I have seen something like this happen over and over. We are a "research 1" land grant state university in a geographically undesirable location: smallish town, severe winters, flat ag landscape all around for 100s of miles. The land grant mission is all about serving the people of the state, so we are not selective with enrollment.
This means we are not an elite university, and typically not the first choice for hiring anyone greatly in demand--such as an accomplished and talented POC candidate, or even a really great white woman candidate. The best ones all get hoovered up by elite universities and/or universities in desirable locations (near the oceans, in places with mild climates, in or near large urban centers that feature cultural coolness, etc.)
And so we tend to get second-tier or third-tier POC candidates. But we have hired them over better-qualified/more capable non-POC candidates, because of the desperate need for "visible diversity". This process has a terrible unintended consequence, besides the obvious one of racial discrimination against non-POCs: because the POCs we hire are not top-tier scholars/teachers, they rarely stand out in their performance—and more often than non-POCs, they fail to thrive as scholars. Not because they are POC, but because they were not sufficiently qualified or capable as their fellow POC who got scooped up by the Ivies et al.
And then another odd effect that this race-conscious distortion of the hiring process gives us: Since nobody anywhere wants to hire white males because they are white males, but everybody wants to hire POC because they are POC (and as noted, we never get the best POC), our white males tend to be the strongest academics and best teachers. The problematic scholars/teachers tend to be everyone except the white males.
I'm sure students notice this sometimes, even if the institution would never acknowledge it. I think this disparate performance was not at all what DEI-obsessed universities had in mind.
I’m at a highly selective liberal arts college in a desirable location, so we definitely do attract absolute top talent scholars of all backgrounds. But even then the pressure to “hire diversely” results in some weak hires. I’ve seen two different departments attempt to hire scholars of color who had run out their tenure clock or had even been denied tenure by their previous institutions. One attempt failed when the provost took a look at the candidate’s cv and pointed out that he was eleven years post degree, no book in sight, and his meager number of pubs were in edited volumes/special journal issues where he was invited and peer review is either missing or very lenient. The other hire went forward because the candidate was from a very underrepresented group in a STEM field. That woman is now struggling with no new pubs and some of the very worst teaching evals I have ever seen. This hire is an utter disaster, an insult to our students, and a disservice to the candidate who should be looking for private sector employment. It’s nuts that this is still happening.
"Diversity" hiring is really just so thoughtless. It seems obvious that selecting for race over merit will lead to degradation of the institution. Any one diversity hire only has a localized effect, but do this hundreds or thousands of times within an institution over at least three decades and you'll have a noticeably weaker institution. This is entirely inevitable. Weaker overall in terms of quality of scholarship, teaching effectiveness, and even in terms of collegiality: it can't be good for an institution for it to be full of professors and administrators who are thought of (even if never publicly acknowledged) by their peers as token hires.
The fantasy was that achieving "visible diversity" was so urgently important, we weren't going to consider any long-term consequences, and/or that people were simply wish-casting any negative consequences away, while imagining (with zero evidence) that all consequences would be positive.
Yes, this overaggressive push to create "visible" diversity among faculty and students has clearly degraded things already: there's no serious principle behind it, it literally makes the most important criterion for hiring or admission become skin melanin/stated identity. And this practice can hurt the "diversity hires/admits" as much as anyone else.
For the many "diverse" non-white scholars who are indeed quite deserving of their positions and honors, it becomes a sore point and an insult to their genuine achievements and make them feel like they are under undeserved scrutiny. In time that can lead to feelings of resentment and burnout.
For those non-white scholars who have been rewarded beyond their talents, it goes one of two ways: the vast majority are just decent people who are understandably not going to turn down the opportunities they are offered. But in time they can feel overwhelmed and insecure. I've seen some colleagues like this who often stall out after tenure and withdraw; they stop growing as scholars because they haven't really earned their position and they become alienated and demoralized by feelings of self-doubt.
But... a toxic few are more deluded or narcissistic. They buy their own hype. They truly lack the discernment to tell good work from bad. When these people get into gatekeeping positions or position of power in the field, shit gets real bad.
The sorting process which engineered virtually only patrician men in the higher educational system took decades to half a century to fully lock-in because the cycle time is of change incredibly long, and the is virtually no restructuring. The educational shift for women - better attainment, more college-bound - realistically only started in the 70’s. We are at the final phases of that lock-in. For other candidates we are in a re-equilibration cycle, the steady state presence will be high then low then high gradually leveling off. It’s what you see when you disturb a dynamical system.
Once in the system the dynamics change because we are speaking to barriers to entry, not to persistence.
AI will radically change the system dynamics. The focus will change to more reason in disciplines, perhaps philosophy but strongly how you frame problems, and search for a solution since AI will vastly reduce cycle times for certain research which traditionally went to the worker bees in the educational food chain.
In industry the cycle time for jobs movement is around 2 years, and there is no tenure. In that, there is no academic year, no accumulation of good or bad over several years towards tenure. In 100 days you must create positive change or work products, within a year people want you in their department, and within 2 years you take on new responsibility. At that point either the company changes or you do.
Higher education rarely restructures the way companies do. For most of my adult life it was every 6 months.
I have seen something like this happen over and over. We are a "research 1" land grant state university in a geographically undesirable location: smallish town, severe winters, flat ag landscape all around for 100s of miles. The land grant mission is all about serving the people of the state, so we are not selective with enrollment.
This means we are not an elite university, and typically not the first choice for hiring anyone greatly in demand--such as an accomplished and talented POC candidate, or even a really great white woman candidate. The best ones all get hoovered up by elite universities and/or universities in desirable locations (near the oceans, in places with mild climates, in or near large urban centers that feature cultural coolness, etc.)
And so we tend to get second-tier or third-tier POC candidates. But we have hired them over better-qualified/more capable non-POC candidates, because of the desperate need for "visible diversity". This process has a terrible unintended consequence, besides the obvious one of racial discrimination against non-POCs: because the POCs we hire are not top-tier scholars/teachers, they rarely stand out in their performance—and more often than non-POCs, they fail to thrive as scholars. Not because they are POC, but because they were not sufficiently qualified or capable as their fellow POC who got scooped up by the Ivies et al.
And then another odd effect that this race-conscious distortion of the hiring process gives us: Since nobody anywhere wants to hire white males because they are white males, but everybody wants to hire POC because they are POC (and as noted, we never get the best POC), our white males tend to be the strongest academics and best teachers. The problematic scholars/teachers tend to be everyone except the white males.
I'm sure students notice this sometimes, even if the institution would never acknowledge it. I think this disparate performance was not at all what DEI-obsessed universities had in mind.
I’m at a highly selective liberal arts college in a desirable location, so we definitely do attract absolute top talent scholars of all backgrounds. But even then the pressure to “hire diversely” results in some weak hires. I’ve seen two different departments attempt to hire scholars of color who had run out their tenure clock or had even been denied tenure by their previous institutions. One attempt failed when the provost took a look at the candidate’s cv and pointed out that he was eleven years post degree, no book in sight, and his meager number of pubs were in edited volumes/special journal issues where he was invited and peer review is either missing or very lenient. The other hire went forward because the candidate was from a very underrepresented group in a STEM field. That woman is now struggling with no new pubs and some of the very worst teaching evals I have ever seen. This hire is an utter disaster, an insult to our students, and a disservice to the candidate who should be looking for private sector employment. It’s nuts that this is still happening.
"Diversity" hiring is really just so thoughtless. It seems obvious that selecting for race over merit will lead to degradation of the institution. Any one diversity hire only has a localized effect, but do this hundreds or thousands of times within an institution over at least three decades and you'll have a noticeably weaker institution. This is entirely inevitable. Weaker overall in terms of quality of scholarship, teaching effectiveness, and even in terms of collegiality: it can't be good for an institution for it to be full of professors and administrators who are thought of (even if never publicly acknowledged) by their peers as token hires.
The fantasy was that achieving "visible diversity" was so urgently important, we weren't going to consider any long-term consequences, and/or that people were simply wish-casting any negative consequences away, while imagining (with zero evidence) that all consequences would be positive.
Yes, this overaggressive push to create "visible" diversity among faculty and students has clearly degraded things already: there's no serious principle behind it, it literally makes the most important criterion for hiring or admission become skin melanin/stated identity. And this practice can hurt the "diversity hires/admits" as much as anyone else.
For the many "diverse" non-white scholars who are indeed quite deserving of their positions and honors, it becomes a sore point and an insult to their genuine achievements and make them feel like they are under undeserved scrutiny. In time that can lead to feelings of resentment and burnout.
For those non-white scholars who have been rewarded beyond their talents, it goes one of two ways: the vast majority are just decent people who are understandably not going to turn down the opportunities they are offered. But in time they can feel overwhelmed and insecure. I've seen some colleagues like this who often stall out after tenure and withdraw; they stop growing as scholars because they haven't really earned their position and they become alienated and demoralized by feelings of self-doubt.
But... a toxic few are more deluded or narcissistic. They buy their own hype. They truly lack the discernment to tell good work from bad. When these people get into gatekeeping positions or position of power in the field, shit gets real bad.
The sorting process which engineered virtually only patrician men in the higher educational system took decades to half a century to fully lock-in because the cycle time is of change incredibly long, and the is virtually no restructuring. The educational shift for women - better attainment, more college-bound - realistically only started in the 70’s. We are at the final phases of that lock-in. For other candidates we are in a re-equilibration cycle, the steady state presence will be high then low then high gradually leveling off. It’s what you see when you disturb a dynamical system.
Once in the system the dynamics change because we are speaking to barriers to entry, not to persistence.
AI will radically change the system dynamics. The focus will change to more reason in disciplines, perhaps philosophy but strongly how you frame problems, and search for a solution since AI will vastly reduce cycle times for certain research which traditionally went to the worker bees in the educational food chain.
In industry the cycle time for jobs movement is around 2 years, and there is no tenure. In that, there is no academic year, no accumulation of good or bad over several years towards tenure. In 100 days you must create positive change or work products, within a year people want you in their department, and within 2 years you take on new responsibility. At that point either the company changes or you do.
Higher education rarely restructures the way companies do. For most of my adult life it was every 6 months.