One Kind of Diversity Colleges Avoid | Hacker News Reader

One Kind of Diversity Colleges Avoid

wsj.com

49 pointsrandomname239 comments

I've never heard of a single institution specifying the kind of the diversity that they want. Just "diversity". What about intellectual diversity? Why doesn't Harvard accept people from a diverse range of SAT scores? It makes me wonder if these institutions actually accept the ideology they claim to embrace, or if they just use buzzwords and do the bare minimum so they're not labeled bigots.

>Why doesn't Harvard accept people from a diverse range of SAT scores

They do

http://features.thecrimson.com/2015/freshman-survey/makeup-n...

"Respondents who identify as Asian, but not including South Asian, reported higher overall SAT scores on average, with an overall best score of 2300 out of a possible 2400. The average best overall SAT score reported by white respondents was 2218; 2174 for respondents who are Hispanic or Latino; and 2149 for respondents who are black or African American."

A range of 2149-2300 doesn't quite strike me as diverse.

> if they just use buzzwords and do the bare minimum so they're not labeled bigots.

Sounds about right.

> Why doesn't Harvard accept people from a diverse range of SAT scores?

In general, these students would need dramatically different courses with a lighter workload and a lot more hand holding to succeed.

Students who have trouble with reading comprehension questions on the SAT are going to have a difficult time in courses requiring several hundred pages of careful reading every week.

Students who have trouble with the basic arithmetic questions on the SAT are going to have a difficult time with college-level science.

It would certainly be possible to build a university around the idea of accepting anyone who applies, perhaps by lottery, but it would be a substantially different type of institution than Harvard currently is.

To save you a click: the kind of diversity in question is "political or ideological diversity" with a focus on conservative politics and ideologies.

Conservative ideology is focused around defining progress (a term somewhat at odds with conservatism itself) as a return to a previous state of affairs (that may have never existed in the first place). That our civilizations apotheosis is somewhere in the past, not the future. This does not seem a compatible perspective with the idea of the university, which was handed down to us from the ideas of Socrates: to probe the universe, to find the answers to misunderstood and perplexing phenomena; to search for the truth. To a conservative ideologue, the truth lies behind us. To the rest of humanity, the truth lies beyond us.

That's not to say that history doesn't have an important role to play for the forward-thinking. On the contrary. We'd like to get the record straight or as close to right as possible. This often flies in the face of the imagined past conservative thinking seems transfixed upon.

This strikes me as a vast generalization. I think that the author of the article is also including people who have conservative economic views (he calls out libertarians as a marginalized group, who are socially liberal and economically conservative). Surely there's nothing about economic conservatism that flies against progress or probing the universe.

While I am not conservative, I believe there is a lot that can be learned from those with a conservative viewpoint.

Libertarians are in a special category. They are the ultimate utopians in the sense that they believe, perhaps in the complete absence of understanding of the role of the state in the creation of markets, that a market is purely a point of exchange between two or more individuals. There has never been such thing in history. Not in the sense that we understand civilization (for better or worse) as it is today.

Libertarianism and Conservatism doesn't make sense, as you said. Discourse of these ideologies should be banned from university grounds.

> a return to a previous state of affairs (that may have never existed in the first place)

If chasing a state that never really existed wouldn't that make conservatism some sort of defacto progressive utopianism?

Could not have formulated the question better.

> Conservative ideology is focused around defining progress [...] as a return to a previous state of affairs

> To a conservative ideologue, the truth lies behind us.

Given the context, I disagree with your interpretation of the "conservative" label.

It is obvious (to me) that what the author means in this particular article, and the grandparent, is "Conservatism as defined in United States political ideology" [1], perhaps of the Barry Goldwater flavour, and not your broader and in this context misleading definition, which coupled to some of the more vocal people calling themselves conservatives today leads to a form of association fallacy I've observed some university departments use precisely to reject "conservatives".

This particular definition of conservatism is compatible with scientific progress and new thinking, as shown by the evidence of decades of both happening in politically conservative university departments (in the US and abroad) in the 20th century.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism_in_the_United_Sta...

I believe conservatism partially covers the "second moment" as well: for instance, one might think that civilization has progressed further than it has ever in the past, but it's accelerating towards a state of affairs that will "overshoot" and end up being worse than some future state.

Maybe we conceptualize political views around higher moments of progress, like jerk-progress and snap-progress.

Can you cite a prominent contemporary conservative who says "We think that progress is going back to a previous state of affairs"?

Because it sounds like a caricature that makes it easy to say "Oh yeah, of course we can't have these crazy conservatives around young people".

I think it's right there on the tin.

http://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_conservatism.html

"Conservatism is any political philosophy that favours tradition (in the sense of various religious, cultural, or nationally-defined beliefs and customs) in the face of external forces for change..."

s/liberialism/conservitism

There's a reason people are voting with their feet in the millions for our capitalist country, not their socialist.

These are at best wiggle words now. Capitalism is a term coined by Marx no less as a criticism. Socialism is a term that is adopted by many different regimes, some democratic, some autocratic. So it too is an almost meaningless word.

"The greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects; In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings." http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/t...

paywall

Use the "web" button above

web link -> first link on new page

> The advocates of diversity in higher education claim that learning requires the robust exchange of ideas, which is enhanced when students and faculty have the greatest possible variety of backgrounds. They argue that exposure to people from different backgrounds breaks down unfair stereotypes and promotes understanding of those who come from different circumstances than oneself.

Huh. I thought that the advocates of diversity in higher education were saying that it is fundamentally wrong to have an applicant pool and a worker pool that is biased on some aspect that has no known scientific reason to be intrinsically biased in that way, no plausible hypothesis for why it would be intrinsically biased in that way, and plenty of known reasons to be extrinsically biased. You could say it's fundamentally wrong because it's morally unjust, or you could say it's fundamentally wrong because it's losing you out on a large fraction of qualified candidates, but either way it's not because of second-order effects like these people bringing new viewpoints and ways of thinking.

I would imagine, for instance, that if a hypothetical Harvard noticed that most of its current and prospective faculty were Boston Brahmin, it would primarily look to diversify its candidate pool because there are tons of other good candidates that they must be overlooking. There's probably also a secondary effect of diversity of thought, and there probably is a bit of explanation as to why it's easier for well-established, well-connected families in Boston to produce Harvard professors, and a tiny bit of that might even be genetic intelligence. But it seems implausible that a well-functioning recruitment process would primarily attract this crowd, and the conclusion would be that the process is poorly functioning, not merely that it is poorly accomplishing some secondary benefit of diversity.

If you accept this reasoning, then it's pretty clear why Prof. Hasnas' experience -- as the "executive director of the Georgetown Institute for the Study of Markets and Ethics, whose tripartite mission is to produce high-quality research on matters related to the ethics of market activity, improve ethics pedagogy, and educate the broader, non-academic community about ethical issues related to the functioning of markets" -- involves a lot of discrimination on political viewpoint, and there is no contradiction or hypocrisy in wanting discrimination on political viewpoint for a job in such an institute but not wanting discrimination on genetics. Candidates applying for such a job probably have an extensive academic history of expressing opinions on markets and ethics, and whether they are libertarian in those forums is absolutely relevant to the recruitment process. (Their political opinions they yell on Facebook is of course a different thing and much more off-limits, but I don't believe that's what the professor or his committees were referring to.) A well-functioning recruitment process for such an institute should be biased on what those candidates have written on these topics and what viewpoints they've argued in favor of.

Once I opened the link, I found that the kind of diversity he was talking about was political (although I couldn't read it since it was behind a paywall). As an academic, my first thought was, "bullshit. There are tons of conservatives in business schools." Imagine my surprise when the author is a professor in a business school: http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/Newindex.html

Imagine my further shock when I find out that he is associated with the Cato Institute: http://www.cato.org/people/john-hasnas

Of course the fact that it was on the wall street journal editorial page should have been my first clue about its subject matter.

As an academic, my first thought was, "bullshit. There are tons of conservatives in business schools."

Huh? That's it?

The only place for conservatives at a University is in its business school?

That clearly illustrates the point the article was making!

I don't think I wrote that the only place conservatives are found is in business schools.

My point was that arguing that there is a lack of diversity in political thought is just plain wrong.

The author does not want diversity at all. He is a conservative is wants more conservatives.

I think it's fair to discriminate (in the literal sense) based on factors people can affect or change, like political affiliation, but not based on factors that people can't change, like race. [1]

That said, if you're touting your commitment to diversity, you really should be seeking out, y'know, diversity. Including lots of different kinds of people is a multifaceted endeavor.

[1] I know it's not legal to discriminate based on religion, which is kind of similar to political affiliation, but I'm talking about my personal ethical framework, not the law.

Imagine if the keys to academic success were that you needed to believe that blue is the best color. There is nothing intrinsic about blue being the best color, and a good argument could be made that green is the best color. But, everyone who holds the keys to the kingdom of academic success think that blue is the best color, and won't let anyone in who thinks green is the best color.

Do you think that system is "fair"? Or a good one?

This is a false equivalency because no intelligent adult believes that any color is inherently superior, whereas many intelligent adults do believe that certain political beliefs are inherently superior.

Blue is obviously superior because of its wider variety of uses. Blue is a much more popular color for cars than green. Blues are much more rare in nature than greens, because blues are harder to recreate due to their superior qualities.

Perhaps these intelligence adults aren't that intelligent after all. If you think you are so smart think that you and 50% of other people have figured it all out, and the 50% of other people are just idiots, then maybe you aren't that intelligent after all.

And your refute is an appeal to the masses or an appeal to authority depending on your tastes. Many intelligent people believe in conservative/libertarian ideals.

When considering solutions to tough problems, why exclude any class of thought?

I wonder how much political inclinations are malleable though. I can't dig up the work now, but I know psychologists like Jonathan Haidt show that things like a persons openness to experience influence their political beliefs. If we can't control our ideological basis any more than an accountant can their inclination to numbers, then we're losing out on a lot.

I once worked for a company where it was mandatory (highly encourage and if you did not you might find yourself being fired) to read Alas Shrugged ... with the boss asking you questions as you read it to try understand your political ideology.

No, it is not ok to force someone to adopt a political ideology, religion or any other thought process.

It was a terrible job, a terrible work environment and I quit as soon as I found a new job.

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