>We are unable to find significant statistical evidence that preexisting growth in diversity for underrepresented racial/ethnic minority groups is affected by the hiring of an executive level diversity officer for new tenure and non-tenure track hires, faculty hired with tenure, or for university administrator hires.
This is certainly no surprise to anyone. The real question is - is this because most college administration jobs are just bureaucratic rent seeking, and really don't do anything to begin with, or is it because trying to hire diversity is difficult because there is a low supply of diverse candidates who meet requirements?
Third option: universities are already seeking to be as diverse as possible, so adding extra C-level pressure doesn't move the meter.
Honestly, I think university culture is too diversity/intersectionality/critical race theory etc. focused at the expense of other goals. So it wouldn't surprise me if additional diversity is hard to achieve.
The irony is that the modern university's view of diversity is so narrow-minded that it doesn't actually yield a diversity of perspectives. Yes, you can bolster a student body by welcoming students of different backgrounds, but ask any conservative student, any Christian student, or any student with no obvious ideological home in the secular Left if they feel welcomed and free to contribute the conversation and you will get an entirely different picture of the university system.
Diversity is not merely a set of physical traits—it has to run through the psychological core of a person.
I remember when I was at an elite institution’s diversity training session and the facilitator asked people to stand up and say how they felt oppressed because of their diversity. An enormous man stood up and said that he felt that people thought he was stupid because he had a Southern accent. That was so clearly the “wrong” answer that even the facilitator laughed, until finding the black people and women she had been looking for.
When I attended a private liberal arts college (04-08) there were plenty of conservative and Christian students, and to my knowledge none had any issues with administration or faculty. Most of the problems came from other students, typically because of the ideological fervor of a fresh (and uneducated) convert.
Occupy wallstreet was 2011, it ended with the narrative switching from class warfare to critical race theory and systemic racism. Gamergate was 2014 when the culture war really started to heat up. 08 was a different time, things have really changed that much.
I felt like it went into overdrive in 2016. Maybe partially driven by a certain political figure who seemed to be the perfect foil.
I think the irony of MAGA is that it made a bad situation far worse. Or rather, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. The question is whether or not we’ve learned that lesson.
> I think the irony of MAGA is that it made a bad situation far worse.
At some level I believe that this is accelerationism. You see pockets of it on both the far left and the far right. It was at least a competiting narrative of the last 4 years, though perhaps subdued from the mainstream.
> an entirely different picture of the university system
I disagree. When I was in college ~4 years ago there were diverse discussions in all my classes and students freely contributed what would be considered conservative mainstream opinions without retribution - and when well argued earned some support from their more liberal colleagues.
University means different things to different people. For many it means partying. For others it means the paper certificate you may then use to get a higher paying job. To me the heart of a university is the discussion sections where students pick and prod at their lectures and each other's ideas. Diversity initiatives did not, anecdotally, affect those for me personally.
> students freely contributed what would be considered conservative mainstream opinions without retribution
Sure, but the presence of these opinions is not the same thing as proof of a diverse, free-thinking environment. I shared unpopular opinions too—when I felt I could. It wasn't always easy to do so.
The chilling effect is hard to measure because people self-censor and self-censorship is invisible. It's a bit hard to explain, but if we take your metric and extend it, you can see where it falls short: just because there are black students on campus doesn't mean they feel welcome or comfortable to share their minds.
Isn't the premise already a problem? Even the mainstream conservative views did not result in retribution. Yet extremist liberal views would never be considered for retribution.
Unless you're the one stating the views, you're not in a position to know if those students received no retribution for their views. What you perceived as your peers listening and responding thoughtfully to the non-tribal thoughts may well have been anything but to someone without your set of assumptions. You simply cannot know.
Claiming that you know otherwise is highly indicative you're part of the problem when it comes to diversity of thought in these venues.
You are making an assumption that Republicans only donated to Trump and not to Biden. The Bloomberg article is about donations based on profession and large employers, not political affiliation or party.
He did. He's also probably correct. I'm pretty sure R/D affiliation is a fantastic feature for tracking the end target of any specific donation. A small subset of R's might donate to Biden, but those are likely swamped by the general split across party lines.
A straightforward conclusion from that data would be that universities are overwhelmingly conservative, having donated to the more conservative candidate. But really it just shows the futility of discussing things in terms of group affiliations when one of the major parties in the middle of an upheaval.
I didn't spin anything. The comment I was replying to said that 95% of faculty donations went to Biden. Biden was the conservative candidate - he respects institutions, supports gradual changes to the status quo, and goes to church regularly.
What I was doing was being a bit facetious, by using the plain definition of the word conservative rather than the contemporary stretched definition referring to a movement that is better described as radical populism. And I obviously don't believe that colleges are full of conservatives - that was a reductio ad absurdum.
My actual point is that it's foolish to be looking at that 2020 presidential race as a proxy for conservatism on college campuses, especially tolerance of conservatism, when the candidate calling himself "conservative" is nothing of the sort. Put another way, shunning Trump supporters is in no way shunning conservatives.
A fair point - once you bother to make it. You could have made the same point in your previous point without sounding like you went full-on troll, though...
That kind of makes sense though - university jobs rely on government funding and it's usually the Republicans who (at least claim to) try to reduce government spending.
Across federal employees, that doesn’t seem to matter much. I also wouldn’t expect republicans to care so much that they’d put monetary source before job type/location — it’d be quite difficult to be a republican teacher and find a job that’s not significantly government-funded
It's not a good proxy, at least not anymore, so I'm not sure why you would. Plenty of fairly conservative people had been registered Republicans for a long time up through and maybe including 2016. Maybe this was different in the 90's or 00's and may have worked then?
I am a bit confused by this. I went to college in the Midwest in the 90s (grew up in the Midwest) and to grad school on the east coast. I am agnostic, but my grandfather was a baptist minister and have other ministers in the family. I am a democrat. I was in the engineering school and started college with a lot of credits, so the only humanities/social science course I took was a junior level english class--so I can't comment on classes. But, I remember that people seemed quite willing to share Christian views. My roommate in grad school was a devout Catholic and we had several good debates in issues like abortion. I had another roommate who was a libertarian who also wasn't shy about his views. In college, I had friends that tried to convince me that the bible was consistent with evolution. My point is that at least in my interactions people seemed pretty comfortable sharing their views even if we disagreed. Has this changed in colleges (I don't work at a university)? Again, in classes I have no idea because it just doesn't come up in say a quantum field theory course or when you are learning analysis on manifolds. Even with coworkers, I had an officemate who was very pro iraq war and we debated a lot-- I also had him over for Thanksgiving dinner. Do I live in a bubble?
At lot has changed in 30 years. Not only are you about two generations removed from the current zeitgeist on college campuses, intersectionality means politics is now appropriate in fields that used to be apolitical.
Edit: Adding on to the generational change asepect, the Millenials and Gen Z people I know are much more sensitive to the idea of offending someone. And to be honest... are much more likely themselves to be offended. My alma mater now has an offical BERT - Bias Education Response Team. As a student you can file a complaint with the BERT against the offending person(s). When I went to college the expectation was that your worldview would get challenged and that was a good thing. But now it looks like you can get in some serious trouble for doing so.
Also christians/religious and people that don't speak in correct PC terms all the time tend to come from poorer backgrounds, so "diversity" ends up discriminating against the poorest of society. For historical reasons these are often the most diverse.
I do believe there exist some well-meaning conservatives who come to be Big City College and are hammered for their views. I think their misfortune is not just to be exposed to the same sort (but opposite polarity) of conformity demands I experienced growing up in a small southern town, but also to be used as political weapons by their supposed allies.
I too dream of a day that even a group as oppressed as Christians are in the US will be able to hold the presidency, the highest office in the land. Who knows, maybe one of these days they'll even manage it 46 times in a row. /s
...
Cut it out with the regurgitated Fox News talking points. My college has a university funded Bible studies club, an entire religion studies department, and a rather large college conservatives political club. My advisor is literally a Deacon in the Orthodox Catholic Church and another professor in the same department used to be a protestant pastor. Nobody is coming to brainwash your children.
People say this about tech, too, and I'm in tech and not particularly left by the standards here (I support free enterprise way more than anything else and can easily say X lives are worth less than Y money) and people haven't been dicks to me at all. In fact, people quite like me.
So considering that there's all this wolf-crying about tech, and the warnings about universities sound almost exactly the same, I'm going to go ahead and just assume they're also wolf-crying.
If you're willing to say, whereabouts are you? My impression is that the rampant illiberalism in tech is mostly confined to California/SV and companies headquartered there.
Which needn't damn the whole sector, but is still worrying considering how influential those places are.
I live in San Francisco. To be clear, here are some views I've expressed and had others discuss with me while still treating me kindly after both as a human being and as a coworker:
* Universal tracking and rating would allow better standards of living for normative people
* It's okay to exclude low-quality people from some parts of cities since they are generally bad for everyone else
* It's okay for some army of people to be kept quiescent with heroin since it is societally cheaper than attempting to get them productive
* Government employees are mostly rent-seekers. We can create systems far more capable than them.
* Most government services should also have auction lanes where you can just bypass the normal line.
Essentially, lots of anti-equity stuff, lots of anti-privacy stuff, lots of callous nonsense. People engage with this all in good faith (which is nice, because I'm not trolling them).
What you describe just sounds like standard neoliberal ideas that tech people with high salaries are likely to gravitate towards. That said, some of these are not necessarily expressed directly or are cloaked in euphemisms and emerge more as actual behavior than stated opinions. In any case, I'm not sure why you expected ostracism in the tech sector from those opinions alone.
That's possible. I don't agree with most of your examples, but only one of them would make me want to reach for a pitchfork, and they're interesting enough to trigger a "hmm, okay, how would that work in practice?" reaction rather than a hardwired one.
In my experience, people only want to debate views that are familiar but with a twist. The actual depth of the opinion is not the main factor.
For instance, among those you have listed there is the bog-standard and comforting "we have to control poor people and keep them away from us" but with the pretend-edgy "using heroin" as a twist. An excellent candidate to invite debate.
If you were to express views that were actually alien to them, I sincerely doubt you'd find an audience among your colleagues no matter your personal characteristics.
I suspect that no matter how abhorrent the view is, I can start an in-person discussion if there is scope for discussion¹. Go ahead, state them here. I will bring the arguments up in person.
¹ The relative merits of coprophagia, for instance, are sort of boring. Some enjoy it, others are disgusted, but there's really nothing interesting about "is coprophagia cool". Likewise, "are evil Jew bankers eating babies?" is sort of boring too.
>I suspect that no matter how abhorrent the view is, I can start an in-person discussion if there is scope for discussion¹. Go ahead, state them here. I will bring the arguments up in person.
I don't need to be convinced, I am sure you can come up with arguments for any topic. My point is more along the lines that what stops debates in real life isn't edginess, extreme views in and of themselves, or the lack of arguments. After all, many people enjoy the feeling of camaraderie that comes from sharing purportedly taboo topics with people they don't know all that well yet. It's just that what is actually abhorrent as measured by people's actual rejection of a discussion has more to do with calling into question the status or material wealth of their own class. For example, looking at a typical high-salary liberal in the tech sector, they generally hold a mix of standard pro-equity beliefs, some more discreet randian/ancap beliefs about separating themselves from what they see as lower classes and the meddling government, and a strong taboo surrounding an actual decrease in their social or effective capital.
Of course, this is all an intuitive reasoning based on anecdotal experience, so we might just be butting anecdotal realities at each other.
Sure, but the topic of this thread is the idea that there is such a monoculture in Silicon Valley that mentioning these ideas will get you cancelled. I think that is wholly untrue.
If there is a monoculture, then there are ideas that are abhorrent to that monoculture. I will attempt, at my own risk, to bring up these ideas and see if I'm cancelled if someone out there will just state them instead of talking in vague terms about these automatic blackball ideas.
We can test this hypothesis. I am volunteering. There is no risk to anyone else. I don't see why no one is taking me up on this. Or rather, I do see why.
To get back to the topic of the thread, I do not think it is a rigid monoculture. In this sense, I agree with you. I see it more as a spectrum. I don't think that you will be cancelled wherever you go, either, merely that it will be much more difficult to strike up a debate or to keep it going. People tend to just glaze over and change the topic to something more fun or pretend-taboo, but not much more than that. If you do decide to test it out, I don't predict that anything remarkable will happen beyond an awkward lull in the conversation.
My entire point is that I was surprised because of all the beliefs you mentioned having tested out in a social setting, all seemed to sit squarely within that spectrum (distancing from other classes, technocratic solutions to social ills, desire to bypass the government... etc.). Some examples of ideas that would probably be less well received:
- Far-left principles involving redistribution of tech worker capital
- Explicit racism instead of the condescending or implied version
- Anything to do with reversing gentrification or having poor people move next to their homes
Basically anything that would upset someone who is both socially liberal on the surface but has a discreet cynical side and a strong material incentive to keep the status quo going. In other words, a neoliberal. Beyond that, there's not much else I was looking to add or test out.
That's certainly controversial, but seems to avoid the major Hot Buttons Of Doom i.e. anything coded on (or insufficiently coded on) the officially important kinds of identity label.
I don't want to be flagged here, so I avoided mentioning any of those. Rest assured that I didn't hesitate to correlate "low-quality people" or who should be given heroin instead of jobs with the appropriate visible markers.
Another option: the same amount of pro-diversity work is being accomplished regardless of whether a university classifies the person/people doing the work as C-level executives or not, and the title and bureaucratic shuffling is effectively noise.
Yet another option: The CDO's effects are hidden as ineffective and maintaining of the status quo. Yet, without them, the environment would be even less diverse. Their actions are meaningful, but through sheer luck, they exactly cancel out any further 'backsliding' of diversity.
Have they considered that tenure track positions are pretty far along the education pipeline?
Best way to get "diverse" tenured hires is to get "diverse" grad students. And the best way to get "diverse" grad students is to get "diverse" undergrads.
And, shockingly, getting "diverse" undergrads can be achieved... by investing in whatever "diverse" community you want to grow.
> And, shockingly, getting "diverse" undergrads can be achieved... by investing in whatever "diverse" community you want to grow.
If only it were so simple. The world's best intelligence scientists and education researchers have spent the past three generations confirming and reconfirming the persistent gap in intelligence between different races.
The gap persists even as average IQ skews upward over time.
The "woke" viewpoint, and the friendly-seeming, easy-to-agree-with framing is that every difference in outcome is explained by oppression--full stop.
That this completely contradicts what we'd expect based on 60 years of hard data and irrefutable evidence is of no concern--as the arbiters of what is culturally acceptable, it is now verboten in most venues to even acknowledge the obvious race-based intelligence gaps. See: Charles Murray, a truly gifted scholar, being pilloried and cast away as though he were a holocaust denier.
what if not they're not actually seeking diversity? maybe that's a red herring?
what if the goal is to entrench an ideology?
a good strategy would be getting control of the hiring process. then adding signals and filters for like-minded people. CDOs may be highly effective if measured on that basis.
That doesn't make for as high quality of a discussion if I open with that. But it's certainly a possibility, and if the goal was to entrench an ideology, getting control of the hiring process is probably the best way to do it.
Some large nonprofit arts organizations (orchestras, theatres, etc.) have privately expressed that the hiring of a "chief diversity officer" has simply become a necessary cost for organizations. Even if you have already been doing outreach for years or decades to attract a more diverse audience, activists will hold it against you that you do not have a formal, salaried position dedicated specifically and solely to this aim.
From an ideology point of view, this is amazing. Imagine having activist pressure be so strong that you can make institutions create high paying executive positions designed to satisfy your demands.
And FYI it's not a paradox that you can 'care about diversity' and still be bullied by activists.
Major corporations are making requirements for panels at conferences etc. and it can get very complicated.
A female documentarian in Montreal just quit the industry over the institutional rejection of her work which focused on homelessness and happened to be mostly 'white men' due to requirements of diversity.
In my own discussions with 'executive level people' I find that they are generally of the classically liberal type (think European liberal). Basically - they are nice, upper middle class white men who actually do 'care' about such things, but generally are not exactly well read or super thoughtful on the issue. They're not 'up on the lingo' and are very, very afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing. The 'right thing' is effectively forced upon them, and they generally act to placate angry voices and want it to all go away, like a Father caving to his teenagers angry demands about this that, hoping that tomorrow it will all just go away.
I've heard, even my own very white, executive golf club member say the most 'woke' things lately it's almost made me laugh, when I inquire about it, it's clear they have no idea what they are saying, they are repeating the argument made to them by someone with a more radical view.
Because there is no 'pushback' on the issue (everyone is afraid), then things get out of tilt.
I'm not sure what the end-game is, but it would be nice if there were some kind of 'centrist' and defensible ideal that people could appeal to that enables execs to make thoughtful decisions about diversity but that aren't based on 'caving out of fear to activism'.
> A female documentarian in Montreal just quit the industry over the institutional rejection of her work which focused on homelessness and happened to be mostly 'white men' due to requirements of diversity.
Homeless folks were white men in Montreal? How is that surprising?
It's not surprising, it's just that she was getting widespread systematic and cultural pushback in the vein of: "It's not the time to tell stories about White Men". Of course, her own rejection of the industry wasn't popularly covered either in the press.
The industry preference is for sympathetic stories of Aboriginal, LGBTQQ, PoC etc..
This becomes apparent everywhere there is government or related money, i.e. grant applications for projects, even commercial enterprises.
Of course there's some thoughtful impetus behind this on some level, but these trends become cultish and authoritarian, sometimes promoting some upside down worldviews.
I don't see what "ideology" or "views" that would be. It's not like anyone is saying that diversity is bad, we all agree that the ideal company would match the diversity of the society it operates in.
It's just that hiring someone specifically for this seems a bit silly. To take a coding parallel, it's as if you had a "chief code review officer" to ensure people are doing enough code reviews. We all agree that code reviews are a good thing, and that most companies could do with more of them, but we also think it's a bit silly to have n executive position for it
> It's not like anyone is saying that diversity is bad
From the start, there are absolutely people out there who argue diversity is bad and that ultimately we should live in some kind of ethnostate. Then there's a whole gradient of people from that end to people who think the government should force integration in pretty much any semi-public setting. There are definitely people out there arguing diversity is bad. I don't agree with these people, but I at least acknowledge these people do exist.
In this spectrum, there are other people who don't have a problem with diversity but only wish for such things to happen more or less organically. Of course there's a view that if the people making hiring decisions are always a particular kind of world view they're going to usually select people they can self-identify with leading to a self-selection bias that restricts the rate of integration in an organization. Enforcing such integration or not, or the level of such forced integration, is absolutely a diverse range of policy viewpoints largely anchored on base political ideologies.
Your own opinion that "hiring someone specifically for this seems a bit silly" is a view you have based on your ideology. Others don't find it silly, which is their view based on their ideology.
We seem to be arguing two different things. I'm saying diversity is a good goal for our society to aim for, not that it's a good means to get there.
i.e. I'm not saying that selection should be based on skin colour, I'm saying that it's a good long term goal for our institutions (be they fortune 500 companies or universities) to reflect the diversity of our society. There are lots of ways to get there, and american-style racial quotas are definitely not the best way IMHO
Hiring a Chief Diversity Officer is a fine demand, in that it requires the institution to pay attention to activists. Activists of the 'woke' kind generally prioritise attention over improving ethnic group involvement in a field. Once the CDO is hired, the activists will move on gaining attention by making subsequent additional demands.
Absolutely, but it's not just nonprofits. It's become a competitive barrier to entry exercise throughout industry. Only the big, established players can afford to do this, and it functions as a sort of tax.
“Tax” is a great model on which to view the situation! I also think of these leadership positions, critical race theory / anti-racism / unconscious bias trainings, and diversity initiatives as a sort of insurance policy against social media-driven outrage. A large organization pays the "premium" to prevent a possible large loss of brand reputation.
As you stated, this functions to benefit the large organizations that can afford the premiums while smaller organizations will go unprotected and pay the costs of the outrage that will be deflected their way.
I think it depends on how much attention the smaller organization gets. I can totally see a CDO being a de-facto requirement for Bay Area startups due to all the pressure from the politics in the area.
It's also possible a small to mid size organization gets into some imbroglio on Twitter and realizes they need a CDO to try and stop the bad PR.
This is consistent with some of my experiences in a university setting. We had an applicant one year who complained (in a semi-formal grievance sense) that, when asked, the department didn't have sufficient numbers of formal administrative committees and roles assigned, programs, and so forth, to address diversity issues. What happened was they asked faculty questions along the lines of "what are you doing to address diversity issues in the department" and when the faculty couldn't point to formal administrative diversity positions and programs, concluded that we must not be doing anything. This led to a sort of penitential panic. The irony is that the most scathing complaints were leveled at the one faculty member in the department who probably did more to address diversity issues professionally in their career than anyone else, as it was a sort of research focus of theirs. The complaints weren't about inappropriate comments, it was about this faculty trying to address the question by way of reference to all the informal (but real) activities and practices going on.
It was one in a long string of "jumping the shark" moments for me, as it became clear that, even in a department full of people who were deeply and genuinely concerned about diversity issues, it didn't really matter what was actually done. What mattered were the formal legalistic trappings of it.
These types of formal programs can really backfire as well. I can recall another instance where the college had a sort of endowed faculty line aimed solely at minority hires. The irony was that this had the effect of attracting the most psychopathic elements in the programs, who publicly advocated hiring faculty under this mechanism in a sort of "pump and dump" scheme. That is, the line was in a certain area of research, which certain faculty had made it clear for years they believed was unworthy of hiring in. However, they were happy to advocate hiring using these diversity funds as a way of bringing money into the department, solely as a financial input, with the implication that it didn't really matter what happened to the faculty being hired. So in this sadly ironic way, this line, which was meant to bring in minority hires, ended up hurting minorities, by luring them into positions where they were almost certainly never going to get tenure, just by virtue of the politics of the research area in that program.
To be clear, I'm not actually advocating against diversity programs or officers per se, as I've seen these offices intervene in situations where it was desperately needed. It's almost like the current approaches I've seen have had the effect of creating as many problems as they solved, canceling everything out. It probably mirrors some of what goes on, where the same people aggressively advocating for addressing prejudice with regard to one characteristic can be some of the most bigoted prejudiced people with regard to another characteristic. Or people will change their tunes on diversity issues to suit their financial benefit.
Almost all the academics I know already share the desire for more diversity, are aware of pitfalls like unconscious bias, and are completely ready to hire people from more diverse background... only to find that the overwhelming majority of the applicants are run-of-the-mill (say, "white male") candidates. :(
One could force up those candidates that would add to a department's diversity, even if there is no indication of prior adverse circumstances. This is however considered undesirable - it might not be fair and also be bad for the candidate's reputation in the long run.
Academic hiring can be great fun but in the end it is already a completely ill-defined optimization problem. I do not see how a CDO could be a valuable addition to the process.
> the overwhelming majority of the applicants are run-of-the-mill (say, "white male")
See, people keep saying this, but when I was in school (in the U.S.) - especially when I was in grad school in the mid 00's - I was the lone white male in a sea of Indians. My teachers were Indian. The TA's were Indian. My classmates were Indian. There was one class where there were two Americans, including me - and the other one was born to Indian immigrants.
I happen to be a white male from the US and during my PhD I was my Advisor's only native English speaker. Also, at most of my jobs, I've been either the only or one of two native English speakers.
While I don't have the numbers, it would not surprise me that for at least CS/Software and likely other many other professions white male is by no means the run-of-the-mill applicant.
Sounds like the CDO might have misread their job description. :)
I should not have said "white male", in particular because in my field there are also a significant number of (excellent) Chinese and Indian researchers. Although we should not forget about the many other underrepresented groups, the most visible diversity issue for us is the gender asymmetry.
The intended impact of hiring a CxO is a press release about how important 'x' is and how great they are for recognizing that, whatever fashionable new thing 'x' might be. Anything more is bonus.
I think that's only true if you don't understand the development of power blocks between groups of people. Empowering someone to define policy regarding hiring gives them a lot of leverage over other people and groups, and it builds power blocks as members of each subclass of identity politics wants access to that power.
The press release is the least impactful long term consequence of the decision.
That's only true if the position is actually empowered. Titles are cheap, the Chief of Diversity may just be a PR rep in the same way that janitor is a "President of Custodial Duties."
That isn't completely true. Titles sometimes have legal implications. If a company is sued the testimony of "just and employee" has a different value from the Chief Diversity Officer. Even a low level HR employee (is someone who should have done something about the situation that brought this to court) might be able to sneak by on company policy not allowing the right action. However the Chief Diversity officer will take the fall. This taking the fall might or might not be enough to protect the CEO (who also should have done something)
I've had to sit through diversity training and then sit at lunch with a team of older guys and gently try to undo the damage the training did in their opinions of diverse people. I honestly think these programs are actively counterproductive in the majority of cases.
I think this makes sense when you consider what hiring a CDO signals. Organizations that don't care about diversity aren't going to hire a CDO and it is likely not going to be anyone's first step into valuing diversity. It instead is a signal of a commitment that already exists within the organizations and therefore isn't going to generate much change. The places that could actually benefit from hiring a CDO don't do it because they likely already have an institutional apathy for the work that a CDO would do.
Organizations that don't care will hire a CDO and put him (sexism intentional, though it could be her and still fit) off to the side to be a figure head for the non-existent efforts. If it gets the activists off their back it might be seen as worth a high salary.
Wow are my eyes deceiving me, but did they just blindly link to anything hit on the web that links back to them? Just from the titles it doesn't look like the backlinks hold too flattering a view on their work? This is pretty bold and catching me off balance, I always interpreted "mentioned in the news" sections as curated and tailored to maximize the positive impressions of a place.
> # Mentioned in the News
> * Colleges Are Hiring More Diversity Officers Than Ever - Here's How Racial Resentment Could Be ...
JULY 13, 2020
SOURCE: THE DAILY CALLER
> Surprise: Diversity officials pull down big salaries with little effect
> SEPTEMBER 7, 2018
> SOURCE: THE COLLEGE FIX
There is a pretty good chance that is automated, and there isn't a ton of mainstream excitement over a paper that fails to reject the null hypothesis. (I'm glad they published though! Keep those negative results papers coming!)
This is certainly no surprise to anyone. The real question is - is this because most college administration jobs are just bureaucratic rent seeking, and really don't do anything to begin with, or is it because trying to hire diversity is difficult because there is a low supply of diverse candidates who meet requirements?