Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
You're welcome, of course, to make your substantive points thoughtfully.
I'm not happy with what is going on, to be clear. But I am also not surprised that it is happening, and furthermore I don't believe there was any other alternative to this scorched earth war against DEI. If one had any reservations against DEI before, one would speak only in whispers. Now the backlash is here.
Of course there is an alternative. Through actual leadership.
It's not hard to effect change over time with a few memos (e.g. no more "pregnant people") and reviews. It may not be quick enough for certain items already in motion, but that really doesn't matter if the pipeline quickly empties out as the memos take effect.
The scorched earth policy is intended to sow fear.
Unfortunately I think the problem is much deeper than something that can be fixed with a few memos. I was just Googling for examples and found this "inclusive language guide" from University of Washington [1]:
> sanity check (why it is problematic): The phrase sanity check is ableist, and unnecessarily references mental health in code bases. It denotes that people with mental illnesses are inferior, wrong, or incorrect. Using an appropriate replacement will also clarify what is intended.
There are of course endless examples. Such sentiments are so absurd on their face, and yet they abound. The first thing "actual leadership" must do is speak the truth and acknowledge that there is a problem.
Yes. But what is happening now isn't speaking the truth, it's just causing chaos for chaos sake. Forget the DEI topic itself. From a managerial point of view, does this look like good management to you? Is this leadership you would want to work for with all the abrupt decisions that keep flip flopping? Does it instill confidence in you that they actually know how to manage anything?
This does look like good management to me, but that greatly depends on one's values and objectives. If your objective is to maintain peace and order, these actions must seem quite harmful. If your objective is to root out the racism, these actions seem wholly justified. Which one of these you care about most surely determines your perception of current events.
I don't like DEI either but you're drinking the Koolaid, there is nothing "good management" about sending out a vague memo with enormous consequences on Monday and rescinding it on Wednesday.
Trump's undersecretary of state for diplomacy tweeted last fall that "competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work".
These people in power are using any good faith doubt about dei that an everyday citizen may have, and are using it to revert to White-by-default government, and tearing up the entire civil service.
If you don't know if and despise Russell Vought and Stephen Miller and their philosophy of the Constitution, you need to.
There may places where it has become discriminatory in practice by overcorrection or by demonizing certain groups.
My point is that the people you cheer on are white supremacists, and people who want to destroy the federal government while making the president completely unaccountable.
You're cheering on a serial killer being made a custodian because he's a clean freak and the halls are messy.
You think we need to start trade wars with our allies, hire white supremacists throughout government, end all DEI, cease all foreign aid, attempt to illegally abolish multiple federal agencies, gut consumer and worker protections, and institute a purge of apolitical career civil servants because you saw a stupid list of words put out by a liberal college group?
Are you serious? I'm not trying to troll. You can't separate out what is being done right now, and who is being put in charge. Trump is a package deal with no surprises. Reading your other comments I can tell we disagree but you seem to be reasonable. I simply can't see how what is happening to the US right now is worth it in order to clean up perceived problems with DEI.
University of Michigan DEI is 1100+ employees strong (!!) at a cost of over $30M/year (the equivalent of 1,800 students’ worth of tuition), and they are launching an even bigger DEI 2.0.
I am not a DJT fan at all, but stories like these are exactly what has people stark raving mad. I can’t really blame them.
While the stated goals are noble, the truth in many cases is that it is an excuse to exclude white males. And I expect downvotes, but you don’t have to look too far to see the truth.
I studied electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois before switching to intercultural communication, because partially, I found it a helluva lot more difficult to solve.
I think the challenge with DEI is the framing of it. If we called it intercultural competence, or intercultural teambuilding, or whatever, then it focuses on how we are a highly multicultural society in the US and that there are huge benefits to being able to connect and collaborate with people across a wide variety of cultures.
Have customers who are in a rural area? Well, sometimes it's really hard for people in the city to comprehend what rural life is like, sometimes much easier to have someone on your team from the rural area to provide that tacit knowledge. Sell beauty supplies and looking to get into the African-American market? Can be really hard for white men to know the tacit knowledge involved in managing 4c level curly hair (most white men probably have never knew there was a classification system on the level of curliness of hair).
I worked in innovation consulting for a few years. The ability to empathize and connect with people across cultures may be one of the most important skills in innovation and problem solving. So maybe it's just a framing issue.
>If we called [DEI] intercultural competence, or intercultural teambuilding, or whatever, then it focuses on how we are a highly multicultural society in the US and that there are huge benefits to being able to connect and collaborate with people across a wide variety of cultures.
And it would be a lie because DEI is not solely about race.
It might not be about race, per se, but when on the flip side the effect is to exclude people based on race or gender, it does kind of become about race, doesn’t it?
I don’t see DEI helping poor white males, for example, and there’s a lot of those in America. Even those whose families don’t own property and have never been to college.
It's interesting that you're willing to accept the anti-DEI crowd's motives on good faith, but not the DEI initiatives'
> the truth in many cases is that it is an excuse to exclude white males.
One might think that the current pushes are an excuse to exclude various minorities. Considering what DEI initiatives were born of just a few decades ago, I don't think that's an unreasonable conclusion either.
I do think there's some truth to listen to from those so opposed to the initiatives - there's some that go too far and should be reigned in - but, as others have pointed out in this thread, drinking the Kool Aid with this push isn't really going to fix anything. It's just swinging back and forth on the political pendulum. Is that really what people want?
But what’s missing is just a fundamental sense of scale. One can rightly think this is a bit ridiculous, while also understanding it’s not that big of a deal. Honestly, there are so many economic and social issues that have real importance on people’s lives, and half the country is wound up in a culture war over which words are considered polite or not.
White men feel abandoned and life expectancy for white men in the US is going down, often due to deaths of despair (suicide, overdose, etc).
Some just shrink away, others lash out with vengeance, but I do think it is a huge societal problem, especially as the demographics of the country shift and white men may no longer have the majority in a democratic society.
Many democratic societies that are ruled by a minority demographic do not tend to survive, and so I think the transition from white majority to non-white majority is actually a fundamental issue for our democracy.
I think there's a number of issues with this diagnosis, but chiefly: Trump won a second term on the back of a massive surge in non-white support. He's basically where he was in 2016 with white voters.
I'm not saying this is why Trump won, I think it has more to do with a global pandemic that hurt a LOT of people and instead of processing that pain, we blame others, and Trump is good at blaming others. But also, if you feel lots of pain and Democrats say life is great, you don't believe them because your life doesn't feel great and someone who says "Make America (you) (feel) Great Again," well, probably gets your resonance and vote.
But about why people are upset about DEI, I think that has more to do with white people, especially men, not feeling well. Unless there's a huge portion of non-white people who have such vitriol towards DEI. I think maybe some of the Asian-American population, but I don't know about other segments. But im open to being wrong on that
Not just fear. Chaos, uncertainty, and cover for what I expect will be the biggest looting in history.
Even if someone thinks DEI had to go, they ought to be aware that their beliefs are being used as nothing but a smokescreen for unparalleled destruction and plunder.
Because the plundering is to pull the power to the white men, so that even if white men lose the democratic majority, they (we? as i'm a white american man) can still have power.
White men feel abandoned, powerless, ignored, blamed, and all sorts of attacks, and if we don't talk about this, then this country may continue a sort of death spiral, borderline suicidal people taking us all down with them.
You want all scientific research in the US halted, just because the term "pregnant people" bothers you? Look, I think the term is a bit cringeworthy, but ripping up the entire US scientific system over that is psychotic.
The issue is cultural and they think the cultural issue will change by slashing the government, not realizing the cultural issue doesn't come from government.
I think it was someone on the right, Steve Bannon or even Andrew Breitbarting, that said politics follows culture. So to focus on culture first.
They're trying to change culture at the political level, and I'm not sure that's how it works.
I don't think that's what the OP or many people likely want at all. I think what the OP was saying is this is what Trump rode to power on. The left is great at eating its own. Reasonable people who were traditionally allies of the left, felt attacked and alienated because of using a wrong word. Add in the economic issues and it was a perfect storm for Trump to rise to power.
The OP said there was no other alternative to what Trump is doing.
What is happening now is not at all a rational response to DEI. It's not even motivated by DEI. Trump and his gang simply want to gut the federal government, because they don't want to pay taxes. DEI is just an excuse.
Academics should keep in mind that they rely on the generosity of taxpayers to fund their research.
They don’t have an entitlement to other people’s money, and if they are perceived as wasting it or spending in discriminatorily then you should expect the public to become less willing to give it to you.
Ah, your post helped me realize that a lot of people probably have an anger or resentment towards academics. So maybe part of it is DEI, part of it is the resentment towards the kids in school who always knew the answers.
I'm not saying this is what's coming from you, just reminded me of how many people have had so much animosity towards me over the years because of my intelligence, or maybe more so, my confidence in my intelligence. A jealousy/envy/admiration all mixed together.
Smugness usually turns people off. It doesn’t matter how smart you are. No one likes people who act superior to them. Hilary lost over her “deplorables” comment. It makes me sad that the left is not taking the right lesson from this election.
I hear you, I think it's a balance of people trying to not be so smug (aka not attacking other people's intelligence) and people trying to not see other people as smug (aka not thinking the other person is attacking their intelligence).
I've struggled with the former a lot in my life. I was really good at school and feel very confident in my intelligence. So when I feel attacked, I often punch back at someone's intelligence without even realizing it.
Sometimes me feeling attacked is just confusion or sadness or disappointment that someone doesn't know something and I feel lonely that I'm the only one who does, and often angry when their decisions impact my life. Takes a lot to remind myself they know other things a lot better than me.
This... explains a lot. Taxes probably need a new phrasing, framing, and mind set. If the military can get $820b (13% of the pie) and be celebrated, then we need to get there with education, infrastructure, healthcare, etc. as well.
Defence is a homogenous concept, or close to it, so people can confidently state they support it.
Research is a messy mix of things people like and things they don’t.
It is it significantly easier to obtain public support for, say, cancer research, than say, fat phobia, but both are lumped together from the public’s perspective as NIH funding.
This makes it harder for people to support, because they cannot easily support what they care about without supporting what they perceive as wasteful spending.
Yes, it's a two-sided problem, with the "more intelligent" sometimes looking down on those who seem "less intelligent" and the "less intelligent" sometimes thinking the "more intelligent" are looking down on them.
You say this like we didn't just have massive outrage at hard medical science because the reality was that, yes, you should be made to get the damn vaccine.
The american public, beyond all else, hates being told they are wrong.
They are rarely right. So how do you square that circle?
That's only true in a very myopic sense. You don't get the US economy (and all of the benefits that come from that) without science and technology and basic research funding.
~82% of all R&D funding in the US is non-Federal, and 75+% is industry. The total investment by companies on R&D is about the same as the US defense budget. Many people still think it is like the 1960s and 1970s, when US government funding of R&D was a large percentage of the total. Federal investment in R&D hasn't declined so much as industry massively increased their investment.
The Federal government found a niche in basic research for a few decades and funded the vast majority of that. Per NSF, today even basic research is <40% funded by the Federal government, again not due to a decline in Federal funding but due to vast increases in industry investment. This shift toward industry investment in basic research was not overnight, it has been a monotonic trend for decades. Over the last century, the areas where Federal research funding is critical have dwindled greatly in scope because industry spends more money and is willing to take more risks.
One of the more interesting stories here is why and how this change happened in the US, to the point where the vast majority of R&D is funded by industry even in areas historically dominated by Federal government funding.
It's worth distinguishing between R&D and science. In my experience in industry, R&D is very focused on product development. Sometimes on a little longer time horizon than engineering, but it's research to solve some problem that the company has. Sometimes that problem is also more broadly useful towards advancing human knowledge and understanding, but often it's not. At my last company, the R&D department focused entirely on 1) building algorithms for a specific product (nothing that advanced the state of the art, just applying well-established techniques to the company's particular hardware); and 2) helping market the company's products by letting them claim that they were clinically-proven. Would they ever publish anything that showed a result that wouldn't serve the company's interests? Of course not. Yes, I know there are some industrial labs that do more basic research, but I've never worked at one.
Also, industry isn't really doing that much to train the next generation of scientists.
We are at the tail end of a 50 year bull run powered by declining interest rates. Maybe ZIRP is the new normal and private industry R&D investment stays high, but I don't think we should gamble our status as an economic, scientific, and technological powerhouse on that and gut our government financed R&D programs.
Further more, my wife works in biotech so I have seen first hand the compromises one has to make to secure private funding. They care about things like market size and revenue potential when making these investments, which means you end up with most of the money flowing towards diseases that largely affect rich people and solutions that are either expensive or recurring. And lets also not forget that almost all of these companies are working off of or spinning out from research programs that were funded by the government. I have yet to meet a single company where that wasn't the case.
I need to read more details on this because everything I’ve seen in the past 30 years has involved industry shutting down basic research.
Maybe it’s more true in some fields (biotech?)
How is this counted? If it’s based on tax figures, there’s a lot of corporate “R&D” that gets written off that wouldn’t be considered research in an academic setting.
Those numbers come from NSF, so I assume the definition of "basic research" would align with NSF.
The rise in basic research in industry coincides with the rise of technology as a major component of the US economy decades ago. I suspect these are not unrelated. The growth of deep tech investment by the private sector probably has a lot to do with it.
You are speaking on an intellectual level. The comment you replied to is speaking on a practical, political level. If voters do not like what is going on in universities, they will defund them. This is a political reality.
Voters are overwhelmingly in favor of funding US science. They are overwhelmingly in favor funding US international aid. The public thinks we spend way more on these than we do.
The idea that the blatantly illegal actions by the current administration reflect public will simply isn't based in any kind of reality- just calling it out as a lie.
