The saints in action
Don’t miss Jesse Singal’s piece on the grotesquerie at UCLA when a handful of fanatics decided Yoel Inbar is not Perfected enough to be on the faculty.
There was a little bit of weirdness when, during one meeting with a small diversity committee now enmeshed in the UC hiring process, Inbar was told that it had been brought to their attention that (four and a half years prior) on Two Psychologists Four Beers, he’d expressed skepticism of the mandatory diversity statements the University of California system had adopted around that time for anyone seeking to get hired as faculty. Inbar is a political liberal and very much favors making campuses inclusive; he just thinks diversity statements are unlikely to accomplish anything, and are much more about a sort of easily faked signaling that one has the “correct” political values. He explained these views and thought the conversation was fine, even if he was surprised to be discussing a very old podcast episode. His interlocutors also asked him what he would say to the department’s “very passionate” (Inbar’s paraphrasing) grad students who might be upset about this. Inbar responded that he wasn’t sure — he’d probably just explain his views as he just had.
“Very passionate” meaning fanatical and determined to make the perfect the enemy of the good. He has some reservations about diversity statements, while still being a fan of diversity, but it seems that’s just not good enough for the Cathars of UCLA.
Despite these minor hiccups, Inbar flew home to Toronto confident he’d be offered the job. Not long after, he got an alarmed email from one of his allies within UCLA: a letter was circulating, signed by dozens of psychology grad students, urging UCLA to not offer him a job.
Why? I’m sure you can guess. Inbar was deemed Problematic. According to this counter-letter disagreeing with the original one, students received the don’t-hire-him letter at 1 a.m. and were told they had to choose whether or not to put their names on it by 4:00 p.m. that day — and they knew that decision, which was being framed as an urgent matter of social justice, would be public to their classmates. Grad students tend to be overworked and overscheduled; it’s basically impossible anyone unfamiliar with Yoel Inbar (which most of the students would have been) could have possibly checked all the letter’s claims in time.
But they signed it anyway, not wanting to be the next bodies on the pyre, so there’s this letter with a great long list of signees, which makes it look as if Inbar is the worst thing since Donald Trump.
I’m job-hunting right now, and this kind of stuff makes me question the wisdom of posting under my own name. I’m not looking for work in academia, but still I wonder if someone will google my name and see that I am not DEI friendly in the TQ+ sector (currently the only one that matters.) *
*Recently I was at the convention for Democrats in My Fair City, and the offices up for grab are for the School Board this year. If the candidates get the D endorsement, they get elected, and that’s just how it is in this city. There was a Q&A session before the votes began, and I had submitted a question related to rebuilding the confidence in our schools so people woould move back from the suburbs. Instead, the few selected questions included one that asked how the candidates would “promote safety and inclusion for LGBTQIA+ students, specifically trans and non-binary kids.” So, that’s what the candidates had to focus on in order to get the votes.
I think it’s worse than that. Diversity statements and DEI courses are HR due diligence and ass-covering. The whole point of doing them is so that they can be documented, and in a situation where, say, a black employee tries to bring a case for racial discrimination, the institution can point at the paper trail of diversity statements and completed DEI courses and say “of COURSE we aren’t a racist workplace, look at all this evidence of us Doing The Work!”
Tackling workplace racism is an important duty. Far too important to be left to the professional grifters.
Annnnd, as expected, PZ Myers is madly gleeful that Inbar was not hired. Myers is now a full blown Maoist in the academic Cultural Revolution. I know he means nothing in the grand scope of things, but I really did like the Myers of old, before his slide into ultra-orthodoxy.
Ugh. I feel grubby after reading the comments on that post (and another one) – so much railing and childish name-calling where discussion should be.Yuck.
Clamboy: it’s funny, but back in the day, my partner and I really wished that PZ’s blog had a filter which would just show us the biology posts. We were ALREADY atheists, we lived somewhere that atheism was normal and nobody cared, and we thought that anti-God-bothering was every bit as boring as God-bothering when there are cool cephalopods to think about instead, you know?
We should have guessed that ol’ PZ was just in need of the right god to bother. And he found it.