A friend of mine knows the author of this article in the Wall Street Journal. The article is about Texas Tech, which is supposed to be a merit-based, professional university. And yet now we find out that the faculty is screening job candidates to prefer candidates who toe the secular left line on wokeness. Let’s take a look.

This article is from the Wall Street Journal. (archived)

Amidst the explosion of university diversity, equity and inclusion policies, Texas Tech’s biology department adopted its own DEI motion promising to “require and strongly weight a diversity statement from all candidates.” These short, written declarations are meant to summarize an academic job seeker’s past and potential contributions to DEI efforts on campus.

[…]At Texas Tech University, a candidate for a faculty job in the department of biological sciences was flagged by the department’s search committee for not knowing the difference between “equality” and “equity.” Another was flagged for his repeated use of the pronoun “he” when referring to professors. Still another was praised for having made a “land acknowledgment” during the interview process. A land acknowledgment is a statement noting that Native Americans once lived in what is now the United States.

[…]One Texas Tech search committee penalized a candidate for espousing race-neutrality in teaching. The candidate “mentioned that DEI is not an issue because he respects his students and treats them equally,” the evaluation notes. “This indicates a lack of understanding of equity and inclusion issues.”

Another search committee flagged a candidate for failing to properly understand “the difference between equity and equality, even on re-direct,” noting that this suggests a “rather superficial understanding of DEI more generally.” This distinction arises frequently in DEI training, always as a markedly ideological talking point. According to the schema, equality means equal opportunity, but, to use the words of Vice President Kamala Harris, “Equitable treatment means we all end up in the same place.” Somehow, failing to explain that distinction reflects poorly on a biologist.

The biology department’s search committees also rewarded fluency in the language of identity politics. An immunology candidate was praised for awareness of the problems of “unconscious bias.” “Inclusivity in lab” was listed as a virology candidate’s strength: “her theme will be diversity, and she will actively work to creating the culture—e.g. enforce code of conduct, prevent microaggressions etc.” Another candidate’s strengths included “Land acknowledgement in talk.”

Many critics rightly point out that diversity statements invite viewpoint discrimination. DEI connotes a set of highly contestable social and political views. Requiring faculty to catalog their commitment to those views necessarily blackballs anybody who dissents from an orthodoxy that has nothing to do with scientific competence.

[…]One cell biology candidate was given a “red flag” for alleged “microaggressions towards women faculty.” The report names two examples: “assuming one junior faculty was a graduate student” and “minimizing the difficulties of women in the US by comparing to worse situations elsewhere.”

The first thing to say is isn’t it wonderful that this fellow was able to get his hands on these documents and expose the school? Already, the school has announced that it is eliminating these DEI policies. Just like that, in one day, one man made a big difference. It’s important to say that, because so many people today like to justify being passive by adopting cynical points of view. “Both political parties are the same”, “the system is rigged”, “even the people on my team are not as committed as me”, etc. They want to appear to be conservative, but without having to do any actions. Well, real conservatism is done with actions – actions that get results.

It looks like even STEM departments are losing their vision about what happens when a young person exchanges tens of thousands of dollars and years of their lives for knowledge. They think that we find value in being taught morality by secular leftists, and so we should be paying for that. But from my perspective, work is very difficult. People expect you to know how to write code. Just take a look at any job description for a programmer. You’re going to see a ton of programming languages (Kotlin), frameworks (Axon), services (Kafka), and libraries (React), listed there. People expect you to know how to use them. And they want months and years of experience with these tools. You don’t have time in college to waste on secular leftist indoctrination. You need to earn money.

Right now, I would be very careful about getting into any university that adopted these Diversity and Inclusion policies. When you get into a private sector workplace, you are expected to perform. You want to work 40 hours to move your cards, not 60 hours. So choose where you go to school wisely.