I frequently claim that American higher education is a self-congratulatory circle-jerk of the mediocre and unemployable - admittedly, not a novel thesis. Here are some receipts.
It's got everything:
Thomas Kuhn was a bit more generous when he described this same phenomenon of long stretches of mere puzzle-solving followed by sudden paradigm shifts. The objective is to get published (in order to get tenure), not find The Truth. (Don't lecture at me about The Science unless you've read Kuhn and Feyerabend.)What few students appreciate is how powerful that approach remains throughout the academic hierarchy. Graduate students seeking faculty positions maximize their chances by embracing and building upon the work of their faculty interviewers. Assistant professors are most likely to gain tenure and promotion if they anchor their work to that of their senior colleagues. Authors seeking publication in prestigious journals cite the previous publications of the editors and reviewers. The same is true for those seeking research grants.
In other words, the safest, surest, most common path to success in academia involves telling those already designated experts precisely what they most want to hear: That their own work had been so groundbreaking that the most interesting and exciting path forward is to build upon it.
Suppose you’re part of the senior faculty of a department committed to the phlogiston theory (i.e., debunked 18th c. chemistry). Two candidates compete for a junior slot. The first presents a marginal tweak on phlogiston citing your own work and that of several colleagues. The second presents groundbreaking proof that phlogiston is wrong.
Who gets the job? The candidate whose work flatters you and your colleague? Or the candidate who’s shown that you’ve dedicated your career to nonsense? Now ask the question about climate change instead of phlogiston. Then ask it about DEI. The answer is always the same. Experts who’ve staked their careers and prestige on the validity of a theory will always hire, promote, and reward those who burnish that theory.
The net result is a reinforcement of orthodox thinking and a field committed to moving further along whatever path it was already taking. I’ve termed this phenomenon “incremental outrageousness.” It defines the basic incentive structure of academia—and of our entire credentialed class.
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One common defense of DEI statements is the claim that there are any number of valid answers to that prompt, and the applicant just needs to show interest in some sort of diversity—be it political, socioeconomic, regional, or religious diversity. FIRE's Nate Honeycutt, also a founding member of the Society for Open Inquiry in Behavioral Science, decided to test whether this is actually true.
He conducted a series of experiments where faculty were randomly assigned to evaluate one of a number of different DEI statements: one focusing on race and gender diversity, one on socioeconomic diversity, one on viewpoint diversity, and another on rural diversity. He found that DEI statements failing to discuss race and gender were penalized—even if they did explicitly address another form of diversity.
An amazing 35 percent of faculty who evaluated a diversity statement advocating for greater socioeconomic diversity said they would not recommend that the candidate advance for further review. That means an effective rejection of people who would argue that socioeconomic diversity is the most lacking kind of diversity in elite higher education today.
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