The University Version Of The Communist Loyalty Oath
People out of touch with what's going on in universities are probably under the impression that they are institutions of higher learning.
They are increasingly all sorts of other things -- more like seriously expensive re-education camps, along "woke" lines.
Robby Soave writes at Reason that UC Berkeley's diversity litmus test is a lawsuit waiting to happen:
The University of California has been requiring prospective faculty members to affirm that they support diversity. This was Orwellian in its own right--reminiscent of the university system's 1950s loyalty oaths, which required faculty to attest that they were not members of the Communist Party.It now appears that at one campus, UC-Berkeley, the diversity initiative goes much further than previously understood. Whether a candidate has proposed a specific, concrete plan to advance diversity is now being used as a litmus test for some positions. No candidate who fails the test can even be considered for employment.
Abigail Thompson, a UC-Davis math professor and department chair, sounded the alarm regarding the modern-day loyalty oaths in a December Wall Street Journal piece. Thompson wrote that increasing diversity is a laudable goal but requiring prospective hires to pledge fealty to the concept seems like forcing them to subscribe "to a particular political ideology."
Sure enough, a report on Berkeley's diversity initiative--recently publicized by Jerry Coyne and John Cochrane--shows that eight different departments affiliated with the life sciences used a diversity rubric to weed out applicants for positions. This was the first step: In one example, of a pool of 894 candidates was narrowed down to 214 based solely on how convincing their plans to spread diversity were.
...Think about what this means: The foremost job qualification is a sufficient commitment to spreading diversity.
The Pacific Legal Foundation's Daniel Ortner is considering filing a lawsuit. But as Soave observes, "whether or not the university's initiative is permissible, it's astoundingly misguided--a striking example of the bureaucratic capture of higher education."
These institutions need to lose federal funding, including student eligibility for federal grants and loans.
Isab at February 5, 2020 4:16 AM
One of the issues with having highly educated people in charge is that they, all too often, think they're smarter than everyone else - in every subject.
"I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m going to think I’m a better political director than my political director." ~ Barack Hussein Obama
I learned early on in life that formal education is only one part of the education of a person. My father would remind us as children that all there was to learn was not in books. He made sure we had experiences that taught things not taught in college.
Two of my friends dropped out of high school. They then went to the community college and enrolled in the carpentry program there. One now owns a contracting company. The other left carpentry and is a professional auctioneer; he's one of the mentally-quickest people I've ever met and that profession suits his personality well.
College is great for teaching ways to approach and solve problems - whether using engineering, philosophy, law, etc. You learn as you enter the "real" world that the case studies in college always had perfect information with which to solve the problem. "Real" world problems are messy and usually don't have enough information to point to the obvious solution. You'll have to guess a lot more often than your college professors told you that you would; you'll have to use some things you picked up outside of college.
One other lesson my father taught us is that the guy sweeping the floor might just own the company, so looking down on him could come back to bite you in the ass.
Conan the Grammarian at February 5, 2020 4:19 AM
"I learned early on in life that formal education is only one part of the education of a person."
The ironic thing is, back in the days of the traditional Western canon in the humanities, that is one of the lessons that was taught.
Conan also raises a good point about people who, because they are experts in one subject, think that their expertise extends across the board. (Confession: I've fallen into that trap myself.) James Randi used to demonstrate how gullible scientists were to tricksters and charlatans, even in their field of expertise. His point to the scientists was: the universe doesn't lie, but people do, and your training doesn't prepare you for that.
Cousin Dave at February 5, 2020 6:02 AM
"the universe doesn't lie, but people do, and your training doesn't prepare you for that."
That is why I've complained so much about replication. The hard sciences aren't smarter. They aren't more accurate. They aren't less bias prone. The only real difference is they check their work against the universe, over and over again.
Ben at February 5, 2020 6:15 AM
The only real difference is they check their work against the universe, over and over again.
Ben at February 5, 2020 6:15 AM
When they are forced to, yes. But when the money keeps on flowing even when the results don’t replicate, you end up with the cherry picking “hide the decline” fakery that we enjoy today.
Isab at February 5, 2020 6:38 AM
Climate science isn't a hard sciences Isab.
Just about the only thing that separates the hard from the soft sciences is replication. Economics has always been a soft science no matter how much math is used for that simple reason. It is more or less impossible to replicate economic conditions. You pretty much can't even implement experiments, so you can't test anything. Same with climate science. Who has a spare planet and the ability to setup a custom climate to test their ideas out?
Ben at February 5, 2020 7:25 AM
You get more of whatever you reward. If you value "promoting diversity" (based on whatever definition you use for that) more than intellectual brilliance, you'll get people who are better at politics than scholarship. How could it be otherwise?
Of course, that might be the whole point -- if you're a mediocre scholar but a skilled political tactician, requiring a particular ideology might be a dandy way to protect your career.
Old RPM Daddy (OldRPMDaddy@GMail.com) at February 5, 2020 7:48 AM
Replication even in the hard sciences doesn't really happen as much as Ben hopes.
https://quillette.com/2019/12/21/the-many-faces-of-scientific-fraud/
Eventually, yes it does happen. Sometimes because of a Lord Kelvin type is attempting to answer a given question definitively, but usually just the weight of time. And sometimes, it turns out the consensus view of a few short decades ago is wrong.
The people chasing research grants are publishing anything that looks good because they realize they're just publishing noise and very few people actually dig into their articles. And looks good in their promotion and tenure binders.
I R A Darth Aggie at February 5, 2020 8:07 AM
I'm quite aware IRA. Were you aware there are labs who's only job is to replicate papers? Even with all of that yes things can be wrong for decades or even longer. There was that Schoon(SP) guy in physics. His papers made it into scifi books and TV. He was widely celebrated for decades. Very bright fellow. Unfortunately almost everything he published was fake. He made it all up. Everything from the testing setup to the data was falsified. He finally got caught because too many replication labs couldn't duplicate his results and people noticed some of his papers had data copied from each other. But yes, the first people who couldn't duplicate his work quietly swept it under the rug. Don't want to get on golden boy's bad side.
My complaint is the soft sciences don't even try to replicate. It is too expensive. Well, without verifying your results against the universe you have nothing of scientific worth.
Honestly we need different words to classify the different fields. The hard and the soft sciences just aren't doing the same thing.
Ben at February 5, 2020 10:55 AM
Jan Hendrik Schön is the person you're thinking of, Ben. His shenanigans put a knife in Bell Labs' once-sterling reputation.
Cousin Dave at February 5, 2020 11:06 AM
I applied for a science job at UC Berk. I had to fill out the loyalty oath thing. It was impossible even though I have done lots of things to further diversity, have had black best friends etc. But I reject the leftist positions so no uni job for me!
cc at February 5, 2020 1:11 PM
Thanks Cousin Dave. That's who I was remembering. Looking over the wiki on him it wasn't a decade before he got caught. Roughly 5 years instead. There are lots of other examples. Most of them aren't even fraud. Just someone famous made a mistake and people afterwards were afraid to point that out. As I said above people in the hard science are people no different than those in the soft sciences. They have the same biases, the same number of mistakes. They aren't any smarter or more ethical or anything else.
The only thing that separates them is repeated replication. Does the light turn on. Is the bridge still standing. Can someone else duplicate your work.
After all if you are the only person who can turn the light on or off then your light bulb isn't really worth much.
Ben at February 5, 2020 7:26 PM
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