Harvard has been in the news a lot lately, and among other things critics say that wokeism has gotten so out of hand that it's all but impossible to be hired there unless you're a person of color. That got me curious, and luckily Harvard has a convenient page listing all the new full-time, tenure-track faculty hires this year. Here they are:
This is just the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which is basically all of undergraduate Harvard except for the engineers. There's also the business school, the law school, the med school, etc., which I was too lazy to do. But they look about the same.
I know that pictures lack precision for those who want to really get into their racial profiling, but I think it's pretty obvious that it continues to be possible for white people to get hired at Harvard.
Looks pretty Woke to me. They haven't hired a single old, white (straight) guy.
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So Tiger—What about the guy in the upper right? Isn’t he old enough for you?
Probably snark, but if not it bears mentioning that, generally speaking, new hires in places with tenure track tend not to be old.
But they all had to describe their commitment to "DEI" in their job applications, and anyone who wrote "It's a lot of Radical Marxist woke bullshit" didn't even get an interview, except in the School of Medicine.
Kevin,
I love how you put it in that last line: "...it continues to be possible for white people to get hired at Harvard." Thanks, I had to laugh.
Years ago, there was an interesting writer named Kevin Drum who wrote stuff like this:
“What matters is what the median voter feels, and Democrats have been moving further and further away from the median voter for years”
And this:
“Our election victory in 2020 was razor thin even though (a) the economy sucked, (b) we were in the middle of a pandemic, (c) voters had had four years to see just what Donald Trump was really like, and (d) our candidate was bland, amiable, white, male Joe Biden. This should scare the hell out of liberals.”
That Kevin did indeed seem justifiably scared regarding the extremism infecting the Left and alienating it from a majority of voters.
But he seems to have been replaced by someone named Kevin Drum, and this Kevin Drum sounds like the kind of person Kevin Drum warned us against:
“[A]nd among other things critics say that wokeism has gotten so out of hand that it's all but impossible to be hired [at Harvard] unless you're a person of color.”
There have indeed been such complaints. So, first of all: does Kevin Drum just dismiss these concerns out of hand? If so, that strikes me as a possible example of the dreaded Fox News Fallacy: anything asserted by (or understood to be believed by) a conservative must be false. And such a claim can therefore simply be dismissed by posting a photo.
Also: there is always the question of what else. Sure, some conservatives (as well as those Liberals still willing to engage with reality) have complained about reverse racism at Harvard and elsewhere, but what else have they said about Harvard and higher Ed in general?
Here is Greg Lukianoff: “But even McCarthyism didn’t seem to cause as much damage on campuses as we’ve seen in the past decade. According to the largest study at the time, about 100 professors were fired over a 10-year period during the second Red Scare for their political beliefs or communist ties. We found that, in the past nine years, the number of professors fired for their beliefs was closer to 200.”
Lukianoff and Kevin Drum would no doubt agree on a lot of these problems in Higher Ed and at other left leaning institutions. But Kevin Drum doesn’t seem interested in seriously engaging.
Ah, Greg Lukianoff et al. "found" that, did they? I'm sure their methods were impeccable. Wonder where they published (assuming, of course, their paper wasn't rejected by the Woke).
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression https://www.thefire.org tracks this sort of thing, Their web site gives many examples of this sort of thing.
Their precise statistics can be found here. I expect (though I don't know for sure) that Lukianoff got his numbers from that data.
https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/scholars-under-fire
But sure, feel free to claim that any statement about the world you don't like must ipso factor be fabricated.
You must engage with this quote from the mouthpiece of a right wing propaganda 'think tank'! I will not engage with your argument, instead i will mock it as a liberal argument.
LIBRULZ!!!!!
lol, good stuff. So much lol.
Yeah imagine that, the new Kevin Drum seems to think that we should be worried about something only if it is real. What happened to him wanting evidence.
I wonder how many University professors there were in the US during the Red Scare compared with today. A quick search puts the instructional staff at 183,758 in 1952 and 987, 518 in 1990, the last year this source gives numbers for. It would seem like anybody who deserves to be taken seriously as a statistician would include that information. There are other obvious places where one might worry that Lukianoff is comparing apples and oranges, but if he doesn't see the relevance of the number of professors there isn't much reason to take him seriously on those other issues.
And Kevin Drum of his entire career would be making fun of such abuses of statistics as he is doing above.
Who the hell is Greg Lukianoff and why should we pay him heed other than the fact he wrote something that jives with your sick world view?
So according to Lukianoff's very own data (apart from their questionable accuracy), a far lower percentage of professors in the past nine years have been laid off due to their political beliefs in comparison to the period of the Red Scare.
I think it's pretty obvious that it continues to be possible for white people to get hired at Harvard.
But that you even have to SAY that is INCONTROVERTIBLE evidence that the WOKE is OUT OF CONTROL!!!
Also vaccines have taken over our minds with microchips controlled by George Soros! It's true! I read it on my Facebook!
Some of those seemingly white people in the pictures might actually be Jews or Italians or women!
This comment wins.
Or -- shudder -- Irish.
Can someone please help me understand what "woke" means?
According to a court filing authored by Ryan Newman, general counsel for Florida State Governor Ron DeSantis, woke is "The belief that there are systematic injustices in American society and the need to address them."
That being the case, call me woke. When there's systematic injustice, there's a justice system, and its job is to restore justice. The day there's no systematic injustice is the day the justice system goes out of business.
Or does it mean "cancel culture"? Cancel culture is a form of systematic injustice.
I get it that words mean different things in different contexts, but words that mean one thing when that serves my personal self-interest, and the exact opposite when that serves my personal self-interest, say more about me than about the topic I'm discussing.
the use of “systematic” instead of the correct “systemic” grinds my gears to no end.
Agreed, "systematic" and "systemic" really mean different things, and the fact that people confuse them makes the discussion more difficult.
systematic
-- done or acting according to a fixed plan or system; methodical.
systemic
-- relating to a system, especially as opposed to a particular part.
The original statement from Ryan Newman seems to be using the correct word "systemic":
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/12/05/desantis-florida-woke-critical-race-theory/
https://floridapolitics.com/archives/574045-in-andrew-warren-suspension-trial-gov-desantis-officials-answer-what-does-woke-mean/
My bad, but why pick on that minor error and ignore the larger point???
Is woke about restoring injustice or perpetrating injustice?
Is capitalism about benefiting from competition or destroying the competition?
Is science about allowing others to challenge my assumptions, or is it about telling everyone my PhD means your assumptions are irrelevant?
Is Christianity about looking at my enemy and seeing a neighbor, or is it about looking at my neighbor and seeing an enemy?
Is freedom about freedom for everyone or about freedom for the people I don't happen to be prejudice against?
If I can use a word, and I can flip the switch and say I meant the exact opposite when I discover I've painted myself into a corner, it makes the discussion more difficult.
Forgot one ...
Is politics about public service or self-service?
No need to decipher ethnicity from pictures. Here are the stats as of 2022:
•Women: tenured faculty, 29 percent; tenure-track faculty, 47 percent.
•Race/ethnicity: tenured faculty, 77.6 percent white, 5.5 percent black/African American, 2.8 percent Hispanic/Latinx, 13.1 percent Asian/Asian American, two or more races 0.9 percent; tenure-track faculty, 58.5 percent white, 7.7 percent black/African American, 7.0 percent Hispanic/Latinx, 23.9 percent Asian/Asian American, 0.7 percent American Indian/Alaskan native, 2.1 percent two or more races.
Rightwing bigots like our resident troll Leo can go pound sand about wokeism when 77% of tenured faculty and 58.5% of new tenure-track hires are white (and while all ethnicities have gained a bit in the new hires, the bulk of the change has been on Asian/Asian-Americans, much more so than Blacks or Hispanics, the common targets of the "too woke" cry babies.
Loss of privilege feels like persecution.
Now why the right wing is concerned about Harvard escapes me--they've always thought it was a bastion of liberalism forever. Why Yale was formed because Harvard was too liberal.
Because they see it as striking at the heart of Librulism.
How many are Jews?
The answer will always be “too many” for certain people.
How many of the new hires of LGTBQ? I would posit a disproportionate amount and that they are checking a box in their own way.
They are probably all LGBTQ.
Steve
Well, this hadn't occurred to me,
2024 is going to be a worldwide election year with national elections in at least 64 countries,
https://i.redd.it/ojlw4q9zdm9c1.jpeg
Is this unusual? I've never thought about it before.
In an increasingly interrelated world this may come to take on greater significance.
Being white, even heterosexual, does not mean you are not "woke"....think Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. I think a more even handed comment would be, almost no conservatives could be found in MANY departments at Harvard, or similar universities.
Basically, the concept of diversity does not seem to include ideology.
No Creationists in the Biology department!?! I'm shocked, I tell, shocked; clearly there is a bias against certain ideologies.
You know, ArgleBargle used to do that shtick too, and much better than you I might add. Until she had her ass handed to her so many times it ceased to be a regular topic of discussion among the many ways conseratives just can't seem to catch a break in modern society.
ScentOfViolets - two points
1. As the father of a current biology student/an aspiring Doctor similar to my wife (our daughter attends a, so called, Ivy Plus university) she had courses on plant microbe interactions, phage hunters, plant biology, biology of the brain, research methods, biology of cancer etc.
NOTHING that touched upon God, creationism etc. So yes, a creationists can teach university level biology.
2. At elite university's approximately 5% - 8% of the faculty, identify as conservative. There is a clear lack of ideological diversity. Note, being a conservative has no impact upon teaching math, physics etc...
Come on, Kevin, be serious.
If you want to actually prove a point, don't argue a strawman.
The claim is not that Harvard won't hire white males, it is that to get hired you have to pass a gauntlet of loyalty tests consisting of things like "What have you done to increase DEI in your teaching career?"
Is this claim false? Exaggerated? Maybe, I don't know. But showing a bunch of photos tells me NOTHING about it's truth or otherwise.