Even when (especially when?) they make us uncomfortable. Our students have just noticed the dirty little secret of a lot of universities: we pride ourselves on the diversity of the student body, but when you look at the faculty and administration, a whole lot of that diversity magically pales to white. So they’re having a rally tomorrow at 1:30, meeting in the Science Atrium and migrating towards the administration, to demand more equality in our hiring practices.
And look, they’re smart and all empirical and everything!
I’m so proud of them.
It’s a real problem. We have a mostly white faculty, so hiring committees are mostly white, and somehow, miraculously, they always seem to find that the very best candidates are also always white. Weird, huh?
Before I get accusations that I, rabble-rouser, put them up to it, I had absolutely nothing to do with this event — it’s entirely our students paying attention and figuring out what’s going on. But I’ll be there in support!
I’m frowning here a little bit, not at the activism (excellent!) or the problem (which is genuine), but at the comparisons listed. Numbers of…? Shouldn’t that be in comparison to the wider society? (Which, of course, raises the question, where? Locally? State-wide? Nationally? World-wide?) That is, something like: “State-wide, X:Y = 5:3, here at U., 14:1″…
Those are numbers solely on the UMM campus, and the point is that, for instance, there is only one native American faculty for every 109 native American students, while there is 1 white faculty for every 14 white students. The comparison is to highlight the difference in student experiences.
Ah! Got it. I misread the chart’s title (not entirely sure how…). Ok, frown gone. No problem with the comparisons, which are obviously more on-topic than how I was mistakenly trying to interpret them. Thanks for clarifying!
I seem to recall a bearded white prof telling me basically the same thing as what you just wrote, using very similar language, back in the late 80s/early 90s when I didn’t really grok what he meant. I just logged it in my brain as “crazy shit my dad says.”
He succeeded at changing things. It took a major sacrifice. He became department head. Are you prepared to do that for the cause?
Oh, dear. Those numbers are not good — and no Asian American faculty at all? I’m wondering how that could even be accomplished, considering the hiring pool in today’s academia.
In its early days (early ’60s) UMM was accidentally much more diverse. I was too young to know much about it, but I think there were shortages (not surprising, considering what faculty was paid in those days) and also an available pool of well-educated immigrants, including refugees. Our circle of faculty families was totally white in 1963, then rapidly gained a couple of Chinese families, a Japanese family, I think a Korean family, an Egyptian family that I think was ethnically South Asian (they were Hindu), and a Hungarian fellow who was one of the heroes of my childhood due to his daring and harrowing escape from the Communist regime. I’m sure there were more; that would probably have been just in Humanities. I vaguely remember a West African guy, but I mostly knew the families with little kids, because I babysat.
Morris coped well with the exotic influx, and we certainly had a lot of hot prospects for guest speakers in 8th grade Geography class. And our cuisine expanded wildly, although we did have to go down to the Cities more for outré supplies like egg roll wrappers.
It wasn’t a lot of people, but Morris is small now — then, it was tiny. Even then, though, I was aware of the complacency of tokenism. How one stranger is exotic and interesting, but a whole big bunch of ’em is alien and scary. Thinking also of the to-do about refugees right now, it seems this is one of those stupid human things that we need to just keep fighting all the time.
And you folks at UMM need to get right on this. Seriously, what good does it do to try establish a tradition for the future, when the minute you turn your back …
Oh, and in case the administration is reading, the tradition for the future was not meant to be “underpaid foreign adjuncts”. Thank you.
For the benefit of society at large, I feel like white students should also be exposed to/taught by more teachers/professors of color, so they don’t grow up seeing only white authority figures.
I have to say that this is a point where I am in slight disagreement.
There are several legitimate reasons for the faculty to be white-male leaning.
1) Most doctorate holders in the US are white (roughly 75-80%; see http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf12304/ )
2) All universities want to hire the best possible candidates for faculty positions. A university like UMM is not as competitive as larger, better funded universities. Therefore, a person from a minority who is well qualified will very likely have the opportunity to go to another university or another city.
3) Academic jobs are historically white, and therefore are (subconsciously, in most cases) more easily considered by white people.
4) UMM has a student population of roughly 1900 and about 130 faculty. Statistics of small numbers may be at play.
In South Africa, there is an aggressive hiring practice that attempts to correct the overabundance of white faculty. The result is that, in some cases, people with roughly the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree are given full lectureships and teach upper division classes (and sometimes even have students doing research projects under them). This is not good for the university or the future of the country, because the students are not being taught by the best qualified candidates, and are therefore not getting the best possible education. Better is to allow the most qualified candidates to be hired, regardless of their race or background, so that in 20 years, the students who are being trained today (who have about the same racial makeup as the country overall) will be in position to take over those jobs. It is no surprise that faculty lags behind other areas in racial equality, because building the qualifications for being a faculty member takes a long time. Before an individual can build those qualifications, the people around that individual have to realize that an academic job is a reasonable pursuit, and encourage that individual. There can be a long lag time.
And, anyway, in my experience, most professors are not white so much as grey :)
Thank you for showing prima facie evidence of wanting to uphold institutional racism. Despite your claims, the pool of qualified candidates is much bigger than you want to admit.
UMM has a student population of roughly 1900 and about 130 faculty. Statistics of small numbers may be at play.
Funny — that’s almost exactly the same numbers as where my dad was. His department (which is all he had control over) had about 6-8 faculty. Somehow he didn’t see that as an excuse.
>Thank you for showing prima facie evidence of wanting to uphold institutional racism. Despite your claims, the pool of qualified candidates is much bigger than you want to admit.
The pool of qualified minority candidates would be ~20% of the doctorate holders in the US. Most of those will not want to go into academic jobs. Of the ones who do, they will very likely have the opportunity to go to a larger/better funded university than UMM.
I am not trying to argue that there should be more white professors, I am attempting to explain the existing phenomenon.
This is so fucking stupid, so-fucking mind-numbingly simplistic, even by Pharyngula standards, that I feel obliged to comment.
I (white male) have been on many faculty STEM search committees (including, as it happens, right now.)
I am sure your university is the same as ours—even though you like to use snide comments (somehow, miraculously, they always seem to find that the very best candidates are also always white. Weird, huh?)
to throw your colleagues under the bus. We go out of our way to identify underrepresented populations when pouring through the initial applications. Every search I have been on would absolutely love to hire someone from an underrepresented population. The problem is not that we (and I’m willing to suspect your university, since I doubt that you are representative of the quality of your faculty) are reluctant to hire underrepresented applicants; the problem is that there are not enough of them. It is not that the “white male search committee” (Holy fuck everything is so un-nuanced in your world) is reluctant to hire such candidates, it’s that the competition for a limited number of such candidates is fierce. I am at a small liberal arts college probably not unlike yours—want to hire an AA female nuclear physicist? Hell yes. Found a candidate—one of the one or two that are available?—good start! Compete with R1s who also would like to diversify and who can offer a lighter teaching load and a half-a-million in start-up funds? Good fucking luck.
But reality is not as fun as, once again, blaming the white males.
The students are correct in identifying a real problem, but their target is too far downstream. At the university level, it is too late. The root of the problem of an insufficient applicant pool of underrepresented populations is somewhere way, way earlier, perhaps way back at the elementary schools that, for those populations, lack the necessary resources.
Oooohhh! Thank you SO much for explaining this to all of us!
“Explaining” an undesirable situation IS arguing for maintaining that situation!
And as for your argument that in South Africa they are hurting the country by trying to boost the number of black faculty, sure there may be a slight disadvantage to SOME students in the short run. So what? Half of all students with white professors will be getting instruction from a professor who is below average. You are just grasping at straws to try to justify maintaining the crappy status quo.
@8, 11 mineralfellow
If it’s true that a higher proportion of minority PhD holders want to avoid academia compared to white PhD holders, then maybe the question we should be asking is “What is it about academics that makes it hostile to minorities?” You could ask similar questions about female faculty in STEM fields.
That is what you think. I know better, having been in a STEM field for almost 40 years, and this has been discussed for almost the whole time. Explaining why the status quo is there does nothing to change the situation. The change requires looking at everything about a candidate, rather than just the research credentials for a teaching position (UMM is a teaching university). This may include the need for diversity within a department, college, or even the whole university.
@12: I cannot resist suggesting that this one went right between your legs. Nor can I resist suggesting that your comment is so fucking stupid, so-fucking mind-numbingly simplistic, that I feel obliged to comment. Students are agitating for a better world. You appear to be saying that’s impossible. (Holy fuck everything is so un-nuanced in your world.) Yes, there are difficulties, certainly; my alma mater (Oxford, graduated ’70) has been trying to attract underprivileged students for fifty years to my certain knowledge, and has failed. Why it failed is a genuinely interesting question, but that does not preclude raising the subject yet again. It’s a real problem, and good for the students for bringing it up.
These whines about how there are too few qualified candidates to achieve desired goals sound exactly like what Silicon Valley execs say when they wheedle Congress for bigger H1b visas (to allow foreign engineers to enter the country to work at American companies). All they want to do is find resumes that perfectly match the requirements they have this quarter. They utterly ignore the fact that at some time in the not-too-distant past there was NOBODY who knew how to do whatever it is they need done. When William Shockley left Bell Labs to start manufacturing transistors, he didn’t look for experienced transistor engineers because there weren’t any in the whole world. He hired people with a wide range of talents and they learned on the job what a transistor engineer needed to know. It was a situation that could only be solved with a long-term solution.
Companies today are constantly laying people off at the very same time they are crying that they can’t find people to fill their newly opened positions, yet they blanch at the thought of training the people right in front of their noses. And it sounds like universities are equally short-sighted.
True. I’ve been on quite a few search committees, and we’re always happy to get a diverse application pool.
But then there’s the next conundrum: why are we happy to see minority candidates, but then fail to hire them? Look at the numbers on that poster. They say very clearly that we fail on the next step, of hiring. Go ahead and complain that I’m being mean to my colleagues (and myself! I’ve been on these committees), but that doesn’t change the hard reality of those skewed numbers.
That is a bizarre comment. It’s not as if we open a job search, get a handful of applicants, and then have to moan that I guess we’ll have to hire the white guy, because no one else applied. This is a buyer’s market. We’ll easily get a hundred applicants for each position, and even if we immediately throw out half (which we often do — because people are so desperate for a job that they’ll apply for positions that they fit poorly), we’re still wading through piles of paper.
You notice all those adjuncts stacked up at just about every university? They’d kill for these jobs. If we just threw out all the applications from white people (and I am definitely not advocating that), and just put non-white candidates in the pool, we’d probably be able to fill most of our positions here. But of course merit is the primary quality we care about, so that would be a very bad idea…but just saying it’s because they aren’t there is completely wrong.
#15,
No. The change does not require “looking at everything about a candidate.” (What the fuck does that even mean?) The change requires that a more systemic problem be solved, especially in STEM. The demand for minority STEM faculty exceeds the supply. I suspect it is also true in non-STEM disciplines. That’s the problem. Search committees can’t fix that problem. How hard is this to grasp?
Well, maybe you should make a point of going through all the non-white applications first. Find all the minimally-qualified minority candidates as a first step. And if you end up with a Latina who is 92% qualified and a white dude who is 96% qualified, maybe consider that that 4% difference might be due to white privilege rather than innate talent.
I have a provisional solution.
Require that the makeup of hiring committees be majority minority (the problem with that, of course, is that it places a burden on existing minority faculty.) Since there is no bias present on faculty committees, it couldn’t possibly skew the ratios unfairly, and then we’d be able to definitely say that the problem is entirely due to the makeup of the applicant pool.
L#18,
They might mean that, but not necessarily. There is, as I and others have pointed out, another explanation, a lack of supply. If the supply was there and the numbers persisted, then and only then could you say with the certainty that you are improperly invoking that the numbers on the poster are due to white-male bias.
Let me ask you, have you actually been on a search committee that offered a position to a white male over a minority in the situation where the qualifications were in the same ballpark? Because that’s never happened to me. If so why didn’t you scream like hell to the administration? Or did you?
What the hell does that have to do with anything? Nobody is questioning how many applicants a faculty position attracts. The question is, even with a hundreds applicants, how many are, say, African Americans? (In physics there are often none. Zero. Probably because the one or two know that they can get a better job than we offer.) And if any make the cut, and you bring them in and try to hire them, how successful are you? Some time ago we tried like hell to hire an AA male physicist–we lost out to Harvard. Harvard. We can’t compete with Harvard, can you?
I’m confused. If they are there, and they have a terminal degree which I’m sure is a requirement, don’t the ones who want a regular faculty position (not all do, some have day jobs they want to keep) apply when a position opens? So what happens then? Why don’t they make the cut, at least when you are on the committee? Are you often a lone voice that gets out voted?
#17,
Oh give me a break. I’d bet dollars to donuts that almost everyone one here would agree that the educational opportunities are way, way better for middle and upper class whites than for minorities, and that (relevant for STEM) boys get better societal and institutional “nudges” along the way. But somehow, magically, the applicant pool for faculty positions doesn’t reflect this serious (and the real) problem. No, in spite of the huge K12 advantage for white people the applicant pool of PH.D.s is actually very close (in this fantasy world) in its distribution to the overall population–and the white search committees simply ignore the sizable 13% AA applications and hire only other whites.
That’s a brilliant question, because you know that confidentiality requires that I can’t discuss what goes on behind the scenes in hiring committees.
But I love that phrase, “where the qualifications were in the same ballpark”. It excuses so many sins of omission. It’s really essentially impossible to find any two applications where the qualifications are equivalent — they’re all different, with multiple parameters. Every hire is a compromise somewhere.
I also love the invocation of Harvard. Why, Harvard is so busy sucking up all the minority faculty that it must be a bastion of diversity.
But it’s also irrelevant. We are not competing with Harvard. The people who apply to a small liberal arts college in the Midwest are going to be very different than those who think an elite ivy is their ideal. So no, we’ve never had a candidate blow us off to go to Harvard…to other comparable institutions, of course. But it’s simply silly to suggest that they’d apply here, or that we’d even want them.
The kind of application that says “Harvard man” all over it gets round-filed in the first pass here.
I’m probably missing the sarcasm, but obviously majority minority committees don’t guarantee that there is “no bias present.” See e.g. Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students where both male and female faculty showed discrimination.
My team are all women, all but one with technical degrees. All immigrants. All doing great work. All paid shit because I have no money (that’s been my key stress in life of late, but the fix is in sight).
Bill Buckner’s theory would predict that all these people would be getting snapped up by the Googles, Apples, and Bombardiers of the world who are trying to brush up their diversity creds so I should be left with the dregs. And yet, reality indicates something different.
I knew when I wrote that phrase that you or someone else would grab it and use it as a blunt instrument. But honesty compelled me to include it. The truth is that there are cases when a white male applicant is truly the hands-down superior candidate. It does happen. Surely you recognize that, right?
Or maybe not. So without asking you to reveal the deliberations of actual committees, do you think that it is ever possible that a white male candidate is so strong that you, PZ Myers, would vote for him over a minority candidate? That’s a real question. Please answer.
If that is ever possible, then you tacitly agree that when discussing bias we are discussing applicants–not with equal qualifications, that’s impossible to evaluate–but in the same ballpark.
And in truth at institutions like ours all applicants that make the minimal requirements are usually in the same ballpark. But I felt it important to use the “ballpark” caveat to allow for the rare case when one candidate is so good that it cannot be ignored, so good that it overwhelms the desire for diversification. It has happened. Ever with you? (I have to admit that if you say no I simply won’t believe you.)
In short, your zeroing in on the “ball-park” phrase is anticipated red-herring bullshit.
I bet you are wrong. I bet if there is a position in developmental biology at UMM and one at Harvard then many of your applicants also applied to Harvard. (Unless, perhaps, you don’t require post-doc experience so you get the fresh PhD applicants that can’t apply to an R1). How do you know what other schools your applicants apply to? Many approach it just like applying for college–with “dream schools” and “realistic schools.” You make it sound like all your applicants are dead-set on a midwestern liberal arts colleges. I’m sure that’s what many say on a phone interview (all our candidates want to be at a school exactly like ours), but I suspect the reality is much fuzzier.
Nice straw-man. I didn’t say that Harvard a bastion of diversity (you really are dishonest) I said that they out-competed us on one AA that we tried to hire–and most likely because they wanted to diversify, as we all do, in spite of your simplistic notions. And how do you know that the lamentable lack of diversity–even in the elite schools, is not a further indication that the supply is lacking? If every AA physics PhD who wanted a faculty job went to the giant R1s with their huge faculties (when I was a post-doc at Urbana-Champaign there were 135 physics professors) the percentages would still be way below the population demographics.
What the fuck? My “theory” has nothing to do with the hiring practices of industry. I am talking about the hiring practices of universities for faculty.
And it is not a theory. The shortage of minority applicants is a fact. Here is AIP data from 2010-2012. There were 1669 physics PhDs awarded. 17 to African Americans. That is consistent with what we see, on the order of 1% of our applicants are AA. Far, far less than the percentage of AA in the population. And it points out that the problem is the production of minority Ph.D.s, which in turn is related to even bigger educational opportunity disparities. The problem is not white search committees. We are not the cause of the problem, we are dealing with the consequences of the problem.
I remember a student campaign for increased diversity at my alma mater that had the slogan: “All the women are white. All the minorities are men.” It was aimed at trying to persuade the administration to hire non-white women. There weren’t a lot of non-white men either, but it was a women’s college, so I think they were feeling the lack of non-white women more acutely.
Up until it’s time to actually interview applicants, it should be possible to screen resumes with no race/gender information available. At that point, I don’t know what you can do beyond say, using a voice changer with a phone interview or putting the candidate behind a screen. Putting a candidate behind a screen really works best when what you’re trying to assess is the ability to play a musical instrument.
If minorities don’t see other people like them in the doctorate fields, will not many of them be turned off of the idea, or think that it’s not possible?
I wanted to be a paleontologist. I never saw female paleontologists. Then Mom told me what she dealt with during her o-chem courses in college and I decided that a ‘male’ field was a shitty place to be. Instead I’m a vet tech now, and I do love my job. But I still kinda wish I’d been a paleontologists… except for the whole sexual harrasment/rape risk when out in the field so I don’t actually wish I’d been a paleontologist.
I’m afraid I have to second what Bill Buckner said, minus the gratuitous insults to our host. I’ve sat on many hiring committees, some of which have ended up giving offers to minority candidates. I’ve seen minority candidates given precedence over candidates who were, in the opinion of the hiring committee, more qualified. I don’t even particularly have a problem with that preference, even though it may have worked against my own job prospects in the past — I agree that it’s hugely important for students to see faculty members who look like them.
I can speak with a high degree of certainty when I say that, on every committee I’ve sat on for the past twenty years, being a member of a minority as an applicant would only be likely to help you at every stage of the process. It wouldn’t be hard to set up the process where all reference to race was removed, but that would be more likely to hurt the minority applicants than help them.
Also, in every case where I’ve sat on a committee that gave a job offer to a minority candidate, that person was gone from the college within two years, due to getting a better offer elsewhere. I’m simply not going to see lack of minority representation on faculties as a problem until I see lots of minority Ph.D.s complaining about not being able to find a job.
It isn’t fair to blame hiring committees. We need to do more to encourage minorities to go for higher degrees — and I’ve tried to do that with my own students at every opportunity.
What’s the big deal? 66/0 and 51/0 means the college is INFINITELY diverse.
….oh, it doesn’t work that way?
Well, shit. ;/
brucegee1962 @31,
Huh? You’re not going to see lack of diversity as a problem until you see lots of minorities complaining about not being able to find jobs? Wha?
So if there’s only 10 minority PhDs per year and they all get jobs then you don’t see any problem here? You would think the lack of minority representation is no problem since all 10 people were able to get jobs and nobody complained? What if all 10 fail to get jobs and they all complain? Would you then see it as a problem?
Sorry just not following your reasoning here. Don’t see why your seeing lack of diversity as a problem would be contingent and more specifically why it would be contingent on the number of minority PhDs complaining about not finding jobs.
Bill Buckner @27,
Wow your level of candor is refreshing. You just come right out and admit it huh?
Not only have you thrown diversification out the window “to allow for the rare case when one candidate is so good it cannot be ignored” but you will disbelieve Professor Myers if he denies doing the same? That about right?
One of the big problems, which has been known for years in the STEM fields, is that it helps to have proper role models in place all during the training of the students. Until the ranks from the bottom lecturers up the research professors have the same diversity as those presently studying the field, it creates a disincentive for those students not represented by teachers/mentors to continue in the field. Couple this with other institutional racism/sexism that is present, the faculties in certain STEM fields can enjoy their old school tie club. No serious attempt is being made to change the situation.
I certainly didn’t say all candidates are equivalent — we can quickly dismiss MOST of our applicants as not suiting our needs (we also get applicants who are grossly unqualified). But the finalists? The ones just before we send out invitations to interview? Those are really, really hard and we’re often sitting there with a dozen candidates we would be overjoyed to have as colleagues, but we have to pare it down to 3, and then 1.
As for your other assertions, no, we’ve never had a candidate, in my experience, turn us down to go to an Ivy League school. There are applications where we have the distinct impression that we’re their ‘safety school’, but they’d be wrong to think that and get shut out fast. We actually have demanding requirements that are very different from a Harvard. If you think someone who really wants a research position can apply here as a backup, and get to the point where they can spurn us for Harvard, you’re wrong — they don’t even get to the interview stage.
#34
Your lack of critical thinking is logical reasoning is typical for this site. I have not thrown diversification out the window. I have stated that there are rare cases where a white male candidate is so strong that you would select him over any minority applicant in that search. It does happen. We had a candidate some years ago who, among other qualifications, was Steven Weinberg’s student and got a good recommendation letter from him. He was completing a post-doc at MIT. He gave a masterful teaching presentation. There was nobody in the pool who came close–he was the unanimous first choice, even though everyone on the committee was dedicated to diversification.
If you think that never happens, or that it constitutes throwing diversity out the window, then you’re an idiot.
And yes, I will assume Myers is lying if he says that never happens and/or could not happen. Absolutely.
Since I’ve never said any such thing, go ahead and assume I’m lying. Of course you get candidates who stand out as exceptional…both exceptionally good and exceptionally bad. They exist. But, as you say, it is the .
“Rare” isn’t exactly the word I’d use — it comes up often enough that I’ve seen it several times — but you don’t build your search strategy around getting the godlike perfect candidate. Besides, that candidate is going to scurry off to Harvard, and then you can choose the pretty damn good minority candidate next, right?
Bill Buckner @37,
Oh sorry must have misunderstood you then.
But… you just said… Wait are you nit picking about the use of the defenestration metaphor? Feel free to substitute an alternative metaphor instead.
During those “rare” cases when you would pick a privileged white male over “any minority applicant in that search” what exactly are you doing with diversification if not tossing it out the window (so to speak)? Just putting it in time out? Just putting it down for a short nap?
On second thought forget the metaphor entirely. The important point is this: does admitting a white male as opposed to a minority applicant further the goal of diversification or does it work against that goal?
Yeah for a certain definition of “dedicated” maybe.
So, to derail the ongoing argument…
I’m glad to see this post, because where I teach, we’re in pretty much the same situation. Our college is one of the most (maybe even the most) racially diverse of the province, and my department is the largest, with over 40 active teachers every semester. I’d say that my classes are easily 20% Black, 10% Maghrebi, 10% Asian, 10% Latino. Yet I can count on one hand the number of colleagues I have who are non-White.
Truth is, it’s a matter I’d like to bring up, but I have no clue where to do this. Department head? Union? Human resources?
Again, a textbook display of critical thinking. It doesn’t matter that I said nothing of building a strategy around such a policy, and that I merely stated that it (an exceptional white-male candidate) does occasionally happen. It sounds to you, I suppose, like you are saying something substantive, when actually you are being evasive.
I see– well, a dedication to diversity means this to me: Let’s go out of our way to diversify. If necessary let us un-level the playing field to a certain, significant (but not infinite) extent to account for, and in some sense attempt to correct for, disparities in opportunity. However, let us also acknowledge that, even with such allowances, there are times when the dreaded white-male candidate might be so exceptional that it would be a travesty not to choose him.
Your definition is apparently: never hire a white male if a minority candidate is available. If hiring a white male under any circumstances is throwing diversification out the window, then just be honest and put “white men need not apply” in the job posting.
I consider yours to be a fucked-up, pathological view of a dedication to diversity–but I’m not at all surprised that you seem to be championing it.
For someone who whines about other people misunderstanding him, you sure do like to put words in other people’s mouths.
I honestly doubt that if you had, say, a 98% qualified white dude and a 92% qualified african american woman, you’d take a significant hit in quality of work if you hired the latter over the former.
Sure, he’s quantifiably more qualified, but what does that translate to in terms of competence in the job? And does that difference make up for the lost potential of more diversity in the faculty?
These kids give me hope.
Ahhh, the idea of “best person for the job”. As if a hireing comitee made of humans were ever able to pick that person without putting people on the Holodeck for 6 months to find out.
Vivec
It also dismisses the fact that being a role model for minorities can be a fucking qualification, too. Somebody who shows clearly that yes, here’s a place for you here.
The problem of lack of minority candidates (as they hold fewer PhDs) vs lack of PhD students is one of the chicken and the egg. There are fewer PhD candidates (in part) because they never see people like themselves in those areas, therefore there are fewer people holdingt hose precious PhDs….
+++
Lack of diversity puts people off. Yeah, I’m your stereotypical cis woman studying languages. Ironically, I didn’t go into STEM because my mother was over-zealous for me to go into STEM. One day I went to the maths department with a female friend. We were stared at. I don’t think that I ever felt so out of place and on a plate to be looked at from every single angle as in those 10 minutes. I won’t even describe the students and faculty as actively hostile. it was still deeply uncomfortable and I was glad to get back to my department where I was “the norm”.
And you can find this on many levels. During a quick check in one of my classes the intructor asked who had a second native language. We’re all teacher candidates and it was noone. Now consider that about 30% of our students will have another native language than German. The message we’Re sending, the message I am sending is “to be a teacher you must not have a second native language”. And this influences people on more than one level and it’s not easily quantifiable in terms of “qualification”: My fellow students are often very negatively influenced against things like “code switiching” because they have no active experience with it. Or they try to re-invent the wheel when it comes to “intercultural learning” instead of making use of their students’ expertise. Or blatant discrimination like banning students from speaking their other native language because the teachers don’t understand what’s being said in Russian or Turkish.
also… seriously? If that’s the case, don’t you have many more messages you’re “sending”?
I had never given myself much extra credit for acquiring a second native language on my own, but now, given that everyday day for over a decade, i was actively being demotivated by the teachers single native language messages… i guess i’m a fucking wunderkind with superhuman powers of perseverance. And you might be right, i never did want to become a teacher.
And so you effectively choose to give privilege to some people and surpress others, based on their ethnicity. Interesting stuff.
That’S not possible given the definition of “native language”. You probably don’t even have a second language. You may be competent in a foreign language.
Makes no sense whatsoever.
Really? I am open to a more charitable reading of #39, at which my comment was directed:
because to me it unambiguously leaves no room for hiring a white male without tossing diversification out the window. Can you parse it differently?
Agreed. I would definitely tilt the playing field taht much (and more) in that situation.
Ahh, a typical Pharygula strawman with a heaping lack of nuance, at least if you are referring to my comments. Not once did I advocate “the best person for the job” approach. I was quite explicit in stating that the playing field should be not be level and should lean significantly in favor of underrepresented populations.
I stated only that it is possible (a not common) on a given search that a white male candidate is so strong that you offer him the job in spite of a strong desire to diversify. Myers seems to acknowledge this is #38 but it must offend him to do so, so he obfuscated his comment with a bunch of irrelevant nonsense.
Small quibble:
The 66:0 and 51:0 ratios are not properly formed (1:0, 100:0 both technically convey the same thing). It’s obvious from context that the intention is say how many people there are in those groups with no representation on the faculty, but that then can lead to confusion as to what the other numbers mean. It would be better to have those two at the bottom of the list, in a non-ratio format ’66 X with no representation on the faculty’ – putting them last emphasises that they are the worst examples from the list.
It would be quite cool if the students made a poster showing what the faculty breakdown would be if there was proportional representation of the student body. Can anyone get in touch to suggest it?
#47 / Giliell:
That’S not possible given the definition of “native language”. You probably don’t even have a second language. You may be competent in a foreign language.
Putting on my pedant hat for a minute, my kid’s spoken two flavors of English and French from birth (well, from when she started speaking), so I think it’s perfectly possible to have mulitple native languages. Not in the way the original poster meant, but still.
What I find weird about the protest (which is a really good idea) is that they list international students as a type of person of color.
And it would be interesting to hear a calm conversation between PZ and Buckner, just to see how similar or different their schools and hiring processes are. It’s an area I really don’t know much about..
So, i guess linguists would know, but then i looked up some definitions, and i’ll stick to it. Although i suppose i see why you would think i don’t qualify from my wording.
Exactly what is so worrying.
You know, since you love to say stuff like this, stereotyping a diverse group of people as “typical Pharyngula”, why should anybody believe your dedication to diversifcation or believe that you are actually able to see who is a “really strong” or “superior” candidate irrelevant of them being a white guy?
People unconsciously make the criteria of “strong” and “superior” fit whatever the white guy has to offer, especially when they’re convinced they’re not doing this.
#51 / DutchDelight: Nou, misschien als de twee talen Nederlands en Fries zijn…
Derek Vandivere
It is absolutely possible to have two native languages. I know quite a lot of them who do. I actively criticised that too few teachers have two native languages.
What is NOT possible is that you “acquire a second native language all by yourself”. That would mean that although nobody used that language around you as a child you somehow acquired it as a native language.
A second language is generally defined as a language that is NOT yur native language but that you learn ’cause you live somewhere for a long time.
And then there’s foreign languages, which you learn while not living in a country where that language is spoken.
This distinction does not say much about somebody’s proficency or fluency. You’ll find people who are happily bilingual (or even trilingual) in all those groups.
Giliell – Fair enough, I’d missed the way DutchDelight put it at first. I actually met a kid once in the mid-90s whose native language was Esperanto! That was pretty cool.
Or twist their perceptions until they’re sure that the white guy is offering what they want. Anyone remember what happened when orchestras started having candidates audition behind a curtain so all the judges had to go by was the sound? Suddenly women got more positions. Not because more women applied, not because the female applicants got better, probably not even because the judges were (consciously) biased. Simply because we all have our subconscious biases and they do affect decisions.
This is almost certainly untrue. The writer probably believes it, but it’s still untrue. There have been numerous studies looking at how people make hiring (or admissions) decisions and there is essentially always a bias in favor of white male candidates, even when the committee members are consciously attempting to not be biased or to move the bias in the other direction. White men get upgraded on things like “cultural fit” and “personality”. If you compare, for example, how candidates are rated when you ask the interviewers to give a rating based on their overall qualifications, you get a very different rating from when you ask them to rate based on specific skills and accomplishments. For example, in an academic job, if you rate people, say, 50% on their research track record (number of papers published, impact factor of journals, h-index), 20% on their teaching history (student evaluations, how well their students do), and 30% on their outreach (community events, talks to the general public, etc), then make a list based on the results of the weighted components scores versus simply asking the interviewers who they thought most qualified, you’ll find that women and minorities rank higher when you look at actual accomplishments, as opposed to interviewers’ gestallt about who is best.
In short, you may think that you’re giving an advantage to minorities or women, but what you’re really doing is giving a huge advantage to white men, although unconsciously, then giving a tiny, condescending, conscious advantage to women and minorities and pretending that you’re sacrificing your best interests to help them.
If you really want the best candidate regardless of race and gender, start looking at accomplishments in concrete terms and avoid, as far as possible, even knowing about race and gender. You’ll get better candidates and more of them will be women and minorities.
Good critical thinking. “This guy is saying some of the right things. But he doesn’t quite fit our agenda. So why should we believe him? It fits our black/white world-view better if we just assume that he is bullshitting.”
Thankfully we have super geniuses such as you to read our minds and set us straight. Silly us, thinking that we can be faithful to the ideals of affirmative action when, in truth, we can’t.
People like Giliell and Dianne don’t know wtf they are talking about, because they talk as if we are routinely selecting white candidates over minority candidates (and reading our minds to tell us why we are doing it.) That might be somewhat excusable if they have no experience on STEM searches and don’t see how the applicant pool presented to us is grossly skewed because of a bigger, structural societal problem that is manifested way upstream*. But Myers– he knows what STEM pools look like. And if he wants to deny that it is very hard to find minority STEM applicants (and then successfully land them if you do find them) then, again, I’d like to hear why he seems to have had no success in winning the day on a search committee.
I would suspect they are very similar. The provost determines how many faculty lines are available in the upcoming year. They are allocated to departments on some combination of need (the only factor in a perfect world) and politics. The department chair forms a search committee. The chair of the search committee puts together an ad, probably with a lot of boilerplate provided by HR and the EEO. The ad goes out to relevant sites an trade journals (e.g., Physics Today). People apply. Applications are not allowed to be viewed until the application closes. The committee does an initial screening, reducing ~100 applicants to, say 12. The twelve are phone (or skype) interviewed to narrow it down to 4 or 5. That list is presented to the dean and/or provost. Assuming they approve, those 4 or 5 are invited to campus. I’m guessing that UMM, like we do, asks them to give a research talk and a teaching demonstration. The committee ranks the candidates. Assuming the administration accepts the ranking, the provosts calls the top candidate and makes an offer.
We have ample opportunity to get underrepresented populations to campus, assuming there are some in the pool. If we have, say, an African American in the pool and we do not hire them, there is a good chances it is because they turned us down.
Myers indicated he has been on search committees. But he hasn’t indicated why the UMM faculty lacks diversity except to blame white search committees. He hasn’t explained his role. Is he a lone voice in the wilderness who always cast a minority vote while the majority of his colleagues on the committee are racist? Or is the explanation what I claim (and have backed up, at least for AA and physics, with hard data) that the applicants just aren’t there.
————-
* A structural problem I see, vividly, in outreach programs to inner-city middle school students in our community. I have many horrifying stories. In some ways a mundane anecdote haunts me the most. I was doing an exercise with sixth-graders where we were timing short bike rides. As we prepared to go back to the classroom I said: “When we get in we will be computing an average of your three trials. If you don’t know how to do that I will help you or your teacher will.” When I looked at the teacher, their math and science teacher, I saw a look that any instructor would recognize: the teacher dod not know how to average three numbers. The kids were enthusiastic. It wouldn’t take long with a math/science teacher of that caliber to destroy both their enthusiasm and to leave them ill-prepared for the next level. It would take a fucking miracle for any of those kids to overcome that disadvantage and end up, 15 years later, applying for a STEM faculty position. That’s the problem. It’s that, it is not white search committees with “subconcious bias.”
Bill, I have to admit I made a serious mistake. I read your first post and thought you were sincerely interested in hiring the best possible candidates for your organization and simply hadn’t thought your biases through. Having read your subsequent posts I see that I was mistaken and you’re just looking to hire the best white guy. My apologies for trying to influence you with silly things like, oh, data.
For those who are interested in the data, I leave this actual peer reviewed article on the effects of bias on hiring practices in the early 21st century. http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.long
Bill Bruckner
Who’s strawmanning now? You don’t give me credit for being my own person, but stereotype me as some member of some omnious group and then you expect me to believe that you treat people fairly.
When I fuck up, I fuck up as myself. Sure, the ways I fuck up are influenced by my environment, but I’m still my own person. So far you haven’t even started to argue my points, you simply throw around phrases and then think you’ve won the argument.
1. There’s quite a body of research out there on unconscious bias.
2. Accepting that you are probably influenced by the cultural messages and the cultural climate you live in would actually be a good first step in working towards a more diverse and equal society. Research also shows that the more people think themselves of being “unbiased” the more biased their actual decisions are. Because that critical evaluation you keep talking about isn’t happening.
Yeah that’s exactly what my posts indicate. You’re a fucking idiot.
And for those of you who are interested in the data (which clearly does not include dianne) I have provided a link that shows the scarcity of underrepresented populations in the awarding of PhDs in the field for which (most of the time) I am on search committees: e.g., physics. 1% African American. Anyone without their head up their ass would see that that presents two almost insurmountable problems: 1) a lack of applicants in the first place and 2) extreme competition, often with prestigious universities, for that small number of minority candidates.
But fuck reality–lets blame it on subconscious bias–that fits our dogma so much better.
Yawn, white male apologist is boring. Typical of anybody unwilling to challenge their biases.
Every time I see such drivel, I assume the writer is someone unable to compete on a totally level playing field, and they know it. Because that is usually the case. They are scared, and it shows.
One field out of a hundred or so. And well known for its misogyny and racism. You lose again.
Bill, you and your colleagues must be exceptional.
The problem is that your reported experience almost exactly matches that of people who are doing it wrong and are making excuses or unaware. (Even to that the extent that your favourite hypotheticals seem to deal mainly with the less qualified minority candidates versus the qualified white guy – could that reflect a bias which affects your perception of quality?)
What about the well-documented fact that equally-qualified minority applicants are less likely to be successful than their majority counterparts? If you are unusually immune to bias then well done, but it doesn’t change the data that suggest such bias is a common feature of recruitment committees.
Except that it’s not. the PhD data includes both US citizens and non-US citizens. Nothing is said about the ethnic and racial makeup of the non-US citizens, who make up nearly half of the US based PhDs in physics. When one considers only US citizens (who are the only ones that we have ethnicity data for), about 2% of PhDs are awarded to African Americans. That is to say, twice as many as you say you have in your applicant pool. Perhaps you should consider your reputation. Also for a physicist you don’t seem to be very good with numbers. Perhaps white men just aren’t.
I am not denying subconscious bias. I would claim that in the hiring of STEM faculty (and maybe most faculty) it is a problem that is in the noise. The real (immediate) problem is a numbers game. In many/most STEM searches your subconscious bias can’t play a role because you can’t identify a minority candidate in the first place.
Do you think that is not the problem? Do you actually think we routinely choose white male candidates over minority candidates? If so you should be badgering Myers about why he has been so ineffectual.
Here is what happens in the real world. We make an initial cut of ~100 to ~12. If any of the applicants has made it known that they are minority, then assuming they meet the minimum requirements (terminal degree in a relevant field, perhaps post-doc experience, etc) they absolutely will make the skype interview. If they make the skype interview it would take an extreme act of self-destruction (never saw it happen, but it could) not to get invited to campus. If they are invited to campus and don’t self destruct (that I have seen happen once or twice) they will be our first choice, barring the rare case where we have a superstar white candidate. (That happened, in my experience, exactly once.) We will make them an offer. I would say 4 out of 5 times what happens next is a variation of this: 1) the candidate asks for more time to make a decision. 2) Reflecting our collective desire to hire a minority candidate, and belying our subconscious bias, we give them more time than we normally do (which is risky, because your #2 candidate may accept a job before you get back to them) and finally 3) they turn us down.
One missing piece of data that would be interesting to know is what the entering class into PhD programs in the US looks like. Bill blames poor primary school education on the lack of minority PhDs in physics, but, as far as I can see, presents nothing but an anecdote to back that claim. It’s certainly true that minorities are more likely to go to schools without the resources to provide them with a good basis for later learning, but is that the only problem? If instructors in physics departments are all as “welcoming” as Bill is, it’s likely that many people of minority background see the writing on the wall and drop out without getting a degree.
So what you’re really saying is that you’re annoyed that the minority candidates you try to attract are too good for you and turn you down. And yet you get your “superstar” white male candidates. Hmm…odd, that. Probably they spend that time they asked for looking into your institutional reputation and realizing that they should get out of there fast.
Good to admit. As you throw all applications with funny sounding names, names ending in “a”, and other methods of triage to assure nothing but white males in your pool. The only way around this is to give the committee redacted information, including the names on publications, etc., so there is no way for any unconscious bias to come into play. Funny how when the field is actually level, more minorities and women end up in the final pile.
Those of use who have been in the STEM fields for years are well aware of your excuses. And recognized those excuses as the problem, and not the solution. Which is why you are not getting your message across, and are just looking like someone without a clue.
Sigh. That’s pretty dumb. First of all 2% vs. 1% hardly changes the fact that there will be a paucity of minority applicants. Secondly, if you knew what you are talking about, you would know that the applicant pool, to first order, consists not of US citizens with PhDs, but anyone with a PhD. That is why on our physics faculty we have 4 Americans (one is AA), a Egyptian, a Greek, a native of Ireland, and a Canadian. We are part of a bigger department (CS and Engineering) that includes Germans, Chinese, Taiwanese and a scientist from Mexico. All in all we are ~50% foreigner. So your point is nonsense (on two levels). In fact it is even more tilted away from the direction you want. The data I presented was PhDs awarded in the US. Those US-educated foreign (which means no African Americans) PhDs apply for faculty positions, hence the 1% number is valid. However, we also get plenty (and increasingly) applications from PhDs awarded in foreign universities, especially China and India, which further dilutes the percentage of populations like African Americans.
OMG you are so insightful! This is not about a serious national problem that results in almost no minority applicants for STEM. No it’s all about hurt feelwins.
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls,
That is your OPINION. We are only interested in EVIDENCE. Demonstrate that we do this or STFU!!! (Isn’t that more-or-less your standard response to, well, just about everything?)
@Bill et al,
I work at a small Canadian University (not in hiring committees, mind you). Our staff is tremendously diverse – we have very large showings amongst our staff of non-whites, women, immigrants, etc. We could use some more diversification among the First Nations still, though. In my own research group we use English, but that’s only because it’s the language we can all be relied on to understand to some extent – some nights it seems as if Chinese might be a better option.
It has little to do with the applicant pool. It has much to do with organizational culture.
These comments seem like a whole lot of squabbling about nothing. Every commenter supports the motivations of the student activists.
The discussion seems to be over a solution. If only 17 of the most recent 1669 PhDs in physics self-identify as African American (post #28), physics departments will not be able to have African American representation within the faculty that reflects society. Many organizations (including NSF) realize this problem and are trying to help.
Myer suggests that hiring committees be comprised of a majority minority (#21), which may be possible in some departments, but you’d likely place an unfair burden on minority faculty. Hiring committees require a major time commitment, and committee work is typically not an important consideration for tenure. I suspect Buckner would not be opposed to this idea – but he’d point out that this won’t solve the problem. My first experience with a candidate pool had only one candidate who I could identify as a minority (on paper) – this person was a foreigner who had never studied or worked in the United States.
My impression is that the percentage of women faculty has steadily increased over the last 100 years (it’s roughly 50:50 where I work – with perhaps slightly more women). I also suspect colleges in communities with large minority populations generally have a greater percentage of minority faculty (for fun I took a quick look at UT-El Paso – there appear to be many minority faculty) – I expect this imbalance to improve with time. Most administrators and faculty are aware of the problem, and we try to make decisions in the best interests of our students (that’s why we are here).
…..
Other thoughts:
>Morris may be especially challenged because minorities are less likely to want to live in a conservative, rural town in America. I would never want to live in Morris, and I am white. I suspect STEM programs in cities generally have more diversity.
>Are the students presuming to know how the faculty self-identify – or is this information publicly available?
>I attended an elite liberal arts college, which bragged about student diversity – but it was an extremely expensive school and most of the minority students seemed to be from wealthy families (US and international.) Having worked and/or attended a wide range of institutions there are obvious class disparities in the student bodies between colleges – but nearly all the faculty are from middle to upper class families. A lack of class diversity creates its own set of cultural blinders.
Correct.
I
I agree. Most administrators and faculty are on the right side of this argument.
There is a secondary reason why the simple “subconscious bias” argument should be used more carefully. It assumes, it seems to me, a coherent effect. But subconscious bias in a group might very well be incoherent. Many people are involved in hiring: committees, administrators, EEO, etc. Let’s stipulate that most are committed to diversity and all have some degree of subconscious bias. Do these biases add constructively or destructively? Will my bias be amplified or reduced by other committee members–all (most) of us who are trying our best to promote diversity? It seems possible that our biases are not identical and if so might tend to get averaged away in a group. But of course I surely do not know.
And of course this question remains of theoretical interest only until such time as we see a sizable increase in STEM applicants from the underrepresented communities.
@74: Well, at least you dialed back the scabrous invective. (I tried satire above, now I’ll be straightforward.) I take it you are fully aware of the many and various studies of unacknowledged bias, particularly in law enforcement and the court system. Your theory of incoherent biases adding constructively or destructively sounds, prima facie, interesting — but all the evidence is that the cumulative bias works against minority hiring. There may indeed be additional reasons for this (largely based on discrimination of various kinds at earlier stages in the education process) but the point you wave and cheerily dismiss with “I surely do not know” comes across as a plausibly deniable rationalization for prejudice. There is a problem. It’s difficult. Please be part of the solution rather than insulting people with whom you disagree and dismissing the problem as insoluble.
I do not, as a practice, insult people I disagree with. I insult people who (for example) insist (with attitude and snide comments) that they just know the problem is primarily related to bias–and then bury their heads in the sand–not even acknowledging the data which clearly show that the bigger elephant in the room is the lack of production of minority PhDs. They can’t even effectively test the bias theory–in this case– because often there are no minority candidates that a committee can be biased against. They continue to ignore the data and write as if there are plenty of minority candidates for us to select, we just (from bias) don’t. And then people like Nerd “know” our tricks– why, we screen on funny names, like names ending in ‘a’. Busted! Such stupidity deserves to be called out. (Although, true, I would not want John Travolta on our faculty.)
Myers, in the OP, flippantly blames it on white committees– a mind numbingly simplistic and self-serving explanation. And then he has failed to explain why–if it is not due to a lack of minority candidates, why has he been so ineffectual when he serves on a search committee?
Your “explanations” are not what is needed. If you give up, you are allowing the present institutional racism and misogyny to continue unabated. And you offer solid solutions. The main solution is don’t give up. Keep bringing in qualified candidates, some of whom are women and minorities, and enough will make the impression and get hired. Once you give up, your contributions to this discussion are worthless.
Bill Buckner @41,
First of all it’s not a level playing field right now. That much should be obvious from the statistics presented already in this thread and from your own admission that there are “disparities in opportunity.” Disparityies in opportunity = unlevel playing field. With diversification programs you are helping to level it (not unlevel it as you state above) and so you’ve gotten it exactly backwards.
Second who said anything about doing anything to the playing field to an “infinite” extent (whatever that actually means). If you have minority applicants who are well qualified for the position and a white male who is yet more qualified, it doesn’t take “infinite” adjustment to the playing field in order to settle on the former as opposed to the latter.
Nope we don’t acknowledge that such is a “travesty” in any sense. If he’s so exceptional he’ll easily be hired elsewhere and so it’s no skin off his nose in the long run and so no travesty from his point of view. And if you have minority applicants who are well qualified for the position then hiring them would certainly be no travesty for you.
Passing up a minority applicant however is another matter. You said it yourself above. They are already dealing with “disparities in opportunity” (unlevel playing field) and so they will be impacted more severely. That could accurately be described as a travesty more so than passing up a privileged white guy. You are adding to the disparity as opposed to helping to rectify it.
Professor Myers is right @42. This is a bullshit strawman of your own creation.
Try this instead: the act of introducing variety or the condition of being varied.
If diversification is your goal then you are working against that goal when you hire white males instead of qualified minority candidates. That’s true quite simply because you are making your workforce less diverse instead of more diverse in the process. Regardless of how rarely it happens each and every time it does happen you are working against that goal.
Try refuting that instead of another of your strawmen.
See above. What you are seeing is not our “pathological view” but rather it’s your own bullshit strawman version.
@48,
Try parsing it as a question (or set of questions) instead of an assertion. Notice the three (3) question marks in the portion you quoted?
I don’t have a lot of experience on hiring committees. In my second experience we forwarded 3 white women to the President (who chooses from our top candidates). The three were different, but no minority or male candidates were even close (we interviewed over a dozen). We do have diversity criteria for our committees. We need more minority faculty, but given my experience we need better minority candidates not more of them. Is this the fault of national or regional availability or just the unattractiveness of our institution? Hopefully we’ll get that figured out. I expect slow progress on these numbers, but progress none-the-less.
OK, Buckner has been taking enough grief. It’s time for me to step up again.
Yes, of course we know all about the effects of unconscious bias. But at least on every search committee I’ve ever been in on, there is also a huge, heaping amount of conscious bias as well. And as we’ve been trying to explain, that conscious bias is entirely working in favor of the minority candidates.
Let me tell you what it’s like to be on one of these committees. You’re trying to pare down a list of maybe a hundred candidates to a set of perhaps five or six who will be invited to campus for an interview. And the message has come down from on high that at least one of those candidates must be a minority. But you don’t actually know who is a minority, unless there is something in their cover letter or research descriptions that would indicate it. So if you can identify a minority candidate who is remotely qualified, then they automatically go to the top of the list. And if there are several? Then they all go to the top of the list. Because most faculty are fairly liberal, just like PZ. We know all the arguments for why increased faculty diversity is a good thing, and we all agree with them. We think it’s such a good thing that we’re willing to accept a candidate who is less qualified, just so we can feel better about ourselves when we look around the room at faculty meetings and see a representative number of non-white faces.
If somehow a committee does forward a list of final choices to the dean that does not include any minorities, then a minority applicant will be chosen and added. I will even say that I have been at teaching demonstrations where the committee felt that the candidate who delivered the least coherent presentation was still given the job offer, mainly due to minority status.
I don’t want anyone to think I’m complaining about this, either. Until there’s more representation, that’s probably the system we should use. Just don’t go talking about academia’s “unconscious bias” unless you’ve actually been there. Take my word for it, being a minority in academia is an unalloyed benefit, at least in terms of getting and keeping a job.
@78:
I am striving to understand the difference between what you say here and the “straw man” you accuse Buckner of creating, Answer a simple question: can you ever envision a situation where hiring a white male would be a better option than hiring a minority applicant who meets the minimum qualifications? If your answer is “no,” then Buckner is simply giving an accurate paraphrase of your position. And if your answer is “yes” then what are we arguing about, anyway?
@80 brucegee1962
Really? Minority status trumps qualifications? I find that depressing.
Honestly, I’m starting to wonder whether white men pass the mirror test: the lack of insight shown here has been remarkable. If you really believe that subconscious bias isn’t a problem and that your supposed conscious bias in favor of minorities somehow makes up for it all, you’re either completely ignorant of the vast literature on the subject (it took me literally 5 seconds to find references to support the position that bias strongly influences hiring decisions and NOT in favor of women or minorities) or you’re in denial so deep that you’ll probably never find reality. It’s sad that people like this are making hiring decisions, but they are, for the most part. And while these are the people making the hiring decisions, minorities will give up on applying to faculty positions and getting their PhDs in general. Which will, of course, lead to more pious complaints about how the white male hiring committees just can’t find the right candidate.
Sigh. The point, it has gone well over your head. Yes, both numbers are too small. I agree. But that is not the point. The point is that somewhere between the PhD being awarded and the search committee half of AA PhDs appear to have disappeared. There were too few to start with? Fine, agreed. But where did half of them go and why? It’s not due to their poor primary school education.
Again, seriously missing the point. Racial and ethnic data were not provided for non-US citizens. Look, this is literally grade school math here: The non-US citizens were not part of the numerator therefore they can not be included in the denominator. What are they teaching physicists these days?
I could point out that the only “evidence” you’ve produced is one little table that you completely misunderstood. However, since reality is (unfortunately) on my side, it’s very little trouble to produce enough evidence to provoke an accusation of a Gish gallop.
Classic paper on the problems of having an “ethnic” name: http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873
Confirmatory paper: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.0021-9029.2006.00035.x/full#b4
Another paper looking specifically in academic medicine, a field with, compared to physics, relatively little bias: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11606-010-1478-7
On the problem of being both a woman and a minority and what it does to your “qualifications”: http://www.dl.begellhouse.com/journals/00551c876cc2f027,4257596a4b2602de,3ec6f0bf76ef4129.html
I could go on. I’ve left a lot out, actually. So, where’s the evidence that your supposed conscious bias in favor of minorities makes up for all this? Or are white men too good to have to provide evidence?
Holy fuck. Did I say anybody asked for an infinite extent? And is it really to abstract for you to figure out that it means: Give minorities a significant advantage, but not to the point where an exceptional white male couldn’t, even in principle, be hired over a minority.
Yeah that would be true, if we ever did that. Which I said over and over we would never do, unless in a rare case the white candidate was was exceptional. Which I also said happened to me exactly once. If you do not acknowledge that it is reasonable to hire an exceptional, sort of a once every ten years type white male– then yes you are effectively advocating white men need not apply. It’s fucking obvious.
To put hypothetical numbers, just to make a point, if we gave numerical scores to three applicants:
1) W 75
2) W 57
3) AA 55
We would offer the job to the AA.
If instead we got
1) W 98
2) W 57
3) AA 55
Then would offer the job to the W 98.
And fuck you if you think that means we are throwing diversity out the window.
(Dispshits on this site will say this is our way out of hiring minorities and neglect that it has happened on a search I’ve been on once, as described upstream. And I’ve been on many, many searches.)
That’s exactly the point. Demand greatly exceeds supply. AA physicists do not get “lost along the way”, they get competed for fiercely. You are too eager to invoke bias and ignore the fucking obvious: we have almost no chance to hire an African American physicist when there are major universities also looking to diversify and going after the same talent.
What is this “half are lost” nonsense? I hope I missed something. If that is coming from your 2% number vs a 1% number–if you are using that to claim half are lost–then in addition to everything else you are innumerate. The 2% v. 1% came from you artificially limiting the applicant pool to Americans. Yes 2% of American physics PhD (in that interval) are AA, but 1% of all PhDs granted in the US are AA, all those are in the pool, and, to further dilute the situation, so are a large number of mostly Asians with PhDs from outside the US. The actual percentage of AA applicants for a faculty position is probably less than 1%.
Nice try. I didn’t misunderstand. And it speaks volumes to your honesty and integrity that you place the reference to actual data, from the organization that tracks physics graduates, in scare quotes. And there are many more of those “little tables” on that site, and if bother to look they all tell the same simple story which you are too fucking dishonest too admit: There is a shockingly low number of minority PhDs, and as a consequence it is very hard to find one and hire one. Nope. Reality doesn’t fit yours (and Myers) dogma that this problem is white search committees. You really are a piece of work.
Bill, do you really only ever get under qualified minority applicants who need the uplift versus their white peers? (Your examples seem to suggest as much.)
Sigh. Two examples designed to make a specific point can be generalized to that old WASPy committee would never rank a minority higher! I gave an example where we would choose the minority candidate even when they did not rank higher. That was the point. You are really looking to parlay that into a suggestion that we would never rank a minority higher? So let me state the obvious. You can add to my example:
1) W 75
2) W 57
3) AA 55
We would offer the job to the AA.
the rather obvious case
1) W 55
2) W 57
3) AA 75
In which we would also (duh) offer the job to the AA.
Someone upstream made the correct (in my opinion) point that subconscious bias will really rear its ugly head when things get better. Right now, at least in STEM faculty hiring, it is in the noise. Right now search committees and administrations (and legislatures) are so dedicated to correcting a gross disparity in representation that minority candidates will be in a seller’s market for the foreseeable future. When that is no longer the case, when representations are reasonably aligned with demographics– then I can imagine the scales being tipped by bias. Of course at that time the committees will also reflect diversity.
Truth be told, while it’s not really the position I would consider the most favorable, I can’t say I’d be out rioting in the streets if there was a “White males need not apply unless there are literally no reasonably qualified people of color to compete against” selection method in use, seeing as for most of US history, it’s been “POC need not apply, ever.”
@ brucegee1962
A lot of people in here are casually referring to bias when it’s a particular kind that is the problem. It’s the irrational bias that’s a problem, the rational bias is a part of decision making. Otherwise the minds that brains run don’t make decisions efficiently. The conscious kind is the point behind giving minorities the extra consideration when candidates are otherwise similar professionally-speaking.
This right here,
…leads me to disbelieve this without farther clarification,
see dianne’s links in #84.
@ Bill Buckner
I went back and re-read your initial comment, and revisited the whole chain. I get that you don’t think that PZ is being fair. But I’m convinced that you are a person with a sensitivity to this issue that is not based on anything rational. The conversation evolves in interesting ways.
You seem awfully hyper-focused on the accurate characterization of the racial make-up of these committees which is a reasonable place to look with respect to disparities. Your point shows that we have two variables and that does not automatically lead to the conclusion that we should take pressure off of irrational bias in academia. There is evidence of irrational bias and motivated reasoning problems on a general human level in academia so looking for it on selection committees is not unreasonable.
This is a very common way of drawing attention from social problems by more dominant social groups. I see no reason to hyper-focus on parts of society that don’t involve you.
The pattern continues in #19. I’ve seen PZ talk about problems with STEM fields and minority children. Again we have two variables, why should we stop looking at the academic one? PZ happens to be talking about a particular variable here. Go read his posts on problems with STEM education and society in general, it might make you feel better if you aren’t a person with irrational bias.
By #22 I still have no good reason to want to shift focus.
Or they are both problems. I can provisionally accept that your paper in #28 could be pointing out fewer minority applicants, and there can still be irrational bias in selection committees.
By #27 I still no reason to think that your twisting he conversation towards rejection of highly-qualified candidates and from bias in more equally qualified candidates is justifiable. PZ says in #18 that the primary factor is qualifications. You admit that you are hyper-focusing on the exceptions by the third paragraph and I see ZERO evidence provided by you at this point in the argument that this is a concern. You apparently bring it up for the sole reason of detracting from the places where irrational bias will be a problem if it is a problem, when the professional qualifications are more similar and such highly-qualified candidates don’t stick out strongly.
By this point I feel the need to give you this and finish,
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/in-practice/201301/50-common-cognitive-distortions
I’m on the side of the people here that think that at the very least the unfriendliness of physics to minorities has skewed your perspective. Broad social problems with STEM and minorities will include manifestations at many levels and I have no problem believing we have a duty to watch for bias against the few minorities that your field encounters.
In my link I would pay particular attention to #1 (your reaction to the thread in general reeks of this), #24, #25 (maximizing with respect to STEM in society generally, minimizing the role of selection committees in our society. Maximizing rejection of highly qualified candidates, minimizing bias when qualifications are more comparable), #38 (your feeling about the blog and commentators). #5 is lurking all over the place.
(Like PZ, I also teach at Morris)
I am in great sympathy of greater faculty diversity and believe it to be an important issue for Morris. I do think that the conversation would be improved with greater accuracy of student information. Regarding the poster above, there are inaccuracies: there are at least three “Latino American” professors on campus (I think all in tenure track positions) in such fields as history, anthropology, and Spanish. There are at least two “Asian American” professors on campus (including myself, although I am not U.S. born and immigrated at age 1) in such fields as history and German. Some of these numbers are also altered by the decision to only count “U.S. born” faculty as counting for the numbers, which I understand is meant to differentiate between someone who immigrates as an adult for graduate school but also I think ignores a number of Morris faculty who are Latino or Asian (which are somewhat problematic definitions in themselves) who have been living in the United States for years and can fully relate to the experiences of Latino or Asian students.
What I think would be important in this conversation is accurate information and also a realization that lack of faculty diversity (a real problem) has many factors beyond racism (conscious or otherwise): the lack of funding and resources to pay competitive wages and attract candidates is one.
I call bullshit on anyone whining about a lack of qualified candidates. My department here at UW Milwaukee is minority-non-Hispanic-White: of 16 faculty members, 6 are non-Hispanic White, 2 are Latina, and one member is each of Egyptian, Chinese, Korean, Indian, Ainu, Vietnamese, Black, and Menominee heritage. We also have close to gender parity, with slightly more women faculty members at this point than men (9:7). This isn’t universally true across all departments on campus, of course, but we are still somewhat more diverse, and I’m here in Wisconsin – we’re not all that different from Minnesota in terms of population demographics. What I find especially shocking is the total lack of Latina/o and Asian-American professors, since we have Latina/o professors in many departments and our computer science, engineering, math, and physics departments have a disproportionately high number of South and East Asian faculty members.
Fact-checking my guesses about what might be driving the difference is leading me to other problems: the site I’m using for institutional diversity metrics indicates that the student poster is bullshit, since it lists 13 Asian faculty members and 10 Latina/o faculty members at UMN Morris. I can’t find their data sources, though (much like the student poster, which cites no source), so I went straight to UMN Morris’s website through the first faculty-area-specific page Google kicked back (not sure if it’s a school, department, area, whatever), which happened to be the Social Science page, and that area alone has 6 professors of Asian heritage, based on names and appearance. Granted, that other site I was at still shows less faculty diversity than other schools in the region (91% non-Hispanic-White versus around 75% at UMN Twin Cities and UW Milwaukee and 80% at UW Madison and UW Green Bay), but note that low “Internationals” ratio, second-lowest behind European-Americans. That category is masking what faculty diversity does exist – all of the professors of Asian heritage I’ve found have BA/BS degrees from outside the US. I’d like to see the numbers they’re using, becasue I’ve also found 6 Latina/o professors so far* (and an additional 10 professors of Asian heritage – Peh Ng, listed on the Math and Science faculty section right after Paul Myers has degrees only from US schools, so he may well be an American-born professor of Asian heritage), all of them with degrees only from US schools, suggesting that the 51:0 “Latino Americans” ratio can’t be explained by the “internationals” category. Indeed, “51:0” and “66:0” make no sense as ratios in this case, because the 0 means they can’t be reduced ratios, and unless UMN Morris has twice as many First Nations students as Asian-American or Latina/o students, and nearly ten times as many as European-American students, the ratios aren’t absolute nor normalized to reflect relative student populations, either. I’m now thinking that entire poster is suspect. This misrepresentation is rather unfortunate, because lack of diversity is a real problem, but the student activists are undermining their credibility (and not even to any sort of more-effective end IMO, since the actual numbers are still pretty dismal).
*As far as I can tell based on Hispanic names and appearance: Oscar Baldelomar, Michael Ceballos, Benjamin Narvaez, Cristina Ortiz, Pedro Quijada, and Roxanne Renedo; if PZ knows any of them, he might be able to tell us if they’re not originally from the US and thus might be lumped in the “Internationals” category; based on the photos, I’d guess that only Benjamin Narvaez would be likely to ‘pass’ as non-Hispanic, were that ever something one would wish to do (Roxanne Renedo lacks a photo)
@91 John Horstman
In your comparisons of UW Milwaukee versus UM Morris you might want to take into account the respective sizes and demographic make-up of the communities in which your respective institutions are located.
Bill Buckner @85,
No but you seemed to imply it when you wrote this (emphasis added):
You also seem to have got it backwards about the unleveling versus leveling.
Thanks for clarifying. Yes it was too abstract and we don’t read minds so it was not clear what you meant.
You first remind us that you have said over and over that you would “never do” this but in the very same sentence you then say you would only it do in “a rare case.” Rare =/= never. Then you say it only “happened to [you]” once. Once =/= never. Also it’s interesting how you phrased it as if it were something that “happened to” you as opposed to something you did or participated in.
Diversification is a project to level an unlevel playing field and what you seem to be advocating is that it’s reasonable to take a break from the leveling process every once in a while when a really great white applicant comes along. Is that a more fair description than tossing it out the window? An injustice is still an injustice even if it only happens once or even it it only happens rarely.
It’s not that the they need not apply it’s that they shouldn’t continue to benefit from the unlevel playing field that confers unfair privileges and opportunities upon them to the detriment of minority candidates. Not until that disparity is rectified. Just consider how many years and how many generations had to live with laws and policies and social norms that explicitly or effectively meant that minorities need not apply. This is not ancient history this is parents and grandparents today who lived through that.
Bill @87,
I’ve never hired faculty, but I do hire postdocs. I’m very familiar with trawling CVs and finding that people will develop a scoring scheme in order to help to eliminate bias, only to award points in such a subjectively biased manner that they can’t help but find their favourite candidate at the top of the pile. (Of course, demonstrating the their scoring scheme was ill-conceived or poorly implemented.)
So I would ask that you forgive my cynicism here.
So often, discussions about diversity revolve around hypothetical scenarios where minority candidates are less qualified. It seems to often be the default assumption that in order to increase diversity, hiring committees will necessarily need to compromise on the general quality of the candidates to whom they make offers. So I often wonder whether that is because minority candidates really do rank differently – which would to some extent be explained by systemic barriers to achievement – or whether they are simply being given less credit for the qualifications. We know that the latter phenomenon is common.
The uplift of minority candidates is always the central theme of discussions around increasing diversity, and it seems to me that it really neglects all of the other forms of bias which lead to exclusion of candidates prior to interview or as under qualified.
I am almost speechless at how incoreect this is. Explaining how something came about is quite simply not equivalent to arguing that it should stay that way.
Bill@87: How were those numbers in your example derived? What goes into the score? Without knowing these things, your claim is completely meaningless.
We? For whom are you a spokesman, just so I know. Because it didn’t requiring reading minds. It should have been quite easy for you to understand.
I wrote: Which I said over and over we would never do, unless in a rare case..
You do grasp, I hope, the well-accepted way that an exception to an otherwise universal negative is introduced via the word unless? Or does that require mind reading?
Yes it is so interesting that I chose the phrase “happened to.” I’m certain it supports all theories about how white committees are incapable of honestly seeking diversity.
Please look up “begging the question”. You have subsumed the answer (it is an injustice no matter what) into the framing of the issue. And do you think that you will ever be honest an admit that what you are advocating is tantamount to “white men need not apply?”
Bernard Bumner,
Actually I don’t employ a scoring scheme, that was just for illustrative purposes.
Illustrating what, exactly? If you don’t use a scoring scheme, then the “illustration” is completely meaningless. The numbers aren’t even something you pulled out of the air, they literally mean nothing.
Illustrating what they in fact illustrated. That committees I have been on will offer great advantage to a minority candidate and give an offer even when traditional rankings (number of peer-reviewed publications, grants, teaching experience, post-doc experience) favors–even strongly favors– a white candidate. But there might be a rare instance where the disparity is too great to justify.
You really, absolutely, do not have a fucking clue.
The fact that you can use numbers to support your claims, even if you have to make those numbers and the supposed facts behind them up? Consider it illustrated!
But if you don’t use any kind of scoring scheme, how do you know who has the advantage in terms of traditional rankings? Peer reviewed literature demonstrates that white men’s accomplishments are overestimated by search committees (including by minorities on search committees) and that ranking by specific criteria helps reduce that bias. So I think if you actually used a scoring scheme to produce numbers based on something other than your impression, you’d be surprised at the results. But of course you’re far to frightened to actually do something like that.
It seems fairly straightforward to me that those numbers were simply a simpllifying abstraction of ‘how much we like this applicant.’ It was plainly not an indication of their actual evaluation process, it was just a handy tool.
Does that mean when we count publications we go something like (1,2,5,6,9) for white candidates and (1,2,2,3,2) for minority candidates? If it doesn’t mean that, how do we overestimate publication counts? Please be specific.
When we look at post-doc experience, we silly white men consider it a binary question! Does the candidate have postdoc experience? (yes, no). Pray tell how our bias enters in that situation? How do we overestimate whether or not the candidate has post-doc experience? Please be specific.
When we look at teaching experience, we look at how many semesters were taught by the candidate a) as a recitation instructor or teaching assistant, b) as a lab instructor, and c) as a lecturer with control over the course. Do we employ a funny white-menz counting scheme for that? How do we over-estimate the count for white candidates? Please be specific.
And if we should not consider publications, teaching experience, etc for candidates because they are white-men metrics, please do tell me what criteria we should use. Please be specific.
And of course there is one more metric–the highest weighted one: Is this candidate from an underrepresented population?
Why aren’t you questioning PZ? The lack of minority STEM faculty at UMM must be attributable (as far as I can tell) to:
1) There are very few minority candidates
2) It is hard to compete for minority candidates
3) White committees including PZ are racist
4) White committees are racist, except of course for PZ–but what can a lone voice in the wilderness accomplish?
He hasn’t answered–at least not clearly. If he answers a combination of 1 and or 2 then we are in agreement. If he answers 3 or 4–I’d find that interesting. I don’t mean to present a false dilemma, so I am willing to hear other options.
Bill, do you actually count publications, citations, etc? If so, what do you then do with that information? Do you record it somewhere and compare candidates counts or just say, “wow, that one looks good” and go on? Do you understand why I’m asking this question?
And then there’s post-doc experience. I don’t know anyone who is really on a faculty search committee or even a post-doc or fellowship search committee who would describe that as “binary”. Are all post-doctoral positions equal in your mind? Does the candidate’s performance in that position count for nothing? I’m sorry, but this statement is so silly that, along with your inability to do simple math or even understand where you went wrong, makes me think that you’re probably not really a physics PhD in a faculty position. Good simulation, though. You sounded very plausible.
Looks like someone is getting defensive. I wonder when the “you are just discriminating against white men!!!!” card is finally gonna hit the table.
My answer is 1, 2, and 3.
I expect the standard white response: but if they aren’t wearing hoods and throwing around the “n” word, then they aren’t racist! Because “racist” is a black and white distinction, no shades of grey!
But here are some phrases I hear all the time in these discussions.
“I don’t think they are a good fit to our institution.”
“They’ll never fit into the community here.”
“They’ll be leaving us shortly after we accept them, once they get a little experience.”
“Don’t bother even inviting that one, they’ll be snapped up by [Harvard] because they’re a minority.”
“Lots of grants and publications, sure, but you know why they got them, and it wasn’t the quality of the science.”
“Most of those conferences are for [ethnic] groups — they’re not mainstream science.”
Those are all problematically racist comments. That first one in particular is the one size fits all, handy-dandy go-to phrase when you want to exclude someone from further consideration.
@Bill,
I would argue that not employing quantifiable metrics is precisely the recipe for unconscious bias affecting your assessment of candidates.
You may find yourself narrowing or overturning a gap (by giving preference to minority candidates) which only exists because you under-estimated the qualifications of the minority candidate in comparison with the majority candidate.
Unconscious bias can mean that the minority candidate goes from a 75 to 65, whist the majority candidate goes from a 75 to an 85. Without quantifiable measures in place in the first instance to rank candidates, your decision making – with the very best will in the world – is at least underinformed.
A CV is, to a great extent, scorable. I think that should be done. Whether you then apply an uplift, either before or after interview, based on the candidate, based on the strategic goals of the school, based on the fit with the establish staff, at least you have taken effective action to eliminate unconscious bias.
It is no good saying that you recognise the existence of such bias, or saying that your awareness inoculates you to the effects of it. Unconscious bias is what it is. Without the tools to detect or eliminate it, you’re only opening yourself to accusations of committing it – and they may not be unfounded, because you would never know.
Experienced hirers often seem to resist using scoring schemes – and it is true that such schemes are not without problems, since they are necessarily blunt instruments – but their reasoning tends to be that such schemes are unnecessary or unworkable, and I think they say that because they have tremendous (over)confidence in their own judgement.
@Bernard 106: Well put. Formal metrics are one method for decreasing bias and one that has been validated, to some extent, by external research. They are, as you said, blunt instruments and don’t take into account a lot of side issues, i.e. it is harder to get a good postdoc and write a lot of grants and papers if you went to a state university versus an Ivy, people tend to cite who they know so citations are prone to “old boys network” effect, etc. Nonetheless, they at least decrease the extent to which people on search committees unconsciously downgrade anyone who is “different” by providing at least some objective data by which to compare candidates.
However, as you point out, people on search committees tend to resist them. I think this is partly Dunning-Kruger effect, partly fear of getting the “wrong” result if metrics are used (searches are often “targeted”, i.e. a specific person–rarely a woman or a minority– may be wanted for that job but the job has to be advertised before it can be offered to anyone), partly just laziness and lack of willingness to learn something new.
OK, that actually (I’m happy to say) seems like an honest question. When deliberating you will hear conversations like this: “Candidate A has 9 or maybe 10 publications (there is sometimes debate as to whether a given journal is actually peer-reviewed), candidate B has only 2. Clear advantage candidate A. We don’t typically evaluate the invidual papers, unless one is already known as a particularly exciting advancement.
And I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t. They either had a post-doc or they didn’t. The only possible ambiguity is when a student graduates and then stays at the same place for another year. Some might argue that should or should not count.
In my mind the basic post-doc is more-or-less equal. That is, I would consider a post-doc at University of Maryland to be of the same value as one at U of Chicago, etc. However, if you were a post-doc in, say, a Nobel Prize winner’s lab (it does happen) that would carry more weight. And the performance in the post-doc is reflected in publications, invited talks, accepted submissions, etc.
Oh fuck you. That (“I doubt you are really…”) is such a simple, cheap, common internet response. As for our relative math skills— gimme a break.
Myers,
If you heard such comments and did not demand that person be removed from the committee, with a threat to go to EEO, you fucked up badly.
You’re an idiot.
BB, your concern trolling about white males being unable to compete in the marketplace for jobs is a one, well refuted note, that shows your problems, not ours. The only reason not to have a diverse final crop of candidates is institutional racism/misogyny. Please take your problems and paranoia elsewhere.
Nerd #109,
I won’t argue with you Nerd because in my mind you’re the face of this site. It would be unseemly.
BREAKING NEWS: White male with authority is the Most Objective Person in the room and truly surely undoubtedly makes all their decisions using pure math, gets very angry when you suggest that they might actually add subjective elements into their judgment making process. We will cover more of this unique and unusual story as it develops.
You are either part of the problem with diversity, or you are part of the solution. You are obviously part of the problem, and have nothing of intelligence to say on the subject. Just inane emotional screeds that say “what about the white males”.
You said that with your first post. Everything since then is repetition of that first post.
I absolutely don’t doubt that Bill sincerely wants to increase diversity. Convincing people like Bill that there are better ways to achieve that may take more than a discussion here – goodness knows I’ve managed to entrench myself in what were, with hindsight, some very poorly judged positions many times.
I’m not sure I ever wrote off the entire site and all of the commenters as having nothing useful to teach me.
BREAKING NEWS: White man with experience claims (what AIP data show is irrefutable) that the supply of minority candidates is abysmally low. White man says: “that’s the real problem! That’s the problem, rooted in racism, that we have to solve!” White man also says: “as a result of that problem there is way more demand than supply for minority STEM faculty, making it difficult for second tier universities or small liberal arts colleges to compete with the big R1s for the few minority candidates.”
Probably somewhere in the recesses of their brains the denizens of Pharyngula understand the reasonableness of white man’s claims. Unfortunately, however, it leaves little room for white committee members’ racism to be the explanation for the shortage of STEM faculty! No, no, no, it just can’t be a “blood from a turnip” problem. That lets the white guys on the committee off the hook! May it never happen! It simply must be that there are plenty of minority candidates (from somewhere) , plenty of them, fuck what the data say. There are surely oodles of ’em, and the white committees weed them out in the first cut by their funny sounding names! John Smythe-Chesterton from Connecticut — in. DeShaun Jackson from Mobile, sorry, better luck next time! There have to be many, because the explanation just has to be white search committees. We’ll except nothing less. We are Pharyngula.
Nerd,
And you are the master at not being repetitive. I have much to learn from you.
I’m all ears! Tell me–give me one real, substantive suggestion as how to hire more minority STEM faculty. No pseudo-sciency bullshit. Just concrete advice. And it has to be effectual when to first order this is what it looks like in physics every year:
100-300 people looking for faculty positions
0-5 (probably around 2 on average) AA in the pool (Only ~ 6 AA PhDs/year, and some will opt for industry.)
Maybe 25 positions, say ~5 at small liberal arts schools and the rest at R1s
Put up or shut up. Explain, fuckwad (because you falsely accused me of not actually wanting to diversify) exactly how we can diversify given numbers like this. What the fuck would do, exactly, to diversify. Don’t give nebulous bullshit, give a concrete plan than my current search committee can implement!
Even were there to be a “white males need not apply” doctrine applied to these committees, so what?
Sure, you’d have to drop the world-class white candidate who studied under famous physicists and wrote a dozen papers.
But to think that a selection pool of solely people of color would be so poor that it would adversely affect your university is absurd. POC can achieve just as much as white people, and if the perception that “Well, even if I tried, the committees would just turn me down” disappeared, I’m sure you’d see an increase of POC applicants very quickly.
Bill, I don’t suppose anyone here wants to argue that minority candidates are not much less prevalent than majority ones. That would be silly.
What they are taking issue with is your claim that that is the only necessary explanation, and that your institution is possibly uniquely immune to the systematised bias which exists everywhere else that people care to search for it. The idea that good will alone will solve the problem, when your description of the process sounds much more like tokenism.
That is not what they are taking issue with, look at Vivec’s post above #117. It is typical. It states that “we’d see an increase of POC applicants very quickly.” It makes that same wrong assumption as many others, that somewhere there is a secret pool of POC STEM PhDs that we are (with malice aforethought) not tapping into–when no such pool exists.
And bullshit. I never claimed that we are immune to bias (show me where)–I admitted bias–I stated that the problem of bias is, at the moment, in the noise when compared to the lack of candidates.
Bill,
Go fuck yourself – I specifically said I don’t doubt your sincerity. I meant it, so you might want to back away from your angry assertions and insults in future.
One thing you should do is to use a scoring scheme to ensure that you aren’t excluding minority candidates in the initial sift. You should submit shortlisting notes to HR. You should institute diversity analyses based on self-identification throughout the application process and interview (carried out by HR, rather than the recruitment committee). The anonymised results should be published. You should make sure that there is minority representation on hiring committees, even if that means using staff from other disciplines for a non-technical secondary interview.
Do you do these things?
If so, you should have precise statistics on the diversity of your candidates, and any argument would be easily shown to be wrong.
“I don’t think they are a good fit to our institution.”
“They’ll never fit into the community here.”
“They’ll be leaving us shortly after we accept them, once they get a little experience.”
I feel a lot of these comments are sort of emblematic of institutions like Morris which prides itself as a liberal arts school. Certainly I agree that they can be problematically racist (and perhaps they explicitly were in the committees you describe). They can also be used to rule out candidates because they don’t seem to have a “good understanding of the liberal arts” or “lack teaching experience at student focused institutions”–by itself, those make sense, but they also have broader connections to issue of race and class–what types of new faculty have the most experience at liberal arts or student focused institutions, for example? Basically what I’m saying is that there are lots of good conversations about the lack of diversity on campus faculty (again, a real problem), but the reasons why are complex and include personal racism but also personal assumptions, institutional factors, and societal constraints.
@119
That’s not what I was saying at all. I do agree that there is a dearth of POC in certain fields. That, along with the dearth of women in STEM fields, is something I’ve had brought up in plenty of classes.
I’m saying that more people of color might aspire to seek out PHDs in STEM fields if the perception that it is a futile course of action to seek a PHD in a STEM field went away.
Favoring POC in every situation except for one where there are no possible alternatives would at the very least help getting rid of that perception, and if that means turning down the super-prestigious white dude with a dozen papers, so be it.
Oh, and institutions have to state that they are not only committed to increasing diversity, but they have to publish policies to explain how that will be achieved. They have to publically acknowledge when there are problems, and show that they understand the negates effects and the gains to be made.
Now your hypothetical high-flying research superstar may not be swayed by the idea that a teaching school or second teir research institution is the place for them because it is more inclusive, but it should ensure that a much greater proportion of the potential minority candidates submit applications. If there are only small numbers of minority candidates seeking tenure at any one time, then becoming known for strong diversity policies and an inclusive working environment should ensure that capture many more of their applications.
If it is anything like the situation for women and ethnic minorities at fellowship level, I doubt that there are only the numbers of people who do apply who could apply.
*negative
(Not “negates”.)
Benard Bumner,
All things aside, I deserved that. I misread your comment about my sincerity in #113. For what it’s worth, I apologize.
Then let’s solve that problem–but that is not the problem caused by a search committee.
BTW I don’t agree that that is the problem–although maybe I’m wrong. I don’t think minorities in general say: I am not going into STEM because I wan’t have any opportunity. I think they are not going into STEM because they do not receive the same quality education as middle and upper class whites, and they do not receive the same “push”. But whatever the problem is, let’s work on that so that we can see more minority applicants.
Bill @125, acknowledged – thanks.
Bill Buckner,
Was this a mistake/typo or do you genuinely believe that diversification programs amount to “unleveling” the playing field? If the latter can you please explain?
Not a spokesperson for anyone. They/them/their are preferred pronouns and we/us/our is self referential (unless otherwise noted explicitly). Sorry for the confusion.
You have tossed out insult after insult since your first comment and there’s no cause for it nor does it do you or anyone else any good. Please stop it if you can.
Might have missed it but we haven’t seen anyone suggesting committees are “incapable of honestly seeking diversity.” What folks have tried to explain is that you or your committee cannot possibly be immune from biases (conscious and unconscious) just as nobody can be immune from that. It takes constant vigilance and proactive measures to mitigate biases and push back against the disparities that you yourself have acknowledged. But that’s not really even in the same ballpark as saying they are “incapable of honestly seeking diversity.”
Enough with this ridiculous strawman.
You said it yourself:
(1) there are a dearth of minority applicants (@12)
(2) demand for minority applicants exceeds supply (@19)
(3) African Americans represent on the order of 1% of your applicants (@28) and often there are no African American applicants in physics (@22)
Ok then. Given 1, 2 and 3 please explain your bullshit reasoning as to how our advocacy of a diversification program is tantamount to effectively blackballing of white applicants (i.e., “white men need not apply”). In what fucked up bizarro mathematical universe do you live where minority applicants (of which there are not enough to meet demand) can somehow magically take up literally all of the jobs to the point where white people need not even apply to begin with? How in the fuck does that work? How do you imagine this “white men need not apply” effect would manifest given there are so few minority applicants and?
Are you imagining some strange scenario where each minority applicant somehow fills multiple jobs to the point where there’s no more room left for the white applicants? Or are you just pretending that we’re espousing a diversification program in some alternate version of reality that does not actually exist? Some other reality where there actually are enough minority applicants to push out all of the white applicants entirely? Or…?
Please explain your reasoning and please show your work.
Heh. Try that. I dare you.
I have reported such comments, and worse. You know what happens next? “How dare you imply that your colleagues have said something racist!”, the response that you have been demonstrating here so well. The university committees charged with preventing such actions will be helpless: there is no official recording of comments in a confidential review meeting, so it’s me vs. them, and I’m outnumbered. The committee really wants to keep such problems quiet, so they’re not particularly motivated to demand redress…and when you’re dealing with tenured faculty, the whole issue of forcing change becomes problematic.
I can’t discuss details because of confidentiality agreements, but I will say that yes, I have been buried in these sorts of issues over the last few years, and it’s a great way to make your professional life hellish.
It’s amazing how certain liberal white college faculty are that they are completely free of bias. If you doubt me, all we’ve got to do is read your comments to see the problem on parade.
Yep. by now saying that somebody said something/did something/Is racist is seen as far worse than actually saying/doing/being racist.
Ironically, the same people who will chastize you for implying such a thing are the same people who whine about “political correctness”
Professor Myers @129,
Wow it sounds like there is a serious problem there. If you have reported these kinds of comments and worse and the response is indignation or hyper skepticism as opposed to investigation and remediation then the problem is far deeper than just individual racists on the hiring committees.
Holy shit this is so disheartening. When the very people and groups who are supposed to protect against this are ignoring it or helping to sweep it under the rug, that’s what leads to institutional and systemic racism and discrimination in hiring practices. When the tenure system is being used to shield people who are actively discriminating maybe it’s time to rethink that system entirely.
Is there a large enough contingent of like minded faculty and staff and students who could join with you in some form of protest or walk out or strike? Imagine organizing something like the recent protests at Mizzou or dozens of other universities in the last few weeks. That would help to put pressure on the university officials to do the right thing and it would garner media attention and help to shine a light on what’s going on.
Have you considered other options such as going outside the university system perhaps to state or federal officials or government representatives? Or maybe the ACLU or some other organization well equipped to fight on behalf of civil rights? Or maybe going straight to the media and blow this wide open to make sure this gets the attention it deserves? If nothing else you could be blogging about it more and help to put this problem under the microscope.
Wouldn’t your tenure protect you somewhat if you decide to start making some bigger waves? Maybe the legal eagles here can advise as to the kinds of whistleblower protections you could avail yourself of if it came down to that. In any case you know you have the support of the a/s community in general on this issue and so you wouldn’t be going up against the university system alone.