Rethinking DEI in Higher Education with Azim Shariff
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- čas přidán 12. 06. 2024
- Is diversity simply a box-checking exercise, or does it hold a deeper significance in academia? Today we're joined by Azim Shariff, Ph.D, a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, to explore the complex landscape of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in higher education. In this conversation, John Tomasi and Azim delve deep into the multifaceted approach to DEI, discussing the pressing need to rethink and clarify the rationale behind diversity in faculty hiring and beyond.
Azim provides a fresh perspective on managing and harnessing diversity's paradox of fostering innovation and coordination challenges. Whether it's the impact of role models on educational outcomes or the intricate balance between meritocracy and social justice motives, this episode promises to unfold the nuanced dynamics of DEI efforts within academic institutions.
Get ready to challenge your understanding of diversity in academia as we navigate through the meritocratic, social justice, and instrumental values driving DEI initiatives.
In This Episode:
00:00 Diversity is crucial for universities to advance knowledge
10:36 Value meritocracy, consider the team's growth in hiring
11:07 The paper discusses the concept of the collective brain
19:26 Meritocracy is not ideal for hiring. Embrace diversity
25:47 Search committees value-adding, not dividing achievements
26:57 Join HxA conference in Chicago this June
36:08 Inappropriate for social restitution; improve education instead
40:37 Lack of diverse professors may affect students
44:25 Role modeling for learning and non-learning outcomes
50:27 Diversity brings benefits
55:07 Research shows a need for wider participation
01:03:09 Encouraging insight into higher education inquiry challenges
About Azim:
Azim Shariff is a Professor and Canada 150 Research Chair at the University of British Columbia, where he directs the Centre for Applied Moral Psychology. His research on morality, religion, politics, and technology regularly receives global media coverage and has appeared in top academic journals such as Science, Nature, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He has written about this work for The New York Times and Scientific American and has spoken at TED, the Aspen Ideas Festival, and the World Science Festival in New York. He is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and a Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences. He teaches a free Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) on The Science of Religion for the public through edX. Professor Shariff earned his doctorate from UBC in 2010 and returned as a faculty member in 2018.
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I wish I could travel back in time and let adolescent me know that any heroes or role models that I selected that didn't match my exact demographic background were less influential in my formation as a person.
I honestly believe humanities and social sciences have come full circle, where they are measuring the demographic impacts of disparities that they dragged front and center into every discussion for the last two decades. Congratulations social sciences, after rubbing everyone's faces in demographic disparities for years and years, generations of students who grew up in this environment now list your social justice motivations as critical to their functioning. Iatrogenic social illnesses.
Abandoning or rolling back DEI/DIE/EDI [to a more functional role, not focused on identities of people] is probably the best idea going forward. There's simply no way to control the intellectual autonomy of academics through activist projects [which is what many of these ideas become] like this without destroying academics as a cultural institution that people trust. I say this as a researcher (Computer Science professor) of DEI/DIE/EDI statements in Canada that is watching the "long march" quite brazenly go through schools in Canada (including Shariff's school) under the veil of this supposedly "good cause" [it really isn't, it's a bunch of people using ambiguous language to "get what they want" and creating a lot of confusion of incentives, while people with actual professional experience [like me] in working with the truly marginalized by society that can't recite the ritualistic phrases that are excluded]. Where some schools did 0% of these horrifically exclusionary practices, now many do. For example, while we speak about "EDI" like this, myself and some others aren't allowed to apply to jobs anymore without compelling ourselves to the quasi-religious framework of EDI/DIE/DEI. I do appreciate the sentiment of many of the arguments, but these are simply not the ways DIE/EDI/DEI actually manifest in Canadian universities, I've known far too many colleagues (myself included) who have been punished for merely uttering and criticizing this quasi-religious framework in Canada. How do we have academics and universities without intellectual autonomy? It's about as fundamental to a university as to chefs to cooking. We don't make chefs juggle balls too or sing for me, that's not their primary role; it is to be a cook.
This is serving a different mission, as Haidt may say, a different telos. Academics should be the primary purpose, but it takes little effort to see that many Canadian universities have abandoned that. Some schools will go as far to say EDI is what drives their decisions and make nonsensical concepts like "inclusive excellence" to hide their weird and convoluted ideas [because they have no idea what they are doing, and the damage it will cause to institutional trust in the long run]. I like the sentiments of the speaker, but I think these are hardly things we want to force upon academics. We can't have things mean 5-6 things at the same time, that's way too ambiguous to concretely institute without corruption.
Thank you for the presentation.
He could have really stopped at #1 - Being aware of those who have been boxing with heavier gloves and could be the best candidate because #2 - Hiring for social justice purposes is in immediate conflict with #1. Do you choose the clear best candidate regardless of identity or or do you choose based on social justice motivations? The latter doesn't necessarily mean that candidate is wearing heavier gloves.
I appreciate your response and have to admit I feel this being a self perpetuating problem in academia. I myself am struggling with pursuing a career in academia because I'm having a hard time constantly subjecting myself to the self denigration and flagellation that's expected of me because of my position on the oppressor hierarchy as a heterosexual white male.
Every article I read in social psychology is rife with wild assertions and accusations that are not fundamentally based in empirical observation or reality, and while I know academia could benefit from less orthodox viewpoints such as my own, the system appears to be so rotted throughout that I feel tempted to throw my hands up in the air and pursue a private industry job on a daily basis. Let the self perpetuating ideological and orthodox machine drive itself off a cliff, because that's where it's surely headed.
A real blow for my morale recently was finding Haidts and Lilienfelds work being cited for opinions that they clearly refuted and rebuked in their works, by academics who were obviously looking to pad out citations with well respected names in order to advance their social justice crap. What's the point of dedicating years to quality research when some room temperature IQ social justice oriented academic will misquote my work to advance their self serving and destructive narrative?
For a time I worked for s small company that did research on various areas within the field of Education centered on the state of Ohio.
Much of their work concerned measuring the efficacy of various DEI programs, including one which purported to increase the percentage of minority educators in the public schools of Ohio.
In the course of my work with this company, it became clear that "minority" meant black educators exclusively, and the idea was to increase the number of black teachers in larger urban districts so that the students had more teachers "who looked like them."
Additionally, it was considered a good idea to lower standards for teaching certification in order to make it easier, essentially, for black education graduates to enter the teacher workforce.
I felt that neither of these goals were really productive or positive programs for either increasing professionalism or achieving diversity. Both seemed more as methods to address the effects of perceived systemic racism in education than means by which to IMPROVE EDUCATION in the state of Ohio.
It's social engineering. It has a telos too and efforts are being made to change things to reach those goals. Reorganisation does not capture that as it sounds too neutral, it's definitely not neutral.
Correct.
Superb. Send this to every dean in the country.
What are your thoughts about the campus protests? Are the small number of students who are grabbing the headlines acting out of entitlement (my desire to express my politics views trump the rights of the rest of the student body)? Are they a reflection of left leaning faculty, poor administrative leadership, or a particular definition of free speech and the role of education
This may be the best talk I have heard concerning DEI.
Thank you for creating and sharing.
The blind men think they are feeling an elephant but it's a snake, a cow, an anteater, etc. all bungie-corded together. Someone please ask an AI to make the image.