“Theese eeese pure eediocy!”
--a German professor’s
response at a faculty meeting regarding accreditation recommendations to put an
outreach program to attract female STEM students inside of an outreach program
to attract female STEM students. The previous sentence is typed as intended.
By Professor
Doom
While people “on the inside” of science
can quickly answer the title of today's essay with “duh!” and anyone paying attention
realizes identity politics destroys everything it touches, a recent article
answers the question by identifying how the destruction is wrought.
Identity politics has taken over many
departments on campus. To be more clear, identity politics has taken over the
administration of many campuses, and they control the hiring. Thus white males,
for example, are shut out of many “leadership” positions, and many fiefdoms on
campus (Hi Diversity Institutes!) strictly hire based on gender and race.
Because admin controls hiring, this leads to “want ads” even for scholars where
race, gender, and political beliefs are prerequisites for scholarly positions.
In certain departments (Hi African
Studies! Hi Gender Studies!) it was easy enough to find scholars the right
shade or possessing the right genitals, but when it comes to the sciences it’s
more difficult.
The STEM fields—science,
technology, engineering, and math—are under attack for being insufficiently
“diverse.” The pressure to increase the representation of females, blacks, and
Hispanics comes from the federal government, university administrators, and scientific societies themselves.
--Emphasis added. Any scientific society
which believes possession of certain genitals is necessary for advancing
scientific knowledge is highly suspect, and I wish the author had identified
such societies.
As long as I’ve been in higher ed,
there’s always been a big push to increase representation of “protected
minorities,” even as far back as the 80s admin made it very clear that we could
only reject such candidates if we could provide good reason (while white
males—among other races but always that gender--could be rejected out of hand,
for being white and/or male).
Absent from this push has been any study
showing that there’s a clear advantage to having such bigotry in the hiring
process…no faculty wishing to keep his
job ever dares ask that question, of course.
“All across the country
the big question now in STEM is: how can we promote more women and minorities
by ‘changing’ (i.e., lowering) the requirements we had previously set for
graduate level study?” Mathematical problem-solving is being deemphasized in
favor of more qualitative group projects; the pace of undergraduate physics
education is being slowed down so that no one gets left behind.
I’ve discussed in detail how much of
what’s called “college” today would be considered 9th grade material
even a generation ago, and many campuses swirl students around in such
pseudo-college courses until the student loan money runs out. Such fraud does
wonders for administrative bank accounts but it does nothing for identity
politics, which demands the hiring of scholars with certain skin colors or
genitals.
So, STEM programs are doing the only thing
they can: water down the program. “Qualitative group projects” is a double-red
flag. Science cares little for “qualitative” work…it deals in facts, or at
least our best representation of facts. Similarly, “group projects” are just a
device by which incapable students’ incapabilities can be hidden by placing
them in groups where the competent students can do the work.
“If there’s an accident at that
chemical plant, we’re screwed. There’s not one person there who knows what
they’re doing.”
--an old friend, an engineer,
describing the situation at a nearby industrial complex. I’ve several engineer
friends who’ve said the like these last few years.
The gentle reader should keep in mind
this stuff has been going on for some time now. Today it’s relatively uncommon
to see new bridges collapse or other catastrophes due to stupid mistakes made
by the professionals coming out of these diluted STEM programs…but I suspect
we’ll see a greater frequency of this in the coming years.
The National Science
Foundation (NSF), a federal agency that funds university research, is consumed
by diversity ideology. Progress in science, it argues, requires a “diverse STEM
workforce.” Programs to boost diversity in STEM pour forth from its coffers in
wild abundance.
Ultimately the source of the racism and
sexism on our campuses is coming from the money. The NSF will give you money
and lots of it to hire a female scholar…a male scholar is worth nothing.
The
tortuously named “Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners of
Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science” (INCLUDES) bankrolls
“fundamental research in the science of broadening participation.” There is no
such “science,” just an enormous expenditure of resources that ducks the
fundamental problems of basic skills and attitudes toward academic achievement.
A typical INCLUDES grant from October 2017 directs $300,000 toward increasing Native
American math involvement by incorporating “indigenous knowledge systems” into
Navajo Nation Math Circles.
I’m not trying to be a jerk or anything,
and absolutely stone age cultures have relevant things to say about human
understanding of mathematics but…this is just pouring money into administrative
pockets, while perhaps, maybe, giving calculators to Navajo children (which,
incidentally, will do quite a bit of harm to their mathematical abilities).
Again, the question comes to mind: where’s
the evidence this “diversity” would help science?
Somehow,
NSF-backed scientists managed to rack up more than 200 Nobel Prizes before the
agency realized that scientific progress depends on “diversity.” Those
“un-diverse” scientists discovered the fundamental particles of matter and
unlocked the genetics of viruses...
Considering this sort of track record, the
“dog not barking” of nobody asking for evidence diversity here would be a good
thing for science is deafening. This sort of lunacy also affects medicine:
The National Institutes of Health are another diversity-obsessed
federal science funder. Medical schools receive NIH training grants to support
postdoctoral education for physicians pursuing a research career in such fields
as oncology and cardiology. The NIH threatens to yank any training grant when
it comes up for renewal if it has not supported a sufficient number of
“underrepresented minorities” (URMs).
How is this not racist? They are literally
denying opportunities based on skin color. There are quite literally human
lives at stake here, and still nobody is asking the question about “why do we
suspect increased diversity will be a good thing?”
I grant the answer is obvious enough:
because there’s more money for diversity.
The research money can only go to
diversity-approved research projects. This will obviously warp our medical research.
Maybe it should be warped, but shouldn’t we have a better justification than
“there’s more money for it”?
Just as the bulk of student loan money
does nothing for education, and simply flows into administrative pockets, the
same thing happens with the “diversity” money:
TEM
departments are creating their own internal diversity enforcers. The
engineering school at UCLA minted its first associate dean of diversity and
inclusion in 2017, despite already being subject to enormous pressures from
UCLA’s fantastically remunerated Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and
Inclusion and other bureaucrats.
Diversity deanlings typically make
$100,000 or more even at small schools. The salary of the above Vice
Chancellor is over $444,000 now, and doesn’t include the fantastic perks these guys get (or
golden parachutes and retirement programs after a handful of years which would
make dictators of small countries blush with shame).
“Diversity”
is now an explicit job qualification in the STEM fields. A current job listing
for a lecturer in biology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst
announces that because diversity is “critical to the university’s goals of
achieving excellence in all areas,”
Because these racist/sexist hiring
policies are (technically) illegal, there are now workarounds to making job
postings racists and sexist in their hiring requirements. It takes little
effort to see I’m not imagining things:
The
University of California at San Diego physics department advertised an
assistant-professor position several years ago with a “specific emphasis on
contributions to diversity,” …All five candidates on UC San Diego’s short list
were females, leading one male candidate with a specialty in extragalactic
physics to wonder why the school had even solicited applications from Asian and
white men.
How Identity Politics Is Harming the Sciences
I’ve often wondered if I could get a good
administrative position if I self-identify as a protected gender/race. I’ll
probably never go through with an experiment testing that hypothesis, however.
Bottom line, the destruction being wrought
on the sciences is being done with the same tool which has done so much harm to
higher education: money, great quantities of money handed over for no good
reason at all.
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