Diversity - Can it Be Achieved in Academia?

[Ryika]

I didn't say that it did. I said that structures exist that make it more difficult to get on purely because of your demographic, effectively meaning that the barriers at every stage for black, female, gay etc candidates are higher than they are for white, male, straight etc ones. That's not fair, and it's not in the interests of the people who want the jobs in question done well.

Quotas are not fair either, as they create situations where not the most qualified person can be picked and situation where not the person most deserving of the job can be picked. The classical example here is once again the rich, black kid who has never worked hard on his education but gets a position over a poor, white kid who has worked hard to get out of poverty, but can't get the job because of an arbitrary number.

The only way to create a fair system is fix the actual problems that keep a demographic from achieving and trusting that once the stigma of that group being "less educated/good at the job" is gone the prejudice will go away, too.

That's like saying elections won't do anything because a person's vote doesn't matter. A few hundred? Try a few million. That's what's going on here. The "structural problem" is who holds power and how they got there, so by bringing in outsiders to that power structure is going to facilitate and assist structural change.

What I'm talking about are areas that are too poor to be able to get enough students into a state where they are ready for higher education. Getting black people from rich families into these position doesn't mean or change anything for the black people who are still caught in the vicious circle of poverty.

 

[Hygro]

The only way to create a fair system is fix the actual problems that keep a demographic from achieving and trusting that once the stigma of that group being "less educated/good at the job" is gone the prejudice will go away, too.

You mean like not enough adults with power to guide the kids toward power? Hm, how might we speed that up.

 

[Zkribbler]

The Supreme Court's Bakke decision in the 70's did away with quotas.

 

[Ryika]

You mean like not enough adults with power to guide the kids toward power? Hm, how might we speed that up.

Certainly not by using quotas instead of fixing actual problems.

It's not like educated adults go into the ghettos and somehow inspire poor kids to... find a magic bullet to leave the vicious circle.

 

[Zkribbler]

 

[Hygro]

Certainly not by using quotas instead of fixing actual problems.

Well, there aren't quotas as zskrib reminds us, but the stage of this discussion is that you're saying "you shouldn't do this specific thing, you should fix [general problem] instead" and I'm saying "here's one part of [general problem] that gets fixed via a generation or two of quotas".

What I'm talking about are areas that are too poor to be able to get enough students into a state where they are ready for higher education. Getting black people from rich families into these position doesn't mean or change anything for the black people who are still caught in the vicious circle of poverty.

Make a quota bigger than the number of rich kids and you ameliorate the problem.

 

[Ryika]

 

[Ryika]

Make a quota bigger than the number of rich kids and you ameliorate the problem.

This does not work and your simplistic way of thinking about this is exactly the problem.

Hypothetical example:

There are 50 jobs available.

200 Rich White Kids want in.
200 Poor White Kids want in.
30 Rich Black Kids want in.
30 Poor Black Kids want in.

What % should be used as the quota here?

 

[Zkribbler]

What % should be used as the quota here?

You're taunting me, are you?

 

[Ryika]

You're taunting me, are you?

You seem tired and way too stressed to take part in an exchange of opinions. Go, get yourself a book and enjoy a quiet, relaxing day.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

Let's be clear: A quota is usually unfair in itself. We can, maybe, measure the "unfairness" and mathematically balance it out using a large sample. We can not remotely account for the actual unfairness on the ground let alone balance it, yet this is where any actual effect manifests.
As a consequence, quotas are not about immediately making a wrong right, they are about breaking through walls. About destroying shared prejudices and notions of prestige, rank etcetera. And to destroy, you need to smash through, hitting all kinds of things and people.

Fairness is too delicate. We can't handle it using abstract means. We can only handle unfairness, and quotas are an effort to handle and use unfairness to destroy a greater underlying unfairness.

Where to draw the line? No idea. But a first step is acknowledging the nature of the matter.

 

[Hygro]

This does not work and your simplistic way of thinking about this is exactly the problem.

Hypothetical example:

There are 50 jobs available.

200 Rich White Kids want in.
200 Poor White Kids want in.
30 Rich Black Kids want in.
30 Poor Black Kids want in.

What % should be used as the quota here?

I'm just trying to reach you at a level you can understand

Quotas are to fix a national problem, and are driven by national policy and culture. Your example numbers apply to the few Harvards, in which case they can use any metric they want to promote diversity and maximum talent. But the genesis of talent comes from an upper middle class, attainable through multiple channels, be they straight outta high school or through community college or some other measure of collegiate merit.

The end result is that there isn't that much more credible demand for spots than supply, so the proportions of your example don't demonstrate the topic.

If you have a minority at 10% of the population and you have quotas for that minority at 5, 10, 15% nationwide, this rich-poor distinction is well passed on by.

 

[Ryika]

I'm just trying to reach you at the level you can understand

Quotas are to fix a national problem, and are driven by national policy and culture. Your example numbers apply to the few Harvards, in which case they can use any metric they want to promote diversity and maximum talent. But the genesis of talent comes from an upper middle class, attainable through multiple channels, be they straight outta high school or through community college or some other measure of collegiate merit.

The end result is that there isn't that much more credible demand for spots than supply, so the proportions of your example don't demonstrate the topic.

If you have a minority at 10% of the population and you have quotas for that minority at 5, 10, 15% nationwide, this rich-poor distinction is well passed on by.

This does not change the fact that you're discriminating against individuals in order to fix a problem of which discrimination is not the main factor. The small-scale example above is meant to (and does) show exactly that, by only taking a second factor in (the financial situation) a closed system and already quotas do not work anymore in its original form.

To make quotas work properly you would need to factor in every facet of what influences a person's likelihood to be able to achieve and change these quotas based on local factors - an endeavor that is absolutely unrealistic... but even if you'd manage to do that, what you'd be doing would still be discriminating against individuals in order to artificially change statistics. You're just shifting the people who are at a disadvantage around, because you're not changing anything about the problems that cause these disadvantages.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

Yeah I addressed all that. A post above the one you are addressing. Not even very long. Though not a one-liner, I admit.

 

[danjuno]

You seem tired and way too stressed to take part in an exchange of opinions. Go, get yourself a book and enjoy a quiet, relaxing day.

He wants you to address the post where he says that the Bakke decision did away with the quotas.

 

[Hygro]

This does not change the fact that you're discriminating against individuals in order to fix a problem of which discrimination is not the main factor. The small-scale example above is meant to (and does) show exactly that, by only taking a second factor in (the financial situation) a closed system and already quotas do not work anymore in its original form.

To make quotas work properly you would need to factor in every facet of what influences a person's likelihood to be able to achieve and change these quotas based on local factors - an endeavor that is absolutely unrealistic... but even if you'd manage to do that, what you'd be doing would still be discriminating against individuals in order to artificially change statistics. You're just shifting the people who are at a disadvantage around, because you're not changing anything about the problems that cause these disadvantages.

Or just recognize that the root problem comes from unequal access to power so you do a quota program here, a jobs program there, voting rights here, access to credit there, and so forth until you've stacked your Legos into a castle.

If quotas improve the total situation by 3% after all the costs and benefits are realized, that's a win.

 

[Ryika]

Yeah I addressed all that. A post above the one you are addressing. Not even very long. Though not a one-liner, I admit.

Sorry, did not see that post.

I think you very accurately summarized the nature of quotas, but I also think the assumption that there are walls that can only be smashed with a hammer is incorrect. What needs to change is the mindset and the mindset does not change if people are just forced into something.

More than that I think trying to fix unfairness with more unfairness is a very dangerous thing to do that can very easily cause more suffering than it solves, especially when we force quotas for things that are only part of the issue - such as focusing on race while ignoring wealth. And on a greater scale allowing people to decide when discrimination is acceptable "for the greater good" is even more of a problem.

Of course, quotas and affirmative action are, once in place, hard to actually remove once no longer needed - see the help women still get for their education when they're already outnumbering and outpacing their male counterparts.

Lastly, the assumption that we can only fix unfairness by countering it with more unfairness and hope for the two to counter each other out seems a very pessimistic view on humanity in my eyes.

 

[Leoreth]

Quotas are not fair either, as they create situations where not the most qualified person can be picked and situation where not the person most deserving of the job can be picked. The classical example here is once again the rich, black kid who has never worked hard on his education but gets a position over a poor, white kid who has worked hard to get out of poverty, but can't get the job because of an arbitrary number.

The only way to create a fair system is fix the actual problems that keep a demographic from achieving and trusting that once the stigma of that group being "less educated/good at the job" is gone the prejudice will go away, too.

I don't think anyone is disagreeing with that. But positing a perfect but currently unattainable solution is not a sufficient argument to discredit an implementable, but flawed solution. Especially because the path to the ideal solution is not a binary one/off switch; if you genuinely support it you also need to be on board for the imperfect stepping stones on the way there.

Otherwise we just get stuck where we are and our common wishes for an optimal situation are nothing but comforting fantasies.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

Actively supporting something that you recognise to be inherently unfair and acknowledge will trample over individual freedoms, all in the name of the "greater good". Awful. Utterly awful.

When you're actually arguing things like "fairness is not of the utmost importance" (paraphrasing obviously), whilst purporting to be ultimately striving FOR fairness, then something's gone very wrong. It's this kind of mindset which eventually leads to herding people into gas chambers. And I genuinely wish I was being hyperbolic.

 

[Flying Pig]

If you support doing nothing - which the 'let's wait for perfection' people invariably do, at least in the short term - you're actively supporting something which you know to be even more unfair. There's nothing stopping us moving towards perfection from a less-imperfect position - in fact, it's much easier to do so.

Incidentally, the Nazis considered the Holocaust an exercise in putting fairness before everything else - Jews (etc) got what the Nazis thought they deserved.