Harvard's largest faculty eliminates requirement for DEI statements in hiring

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/06/03/metro/harvard-diversity-statements-dei-faculty/

by RestlessMind • 2 years ago

36 23 2 years ago

There is a clear reversal of trend in American society when it comes to DEI policies. Lots of corporate layoffs in the DEI department, elimination of DEI statements in hiring (first MIT, now Harvard, probably others too), reinstating SAT in admissions, firing of incompetent hires who checked the right profile boxes (Claudine Gay) etc.

I am rather glad about that. While I support DEI goals, the effort seemed to tackle only the superficial symptoms rather than core problems which are hindering diverse representations. It also didn't help that there was no clear leader with a coherent goal (eg. MLK in 60's who wanted voting rights for Blacks). Instead, we had weak-sauce thought leaders (Kendi or DiAngelo) and DEI essentially meant whatever one wanted it to mean, leading to a lot of potential attack surface for detractors.

PheonixPharts• 2 years ago

It also didn't help that there was no clear leader

The public narrative is that DEI was being pushed by some outside, socially progressive force, but when you look into the details it was almost always investors that were pushing for DEI in companies with internal cheerleaders being the champions.

I'm not entirely sure what the true motivations of this trend coming from investors was but I'm a bit too cynical to believe it was primarily "love for humankind".

aprilthird20214• 2 years ago

Like many left-ish leaning ideas (I'm one myself), it came from ideas about how to improve the world around us, but when the practical implementation of the great ideas came around they turned out to be far more complicated with unintended negative consequences than most imagined and now we're backtracking from the idea.

The same thing was true with the anti-police movement. We can all see problems with policing and envision alternatives, but most practical attempts to implement alternatives (like the now wildly unpopular reformist prosecutors elected in the bay area) had unintended consequences people didn't expect and got walked back.

ninininino• 2 years ago

Without measuring the changes that _have_ stuck around, it's not really easy to tell whether it's a matter of two steps forward and one step back, or two steps forward and two steps back, or one step forward and two steps back.

frugalmail• 2 years ago

DEI hurt many companies. If anything it eliminated diversity of thought for those superficial categories of difference, and caused strong leaders to mutate their contributions from clear direction and achievement into playground cow towing to participation award saboteurs dragging the entire team down.

_nist4• 2 years ago

DEI has always been in companies before the term even arose to the larger public discourse. I have to go through such trainings every year at every company I've been at. There has never been true "diversity of thought" at most institutions and I doubt you would really want it, especially if you were on the receiving end of it every day and it was just blatant bigotry towards you. As far as achievements, I can't recall a single instance of someone being brought down because of a participation award. Unless you think being 1st, 2nd, or third gets robbed of all meaning because everyone got an award.

aprilthird20214• 2 years ago

While I believe what you're saying could be true in some cases, I work at a tech giant and there's no "diversity of thought" anyways because anything remotely controversial is not allowed to be discussed at work.

This is a company which went hard on and is now currently backtracking from DEI but this policy of "don't discuss anything controversial at work" has strengthened the entire time making diversity of thought a moot point.

_nist4• 2 years ago

I think Claudine Gay is a bad example. First of all, she wasn't fired, she resigned. If you look at her credentials, she is more than qualified for the position. Many people attacked her primarily for the faux claims of antisemitism and her logical response to an inflammatory question from a Congressional hearing. Such a notion of antisemitism has been largely not backed up by much of anything other than spurious claims and deliberate misinterpretations (from the river to the sea, etc.) because people are obsessed with Israel which has been condemned for their actions against the Palestinians. As far as her plagiarism allegations, they have much more merit. However, so many academics have deliberately faked data and plagiarized that a few examples of miss-citations and misquotes (that were largely discovered due to the fact that people wanted her fired anyways, nobody cared before) is very weak in my opinion, especially if it wasn't deliberate. Not to excuse it, but its not out of the realm of possibility for it to be a mistake and it certainly isn't because of DEI that she somehow plagiarizes worse (all races and genders do it). She also requested to make corrections to some of these accusations showing an attempt to fix it. DEI is an attempt to level the playing field for people who have far worse upbringings by nearly every statistical measure. It's what affirmative action attempted to alleviate. These poor upbringings largely affect minorities and this is a statistical fact.

isr• 2 years ago

I agree that the "oh my god, she plagiarized someone" shock & horror was mainly (not entirely) an exercise in firing her, without admitting the main reason - that she initially gave lukewarm pushback to the hysterical "anti-semitism is widespread on campus" fake hoax.

In hindsight, she (& others) might feel that they ought to have pushed back more strongly, and debunked this hoax more definitively, when it was first trotted out.

Since then, we've had, on campuses, Zionist students made into media darlings for a day for being stabbed in the eye, when all that happened is that a piece of fabric lightly brushed her cheek. While other (Seinfeld funded) students attacked campus protestors with lead pipes and whatnot, but getting away scott free.

It's like McCarthyism, mixed with 30's era brownshirts, with the mainstream media coverage being directed by Goebbels.

gwbas1c• 2 years ago

IMO, a lot of DEI policies smell like win-loose power games, or simply dirty politics. They backfire in that a group made up of mostly left-leaning, similarly-thinking people is not diverse.

The problem is that diversity isn't just based on metrics like racial, sexual orientation, gender, ect. It also comes from including people who have different biases, backgrounds, political leanings, economic status, ect.

What makes this complicated is that organizations are powerful because of who they include and who they exclude. It's a good thing to say "we're not going to exclude people based on race / gender / sexual orientation;" but then to say "we're going to favor people who have left-leaning politics" basically unravels the advantages of a diverse organization.

fxd123• 2 years ago

Good. DEI, at its very core, is a racist and shallow ideology

chasing• 2 years ago

This on its own may or may not be a good thing, but remember to keep it in context:

Our country has had a centuries-long problem with racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism keeping large numbers of people from accessing the mainstream of American life. We have tried to create a variety of often imperfect tools to combat this situation and create a more equitable country — something right-wingers in general and the Republican Party specifically in the last couple of generations have worked hard to tear down. Lately they've been getting extra aggressive and, sadly, successful at it.

So, again, this action on its own may or may not be a good thing. But we need to make sure not to let the bigots in our country return us back to the very broken situation of thirty, fifty, a hundred years ago.

aprilthird20214• 2 years ago

I probably agree with you politically but I think there's no value in "keeping this in context". This is a specific policy in a specific institution which had specific consequences on hiring specific staff.

Those consequences were largely negative even if you are a great advocate of diversifying our great institutions because they hamper academic freedom, period. The great Universities of America had (till recently) a reputation of being a place where tenure was so strong faculty members could think and state opinions most normal people could never try to articulate. Forcing all faculty to accept a certain ideological position in the manner of the diversity statement really hinders that ability, that academic freedom, which incubates so much intellectual work.

poochipie• 2 years ago

This is great, however the phrasing of the question might lead to a "Tyranny of Structurelessness" [0] issue where they're not asking for a diversity statement, but are expecting the answer to contain a diversity statement.

Time will tell.

0: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

lupire3• 2 years ago

It's the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which is the undergraduate college and the non-professional-degree academic graduate school. NYT headlines have weirdly pretentious clickbait.

lupire3• 2 years ago

Headline is false. Harvard's essay was ", diversity, inclusion, and belonging", not "equity".

going forward candidates for tenure-track positions would be required to provide a more broadly focused “service statement,” instead of a statement focused specifically on “diversity, inclusion, and belonging.”

Nothing really changed except saving a few minutes of some applicants' time, and not hurting the feelings of people who didn't want to think about diversity, inclusion, and belonging. The hiring committee can still evaluate the quality of the applicant essay against their priorities, which might or might not weight those factors, same as before.

Harvard's largest faculty eliminates requirement for DEI statements in hiring

Related Stories