Reply to Diversity, “Opportunity” and Inclusion

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[quote=Anonymous]Frankly, it should just be "M."  Merit. 
And, in order to do that successfully and STILL have a diverse workforce or representation, we need to do a much better job in K-12 education. 
It actually starts in kindergarten - setting high expectations, providing quality instruction, and stop watering down the curriculum.  The curriculum needs to be rigorous for ALL students and our expectations should be high regardless of gender or race.

[quote]I start from the following proposition: being female is not an accomplishment. My being female should play no role in my being hired for a job. Of course, my sex undoubtedly has made me the target of sex preferences on numerous occasions, thus casting doubt on any actual qualifications I might presume to possess.

My being female should be particularly irrelevant in a university. Until recently, universities were dedicated to the Enlightenment ideal of universal knowledge. A male Chinese engineer and a female Nigerian engineer may have no spoken language in common, but they can communicate through the universal languages of mathematics and physics. Whether the buildings they erect stand or fall depends not on their nationality or sex but on their mastery of engineering principles.

I will go further. Being black, gay, or gender-fluid are also not accomplishments, and should have nothing to do with faculty hiring or student admissions. The only thing that should matter when, say, a medical school hires a researcher in pancreatic cancer is whether that oncologist is the best in his field.

The diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy is the nemesis of the Enlightenment ideal of knowledge. It puts relentless pressure on every academic department to hire on the basis of race and sex, not on the basis of intellectual achievement. Every faculty search today is a desperate effort to find even remotely qualified minority or female candidates. Being female or a non-Asian minority confers an enormous advantage in the hiring and tenure process.

Yet despite this obsessive attention to diversity, many departments still do not pass the DEI proportionality test. So DEI bureaucrats are on a crusade to extirpate the sources of bias that allegedly stand in the way of proportional representation. Every colorblind objective test of academic skills—SAT, LSAT, or MCAT—is under attack as racist and is going down.

Consider Step One of the United States Medical Licensing Exam, which tests students’ knowledge of basic physiological processes. Step One changed to a pass-fail grading system last year because black and Hispanic students disproportionately got low scores, impeding their ability to land the residency of their choice. Whether the students who will now squeak by with a pass are the most qualified candidates for those residencies is of no interest to the gatekeepers.

Scientific institutions are now reformulating research priorities to increase the diversity of federal grant recipients. The National Institutes of Health has shifted funding from basic science to research on health disparities and racism simply because black scientists do more research on these race topics and less on pure science.

Reality check: the reason why colleges are not proportionally diverse has nothing to do with bias or exclusion. The reason is large racial differences in academic skills. This is an uncomfortable subject, and one that is taboo on college campuses, but if we are going to indict American universities and other institutions for systemic racism, we should get our facts straight.

In 2019, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, 66 percent of black twelfth-graders did not possess even partial mastery of basic twelfth-grade math skills, such as being able to perform arithmetical calculations or to recognize a linear function on a graph. Only 7 percent of black twelfth-graders were competent on those basic twelfth-grade math skills, and the number who were advanced was too small to show up statistically. The picture was not much better in reading.

In 2021, the American College Testing organization rated only 10 percent of black high school seniors as college ready, based on their combined math, general science, and reading scores on the ACT. Whites were five times as likely to be college ready.[/quote]

https://www.city-journal.org/article/higher-ed-must-choose-merit-over-identity

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