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Comment by cperciva | Hacker News Reader

Leaving aside the methodological issues, this is a general phenomenon not isolated to Americans. In my corner of the world (Vancouver, Canada) many students recently expressed outrage that, over the course of a 4 year degree, they hadn't even had a single Black instructor.

Based on the census-reported prevalence of Black individuals in the community, they would need to be significantly overrepresented in University teaching in order for most students to take courses taught by them!

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That sort of level of critical thinking really should be the outcome of all degrees too, tbh!

Alas, it's not just the students who struggle in that respect. Over half of the faculty supported them.

You’re lucky they didn’t call for the firing of the people who read the census numbers, too.

I'm an alumni representative on the University's academic governing body (Senate) and was the only person in the room who receives neither grades nor a paycheque from the University.

In light of that, I have a standing offer to speak on behalf of any Senator who sends me written remarks and does not feel safe (either physically or career-wise) being publicly identified with their opinions. I'm sad to say that this offer has been utilized.

That's a sad state of affairs, thank you for doing the right thing and speaking up for those who have been chilled into silence.

That tells me how to value a degree from there when looking at resumes.

The good news is that it varies tremendously across the University. Most of the Mathematics faculty are quite numerate, for example.

If you're considering hiring someone who did a degree in Political Science, on the other hand...

A few of my co-workers brought this up at a previous workplace and the end result was they stopped allowing employees to ask questions at all-hands.

The questions were along the lines of: Why is D&I openly telling us they are prioritizing the hiring of engineers from Sub Group $A instead of Sub Group $B, when $B is also a minority but is much less fairly represented by our company in relation to the population. The fact of the matter is, they don't want to admit that some minorities in tech are more equal than others.

If they keep pushing this crap it's going to make people bigoted. Sometimes I wonder if that's their goal.

Your numbers seem slightly off. While Vancouver is 1.7% African, it’s unlikely for a university to only recruit from a single city. Canada as a whole was 3.5% Black in 2016. I would expect unbiased selection should result in a number between them.

Assuming students had 45 courses the majority of students should eventually have a black instructor at 1.7% as 0.983^45 < 50%. At 3.5% and 45 courses 80% of students should have had a black instructor at some point.

Of course blacks are likely to be under represented in applicants for such jobs, but that’s a different issue.

Census data I saw was 1.2% Black for Metro Vancouver. Students take 30-40 courses (120 credits for a degree; almost all courses are 3 or 4 credits), and typically have 20-25 unique instructors since they'll take multiple courses with the same instructors in their programs.

98.8%^25 = 74%.

So your assuming every instructor was both recruited and lives in the Metro area for Vancouver, that’s simply not how collages actually work.

Further your 30 credit lower bound requires every class to be 4 credit hours which is clearly ridiculous, especially when you mention 1 credit hour courses.

Garbage in Garbage out.

PS: “Repeating same instructors” how tiny is your school? I repeated the instructors 4 times before graduation and I went to a small school.

Not Canadian but you're assuming that instructors only teach one course each which was definitely not the case during my degree. Most of the senior academics ran multiple courses across different years and the TA's taught on multiple courses even in the same term. I doubt I had more than 10 instructors across 4 years and three departments and subjects. Relatively small university of about 3500 though.

That sounds terrible. I think we had ~4k undergraduates but I very rarely repeated a professor. 1 time by choice, 3 times because they taught two required classes, but I never had TA’s.

Many professors would teach multiple courses, but they where split across undergrad programs and graduate classes plus general education requirements. Toss in some part time adjuncts who actually did what the course was for professionally or taught at another school and overlap was extremely rare.

Nassim Taleb talks about a similar phenomenon in “Skin in the Game.” His proposition is that there are cases where a minority’s needs or values might be small relatively speaking but the cost of not accommodating them is more than that of not doing so so the niche becomes mainstream for something akin to economic forces. I listened to the audiobook so don’t have access to his sources but it might be a better place to start looking for more credible research into this idea of anyone is interested.

https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

You are talking about his idea of "the intolerant minority", but it has nothing to do with over- or under-representation of people in certain demographics.

If anything, it is almost the opposite. The idea is that intolerant minorities can get to have their preferences dominate if they are more-or-less evenly dispersed among the larger population.

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