We continue our series of the pozzing of science by Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (DIE) mavens (the DIE is from Steve Sailer).

A mathematician wrote in the Wall Street Journal of her experiences with academic DIE statements.

She begins by saying DIE statements are required by

applicants for faculty positions profess their commitment to these social goals, have become required on eight UC campuses and at colleges across the country. These requirements are promoted as fulfilling worthy goals: to help redress the historic exclusion of underrepresented groups, to ensure that candidates from all backgrounds apply for and are given fair consideration for faculty jobs, and to make sure faculty respect and support all students in their teaching and mentoring.

She goes on to fight, but the war has already been lost, and because of the territory she, and her fellows, surrendered.

The goal of injecting “underrepresented groups” turns the hiring process into identity politics. It then only becomes a question of which identities win. Quality and ability must fade into the background, and identity must rise to prominence.

She has no clue that her own actions will cause her very own downfall:

The mathematical community, my own discipline, has widely embraced the ideals of inclusiveness. But I have become increasingly uneasy with the use of [DIE] statements in faculty hiring. This spring the university issued guidelines instructing each campus to develop and use a scoring system, called a “rubric,” for applicants’ diversity statements. No longer will faculty hiring committees use their own judgment about how best to create a diverse and inclusive environment in their fields.

If Diversity and inclusive “environments” are the goal, and not superior mathematics as she concedes, then it does not matter what mechanism is used to bring it about. So what if it’s the administration who invents the method rather than the department? Either way, DIE will result.

Now about those UC “rubrics”, our friend Jerry Coyne has a nice write up. They have an interesting twist.

A document from the University of California tells us how the system worked in six searches in the life sciences, and I find it a bit disturbing—disturbing because the ideology and social engineering is clear, because candidates, however good in scholarship, were eliminated if their diversity statements fell below a specified cutoff, and disturbing because the only kind of diversity involved was racial and gender diversity. But we know that that is what people mean when they talk about “diversity”. Ideological, class, and background diversity are irrelevant.

The identities in the identity wars do shift: it’s currently race, sex, and favored sexual perversion. But as Coyne notes, it used to be ideology, class, and national origin. It may shift back to those, too. It only depends on who is winning and who losing.

Anyway, what happened was applications were scored based on the applicants’ commitment to the DIE ideology. Scores were from 3 to 15, higher being better DIE.

Statements were evaluated blind to the candidate’s names, getting rid of some clues to sex and race. But these data would have been clear, I suspect, from the diversity statements alone (at least for minorities), so I highly doubt that candidates were evaluated “blind” in this respect. No cutoff in scores was given in the description of this search, though there was a described cutoff in the second search (see below). Only 214 of the 893 candidates (24%) passed muster here as having adequate diversity statements. These 214 were then passed on to the appropriate departmental search committees to create a short list for interviewing candidates (these are typically 3-6 candidates per job). In this search and the second one below, candidates were also asked to explain their ideas about diversity during the interviews. The diversity interviews also served to weed out candidates:… So even at the two last stages of the process, candidates were eliminated because of a perceived insufficient commitment to diversity.

Coyne rightly points out that the quality of the applicants’ work nowhere was important in this filtering process: only their ability to DIE.

Best part is data on the results are available, but only for one department, that of Environmental Science, Policy and Management. Before DIE filtering, whites were 59% of applicants, after DIE filtering, 0% were. Other breakdowns are available, but you already know the story. The ladies are given a leg up, as were non whites. White males took it in the neck.

Only at the point after the DIE ideology filtering were the applicants’ work quality considered.

The implications of this are immediate and obvious: the quality of work at science departments at UC will accelerate its downward trend.

About more interesting effects, we’ll save until next week.

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