4 ms·

Have you been in a position to read many (or any) DEI statements? Thanks heavens, no. I totally agree that you don't want to hire people for instructor roles

by vanusa 5y ago

Have you been in a position to read many (or any) DEI statements? Thanks heavens, no. I totally agree that you don't want to hire people for instructor roles who regard teaching as an afterthought or a nuisance. That's always been a "given" (even though obviously not always adhered to, in practice). And yes, in general you want to avoid the mostly mono- and bisyllabic types, and hire people who answer important questions with more than a single sentence fragment. But to be clear: the practice of mandating diversity statements (with highly refined, and in places, what can only be described as ideologically charged evaluation criteria) is completely orthogonal to the simple matter of needing to hire teachers who actually can teach and want to to.

ModernMech 5y ago
Okay, well what's your suggestion then? People are always very eager to say they treat everyone with respect and dignity, and they want to make everyone feel welcome and accepted in the classroom. But it seems like if we ask them "Okay, how do you make people feel welcome and accepted in your classroom? What specific practices have you put in place? How do you measure this impact? How specifically will you adapt in the future?" then that is very problematic for some people. They don't want to answer those questions. They'd prefer to leave it at "I treat everyone with respect" and leave it at that, which is a meaningless platitude. > with highly refined, and in places, what can only be described as ideologically charged evaluation criteria I will keep reiterating the point, but this again overstates the role the document released by the Berkeley DEIB office plays in the faculty hiring process. At all levels, individual departments and the college dean have full discretion on what searches are conducted and how applications are evaluated. Individual faculty members are free to fully disregard any and all DEI concerns when voting on a faculty hire. Yes DEI statements are required in the application. No the DEIB office at Berekely doesn't have control over how that statement is evaluated. They have some thoughts, but they are just those -- impotent thoughts of the DEIB office to which you are ascribing far more weight than they deserve.
- MatteoFrigo 5y ago
  I think you have answered your own question. If you want to know "how do you make people feel welcome and accepted in your classroom", just ask that. Tell people to write a statement of pedagogy or something, where they discuss the things you care about. Your problem is the DEI label. Your DEI office is working hard to convince the world that all whites are racists, which leads to pearls like this one which just came out today: https://alex-hanna.medium.com/on-racialized-tech-organizations-and-complaint-a-goodbye-to-google-43fd8045991d https://alex-hanna.medium.com/on-racialized-tech-organizatio... I was not on the receiving end of the rants of this particular person, but similar expressions of deluded ontology happened all the time. You appreciate that calling one's colleagues racist all the time is not conducive to a good working relationship. Maybe DEI was a good thing in academia years back. That horse has sailed. In the same way as people have redefined racism from KKK to "anything that leads to unequal outcomes", DEI is now associated with "the world is racist", "everybody is a white supremacist", "white fragility", and all this stuff. The message that your DEI office sends is pretty clear. I wish you to be able to retain control over the choice of your colleagues forever.
  - ModernMech 5y ago
    > Tell people to write a statement of pedagogy or something We do in fact ask them to write a teaching statement, and they focus on pedagogy there. But we want them to address issues of diversity specifically (I think I made it clear in my other posts why), because we found if we don't, then they won't address the topic at all. If we ask a question during the interview like "How do you handle a situation where a student reports sexual harassment to you?", we don't want it to be the first time in their life a candidate has ever even considered the question. Requiring an DEI essay is a way of elevating the profile of a job requirement during the interview process; if a candidate has to spend some time writing a DEI statement before a phone screen, it makes focuses their thoughts and makes in-person discussions much more productive. > Your DEI office is working hard to convince the world that all whites are racists, which leads to pearls like this one which just came out today The article you link is quite a pearl, but you have to admit this is probably one of the more extreme positions, and I would say it doesn't really represent what we're talking about here (the Berkeley rubric). This is a post by a blue-haired sociologist about DEI efforts in corporate America, which doesn't really reflect hiring practices in academic departments (except maybe the Sociology department). I know that academia has a reputation as being a bastion of leftism, but it might surprise a lot of people to know that there is a degree of political beliefs across the university, and that not all departments are as left leaning as e.g. the Sociology department. > DEI is now associated with "the world is racist", "everybody is a white supremacist", "white fragility", and all this stuff. The message that your DEI office sends is pretty clear. At the same time messages sent by DEI offices are misread and misrepresented. Look no further than the Berkeley rubric in question. It clearly presents itself as a suggestion, a template, non-exhaustive, not ironclad, open for interpretation, available to be used (or not) by any departments. Despite this very clear and unambiguous language, some people interpreted it as "You don’t get a job without demonstrating tangible contributions to DEI in the past." No, that's just not what is happening in reality. We have hired plenty of new faculty who have very weak DEI statements. It's very rare for new faculty to have much of a track record of tangible DEI contributions. But they get hired anyway, because as I said, the perception of this document does not match reality. Nonetheless, what you get is a bunch of people who have never read a single DEI statement in their life, have never been a part of a faculty search, have never applied to a faculty position, all talking about and repeating how awful and corrupted the process is by DEI statements. All the while no one can point to a practice of this DEI rubric being used in the way they fear. So when you say that academic DEI offices are convicting the world that "all whites are racists" or "everybody is a white supremacist", I have to take a step back and pause. These are some pretty extreme, absolutist statements, so I have to ask are these hyperbole? Or do you have examples of academic DEI offices trying to convince the world that "all white are racist". Because I've seen a lot of communications from academics DEI offices, and it's not something they are likely to say. I know people in those offices and I'm sure they would disagree with the statement "everybody is a white supremacist". It's worth pointing out that the Berkeley rubric doesn't mention the words "racist", "racism", "white", or "supremacy" at all. I will say that there's a lot of nuance in these issues. It's quite easy to go from a nuanced, qualified, well-reasoned, sourced statement to incendiary hyperbole by removing a few well-placed words. Often times you can take an outrageous statement that is taken as "everybody is a white supremacist", and trace its provenance back to something that is much more reasonable in context, that doesn't even closely resemble where it ended up (ever play whisper down the lane?) > I wish you to be able to retain control over the choice of your colleagues forever. We will. The economics work out that way.

by vanusa 5y ago

ModernMech 5y ago

Okay, well what's your suggestion then? People are always very eager to say they treat everyone with respect and dignity, and they want to make everyone feel welcome and accepted in the classroom. But it seems like if we ask them "Okay, how do you make people feel welcome and accepted in your classroom? What specific practices have you put in place? How do you measure this impact? How specifically will you adapt in the future?" then that is very problematic for some people. They don't want to answer those questions. They'd prefer to leave it at "I treat everyone with respect" and leave it at that, which is a meaningless platitude. > with highly refined, and in places, what can only be described as ideologically charged evaluation criteria I will keep reiterating the point, but this again overstates the role the document released by the Berkeley DEIB office plays in the faculty hiring process. At all levels, individual departments and the college dean have full discretion on what searches are conducted and how applications are evaluated. Individual faculty members are free to fully disregard any and all DEI concerns when voting on a faculty hire. Yes DEI statements are required in the application. No the DEIB office at Berekely doesn't have control over how that statement is evaluated. They have some thoughts, but they are just those -- impotent thoughts of the DEIB office to which you are ascribing far more weight than they deserve.

MatteoFrigo 5y ago
I think you have answered your own question. If you want to know "how do you make people feel welcome and accepted in your classroom", just ask that. Tell people to write a statement of pedagogy or something, where they discuss the things you care about. Your problem is the DEI label. Your DEI office is working hard to convince the world that all whites are racists, which leads to pearls like this one which just came out today: https://alex-hanna.medium.com/on-racialized-tech-organizations-and-complaint-a-goodbye-to-google-43fd8045991d https://alex-hanna.medium.com/on-racialized-tech-organizatio... I was not on the receiving end of the rants of this particular person, but similar expressions of deluded ontology happened all the time. You appreciate that calling one's colleagues racist all the time is not conducive to a good working relationship. Maybe DEI was a good thing in academia years back. That horse has sailed. In the same way as people have redefined racism from KKK to "anything that leads to unequal outcomes", DEI is now associated with "the world is racist", "everybody is a white supremacist", "white fragility", and all this stuff. The message that your DEI office sends is pretty clear. I wish you to be able to retain control over the choice of your colleagues forever.
- ModernMech 5y ago
  > Tell people to write a statement of pedagogy or something We do in fact ask them to write a teaching statement, and they focus on pedagogy there. But we want them to address issues of diversity specifically (I think I made it clear in my other posts why), because we found if we don't, then they won't address the topic at all. If we ask a question during the interview like "How do you handle a situation where a student reports sexual harassment to you?", we don't want it to be the first time in their life a candidate has ever even considered the question. Requiring an DEI essay is a way of elevating the profile of a job requirement during the interview process; if a candidate has to spend some time writing a DEI statement before a phone screen, it makes focuses their thoughts and makes in-person discussions much more productive. > Your DEI office is working hard to convince the world that all whites are racists, which leads to pearls like this one which just came out today The article you link is quite a pearl, but you have to admit this is probably one of the more extreme positions, and I would say it doesn't really represent what we're talking about here (the Berkeley rubric). This is a post by a blue-haired sociologist about DEI efforts in corporate America, which doesn't really reflect hiring practices in academic departments (except maybe the Sociology department). I know that academia has a reputation as being a bastion of leftism, but it might surprise a lot of people to know that there is a degree of political beliefs across the university, and that not all departments are as left leaning as e.g. the Sociology department. > DEI is now associated with "the world is racist", "everybody is a white supremacist", "white fragility", and all this stuff. The message that your DEI office sends is pretty clear. At the same time messages sent by DEI offices are misread and misrepresented. Look no further than the Berkeley rubric in question. It clearly presents itself as a suggestion, a template, non-exhaustive, not ironclad, open for interpretation, available to be used (or not) by any departments. Despite this very clear and unambiguous language, some people interpreted it as "You don’t get a job without demonstrating tangible contributions to DEI in the past." No, that's just not what is happening in reality. We have hired plenty of new faculty who have very weak DEI statements. It's very rare for new faculty to have much of a track record of tangible DEI contributions. But they get hired anyway, because as I said, the perception of this document does not match reality. Nonetheless, what you get is a bunch of people who have never read a single DEI statement in their life, have never been a part of a faculty search, have never applied to a faculty position, all talking about and repeating how awful and corrupted the process is by DEI statements. All the while no one can point to a practice of this DEI rubric being used in the way they fear. So when you say that academic DEI offices are convicting the world that "all whites are racists" or "everybody is a white supremacist", I have to take a step back and pause. These are some pretty extreme, absolutist statements, so I have to ask are these hyperbole? Or do you have examples of academic DEI offices trying to convince the world that "all white are racist". Because I've seen a lot of communications from academics DEI offices, and it's not something they are likely to say. I know people in those offices and I'm sure they would disagree with the statement "everybody is a white supremacist". It's worth pointing out that the Berkeley rubric doesn't mention the words "racist", "racism", "white", or "supremacy" at all. I will say that there's a lot of nuance in these issues. It's quite easy to go from a nuanced, qualified, well-reasoned, sourced statement to incendiary hyperbole by removing a few well-placed words. Often times you can take an outrageous statement that is taken as "everybody is a white supremacist", and trace its provenance back to something that is much more reasonable in context, that doesn't even closely resemble where it ended up (ever play whisper down the lane?) > I wish you to be able to retain control over the choice of your colleagues forever. We will. The economics work out that way.