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The irony is that the modern university's view of diversity is so narrow-minded that it doesn't actually yield a diversity of perspectives. Yes, you can bolster
by ordinaryradical 6y ago
The irony is that the modern university's view of diversity is so narrow-minded that it doesn't actually yield a diversity of perspectives. Yes, you can bolster a student body by welcoming students of different backgrounds, but ask any conservative student, any Christian student, or any student with no obvious ideological home in the secular Left if they feel welcomed and free to contribute the conversation and you will get an entirely different picture of the university system.
Diversity is not merely a set of physical traits—it has to run through the psychological core of a person.
- ARandomerDude 6y agoAgreed. I was in ROTC at a very left-leaning campus during the "Bush=Hitler" fad. It wasn't a pleasant experience.
- tmpz22 6y ago> an entirely different picture of the university system I disagree. When I was in college ~4 years ago there were diverse discussions in all my classes and students freely contributed what would be considered conservative mainstream opinions without retribution - and when well argued earned some support from their more liberal colleagues. University means different things to different people. For many it means partying. For others it means the paper certificate you may then use to get a higher paying job. To me the heart of a university is the discussion sections where students pick and prod at their lectures and each other's ideas. Diversity initiatives did not, anecdotally, affect those for me personally.
- musingsole 6y agoUnless you're the one stating the views, you're not in a position to know if those students received no retribution for their views. What you perceived as your peers listening and responding thoughtfully to the non-tribal thoughts may well have been anything but to someone without your set of assumptions. You simply cannot know. Claiming that you know otherwise is highly indicative you're part of the problem when it comes to diversity of thought in these venues.
- AnHonestComment 6y agoIt’s a self-serving lie: even places like HN use shadow and to enforce ideological conformity — and then people like this come along to give everyone a pat for being open minded.
- asciident 6y agoIsn't the premise already a problem? Even the mainstream conservative views did not result in retribution. Yet extremist liberal views would never be considered for retribution.
- ordinaryradical 6y ago> students freely contributed what would be considered conservative mainstream opinions without retribution Sure, but the presence of these opinions is not the same thing as proof of a diverse, free-thinking environment. I shared unpopular opinions too—when I felt I could. It wasn't always easy to do so. The chilling effect is hard to measure because people self-censor and self-censorship is invisible. It's a bit hard to explain, but if we take your metric and extend it, you can see where it falls short: just because there are black students on campus doesn't mean they feel welcome or comfortable to share their minds.
- _jal 6y agoI do believe there exist some well-meaning conservatives who come to be Big City College and are hammered for their views. I think their misfortune is not just to be exposed to the same sort (but opposite polarity) of conformity demands I experienced growing up in a small southern town, but also to be used as political weapons by their supposed allies.
- cherrycherry98 6y agoWould love to see some statistics on party affiliation of faculty at these universities as a proxy measure for ideological diversity.
- COGlory 6y agoI haven't thoroughly investigated this study or its methodology, but it doesn't seem very hard to believe: https://econjwatch.org/articles/faculty-voter-registration-in-economics-history-journalism-communications-law-and-psychology https://econjwatch.org/articles/faculty-voter-registration-i... >We looked up 7,243 professors and found 3,623 to be registered Democratic and 314 Republican, for an overall D:R ratio of 11.5:1.
- commandlinefan 6y agoThat kind of makes sense though - university jobs rely on government funding and it's usually the Republicans who (at least claim to) try to reduce government spending.
- setr 6y agohttps://news.gallup.com/poll/146786/democrats-lead-ranks-union-state-workers.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/146786/democrats-lead-ranks-uni... Across federal employees, that doesn’t seem to matter much. I also wouldn’t expect republicans to care so much that they’d put monetary source before job type/location — it’d be quite difficult to be a republican teacher and find a job that’s not significantly government-funded
- pc86 6y agoIt's not a good proxy, at least not anymore, so I'm not sure why you would. Plenty of fairly conservative people had been registered Republicans for a long time up through and maybe including 2016. Maybe this was different in the 90's or 00's and may have worked then?
- offby37years 6y agoHeavily Democrat: - Of 12k donors from University of California faculty, only 6% donated to Trump, 94% to Biden - MIT, 5% Trump, 95% Biden - Stanford, 5% Trump, 95% Biden - Harvard, 4% Trump, 96% Biden - University of Colorado, 4% Trump, 96% Biden - University of Washington, 3% Trump, 97% Biden And so on: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-election-trump-biden-donors/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-election-trump-biden...
- pc86 6y agoWhen I attended a private liberal arts college (04-08) there were plenty of conservative and Christian students, and to my knowledge none had any issues with administration or faculty. Most of the problems came from other students, typically because of the ideological fervor of a fresh (and uneducated) convert.
- ripply 6y agoOccupy wallstreet was 2011, it ended with the narrative switching from class warfare to critical race theory and systemic racism. Gamergate was 2014 when the culture war really started to heat up. 08 was a different time, things have really changed that much.
- listless 6y agoI felt like it went into overdrive in 2016. Maybe partially driven by a certain political figure who seemed to be the perfect foil. I think the irony of MAGA is that it made a bad situation far worse. Or rather, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. The question is whether or not we’ve learned that lesson.
- scruple 6y ago> I think the irony of MAGA is that it made a bad situation far worse. At some level I believe that this is accelerationism. You see pockets of it on both the far left and the far right. It was at least a competiting narrative of the last 4 years, though perhaps subdued from the mainstream.
- cafard 6y agoJosh Hawley graduated from Stanford, didn't he?
- renewiltord 6y agoPeople say this about tech, too, and I'm in tech and not particularly left by the standards here (I support free enterprise way more than anything else and can easily say X lives are worth less than Y money) and people haven't been dicks to me at all. In fact, people quite like me. So considering that there's all this wolf-crying about tech, and the warnings about universities sound almost exactly the same, I'm going to go ahead and just assume they're also wolf-crying.
- mrec 6y agoIf you're willing to say, whereabouts are you? My impression is that the rampant illiberalism in tech is mostly confined to California/SV and companies headquartered there. Which needn't damn the whole sector, but is still worrying considering how influential those places are.
- renewiltord 6y agoI live in San Francisco. To be clear, here are some views I've expressed and had others discuss with me while still treating me kindly after both as a human being and as a coworker: * Universal tracking and rating would allow better standards of living for normative people * It's okay to exclude low-quality people from some parts of cities since they are generally bad for everyone else * It's okay for some army of people to be kept quiescent with heroin since it is societally cheaper than attempting to get them productive * Government employees are mostly rent-seekers. We can create systems far more capable than them. * Most government services should also have auction lanes where you can just bypass the normal line. Essentially, lots of anti-equity stuff, lots of anti-privacy stuff, lots of callous nonsense. People engage with this all in good faith (which is nice, because I'm not trolling them).
- mrec 6y agoThat's certainly controversial, but seems to avoid the major Hot Buttons Of Doom i.e. anything coded on (or insufficiently coded on) the officially important kinds of identity label.
- d33lio 6y agoPeople still think that the way the TV show Silicon Valley portrayed Christians is a joke... it's now more true than ever. For those out of the loop, the gist of the joke is "it's more risky to come out as a christian in SV than come out as gay in a baptist town in the 50's"
- spoonjim 6y agoI remember when I was at an elite institution’s diversity training session and the facilitator asked people to stand up and say how they felt oppressed because of their diversity. An enormous man stood up and said that he felt that people thought he was stupid because he had a Southern accent. That was so clearly the “wrong” answer that even the facilitator laughed, until finding the black people and women she had been looking for.
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- ylem 6y agoI am a bit confused by this. I went to college in the Midwest in the 90s (grew up in the Midwest) and to grad school on the east coast. I am agnostic, but my grandfather was a baptist minister and have other ministers in the family. I am a democrat. I was in the engineering school and started college with a lot of credits, so the only humanities/social science course I took was a junior level english class--so I can't comment on classes. But, I remember that people seemed quite willing to share Christian views. My roommate in grad school was a devout Catholic and we had several good debates in issues like abortion. I had another roommate who was a libertarian who also wasn't shy about his views. In college, I had friends that tried to convince me that the bible was consistent with evolution. My point is that at least in my interactions people seemed pretty comfortable sharing their views even if we disagreed. Has this changed in colleges (I don't work at a university)? Again, in classes I have no idea because it just doesn't come up in say a quantum field theory course or when you are learning analysis on manifolds. Even with coworkers, I had an officemate who was very pro iraq war and we debated a lot-- I also had him over for Thanksgiving dinner. Do I live in a bubble?
- BitwiseFool 6y agoAt lot has changed in 30 years. Not only are you about two generations removed from the current zeitgeist on college campuses, intersectionality means politics is now appropriate in fields that used to be apolitical. Edit: Adding on to the generational change asepect, the Millenials and Gen Z people I know are much more sensitive to the idea of offending someone. And to be honest... are much more likely themselves to be offended. My alma mater now has an offical BERT - Bias Education Response Team. As a student you can file a complaint with the BERT against the offending person(s). When I went to college the expectation was that your worldview would get challenged and that was a good thing. But now it looks like you can get in some serious trouble for doing so.
- flukus 6y agoAlso christians/religious and people that don't speak in correct PC terms all the time tend to come from poorer backgrounds, so "diversity" ends up discriminating against the poorest of society. For historical reasons these are often the most diverse.
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- djaque 6y agoI too dream of a day that even a group as oppressed as Christians are in the US will be able to hold the presidency, the highest office in the land. Who knows, maybe one of these days they'll even manage it 46 times in a row. /s ... Cut it out with the regurgitated Fox News talking points. My college has a university funded Bible studies club, an entire religion studies department, and a rather large college conservatives political club. My advisor is literally a Deacon in the Orthodox Catholic Church and another professor in the same department used to be a protestant pastor. Nobody is coming to brainwash your children.