I’m baffled as to why state governments, especially in alleged “red” or even “purple” states don’t step in to stop these blatantly obvious abuses in state schools. Currently, only Florida appears to be doing so.

Your article is disingenuous. Your publication is garbage. Your supposed mission is rascist bullsh*t.

Sorry about the formatting of that spiel, something swallowed the para breaks. Trying again –

The issue is not whether the university should be studying diversity in STEM fields. The question is why is the Physics department hiring a professor to study something that IS NOT PHYSICS. Presumably the hire would not actually be a physicist, as to accept such as job with a PhD in Physics would essentially be an admission that you would rather being doing social science work. What value is gained by having such a professor within the department? They’ll be just as much as an outsider as if they were in whatever social science department would normally study these issues, which I would assume already does. About all this does is allow the hire to publish work as if they were a practicing physicist, which they won’t be by the nature of the job.

This is just another extension of the modern university’s response to under representation over the past 50 years. It started with the creation of the various “studies” programs as a way to increase representation in the absence of qualified candidates in the hiring pool, if nothing else than because possible candidates had been actively denied opportunities by prior discrimination. Otherwise they would have had to spend a couple of decades actually attracting, training and retaining qualified candidates before you could hope to approach something approaching proportional representation. Of course rapidly creating such programs meant much less competition for those jobs compared to more established fields, did nothing to help the original under representation issue and can be reasonably assumed to have drawn at least some potential candidates away from the existing departments. These programs were of lower prestige within the university, not only because of what they studied but because the circumstances of their creation attracted second rate talent, which happens pretty much any time you create new fields outside of existing ones.

Having created fields that are regarded by pretty much everyone not actually in them as second tier and filling them with the under represented you now have a situation where those populations are no longer under represented within the university as a whole, but remain under represented in the high prestige departments, particularly STEM, and over represented in the low prestige departments. A DEI hire within the Physics department is just taking this process one level down. You’ll now be able to say you have better representation in your STEM departments, just like the university could claim gains before, but the under represented will continue to be under represented in terms of who does the actual work in the field.

As to the problem of students floundering, that too stems from this approach. Rather than champion the reforms in primary and secondary education necessary to produce a pool of suitably trained students from under represented groups the universities instituted affirmative action, figuring that they could make up the gaps. I can understand the motivation, as we haven’t made all that much progress there in what is now pushing 70 years. But accepting kids with significantly weaker preparation than the other students they will be in class with is WHY students are floundering. Prop 209 in California proved quite clearly that matching minority students to schools within the U Cal system where they matched the rest of the student body resulted in them performing at the same level as those students. But push the kids who should be at UCLA to Berkeley and so on down the line and they all struggle.

This doesn’t necessarily matter throughout the university. If you’re going to college as a finishing school and a place to make connections then preferences aren’t that big a deal. That’s the deal for legacies and athletes as well after all, that’s why there were “Gentleman’s C’s”. But if you want to go into a demanding field of study such as STEM preferences are a disaster, and this is why those students abandon STEM majors at a much higher rate than the general student population. They’re simply overwhelmed by finding themselves below the curve in all their required classes from the get go. Forgive me if doubt that institutions that have been promoting policies that have devastated minority performance in STEM for decades will some how be able to fix the issue by bringing advocates of those policies into the departments themselves as professors. This will just bring an advocate inside the department for the dilution of standards already being pushed by administrations more concerned about the composition of their student body than actually educating them to an appropriate professional standard. I’m cynical enough about university administrators that I doubt this is even a good faith effort.

As for constructive solutions, how ’bout we just stop setting kids up to fail. Admit them to schools they belong in, where they can learn their chosen profession in an environment they can actually succeed in. After the initial job interview nobody cares what school you went to, only whether or not you can do the job. If we’re looking at a shortage of trained STEM workers employers aren’t going to be restricting their searches to MIT. And for those kids who just can’t hack college, stop pushing them to go there. We’re facing a crisis in the trades every bit as bad whatever skills gap you are worried about with colleges. Let them learn a trade or skill they can master, and they’ll be a lot better off than wasting time and money in pursuit of a paper credential. This isn’t just about the under represented either. We have a bloated university system feeding on student loans providing minimal education and a paper credential at great cost. Just stop.

What is the Republican-controlled Ohio legislature doing to check this at its state-controlled intuitions of higher learning?

‘The RAISE initiative extends to fields that have little connection with DEI. The university is currently seeking three STEM professors—in chemistry, mathematics, and physics—who will “study issues relevant to educational equity.” ‘

It’s really not true that there is no connection of these STEM fields with DEI. The fact is that whites/Asians perform distinctly better in these fields than do the other groups (i.e. black, Hispanic, native). It really is painful to see the underperforming groups up close, i.e. see them flounder. And this really is a problem for the colleges and universities — behind the DEI screen, they are very worried about maintaining enrollments of capable students in the face of declining enrollments, with the “demographic cliff” coming in a couple of years, and the increasing prevalence of minority groups in the college-age cohort (white failure to reproduce). And there is a real “national” problem here too — what kind of a country are we going to have if we don’t do something about all this? If you are a MAGA type, you should be worried!

In other words, they are trying to something about a real problem — for the students, for the colleges, and for society.

At least they are trying to do something positive — I don’t see that organizations like NAS even recognize that there is something that needs somehow to be attended to.

I dislike the DEI stuff as much as just about anybody — but I don’t see much of anything positive in the response of people who oppose it.