Remember when the hard sciences were thought to be the last bastion of meritocracy?
It’s not as though science has always been a pure meritocracy, however. For example, even I can remember, back in my youth, when women were discouraged in many ways from going into scientific fields, although it was possible to do it and to achieve some success. But many long years ago that situation ended and women were actually sought after. Same for black people of either sex.
However, it was originally thought that, once the correction occurred, there somehow would magically be de facto parity and each group would be represented in the sciences in approximate proportion to its percentage in the general population. When that didn’t occur – when the fact that differences remained in aptitudes for and/or interests in science at the tail of the distribution – the war on meritocracy began.
Ask Larry Summers. As I wrote back in 2005 in a piece about him:
…[T]his entire [Larry Summers being driven from Harvard] affair is extremely chilling. There seems to be a trend in academia to try to drag us into a new Dark Ages – this time one in which political correctness, rather than religion, triumphs over science. And some of its proponents are academics and scientists themselves.
It was already apparent almost twenty years ago.
And now we’ve come to this point:
The heads of some major institutions such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are boycotting conferences if speakers are not deemed diverse enough.
University administrators, the panelists say, pressure faculty to substitute scientific discovery with metrics, including the number of articles published and the dollar value of grants as major grantors become increasingly politicized.
Activists engage in a proverbial statue toppling, calling for the cancellation of Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, and any paradigm-shifting scientist whose beliefs no longer conform to present-day sensibilities.
Leftists have also presented a claim that Kambhampati argues against: there is no objectivity, only lived experience that is formed by a person’s identity.
That’s not science, of course.
But speaking of “lived experience,” here’s a DEI whistleblower, who happens to be a black woman who took the word “diversity” seriously:
Lee served at California’s De Anza College in the role of faculty director since 2021.
“I’m not going quietly,” Lee (pictured) told The College Fix in an exclusive interview last month. “I cannot do that and I won’t do that.”
She’s made good on that promise by continuing to sound the alarm on what she experienced as a black woman fighting for true diversity, equity and inclusion on campus.
Lee, in a March 31 essay for the online magazine Compact, wrote that “my crime at De Anza was running afoul of the tenets of critical social justice, a worldview that understands knowledge as relative and tied to unequal identity-based power dynamics that must be exposed and dismantled.”
“This, I came to recognize, was the unofficial but strictly enforced ideological orthodoxy of De Anza—as it is at many other educational institutions,” she wrote in the piece, titled “A Black DEI Director Canceled by DEI.”
Lee stated that some of her adversaries on campus called her a “dirty Zionist” and a “right-wing extremist” for inviting Jewish speakers to the college to discuss antisemitism and the Holocaust.
Lee also described forming a “Heritage Month Workgroup,” a project to create a calendar celebrating multiple heritages and religious holidays. The student government approved it, but her dean and other colleagues told her the project was “unacceptable, because it didn’t focus on ‘decentering whiteness.’”
Lee is also a co-founder of a group called “Free Black Thought.” I wish her much success.
Diversity (i.e. color judgment, class-based bigotry) is Inequity, Exclusion or DIEversity
That said, diversity of individuals, minority of one. #HateLovesAbortion
What more certain way to destroy a society than to utterly corrupt its young? First using western civilization’s cultural values of tolerance and free speech to plant its poisonous seeds. Then inculcating intolerance for anything but the approved narrative. Arrogantly certain that those still loyal to classical liberal principles will not fight fire with fire, given that they foolishly imagine that it would make them no better than the ‘progressive’ civilization destroyers.
science and mathematics are supposed to be the universal language, well the aliens won’t have to pretend like in independence day,
When Larry Summers got sacked for merely suggesting…no, ASKING IF…genetic sex differences might play a role in men excelling women much more at higher maths – I then decided NOT to pursue the masters in the history of science at Harvard. I found the affaire too disgusting to abide them.
The enemies of free enquire and science have since become Legion and plague.
Brazilian Marxist Paulo Freire wrote the educrat’s indoctrination handbook, “The Pedagogy of The Oppressed,” becoming the primary tool promoting victimhood in classrooms in order to destroy ALL systems but their own.
The Cult of “Woke” Zombies has achieved the rapid early retirement of my friends in academe, just like our frequent poster here, “physicsguy.”
The Biden Fake Ruler is deeply embedding this Cult to control every lever of Federal government — THIS scares me the most.
Until there’s shooting, these brain eating Borg monsters will be hungrily consuming our world. Night of Very Whiny Living Dead, indeed.
Tabia Lee obviously didn’t give any thought at all to what this DEI thing means when she applied for this position. And the morons that hired here assumed she believed whatever black women are supposed to believe.
My high school girlfriend graduated with a BS in Chemical Engineering in 1960. We were in different states so she married another student at Purdue. She worked on the Apollo program. She took some years off to raise her kids. We socialized after she and her family moved to California. Even then, it was possible.
DEI was certainly a factor in my leaving university. Each year the Woke Call to Prayer got a little louder.
I was taking STEM (mostly math and computer science). I noticed STEM faculty frequently had Diversity posters on their doors and most of the new hires for faculty and adminstration were women or foreign non-white.
Anyone who has worked in tech is aware that, for whatever reasons, the strong engineers are generally white or Asian males. So the university is cutting a lot of the best candidates
I’m also sad that the arts are also in the process of phasing out merit in favor of DEI.
Well, everybody knows that physics is sexist and racist. I took the notoriously difficult senior physics course in analytical mechanics taught by Dr. Miller, AKA Dr. Death. We started the course in the fall semester with 36 people in class and ended the course at the end of the spring semester with 6 white guys in class. No women, no poc. Oh, the horror.
Ray,
I don’t care about the demographic makeup of those 36 students. The fact that only 6 emerged at the end of the course says more about the lack of teaching ability of the faculty member. You say this was a senior level course; interesting as analytical mechanics is usually a first semester junior course. Do you remember the text? If it was Goldstein, then it wasn’t a senior level course, but a grad course.
Anyway, a senior course with 36 physics majors means those students have made it through 3 years of physics. Any physics department concerned at all with its students would immediately remove said Dr Miller from teaching any such course again.
Physics Guy: you are exactly correct. I had a professor like that once. He liked to brag about how smart he was – I remember him saying on one occasion that if he went back to grad school, he could finish his masters in a month. People like that are only interested in demonstrating their own superiority, not actually in teaching students.
In a sophomore ChE class, he gave a midterm that literally no one passed, so the parents of the entire class received letters that their son or daughter was failing a course. I think someone spoke to him, because after that, he loosened up considerably. He did not last long in the department.
well that does defeat the purpose, but rigorous instructions is necessary, actually indispensable in the hard sciences,
Physicsguy,
I am an EE major. Not everybody that took the course was a physics major. I knew a number of EEs that took the course. The course was advertised as senior-graduate level, if I recall. (That was over 50 years ago.) The book was “Mechanics” by Dr. Kieth Simon. Dr. Simon was from Kent State and his office was burned during the riots there in 1970. The joke was that his class notes got burned and after that he couldn’t work his own problems. I still remember the course because it was very challenging.
Tough to feel sorry for Tabia Lee.
After all , when one chooses to take an appointment as a Political Commissar to coerce – not ask, not discuss – others to act, think and say only what is deemed acceptable to the Commissar’s political ideology, then don’t be surprised if the guns get aimed at you.
Sort of like those Stalin show trials in which Lenin’s inner circle of advisors were sentenced to death (a decision reached the day Stalin took power). Too bad for them; they had it coming for unleashing policies that resulted in the deaths of millions.
Sometimes, but not all the time, what goes around comes around.
Ray,
Yes, Simon is an advanced undergrad book with some very advanced grad level material and problems. Sounds like he was teaching it really at a grad level, especially if it was advertised as such. EE’s really had no business being in that course in that case, and some of the physics majors also unless they were very good and wanted a jump on the grad courses.
physicsguy,
I couldn’t agree more. I’ve always found it absurd that in so many STEM classes the “curve” sets a “B” at less than half correct on an exam, or less. To me that’s not a sign of a challenging course, or a tough teacher. It’s a sign of a poor teacher and/or a teacher who doesn’t know how to write exams.
Especially, as you write, when the student body are competent and capable.
John Tyler,
I disagree. We need people like Tabia Lee who have common sense, intelligence and values and the immutable characteristics (minority, female*) to land these jobs to work for change. I hope she sues them for more money than the Oberlin bakery won.
*Well, female used to be immutable.
@Rufus T. Firefly:o me that’s not a sign of a challenging course, or a tough teacher. It’s a sign of a poor teacher and/or a teacher who doesn’t know how to write exams.
Can’t speak for all the STEM course but for the intro calculus-based physics courses it’s not that at all. It’s that the intro physics courses are required by many other majors besides physics. (When I taught it I always had 100 – 200 students, and only 1 or 2 physics majors per semester.) No one at a real university will allow it to be dumbed down to the point that the 198 non-physics majors can get a B without that kind of curve.
In addition, math is also a hurdle. I had many students who were taking my course as seniors instead of sophomores because they’d failed calculus 3 or 4 times, and then mysteriously got an A taking it online over the summer. I would pretest my students in algebra and calculus and they were usually totally unprepared. (Many could not read their textbooks.) And if I failed them I was going to be the one who kept them from graduating and what was Grandma going to say?
It’s not because the math teachers can’t teach either. It’s that no one will relax the requirement, or allow it to be dumbed down.
I have though seen it dumbed down unofficially, where instead of setting up and solving circuits the exam was to color and label the parts of a circuit. Those people got Bs, but they didn’t know any physics. I don’t think they were well served either, but they were pretty happy of course.
but if they had common sense, they wouldn’t go into die, you see the quandary,
Rufus:
Someone with common sense and truly seeking to help minorities would not take a position as a DEI political enforcer.
Physicsguy,
I’ll tell you why EEs took the course. The EE dept required you to take the 1 semester statics course taught by the CEs and the 1 semester dynamics course taught by the MEs, or with their permission, substitute the 2 semester mechanics course taught by the physicists. This was regarded as a challenge by the EEs. If you think you are real smart, sign up for the mechanics course. I took the course as a junior.
Your sensibilities are appreciated but back then they weren’t very welcoming and inclusive. When I entered school the head of the EE Dept. addressed the class and told us our tuition only paid about 1/3 of the cost of going there and the rest was paid by the taxpayers. so if we weren’t there to study hard and get good grades, they would get rid of us and find somebody that would. You didn’t get an A for attendance.
Frederick,
I absolutely agree in the scenario you present. Courses shouldn’t be dumbed down to meet an incompetent or lazy median. But I’ve seen plenty of courses where 80% or more of the students were smart and hard working and would go on to long careers in STEM fields, and yet 90% or more of the class score below a 50% on the exams.
What’s the point of an exam that tests less than half of what competent, hard-working students have learned? Either the teacher did a poor job teaching it, or the material wasn’t taught.
John Tyler:
What makes you think she’s asking for sympathy? I think she tried to fight a system she knew was corrupt. Perhaps she naively thought she would be more successful than she was. But at any rate, she tried, and is at least pointing out the very serious problems. She also is pointing out that black people do not march in lockstep, politically. That is what that website at the end is about.
I did my part. When I finished my bio degree for the hell of it, I of course took BiPsych. When the prof told us the uni rules were that she apply a sliding scale, I made it my goal to score 100% on each test there and elsewhere. I averaged ~98% there and about the same elsewhere. I know how to study and came in with 55+ years of accumulated exp. There were around four people drop the class after two tests with Fs. Zero pity.
People like me are probably part of why the ‘no grades’ push. Right now diplomas aren’t worth much of anything. It that push sweeps, they’ll be worth less than the now extinct corn cob bin.