? Purposefully racist? I honestly don't care.

fche3• 3 years ago

tragedy

The rise of universities’ diversity bureaucrats (2018)

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