Posted on 06/11/2018 3:23:07 PM PDT by artichokegrower
Diversity Policies Are Corrupting the Sciences.
Anyone who believes that the hard sciences could never capitulate to identity politics in the way the humanities and softer sciences have should not read Heather MacDonald’s report just posted at City Journal. It’s too infuriating, and the impacts could be devastating.
MacDonald surveys the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and accrediting organizations such as the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education and finds the quota police alive and well within them.
The NSF, for instance, “dumps millions of dollars into implicit-bias activism,” a pseudo-scientific effort to explain lack of proportionate numbers of women and certain minorities in STEM fields on the grounds of racism and sexism. It has other programs that “pressure actual science grantees to incorporate diversity considerations into their research.” Such programs aim to set “inclusion and equity” at “the very core” of STEM science.
The NIH puts similar burdens on the field. Its training grants for postdoctoral education for physicians are threatened with funding cuts if the programs don’t support “a sufficient number of ‘underrepresented minorities.’” It also wants to see proportionate representation in the sample of medical subjects, so that (in MacDonald’s example) the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota must reach out well beyond its surroundings to draw in different identities, a costly and time-consuming practice.
Accreditors play their part by criticizing academic departments if they don’t have enough underrepresented groups. They don’t bother, however, to consider the number of available job candidates in those groups. MacDonald doesn’t mention this, but the percentage of doctorates in STEM fields granted to African Americans each year is under four percent. The applicant pool isn’t nearly large enough for departments to reach proportionality in the demographic make-up of the professors (using the population of the surrounding geographic area as a base measure).
MacDonald summarizes the problem perfectly: The use of a school’s immediate surroundings as a demographic benchmark for its faculty is a significant escalation of the war between the diversicrats and academic standards.
Escalation is the right word. It’s as if the official bodies that monitor scientific research are searching for mechanisms that will ramp up the pressure on individuals and institutions to include underrepresented minorities in their work in one way or another.
These tactics are backed by funders who explicitly set aside money for “gender- and race-exclusive science training.” University departments and schools, too, are creating their own diversity enforcers.” Schools are adjusting the way they teach and evaluate minority students and job candidates, for instance, developing “culturally sensitive pedagogies” that downplay knowledge and skills and upgrade, in the words of one program, awareness of the “racialized and gendered construct of scientific brilliance.”
The results are already showing. From 2013 to 2016, MacDonald notes, “medical schools nationally admitted 57 percent of black applicants with a low MCAT of 24 to 26, but only 8 percent of whites and 6 percent of Asians with those same low scores.” Allegations of racism, sexism, microaggression, and bias continue, despite nearly everyone in STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) complying with diversity ambitions. As one practitioner quoted by MacDonald puts it:
The sheer effort that is expended in complete good faith at the graduate, post-graduate, and faculty level chasing after a declining population of minority applicants is astonishing. URMs [underrerpesented minorities] are encouraged to apply, indeed begged to apply, to medical school and post-graduate medical training programs. Everyone at this level is trying incredibly hard to be generous, fair, forgiving, thoughtful, kind, and encouraging to these applicants.
This is the general circumstance that coincides with the ceaseless talk of systemic and individual discrimination. The insertion of diversity criteria into the practice of science relies upon presumptions of bias, but one would have to search far and wide to find any scientists who wish to keep women, African Americans, and Hispanics out of their classrooms, departments, and research projects.
A few years ago, I was in a small meeting of college leaders and a few people who run organizations devoted to improving diversity in higher education. One person in the room raised the charge that professors prefer to hire people who are just like them, which was just a way for him to assert that white males want to hire white males. I asked him if he had ever served on a hiring committee. He hadn’t–he wasn’t a professor. I told him with a laugh about standard efforts and intentions of everyone in the room to favor any underrepresented minority candidates we could find. He wasn’t impressed, though. The fact that African Americans and Hispanics are still underrepresented in the departments makes our efforts and motives inadequate and perhaps suspect, too.
Those of us who believed that the empirical demand would preserve the sciences from progressivist coercion were naive. The diversity mandate is too strong. It has no scientific or intellectual rationale; the justifications that proponents offer are less than flimsy, but they don’t care. There used to be a lot of talk about the cognitive and disciplinary benefits of diversity (people with different backgrounds and experience will bring new ideas into the room), but even diversiphiles seem to have grown tired of those weak supports. They mutter truisms such as “Diversity is our strength” with a listless air. For them and for everyone else, diversity doesn’t mean anything anymore except more women and underrepresented minorities in the jobs–which is to say, less white and Asian men. It’s a crass ambition managed in a crass manner. But this is where we are.
Link: https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2018/05/30/how-threats-of-bias-are-corrupting-the-sciences/
“... Maxine Waters, ... with fellow members of the Congressional Black Caucus, ... at Lyft’s offices in San Francisco, ... “floored” to learn that black workers make up 1 or 2 percent of the workforce at several prominent tech companie”
Maxine, would you be “floored” to learn that perhaps blacks make up a minute percentage of STEM college programs? How about saving your fake outrage for noncompetitive black students and their unconcerned parents?
It’s the tech industry’s own fault that more blacks are not employed by them. They keep insisting that applicants demonstrate competence and knowledge before being hired! What do you expect?
If Silicon Valley weren’t hypocrites, funding the liberal politics that impose such quotas on the rest of the world, I would oppose this on principle. But I think the only way they might wake up is to have to live by the idiotic political rules they advocate.
It’s the bell curve, Maxine.
Mad Maxine can’t even spell Silicon Valley. I’m surprised she even found the complex.
How and why would being a minority effect your willingness or ability to show up?
Holmes said that diversity efforts felt more like top-down initiatives rather than something everyone cared about, and she left the company because she wanted a job outside of Human Resources.
Typically a company that hired you to do a specific job wants you to do that job and expects you to advance in that field unless you pursue education on your own outside of that field or you convince management that your will be competent in that other field. Movement from Human Resources to Technical is a big diversion from her initial position.
Holmes said that diversity efforts felt more like top-down initiatives rather than something everyone cared about, and she left the company because she wanted a job outside of Human Resources.
This probably has a greater success of getting blacks in to coding than trying to recruit blacks out of colleges.
The real problem with getting blacks in to tech like Google or Facebook is that the jobs there are mostly jobs that would be male oriented. Which presents a problem since a large portion of the black males gravitate towards a career the penal system in the United States.
Here is the solution. Pay the affirmative 120% of what the white guys and Asian guys get paid. Then tell them to work from home on “special assigments.” You are not going to get quality work from those people anyway.
.
What a dunce!
Substantiating “The Bell Curve” every minute of his life.
.
Educated, not indoctrinated.
go ahead and hire some of then and put them into the tree and shrubbery department... ten points if you get the reference
So it winds up that the tech companies are the biggest RACISTS of all (at least by the standards of the Left).
Simple Fix. Outlaw Resumes and In Person Interviews.
Competition for workers creates higher pay that creates better workers. JMHO.
All obviously part of the effort by The Man to keep blacks down. Probably because all the test questions were biased against minorities.
Another fix. Switch to the Reddon-Simons “Rap” (Standardized) Test
See: Redden, P. M., & Simons, J. A. (1986). Manual for the Redden-Simons “Rap” Test. Ankeny, IO: Des Moines Area Community College.
Here are some example Redon-Simons questions that would improve black admissions to universities instead of the racist SAT exams:
1. Don’t play the dozens.
a. Don’t gamble.
b. Don’t talk about others’ family members.
c. Don’t try to stay up ‘round the clock.
d. Don’t date too many people at once.
2. She’s a mary jane girl.
a. She smokes marijuana.
b. She’s someone’s pet project.
c. She has a pimp.
d. All of the above.
3. I got some new kicks.
a. I just got some good drugs.
b. I’ve just been in a fight.
c. I’ve got some good gossip for you.
d. I’ve got some new shoes.
4. Let me throw down on this plate.
a. Let me check the quality of this marijuana.
b. Let me snort some cocaine.
c. Let me finish eating.
d.Let me steal this car.
5. She’s buffed.
a. She’s got a cute rear-end.
b. She’s overweight.
c. She’s wearing leather.
d. She’s got polished manners.
6. He bumped me.
a. He tried to start a fight.
b. He sold me bad drugs.
c. He missed my vein and injected dope into my muscles.
d. He took me on a date but brought somebody else home.
7. He’s clean.
a. He’s dressed up really nice.
b. He doesn’t have any drugs on him.
c. He’s off parole.
d. He doesn’t snitch.
8. Dog food.
a.Heroin.
b.Cocaine.
c.Downers.
d.Amphetamines.
9. Dogs.
a.Drugs.
b.Feet.
c.Leftovers.
d.Tired-looking eyes.
“A simple fix, merely lower the hiring standards.”
Tech company really can’t do that. So what they really do is they hire a bunch of people for fake make work that really have no responsibilities but they let them think they are doing super important work...though technically they do contribute some fake value by keeping the jesse jacksons and sharptons of the world off their asses. In the third world, it is the equivalent of bribing the correct bueracratic officials, it provides negative value to and impedes the progress of civilization, but is simply accepted as the cost of doing business
Why the complainin Maxey? Whiteys are generally underrepresented in gang-bangin, rap filth, and hanging pants. People just naturally tend to migrate to do what they do best, or to what their culture has most promoted.
So your whining cuts two ways young lady.
Why don’t they consult with the NBA to find out their secret?
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