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Tiger Lava Lamp's avatar

I was surprised that neither this article, nor the BAR pod episode mentioned DEI statements during the hiring process.

These feel to me like they are explicitly political tests that require you to answer correctly on questions like "Who are the marginalized groups that need to be favored?" and "What is the correct attitude to take wrt helping those groups?" (hint: it's not "Fuck the haters. Be so good they can't ignore you") These seem like they would do more than advantage liberals over conservatives. They would advantage progressive liberals over classical liberals.

https://x.com/paulg/status/1794325571767513447?t=_ZRSm_YIQyee99cntXLumQ&s=19

Are these not as prevalent as I think they are from a Twitter heavy media diet? Are they too recent to explain that much of the gap?

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jsb's avatar

My experience in academia is that people are pretty open about discriminating against conservatives in hiring. People say a candidate is disqualified for favoring merit based hiring or something similar all the time, and if you interview in a red state, there’s a lot of only semi-indirect questions making sure you disapprove of local politics. I did a recent interview where a weirdly large part of one one-on-one meeting was her explaining she left Flordia because of Ron Desantis. Since the interviews take 2 days, you have dinner with faculty, and the conversation is usually pretty political and homogeous.

You wouldn’t have this without self-selection, etc, first but even if you are just a relative centrist on things you have to be really careful about cosplaying as a hard leftist. This is for a hard science too.

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