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Scholars asked Harvard President Claudine Gay for her data. She said no.
- typeofhuman 3y ago[flagged]
- pierat 3y ago[flagged]
- typeofhuman 3y ago[flagged]
- zug_zug 3y agoI feel like you have a point here, but if you phrased it just 20% more carefully then a wider audience would be willing to hear it. Also worth pointing out -- Yes many companies do include a huge number of "non-white" people when you count all the foreign people they hire, but a lot of times this isn't because we've reached a post-racist / post-cultural-preference state, but just because of the economics of many of these other countries being super cheap to hire in. Perhaps a more reasonable goal would be to hire proportionally within US at rates roughly aligning to CS degrees by demographic. Then for overseas hires I'd like to see data on casts etc be factored in.
- constantly 3y ago> Perhaps a more reasonable goal would be to hire proportionally within US at rates roughly aligning to CS degrees by demographic. This doesn’t quite do it because of the systemic reasons that CS grads are not representative of the US population at large. So, the goal should really be to hire proportionally within US roughly aligning to the overall demographics of the US population.
- zug_zug 3y ago> So, the goal should really be to hire proportionally within US roughly aligning to the overall demographics of the US population. Well you're welcome to shoot for that goal if that's what you believe. But I don't believe that; I believe exactly what I said.
- constantly 3y agoThat’s super interesting. I try to emphasize with other belief systems. Can you explain more?
- zug_zug 3y agoSure. In short I think in a simpler world we might expect all genders, races, and backgrounds to equally participate in all fields but in practice I don't think that needs to be our first goal (and maybe not ever depending on what the research shows). For example, a lot of people think it's sexist to suggest some groups might prefer coding more, and I think they're coming from a good place with that. However scientists don't dispute that autism rates in boys are significantly higher than girls, for example, and though I haven't seen any formal research it's my impression that about half of professional software engineers fall somewhere on the spectrum (guy or girl). So personally, I'd want to understand this huge correlation between autism and software engineering (and potentially between gender and autism) before I judged the problem primarily societal. If we're being honest with ourselves I also think certain cultures have their own respective norms. This isn't really a hot take -- e.g. some cultures value machismo more than others. Different cultures can also value money and saving differently. I haven't looked deeply, but a cursory glance suggests some minorities are even overrepresented in software. If differing cultures is a big player in differing interest in software careers then I see it as not-our-place to try to try to alter those values. And I'd even go a step further and say that I've grown skeptical of both sides' motivations as simplistic and tribal. I haven't thought that deeply about this topic (e.g. never read an encyclopedia article), but I get the sense that many people who have much stronger opinions have thought about it even less than I have, and have put less effort into making a logically consistent views on the topic. Often I worry overzealous advocates give a bad image to the cause (as they do for pretty much any group).
- coliveira 3y agoThe problem with the US is trying to play fairness around the world, when in fact their population is not interested in that, they really want the same old white supremacy ideas. This becomes very clear when the US alone supports the genocide of colored people (not just in the obvious place currently in the news). So, their "diversity" policies are hollow no matter how they try to sugar coat it.
- pierat 3y agoThere's so many problems with DIE. 1. There's no metrics put in place to identify where there are DIE-related problems. We're just told there ARE problems, and that we're horrible racist & sexist humans, and the C suite will let us know when they see better. 2. There's no real metrics to indicate when a DIE initiative is actually successful. We don't look at general population compared to hires, or pay equity, or any other factors. All we're told is that there's always room to do better (uhh, there always is). 3. There's no stopping point. If your DIE initiative was good-intending, then we'd also identify when the initiative is completed. Instead, its a forever-going "white man bad" propaganda machine. 4. Only the DIE hires can criticize. Doesn't matter if major flaws are found, or utter logical fallacies, or anything. If you criticize as not DIE person, you are bad and likely be fired for "racist" reasons. 5. There's a lack of diversity in DIE. When's the last time you saw a man in any DIE position? Yeah, excluding 50% of the population sure sounds... DIEverse. DIE never looks at socioeconomic differences, religious differences, sexuality differences, or multitudes of differences that aren't based on "possession of vagina" and a shallow skin color assessment that veers on Family Guy skin color card.
- coliveira 3y agoYou're correct, white males are a minority, so they shouldn't be (from the point of view of diversity and fairness) the majority in any corporation. Your comments just prove the necessity of these policies.
- smegger001 3y agoThe irony in that statement is both Israelis and Palistinians are semetic peoples. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_people https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_people "Semitic people or Semites is an obsolete term for an ethnic, cultural or racial group associated with people of the Middle East, including Arabs, Jews, Akkadians, and Phoenicians."
- asdajksah2123 3y agoAnti-semitism has had a very clear meaning for decades which would not include discrimination against Palestinian Arabs. Arguing that "Semite refers to both Palestinians and Israelis" and therefore anti-semitism doesn't mean what everyone understands it to mean, is pedantic at best, but mostly grossly misleading. If we stuck to this logic we would have to eliminate Computer Science departments across the country because there's very little that's "scientific" about what CS courses teach.
- leephillips 3y agoIt’s not pedantic, because pedantry is a pointless insistence on detailed correctness. It’s simply wrong. Many words in English mean something other (sometimes something opposite) than what their roots and etymology suggest. Mistaking etymology for meaning is a tiresome, sophomoric mistake. Antisemitism is Jew hatred, period.
- mc32 3y agoApparently, according to a report,the Obama’s called in a favor. Maybe it’s untrue, but I wouldn’t be too surprised at this point in the fiasco. https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/barack-obama-backed-harvards-claudine-gay-amid-antisemitism-controversy-report-101703306951681-amp.html https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/barack-oba...
- asdajksah2123 3y agoApparently JFK called in for a favor as well. That's the rumor. Maybe it's untrue, but I wouldn't be too surprised at this point in the fiasco.
- ethbr1 3y agoWe all know the mole people run things from their illuminatied caverns.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- newsclues 3y agoBetween this, plagiarism accusations and antisemitism, it’s remarkable that she still has her job. Sad watching prestigious institutions fail.
- decremental 3y agoShould just let the fraud keep her position. It paints Harvard in exactly the light it deserves.
- typeofhuman 3y agoGreat point. These institutions are being eroded from within. Some say DEI is a failing practice, I say it's achieving the exact results it set out toward.
- john022 3y ago[flagged]
- billy99k 3y ago[flagged]
- ethbr1 3y agoEh... academia has always been extremely political. A hierarchical pyramid with a few tenure / dean positions at the top will do that, just as it does in corporations. Is "Dissuading people from publishing takedowns of my paper" any different than "Switching KPIs post-hoc" after an executive's pet project failed to deliver the expected results?
- fallingknife 3y agoYeah, but you're responding to a straw man. The comment you are replying to didn't accuse academia of being political. It accused them of being racist.
- coliveira 3y agoSo, how many white presidents of Harvard had every single word they wrote scrutinized by a thousand of people negatively motivated against him? I don't think the parameter is the same here. She is definitely being targeted by people who don't like her for being there doing what she is doing.
- ethbr1 3y agoThe parent comment, before flagging, said something to the effect of 'but we know scholarship isn't why she got there.' My point being: Scholarship isn't why anyone becomes president of Harvard. It isn't why anyone becomes a dean at Harvard. It probably isn't even why anyone gets tenure at Harvard. That's base level academic competency + politics. So accusing Claudine Gay of 'getting her position for reasons other than scholarship' is... yes, that's why everyone who's ever sat in that seat got it.
- justaman 3y agoThe pendulum has begun swinging in the other direction. Seems to follow roughly a seven year cycle. As the world shifts to a more conservative paradigm in the coming years, I hope that people are reminded that things will go too far before self-correcting and find solace in the fact that most people have settled in the middle.
- goalieca 3y agoI lost faith in academia when I saw so many fudge data and copy pasta. This wasn’t even secret, it was quietly acknowledged. I once inherited code that “worked” but operated on uninitialized values and out of bounds data unintentionally. I also couldn’t get it to complete a run without crashing. Even when I fixed bugs, I couldn’t reproduce the results. My own mentor told me to look the other way and move on as if this was known and totally usual. It was also exceedingly hard to reproduce results from papers and authors seldom responded. Few would open data and even fewer would detail enough about their methods in the paper. I’m sure others saw exceptional levels of fraud and other unethical behavior. I don’t, for one second, doubt that Claudine could have forged her way to the top. In fact, I think it could be the norm.
- rayiner 3y agoNobody ever read or utilized President Gay’s “research” anyway, or that of the overwhelming majority of social “scientists.” What’s the point of adhering to some charade about analytical rigor? It’s not like bridges are falling down as a result.
- throwaway167 3y agoIt's still sadly fashionable in engineering circles to bash social science without reason. Please list objections objectively * . '* Was Kant a social scientist? Perhaps. Odd trivia: his work reversed the notion of subjectivism and objectivism. But what's in a word?
- goalieca 3y ago[flagged]
- novemp 3y ago[flagged]
- throwaway167 3y agoCritical theory? I feel an analysis of power structures - what they are, how they come about - is a pretty useful arrow to the bow of the study of a society (as in, any collection of people, not exclusive to a nation, etc). But I draw an analogy to the 1980s when 'trickle down' policies were called "the economic argument" - indeed an economic argument but hardly closed-book economic proof and there's plenty of opposing economic argument. It was a political agenda painted under an economic slogan to fool many (and even fool many into promoting). Likewise Critical Theory: a useful tool but only one of many and to paint it as the analysis a political agenda (again，fooling many into not only believing but promoting). Modern (can't say Neo, some terms get camped aggressively) takes on critical theory can be a bit removed from Marx, or can be close, but to knee jerk against it completely just coz one doesn't like some of the users feels like denial for the sake of it, and in the end means missing out just like those that stick to one theory to rule them all miss out on the othrs.
- novemp 3y ago[flagged]
- mavili 3y ago[flagged]
- mavili 3y agoBeing downvoted by people that I complain about, obviously quite expected :)
- gedy 3y agoIf the President of Harvard was a white male and on "the wrong side" of a topic like DEI, Trump, gender, etc most media outlets and other academics would likely be hammering on their academic qualifications if there was any doubt. I think this is what many people are annoyed by.
- novemp 3y agoPeople and media outlets are still hammering on her qualifications. If you think the mainstream media isn't covering this, you have your head in the sand.
- criddell 3y agoWhat brought Gay to my attention was her testimony in front of Congress. What I couldn’t understand was how she and a couple other university leaders who testified were so awful at answering the questions. I’m still baffled by that because I’m sure she and the others are all smart people who were coached and have received media training.
- novemp 3y agoWhat does this have to do with diversity?
- 3y ago
- cs702 3y agoIF this is true: Shame on Harvard, shame on Harvard's administration, and shame on Harvard's Board of Overseers, for failing to live up to the University's ideals. I mean, IF this is true, the implication is that no one at the university ever bothered to perform due diligence with a skeptical eye on Gay's track record. IF this is both true AND representative of the state of leadership at our leading universities: They need major organizational change to clean up the rot.[a] --- [a] Stanford's President had to resign for similar reasons: https://www.npr.org/2023/07/19/1188828810/stanford-university-president-resigns https://www.npr.org/2023/07/19/1188828810/stanford-universit... --- To the moderators: I'm not sure why the OP is flagged. While the author is very ideological and controversial (see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38782112 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38782112), on a first pass the facts about Gay in the OP appear to be accurate. Maybe there's a better, less-tainted link to this story?
- orangepurple 3y ago[flagged]
- TriangleEdge 3y agoI'm finding this thesis kind of pathetic, it doesn't seem PhD material to me. The US is so ¬ DEI and sensitive about it that even mentioning anything DEI related gets you in a position of power at Harvard now? Fun fact for me, I beat Harvard in an ACM north east programming competition many years ago (but got destroyed by MIT). To be fair, I don't think Harvard is known for its comp sci.
- notaustinpowers 3y agoShe attended Princeton and Stanford as an undergrad and got her PhD at Harvard. She sounds more like a legacy hire than a DEI hire.
- you-make-it 3y ago[flagged]
- notaustinpowers 3y agoQuestion to many of y'all: What does this have to do with DEI? Can she not just be a bad person...
- constantly 3y agoShe can just be a bad person, but my sense from scanning the comments is that a bad person artificially propped up by a social framework is worse because in theory it made it easier for the bad person to achieve a position of power where otherwise it’s less likely they would have achieved such a position. At least that’s my take on what people are arguing without diving in too deeply.
- notaustinpowers 3y agoBut what of her past indicates she's propped up by a social framework like DEI? She's related to NYT best-sellers, she lived in Saudi Arabia with a father that worked with the Army Corps of Engineers. She attended a private boarding school in New Hampshire, completed her undergrad at Princeton and Stanford, and earned her PHd at Harvard. If anything, she sounds like a privileged rich kid who's a legacy hire. Now some DEI-supported "token".
- constantly 3y agoI’m curious too! I’m not making the argument, just distilling a little of what I’m sensing from others.
- nkurz 3y agoYou've used "legacy hire" in a couple comments here. I'm not familiar with the term, and searching doesn't find it used much: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22legacy+hire%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22legacy+hire%22 Are you consciously trying to create it as a new term, or is it in common use in some circles that I'm unfamiliar with? I don't think it's a good parallel with "legacy admission" unless it were to refer to hiring the child of an a previous employee, but this doesn't seem to be what you mean.
- coliveira 3y agoI agree with her position, because what they're trying to do is a fishing expedition to find excuses to take her down. Why is everyone now trying to prove her academic honesty, only when she has become president and especially after the current events regarding the Middle East? Every lowlife is now trying to find some fault with her previously accepted work.
- gruez 3y agoShouldn't people in power be subject to more scrutiny? Politicians get taken down by past comments/tax evasion/affairs all the time. In those cases should we also dismiss those because they were "fishing expeditions"?
- coliveira 3y agoTell me how many white male Harvard presidents suffered this kind of close scrutiny of everything they ever wrote? This is not a fair comparison. Every chauvinist, racist, and other kinds of lowlifes who want to take her down are joining in this fishing expedition.
- gruez 3y ago"Controversial figures get more scrutiny" explains this without having to get race involved and implying that all scrutiny are from "lowlifes". Furthermore, I'm not sure what your policy prescription is here. Should we give people in disadvantaged groups a pass on scrutiny because we can write off any attempts as bad faith attempts from "lowlifes" to discredit them?
- coliveira 3y agoIf you don't understand why she is being closely scrutinized now, just check the front pages of major newspapers in the last weeks. That is not an academic integrity check, it is a campaign by lowlifes to take her out of a position where they don't want her to be.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y agoThe author asks many questions - typically in conservative publications. > what happens when such crypto-communism is allowed to creep into our once hallowed institutions? What happens when Marxists become our central bankers? [1] > Is Claudine Gay a Plagiarist? (Harvard President) [2] [1] ref: https://www.karlstack.com/p/the-federal-reserve-goes-woke https://www.karlstack.com/p/the-federal-reserve-goes-woke [2] ref: https://christopherrufo.com/p/is-claudine-gay-a-plagiarist https://christopherrufo.com/p/is-claudine-gay-a-plagiarist Other writings: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/author/christopher-brunet/ https://www.theamericanconservative.com/author/christopher-b... https://freebeacon.com/men-of-the-year/2022-man-of-the-year-chris-brunet/ https://freebeacon.com/men-of-the-year/2022-man-of-the-year-... Questions about the author: https://www.poliscirumors.com/topic/why-was-chris-brunet-dismissed-from-u-chicago https://www.poliscirumors.com/topic/why-was-chris-brunet-dis...
- r721 3y agoYeah, and dossier.today is Jordan Schachtel's substack, who is also an interesting person: https://thefederalist.com/author/jordanschachtel/ https://thefederalist.com/author/jordanschachtel/ https://brownstone.org/author/jordon-schachtel/ https://brownstone.org/author/jordon-schachtel/ https://www.aier.org/people/jordan-schachtel/ https://www.aier.org/people/jordan-schachtel/
- cs702 3y agoThanks for sharing this info. I posted the OP, and didn't know anything about the author until now. A friend shared the link with me, and on a first pass it seemed accurate, so I posted it here. It stills looks accurate to me. No matter how poorly we think of the author, we should evaluate the OP on its merits, no? To the moderators: Maybe there's a better, less-tainted link to this story?
- r721 3y agoI'm not from U.S., so I didn't look into this story closely. Just the name was familiar, and I also recalled this tweet from Ben Collins: https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/1737887968570839268 https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/17378879685708392... I mean this looks a bit like conservative PR campaign, but maybe plagiarism accusations are also true, I don't know.
- TibbityFlanders 3y ago[flagged]
- leephillips 3y ago> Her supposed crime is paraphrasing the work she cited. No, that’s normal and not a crime. Her offense was using other people’s words without proper attribution. That’s plagiarism. I’ve seen the examples. It’s plagiarism. > But who here could withstand the same pressure on their own body of work? Nearly everyone, including me, if you‘re talking about willful “mistakes” (odd expression). Actual mistakes are unavoidable; even I’ve made them. Nobody’s making an issue out of that.
- TibbityFlanders 3y ago[dead]
- leephillips 3y agoI think this is an area that most journalists are ill-equipped to cover or understand, so you get a lot of confused reporting.
- 6R1M0R4CL3 3y ago[flagged]