"During one meeting, an educator recounted their experience of finding a colleague crying in a closet because they felt like such a failure teaching multilevel." https://t.co/RhU4kDFbZz via @BostonGlobe — Paul Epps (@paulepps) December 11, 2024 Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Equity
Racist Dog Whistles for Racist Dogs?
A racist dog whistle is like a regular dog whistle but it can only be heard by racist dogs. https://t.co/Yqy0pfNooq — Paul Epps (@paulepps) April 27, 2024 A longstanding argument against affirmative action is that if you’re a member of an affirmative action-eligible group, it’s difficult — it’s not impossible, but it’s difficult — for anyone to figure out whether your achievements are the result of merit or whether they were gifted to you. If someone wants to assume the worst, the numbers back them up. For decades, affirmative action candidates have been admitted to colleges and professional schools with much lower academic qualifications than other candidates. DEI is the new affirmative action. (It seems illegal to me since Title VII doesn’t differentiate between “good” discrimination and “bad” discrimination.) Companies and organizations have been promoting themselves as supporters of DEI, creating the problem that DEI-eligible employees are often seen as… Read more →
Unintended Consequences of DEI
Scott Yenor’s recent report on the rise of the equity regime at Texas A&M (TAMU) provides a glimpse into the gap between DEI’s public claims and its real, material meaning. Formally, Yenor notes, “diversity” is portrayed as the principle that “everyone and every group should be valued” by “embracing and celebrating the rich dimensions of difference”; in practice, it represents “an identity-based approach to society,” intended to box out “now-disfavored groups like whites and males through ‘political quotas.’” Formally, “equity” is allegedly aimed at “overcoming challenges and bias to achieve equal opportunity”; in practice, it redounds to “equality of outcomes plus reparations.” Formally, “inclusion” means “bringing the formerly excluded into activities and decision-making so as to share power”; in practice, it’s “enforced segregation of people by race” and “restrictions on speech” for disfavored groups. Yenor substantiates those claims with a startling statistic: As the DEI regime advanced through TAMU —… Read more →
Is Diversity Training Doing More Harm Than Good?
From the New York Times: Diversity trainings have been around for decades, long before the country’s latest round of racial reckoning. But after George Floyd’s murder — as companies faced pressure to demonstrate a commitment to racial justice — interest in the diversity, equity and inclusion (D.E.I.) industry exploded. The American market reached an estimated $3.4 billion in 2020. Though diversity trainings have been around in one form or another since at least the 1960s, few of them are ever subjected to rigorous evaluation, and those that are mostly appear to have little or no positive long-term effects. The lack of evidence is “disappointing,” wrote Elizabeth Levy Paluck of Princeton and her co-authors in a 2021 Annual Review of Psychology article, “considering the frequency with which calls for diversity training emerge in the wake of widely publicized instances of discriminatory conduct.” But there’s a darker possibility: Some diversity initiatives might… Read more →
Harvard, Yale, Berkeley Pull Out of Law School Rankings
Law schools at Harvard, Yale and UC Berkeley have pulled out of U.S. News & World Report’s rankings over concerns that the system is biased against equity programs. It seems unlikely that the system is biased against equity programs or that the rankings even consider equity programs, but if “equity programs” means what I think it does, it means that the schools reject accomplished candidates who are White, Asian or Jewish in favor of less accomplished candidates who are not White, Asian or Jewish. That would show up indirectly in rankings if the rankings look, as I’m sure they do, at LSAT scores, GPA and other indications of merit. It seems like one of two things can happen as a result of equity programs. One is that the schools teach classes to the level of the students, so if you reduce the qualifications of the students, you teach classes at… Read more →