Major LOL on all fronts.
On DEI and its current inevitable dismantling: Human beings tend to learn by making glaringly obvious mistakes and then backtracking from them. UD doesn’t know why this is. In principle, advanced societies should feature people who anticipate that many procedural paths are in error, and these people would therefore avoid these paths.
One crucial, all-American pitfall on this particular path involves our national tendency to overdo. We can’t leave well-enough alone; we seem compelled to pile on to whatever idea we’ve got hold of, until it’s not just a policy or a program anymore — it’s a calling, an obsession, a nasty insistency.
Anyone with even modest brains should have known that imposed DEI regimes were disasters waiting to happen, but, lemming-like, our universities went there. Now we must pick up the lemmings from the bottom of the cliff, dust them off, and encourage them not to find another way to rush the cliff.
December 13th, 2024 at 11:03AM
In practice, faculty meetings are full of people who are so clever at anticipating possible error that peacocking, straining at gnats, and word-by-word group editing is what follows. That the diversity regime became a cluster is a consequence of a related phenomenon, the usurpation of faculty stewardship by Student Affairs deanlets, because the usurpations were for purposes a majority of the faculty agreed with. The dissenters got mau-maued. Now everybody reaps what the groupthinkers sowed.
December 13th, 2024 at 12:32PM
Stephen: For me, the scandal is not groupthink in itself, because corporate life was always thus. It’s not the fact that some DEI bigwigs are bigots.
It’s the fact that the groupthinkers got away with the coercion of DEI statements and other DEI stuff. This successful coercion, in an American context, continues to shock me. I’m shocked professors let it happen.
Deconstructing the fucker will be long, ugly, and litigious.
December 14th, 2024 at 2:21PM
UD: Yes, management fads we have always had with us, and you’ll still see passing your house a weathered “Q” on a railroad car that got slapped on when “total quality management” was a thing and DEI is of a piece with the continuing tussle between “shareholder value” and “stakeholder value” that goes on in the C-suites, all of it reflecting a lack of understanding of “mutually beneficial trade,” but that’s an econ thing the B-school boys have trouble understanding.
In the universities, the successful coercion isn’t that hard to grasp. Student Affairs injected a lot of that stuff, I repeat, because it aligned with the priors of the faculty. Then that arrest went wrong in Minneapolis and dialing up the DEI was only fitting and proper, and here we are.
Professors letting it happen? Look no further than your post featuring Julia Alekseyeva, whose knowledge of the Soviet is only by acquaintance with her emigrant babushka, not from any lived experience, and yet from among all the possible job candidates Penn offered her a joint appointment. If it’s going to be ugly, in part it’s because it’s so entrenched.
I wonder, though, when an assistant professor wins one of those distinguished teaching awards, is that the same thing as the owner of a sportsball team expressing complete confidence in the head coach?