By Heather Mac Donald
Thursday, October 19, 2017
Note: The following
piece originally appeared in City Journal.
Another academic year, another fattening of campus
diversity bureaucracies. Most worrisomely, the STEM (science, technology,
engineering, and math) fields are now prime targets for administrative
diversity encroachment, with the commercial tech sector rapidly following suit.
The most significant new diversity sinecure has been
established at the University of California, Los Angeles, where the engineering
school just minted its first associate dean of diversity and inclusion. The
purpose of this new position is to encourage engineering faculty to hire more
females and underrepresented minorities, reports the Daily Bruin, UCLA’s student newspaper. “One of my jobs,” the new
dean, Scott Brandenberg, told the paper, is “to avoid implicit bias in the
hiring process.”
The new engineering-diversity deanship supplements the
work of UCLA’s lavishly paid, campus-wide vice chancellor for equity, diversity,
and inclusion, Jerry Kang, whose 2016 salary was $444,000. Kang, one of the
most influential proponents of the “implicit bias” concept, already exerts
enormous pressure throughout the university to hire for “diversity.” Even
before his vice chancellorship was created, any UCLA professor hoping for the
top rank of tenure had to write a “contributions to diversity” essay detailing
his efforts to rectify any racial and gender imbalances in his department. The
addition of a localized diversity bureaucrat within the engineering school can
only increase the focus on gender and race in hiring and admissions decisions.
(Brandenberg, of course, expresses fealty to California’s beleaguered ban on
racial and gender preferences in government. But it would be naïve to think
that the ubiquitous mandate to increase “diversity” does not inevitably tip the
scale in favor of alleged victim groups.)
No evidence exists that implicit bias is a factor in the
engineering school’s gender and racial composition. Its percentage of female
undergraduate and graduate students — about one quarter — matches the national
percentage reported by the American Society for Engineering Education. I asked
the school’s spokesman, Amy Akmal, if UCLA Engineering was aware of any
examples of the most qualified candidate being overlooked or rejected in a
hiring search because of implicit bias; she ignored this fundamental question.
(She also ignored a question about the new dean’s salary.) Every science
department in the country relentlessly strives to improve its national ranking
through hiring the most prestigious researchers. It would be deeply contrary to
their interests to reject a superior candidate because of gender or race. And
given the pools of federal and private science funding available on the basis
of gender and race, hiring managers have added incentive to favor “diverse”
applicants. Contrary to the idea that females are being discriminated against
in hiring, Wendy Williams and Stephen Ceci found that female applicants for
STEM tenure-track positions enjoyed a two-to-one advantage over similarly
qualified males in paired résumé experiments.
The director of UCLA’s Women in Engineering program
trotted out the usual role-model argument for gender- and race-conscious
decision-making. Audrey Pool O’Neal told the Daily Bruin that she never saw anyone who looked like her (black
and female) when she was an undergraduate and graduate student. “When I do
teach classes, the female students let me know how much they appreciate seeing
a woman in front of their classroom,” O’Neal said.
Why not appreciate seeing the best-trained scholar in
front of your classroom? Any female who thinks that she needs a female in front
of her in order to learn as much as she can, or to envision a career in a
particular field, has declared herself a follower rather than a pioneer — and a
follower based on a characteristic irrelevant to intellectual achievement. If
it were really the case that a role model of the same gender is important to
moving ahead, it would be impossible to alter the gender balance of a field,
assuming such a mission to be worthwhile, which — absent a finding of actual
discrimination — it is not. Marie Curie did not need female role models to
investigate radioactivity; she was motivated by a passion to understand the
world. That should be reason enough to plunge headlong into the search for
knowledge.
The Columbia University Medical Center has just pledged
$50 million to diversify its faculty and student body, reports the Wall Street Journal, part of a new $100
million diversity drive across the entire university. Never mind that Columbia
University has already fruitlessly spent $85 million since 2005 toward the same
end. Never mind that there is a huge gap between the MCAT scores of blacks and
whites, which will affect the quality of subsequent hiring pools. Columbia’s
vice provost for faculty diversity and inclusion regurgitates another classic
of diversity boilerplate to justify this enormous waste of funds. “The reality
is that you can’t really achieve excellence without diversity. It requires
diverse thought to solve complex problems,” says Vice Provost Dennis Mitchell.
Mitchell’s statement is ludicrous on multiple fronts.
Aside from the fact that the one thing never sought in the academic diversity
hustle is “diverse thought,” do Mitchell and his compatriots in the diversity
industry believe that females and underrepresented minorities solve analytical
problems differently from males, whites, and Asians? A core plank of left-wing
academic thought is that gender and race are “socially constructed.” Why then
would females and underrepresented minorities think differently if their
alleged differences are simply a result of oppressive social categories?
Columbia’s science departments do not have 50/50 parity
between males and females, which, according to Mitchell, keeps them from
achieving “excellence.” Since 1903, Columbia faculty members have won 78 Nobel
prizes in the sciences and economics. The recipients were overwhelmingly male
(and white and Asian); somehow, they managed to do groundbreaking work in
science despite the relatively non-diverse composition of their departments.
The only thing that the academic diversity racket
achieves is to bid up the salaries of plausibly qualified candidates, and
redistribute those candidates to universities that can muster the most
resources for diversity poaching. The dean of UCLA engineering, Jayathi Murthy,
laments that of the 900 females admitted to the undergraduate engineering
program in 2016, only about 240 accepted the offer. “There are (about) 660
women there that are going somewhere else and the question is . . . is there an
opportunity for us to do something differently?” she told the Daily Bruin. Presumably, those 660
non-matriculants are getting engineering degrees at other institutions. If the
goal (a dubious one) is to increase the number of female engineers overall,
then it doesn’t matter where they graduate from. But every college wants its own set of “diverse” students and
faculty, though one institution’s gain is another’s presumed loss.
The pressure to take irrelevant characteristics like race
and sex into account in academic science is dangerous enough. But Silicon
Valley continues to remake itself in the image of the campus diversity
bureaucracy. Dell Technologies announced in September a new “chief diversity
and inclusion officer” position. Per the usual administrator shuffle, the
occupant of this new position, Brian Reaves, previously served as head of
diversity and inclusion for software company SAP. Reaves will engage the company’s
“leaders” in “candid conversations about the role of gender and diversity in
the workplace,” said Dell chief customer officer Karen Quintos in a press
statement. “Candid” means you are free to confess your white cis-male
privilege. “Candid” does not mean questioning Dell’s diversity assumptions, as
this summer’s firing of computer engineer James Damore from Google made
terrifyingly clear to any other potential heretics.
According to the Austin-American Statesman, over the last
three years Dell’s existing diversity programs have not changed the company’s
gender and racial balance. Dell’s share of women (28 percent) and “people of
color” (27 percent) is consistent with the academic pipeline. But magical
diversity thinking holds that adding another administrator will somehow conjure
forth previously overlooked “diverse” hires. If they don’t materialize, one can
always fall back on racial and gender double standards.
Apple CEO Tim Cook has similar confidence in the power of
diversity bureaucrats. Cook said in 2015 that diversity is a “readily solvable
issue,” according to CNN, and announced that he would hire more women. Failing
that, he can at least hire more diversity functionaries. In May, Apple created
a new vice president of inclusion and diversity, who will report directly to
Cook. This new executive position comes in addition to Apple’s existing
director of inclusion and diversity.
Official scientific organizations have all turned
obsessively to the diversity agenda. Any academic scientist who wants to move
up in administration — or apply for grants, leave, or access to the conference
circuit — must be on a crusade against his fellow scientists’ microaggressions
and implicit bias. This is good news for the diversity industry, but bad news
for America’s scientific competitiveness.
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