Main Edition
US
FR
October 11, 2024 - 10:00am
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) is on the ropes these days, and it’s a big problem for institutions that have invested deeply in this belief system. One way to rescue the enterprise is to tout new scientific results which buttress the claim that minorities and women are discriminated against in academia. Ergo the need for affirmative action.
Now the popular and increasingly woke magazine Science is trumpeting a new academic paper in the equally woke Nature Human Behaviour as a riposte to the naysayers. “Racial bias can taint the academic tenure process,” reads the headline.
The paper’s authors claim black and Hispanic academics with the same track record are discriminated against when they come up for tenure and promotion. But their data, if anything, points to anti-white and anti-Asian bias. Really, they foreground weak results while covering up inconvenient but powerful findings.
The authors briefly admit that disadvantaged minorities are advantaged over white and Asian academics when it comes to being promoted to full professor. But, at an earlier career stage, when moving from a relatively insecure non-tenured professorship to a secure tenured professorship, minorities are discriminated against. This helps explain their underrepresentation in academia.
Curious, I downloaded and crunched the data. Looking under the hood, the paper is in fact highly misleading. The term “p-hacking” is used to describe quantitative analysis which manipulates the data to find a significant finding that can be spun to support one’s priors. In this case, the authors did not pre-register the hypothesis they were going to test, allowing them to flex their hypothesis to match what they could mine from the data using a trial-and-error approach.
Second, they downplayed their strongest findings because these did not fit the narrative. Here is what they actually found: minority scholars are much less productive than white and Asian scholars, controlling for scholarly discipline and years as an academic. Academic output scores for the 8,157 white/Asian and 776 black/Hispanic case studies are significant at the powerful .1% level, but this goes unreported in the paper. The same pattern shows up in the sciences and social sciences/humanities. Women underperform men by an even larger amount.
In addition, white or Asian candidates for full professor are significantly less likely to be promoted than black and Hispanic candidates for a given level of publications. This reverse discrimination result is significant at the powerful .1 percent level. While this finding is briefly mentioned in the body of the paper, it is downplayed in the abstract, conclusion and marketing.
While the authors did find that minorities with weak publication records were disadvantaged compared to whites/Asians with weak records, this held true only for associate professors, not professors — where the reverse was true — and only on one measure and not the other. This is likely an artefact of the method and data collection, hardly the basis for a shouty headline about systemic discrimination.
Most academic proponents of DEI, or social justice, rely on pseudo-conspiratorial meta-theories such as critical race theory or flabby qualitative methods such as “auto-ethnography” (a.k.a. contemplating one’s navel) to buttress their knowledge claims. No wonder James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian were able to publish so many hoax papers in grievance studies journals merely by parroting feminist and critical race theory buzzwords.
However, laundering radical Left ideas enough to sell them to organisations requires at least some scientific patina. Even a thin quantitative foundation can be enough to backstop what Doug Stokes terms the grievance-industrial complex, with its well-remunerated institutional programme of radical indoctrination and race or sex discrimination. We’ve seen this with claims of sex discrimination in academia, which have failed to replicate, and with faulty arguments that diversity improves corporate performance. Rigorous studies which come to the wrong conclusions go uncited while weak papers like this one grab the limelight and make it into diversity training workshops. Don’t be fooled again.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep” In these few words Saul Bellow hit the nail on the head about the nature of our wokeified academia in the Western world. Anyone who has read Heather Mac Donald’s comprehensive study of campus DEI The Diversity Delusion could be left in no doubt about who is really discriminated against in universities. But of course the kind of people who need to be put straight on all this, won’t ever read anything that doesn’t indulge their infantile virtue-signalling prejudices. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/how-diversity-narrows-the-mind
I think if you’re experiencing certain obstacles like Jane Willenbring, Katalin Karikó, Lise Mitner and untold other people have, you’re not likely to find time to publish.
Why is it only men who comment here? p***s priority?
Thank you for taking the trouble to examine the numbers. Will you be sending a letter to the journal? Perhaps asking for a response from the authors?
I have only been reading popular science lately but New Scientist is also infected. I believe Scientific American is long lost.
How convenient to have the pre-packaged excuse of ‘racism’ to explain every instance of one not getting his/her way or achieving the desired results. And how predictable that a publication with ‘science’ in its title engages in blatant malpractice of the subject.
It is one consolation of being genuinely a victim of discrimination. When you know from experience that people sometimes stick it to you for no good reason, it is very tempting to forget that sometimes when bad things happen to you it just might be because the world is a tough place – or even because of your own faults.
What happened to the women scientists in the Antarctica?
double post, sorry
For one thing, data that shows DEI causes discrimination would not go over well with those who deserved promotions based on merit, but did not get them.
Your reporting of the statistical significance is a little confusing. By .1%, I assume you mean p less than .001, correct? Writing “.1%” is not standard, so a description of precisely what you mean would have been helpful. If I’m correct in this, then your interpretation is fine, this is a robust finding in which we can have confidence.
Most commonly you give those p levels as ‘5%’, or ‘1%’, at least in normal talk. So ‘0.1%’, standard or not, pretty clearly means what you think it means.
Perhaps if all academics and professors in non-STEM subjects were given five years unpaid leave and set to cleaning the verges of our highways of rubbish and weeds we might be better off. The output of their disciplines has become so no-sensical a good break would do. I am not proposing a Pol Pot solution but a more gentle fumigation of the space occupied by those gifted by race, trust fund or family connections to inhabit our universities in high positions.
Radical leftism frequently comes from parvenu, aspirational types, and serves ambition, not accomplishment.
People who are secure enough in life don’t feel the need to point fingers, and identitarianism – which today comes primarily from leftists – is based almost entirely on finger pointing. That was Marx’s worldview in a nutshell, that the bourgoise are to blame.
Today, it’s men, heterosexuals, and people of western European ancestry who are swapped out for the bourgoise. These are of course glaring stereotypes themselves – Kamala always had far more privileges in life than JD Vance, for example – and are of course very racist and sexist ideas, themselves.
Another approach is to make non-STEM or business programs more difficult to enter rather than offering them as a catch-all for directionless youth.
There it is. Given a chance, the authoritarian mindset will always out itself with wee jokes like that. It’s only a joke, yet the impulse behind it is not. It advertises a predisposition.
“Not proposing a Pol Pol solution” — setting the comparator bar at ground level so as to appear actually moderate, reasonable. Nice.
Authoritarians are always afraid of “non-STEM” because the humanities are concerned with things like language and knowledge of historical context. These have always been the most powerful means of talking back to power, to righting wrongs, to setting limits, which is why authoritarians want to tame and suppress this arena first, above all others. Don’t believe it’s only academia on the list to be controlled; it will include other forms of expression, like internet platforms.
The humanities gives people ideas, independent ideas from official doctrine, and the means to express them powerfully. The authoritarian doesn’t want to debate ideas, but wants everyone to be part of a herd, with them as the alpha, of course. The vision here is to tame the humanities and make people obedient to approved ideas, in this case a technocracy. Of course, if scientists discover things that don’t fit the ideology, they and their work will be “fumigated” too.
This is the thing about authoritarianism: it can’t stop because it removes the brakes. You see it here, where the focus instantly expands from “identarians” to all the humanities.
The irony is that this is the exact same mindset that many resent and rebel against which imposes ill-conceived and executed DEI. (Not all DEI is ill-conceived and executed.) Authoritarianism does not spring from left or right, it’s not a left/right problem, and never has been. It falsely divides us by reducing the world into simplistic opposing categories and goading us into reflexive antagonism.
That is the core problem that should be challenged in academia, through vigorous debate, without fear of censure. Because, depending on the issue at hand, we witness people being silenced, threatened, etc. for speaking out, who are called “radical” right or “radical” left. Obviously, all that “radical” means is “I don’t like it.” And increasingly, what “left” and “right” means is idiosyncratic and cynically reductive.
Would you prefer the rake or the sack on Monday?
But the Humanities in academia currently are the opposite of your ideal, closing off debate, and silencing debate.
The STEM students have too much work to do, and the staff are too interested in their actual subject to do more than go along with the orthodoxy for a quiet life.
I think the source trigger of the knee-jerk negative framing of the humanities is older and deeper than the relatively recent pattern of intolerance by some with a background in that sphere. That pattern is shameful and deserves condemnation. However, when a critic wants to throw the baby out with the bathwater, it’s often not accidental, and their problem is often not with the bathwater.
It remains true that studying the humanities empowers people to form independent ideas and the means to express them powerfully. That’s scary to the authoritarian mind.
There is a lot of hard work involved in studying the humanities, if one is truly engaged. It can be extremely rigorous. Staff tend to be highly interested in their actual subject. But this arena is often depicted as easy, light, like a hobby, as if such qualities are natural to this sphere of study. It’s a distortion, but taken as necessarily true by reactionaries. Like any discipline, you get from it what you put in, whether staff or student. It may be that there are some specializations in the humanities which tend to inculcate a dogmatic and insular POV. But it seems to me that this is a brash and reckless minority, and that those with a prejudice against the humanities exploit this to give a bad name to this essential branch of knowledge and study as a whole. Certainly not everyone involved in the humanities is devoted to identitarianism, as implied.
I should also note that zealotry and intolerance isn’t limited to the humanities. A big portion of the closing/silencing I’ve read about has been done by administrators. I’ve also witnessed plenty of attempts, many successful, to repress inconvenient ideas by STEM sources. My conclusion is that STEM is hardly immune from this affliction. To take one example, a common scenario for years now is researchers and physicians attacking other researchers and physicians for doing things like trying to educate and warn about continuing serious long-term effects of SARS-CoV-2, countering more agreeable myths about it. These responses haven’t been based on dispassionate engagement with the actual work, but on ideology. I’ve witnessed a top physician lose his leadership position in a hospital over it, seen researchers relentlessly smeared, and so on. The impulse to silence is universal; but as usual we like to focus on the humanities. That’s not surprising, since in general that arena is harder to control, and so it attracts more attention as a matter of course.
> “It remains true that studying the humanities empowers people to form independent ideas and the means to express them powerfully. That’s scary to the authoritarian mind.”
Andrew, would you please direct readers to evidence that the humanities has the effect you assert? Doing that would let us know that your claim is based on demonstrable fact, not only on personal belief. (to use your phrasing to Dorothy)
If that is true, then there should be much evidence to support your claim. If it’s more an article of inarguable faith, then obviously (for you anyway) it would not need any evidence, being axiomatic.
Have you seen ANY actual evidence that the Humanities curriculum in universities today is successful at producing students who form independent ideas and gives them the means to express them powerfully, on the whole (rather than as an exception)? For example, have you seen studies which show that there is a wider range of accepted ideas among those educated by the university humanities departments than in other fields, or among the general public? Or are the “socially acceptable” expressions more limited and biased towards some ideologies among graduates of such education?
I would suggest that it is more aspirational that a classical study of the humanities would hope to inspire independent thinking, than descriptive of actual real world outcomes today. And I do not think that even that aspiration is shared by all of the teaching academics; some may appear more interested in infusing their students with the instructors own “right thinking” than in fostering independent thought which might conflict with the instructor’s own ideology.
When I was at university, I recall professors who would give a high grade to a well written paper which come to conclusions differing from the professor’s own. From accounts from students today, there are many instructors who do not follow that practice; their commitment to social justice demands that they reward agreement and compliance as the path to a more just society, and punish deviation from the prescribed path. Students tell of knowing they can far more easily get a good grade by reguritating the ideology presented by the instructor; the more they appear to be a committed activist for the ideology imbuing the department, the more biased the instructors will be in their favor. These are not statistical studies obviously, just experiences and reports. But they give me pause before accepting your assertion of truth absent such empirical studies to back it up.
Demonstrable: “clearly apparent or capable of being logically proved.”
Dorothy claimed that DEI programs are a by-product of communism. That did not seem clearly apparent to me. Maybe she could have logically proved it, say, by pointing out that there is plentiful circumstantial evidence. In other words, a sense of strong correlation would do; I didn’t require a formal study presenting direct evidence.
In the case of my claim, I think that there is abundant circumstantial evidence to support it, and much less direct evidence. I don’t think direct evidence is necessary, as it wasn’t in Dorothy’s case.
Evidence that studying the humanities empowers people to form independent ideas and the means to express them powerfully would be Dr. Kathleen Stock, particularly her book Material Girls. Dr. Stock is trained in philosophy, a field of study in the humanities. We don’t need a formal study to accept that she has been empowered to form independent ideas and the means to express them effectively because she engaged in that training. Not to say, mind, that she hadn’t these qualities to start with, but that her training in the humanities greatly added to that power.
Martha Nussbaum, another philosopher, speaks to how training in the humanities helps one form independent ideas in Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (2010):
Regarding that skill “to understand how a narrative is assembled from evidence,” business leaders acknowledge the value of such training. For example, in this research project, Storycraft: The importance of narrative and narrative skills in business (2021):
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:81bb9c20-0896-47cb-aa14-26a41817e591/files/s9p290b086
“The most commonly practised tool of assessment in a humanities degree – essay writing – is still considered by business leaders to be a major asset. Many of them opined about a perceived deterioration in the quality of writing skills among university graduates across the board, while lauding writing ability as a key attribute for humanities graduates. Yet they highlighted that essay writing provides training in much more than simply the ability to write well. Essay writing also involves training in reading significant amounts of information, while simultaneously sorting through what is relevant and what is irrelevant, and often determining what is factual and what is not factual. In turn, the composition or planning of an essay was highlighted as requiring the structured ordering of thoughts and ideas, in order to develop and articulate a coherent argument.”
‘You can imply that art subjects are unstructured, but actually in writing essays and formulating arguments there is utter structure – you actually need to structure a narrative and simplify a narrative.’ (Business leader)
“Similarly, another business leader emphasised the critical thinking skills inherent in essay-writing, arguing that the process of structuring a narrative and dealing with multiple sources and different information is:
‘Something that is massively important in today’s world of basically an overload of half-truths. It [teaches one] to ask the question: Is that true? Is that really what he said or she said? Has that been taken out of context?’ (CEO)
“The notion of structuring ideas and engaging with complex information was seen as being inextricably related to another key skill the majority of participants explicitly linked with arts and humanities degrees: independent, critical thinking. While respondents on the whole acknowledged that critical thinking is a component of any good university degree, regardless of the faculty, they emphasized that arts and humanities degrees are closely linked with critical thinking amid uncertainty, ambiguity, and subjectivity, given the subject matter… these kinds of critical thinking skills were particularly valued by the participants given the increasingly complex contexts businesses must now operate in, the range of stakeholders’ interests they must take into account, and the challenges of working in a post-truth age.”
A 2018 study in the Journal of General Internal Medicine references similar value to medical students. “Medical Students’ Exposure to the Humanities Correlates with Positive Personal Qualities and Reduced Burnout: A Multi-Institutional U.S. Survey“:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11606-017-4275-8
“[O]ur results suggest that the humanities do correlate with important physician qualities. Of interest, the three personal qualities that correlated most strongly with exposure to the humanities were tolerance of ambiguity, empathy, and wisdom. This is intuitive considering that the humanities are not only a way to teach compassion and tolerance, but also represent the wisdom of those who came before us. In fact, wisdom might very well be the single trait that encompasses all of those other traits which define a well-rounded doctor: empathy, openness to possibilities, emotional resilience, mindfulness, humility, altruism, a knack for learning from life, plus a cathartic sense of humor. However, wisdom is not a focus of today’s medical education, which concentrates primarily on information and knowledge. Ironically, knowledge without wisdom might be dangerous. As Socrates put it in Menexenus, ‘all knowledge, when separated from justice and virtue, is seen to be cunning, and not wisdom.’
“In summary, our study empirically confirms what many have intuitively suspected for years: exposure to the humanities is associated with both important personal qualities and prevention of burnout. In fact, one could argue that some of the qualities we measured (tolerance for ambiguity, empathy, emotional appraisal of self and others, resilience) are, together with wisdom, fundamental components of professionalism. Hence, if we wish to create wiser, more tolerant, empathetic, and resilient physicians, we might want to reintegrate the humanities in medical education.”
I consider the very existence of certain occupations, essential to navigating our increasingly complex world, as evidence that studying the humanities empowers people to think independently and to express those thoughts effectively.
For example, bioethicists have become increasingly vital as science and applied science (AI, for example) develop. Where do they learn to think independently and to express themselves effectively unless from studying the Humanities curriculum in universities today?
From where do many original writers — independent journalists, novelists, poets, playwrights — come from, if not from those who have studied the Humanities curriculum in universities today? What is the background of many contributors to Unherd, including the author of this article?
Where do many visual artists and musicians train, develop their thoughts and ability to express them in work that penetrates, speaking to what is most alive in us if not disciplines in either the Humanities curriculum in universities today, or in art schools (which often incorporate studies in other humanities)?
Some consider legal studies part of the humanities, some do not; regardless, the study of law is deeply informed by humanities subjects. How do lawyers learn to think through complex context and present effective legal arguments, some of which become highly influential, if not by studying subjects in the Humanities curriculum in universities today?
From where do insights on history arise, reaching beyond academia to policy makers and the general public, helping us to potentially avoid making the same mistakes, if not from people who’ve studied the subject in the Humanities curriculum in universities today, and been empowered to form independent ideas and the means to express them effectively as part of that education?
Adding to the abundance of circumstantial evidence there is interesting related literature about how a humanities background helps people innovate in various fields.
As I noted in a reply to JR Hartley, “it may be that there are some specializations in the humanities which tend to inculcate a dogmatic and insular POV. But it seems to me that this is a brash and reckless minority.” Most of us have a cognitive bias, the negativity effect, making us vulnerable to colouring a whole by experience of its negative part/s. Not that we should ignore red flags, or discount experience.
All DEI is ill-conceived. It is a by-product of communism. Cultural marxists always claim that communism is a noble idea and great philosophy and the only problem has been the poor execution. It is not so. Communism and all its derivates are ill conceived.
Dorothy, would you please direct readers to evidence that DEI programs are a by-product of communism? Doing that would let us know that your claim is based on demonstrable fact, not only on personal belief. Thanks.
As for an example of a DEI program that is well-conceived, I recently looked into one that got a lot of undeserved bad press recently, and was even the subject of a highly misleading Unherd article.
An Asian-American graduate of one of the top schools in the country, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, came to the school’s defence of its DEI program. Some people had complained, based on a single year-to-year admissions decrease, that Asian Americans suffered a disadvantage relative to other races. Well, this Asian-American grad said that many Asian-Americans actually supported the program. She had become a lawyer. I read her team’s brief to the Supreme Court, which found in the defence’s/school’s favour.
It turns out that “the numbers of Asian-American students from poor families and less affluent areas of the County who obtained admission to TJ under the new policy was orders of magnitude higher than under the prior admissions system… The Policy significantly increased admission of low-income Asian Americans and those attending underrepresented schools, demonstrating that the Policy had just the effect of ameliorating socioeconomic and school-related disadvantages—for students of all races—that the Board hoped…
“Of particular note, Asian-American students from disadvantaged backgrounds benefited substantially from the Policy: the number of low-income (FRM) Asian-American admittees increased from just one student in 2020 to fifty-one in 2021… The number of admissions offers to Asian-American students attending nonfeeder middle schools historically underrepresented at TJ increased six-fold.”
The court also agreed that the “Asian-American share of admissions under the Policy did not deviate significantly from fluctuations in the years before the Policy,” and that “a single year-to-year decrease, without more, does not establish that Asian Americans suffered a disadvantage relative to other races, or that the Policy caused any such impact.”
All those bright kids getting a fair chance instead of facing an overwhelming barrier because of their families’ economic status.
There was no evidence of communism, of communist influence, of cultural Marxism, etc. The current Supreme Court is often described as conservative. And the law firm the graduate works for specializes in corporate law. Their bread and butter is defending big business. For example, helping a company that makes pipelines carrying gas from fracking sources avoid avoid environmental impact assessments, or a cryptocurrency company that wants to avoid stock market regulation enforcement.
Why are Communism derivatives ill-conceived? – Because they ignore the human tendency to greed and selfishness, ultimately desiring power over others. Utopianism always imagines that with the right communal framework, the right authoritarian government, human happiness could be guaranteed. That turns out to be a tragic fallacy. Communism enshrines corruption instead of transparency. A merit-based system with education to assist the least able, produces much more human happiness, although with inevitable inequality of outcome, if measured by money alone. But everyone can serve others with their hard work and skills, and voluntarily serving others produces happiness. Choosing it is the key.
People routinely make sweeping pronouncements like that in the comments sections. From my reading, communism doesn’t appear to be a monolithic doctrine; there have been multiple strands over its history. The same is true of, say, socialism, or feminism, or conservatism. Conservatism today looks different than conservatism of 50 years ago, and conservative opposition to corporate power 100-120 years ago can look downright progressive compared to today. So many ideas get simplified into monolithic baskets, and in this way they don’t have to be understood or taken seriously.
Yes, I sense “Betsy Warrior” (see above in comment thread) is one such – unless she’s Andrew Doyle’s latest jeu d’ésprit and I simply hadn’t realised.
Even if true that there are differences, correlation does not mean cause. Maybe there are other factors, such as cultural differences among the different cohorts.
“Science” as the name of this magazine is about as appropriate as changing Playboy’s name to “Chastity.”
Dear Prof Kaufmann
If you really think that the worth of an academic can be measured by counting their publications, then I fear that you may be part of the problem, not part of the solution.
The term p-hacking is a new one for me.