And in reality, entry requirements that are adjusted for circumstances are not *that* much lower - if you think BBB instead of A*AA is a 'free pass' then clearly you haven't done A Levels anytime recently.
Just pointing out that for some us who have only a vague idea of what A Levels are (having been introduced the concept by Harry Potter books), this discussion of BBBs and A*AAs and 3Cs and 2Es and the like is incompressible. Interesting that a thread on inclusion has gone in a direction that essentially excludes anyone not familiar with ins and outs of qualifications of the UK educational system.
The functional concept is that of offering to give someone a university place with grades lower than would otherwise be required if you know them to be disadvantaged in some way. That actual example grades don’t really matter - but A or A* is high and E is the lowest letter grade you can get - C would be a pass.
The 'free pass' title would be better applied to the private school entrant who (used to - they've phased them out now) got the offer of 2E for Oxbridge, and are now running the country.
To be fair, the famous "EE" offer from Oxford was made after performance in the entrance exam. Essentially, Oxford was saying "we don't actually care about your A-levels because we think our exam is better at distinguishing the best candidates". (And yes, the entrance exam was scrapped as being a significant barrier to entry for non-traditional candidates.)
The US uses a very similar A-E letter grade system for school and college courses, so I'm sure you can work that bit out. A-levels are the public exams covering the final two years of schooling in England & Wales*. Most kids who take A-levels will study 3 subjects, and university offers are typically made contingent on the results they obtain. A relatively modern wrinkle in the UK exam system is the creation of an "A*" grade above an A, as sort of an attempt to combat the increasing number of pupils who were awarded A grades (if lots of people get the top grade, then your exam has no distinguishing power at the upper end of the ability range).
So a university might give you an offer of "A*AA" to study medicine, meaning that you will need to achieve an A* grade on one of your A-levels and at least an A on the other two.
*I'm not going to attempt to explain Scotland's education system, because I'll probably get it wrong.
So. At the end of secondary school - usually the school year in which a student turns 18 - students’ academic performance is measured, most probably by Public examinations for Advanced Level Certificates of Secondary Education aka A levels. Most commonly these will be in three or four subject areas. The outcomes of these exams graded from A*, A, B, C etc. are used by many tertiary eduction institutions as threshold indicators for admission to first degree courses.
The functional concept is that of offering to give someone a university place with grades lower than would otherwise be required if you know them to be disadvantaged in some way. That actual example grades don’t really matter - but A or A* is high and E is the lowest letter grade you can get - C would be a pass.
E is a pass in A Level. You're thinking of the old O levels
If people want to know if you have “got” a subject, e.g. needing Maths & English for a follow on qualification they usually say at C and above - even though the pass distinction is technically between ungraded or any letter grade. I am not sure what the equivalent number is for GCSEs, maybe 4 ?
From 1975 to 1987 attainment in an O-level [General Certificate of Secondary Education Ordinary Level] subject was indicated by a grade A, B, C, D or E, of which grade A was the highest and grade E the lowest. Grades A, B and C represented the former O-level Pass. Grades D and E indicated a lower standard of attainment, but were still judged sufficient to be recorded on the certificate. Grades below E were ungraded and not recorded on the certificate.
GCSE [General Certificate of Secondary Education-replacing O levels] grades A*-C maintained the standard of the former O-level grades A-C and CSE [Certificate of Secondary Education] grade 1. Where the certificate for a pre-1975 O-level shows ‘Pass’ or ‘reached the Ordinary standard’ the result is equivalent to GCSE grades A*-C.
In the reformed GCSE examinations graded 9-1, of which grade 9 is the highest and grade 1 is the lowest, the lower thresholds for grades 7, 4 and 1 are equivalent to the lower thresholds for GCSE grades A, C and G respectively.
If people want to know if you have “got” a subject, e.g. needing Maths & English for a follow on qualification they usually say at C and above - even though the pass distinction is technically between ungraded or any letter grade. I am not sure what the equivalent number is for GCSEs, maybe 4 ?
That's GCSEs - was C, now a grade 4 being the "Old O Level pass". For A Level the red brick/Russell Group universities generally want As and Bs; the ex-polys anything down to two Es depending on course and how desperate they are for students.
Hence the old Oxbridge 2Es offer - to enter university at all you had to matriculate- the old matriculation requirement was 5 O Level passes and 2 A Level passes.
The functional concept is that of offering to give someone a university place with grades lower than would otherwise be required if you know them to be disadvantaged in some way. That actual example grades don’t really matter - but A or A* is high and E is the lowest letter grade you can get - C would be a pass.
The US uses a very similar A-E letter grade system for school and college courses, so I'm sure you can work that bit out.
I think you’re both missing my point, which granted I may not have made very clearly.
I wasn’t looking for an explanation of how the UK system works. Yes, I can generally work out that As are better than Cs. And yes, the US uses a similar A–D and F system (no Es here), though the US doesn’t have a similar qualification in a particular subject, like an A-Level in Math. The determinative thing in the US system is usually the grade point average in all subjects.
But my point was this: In a thread on inclusion, the discussion had taken a turn that used lots of what is essentially local jargon, resting upon assumed shared knowledge and experience—if not directly, than indirectly (i.e., I know how you do it is different but it’s close enough that you should be able to translate it.) From my perspective and in my experience as one who ticks pretty much every box on privilege in America, it’s fundamental to a discussion about inclusion and exclusion to understand that what I take as given to be common knowledge or experience very well may not actually be common knowledge or experience; it’s just the common knowledge and experience of people like me. And to treat it as universal knowledge and experience excludes people not like me, and makes it harder for me to hear what they are saying.
The Ship often tends to be a very British-centric vessel, where a British (and maybe Anglican) norm can be taken to be the norm. Given the history of the Ship and the makeup of those onboard, that’s not surprising. The result is that there can be times that those of us who aren’t British can be bewildered and may need to ask for clarification, or maybe just shrug and move on.
To be very clear, I’m not saying anyone here is trying to exclude, that it’s unreasonable given circumstances for the Ship to list to British-centric, or that this is really a problem. It just struck me as worth noting that in this thread on inclusion, we have a completely low-stakes, almost trivial example of how a discussion can exclude without any intent to do so, and without any awareness on the part of those participating of it doing so.
The functional concept is that of offering to give someone a university place with grades lower than would otherwise be required if you know them to be disadvantaged in some way. That actual example grades don’t really matter - but A or A* is high and E is the lowest letter grade you can get - C would be a pass.
E is a pass in A Level. You're thinking of the old O levels
The functional concept is that of offering to give someone a university place with grades lower than would otherwise be required if you know them to be disadvantaged in some way. That actual example grades don’t really matter - but A or A* is high and E is the lowest letter grade you can get - C would be a pass.
E is a pass in A Level. You're thinking of the old O levels
Is there an English translation of this please?
Not without getting a detention from the hosts, no.
Anecdotally, I know an academic to whom this applies. He identifies as a straight cisgender white male with no identified disabilities. He can't get hired by any faculty anywhere, as institutions aren't looking to add more academics with his profile. (He's also kind of a douche, so his personality may be a barrier too. He does not identify as having, nor in my non-expert opinion does he have, a diagnosis relating to neurodiversity or mental illness. Just garden-variety douchiness.)
This isn't fair to him. It is an accident of history that his incarnation coincides with non-preferred categories.
If I were looking for a place to study, and the faculty were all straight cisgender white males with no identified disabilities, I would not choose to study there. Even if the faculty were Einstein-level geniuses and superb educators, I would not choose it.
I recognize and wrestle with my own hypocrisy about this. I don't think it was fair when accidents of history meant that people with non-preferred categories of different eras were discriminated against. I've decided that God is responsible for creating the space-time parameters in which we live.
Anecdotally, I know an academic to whom this applies. He identifies as a straight cisgender white male with no identified disabilities. He can't get hired by any faculty anywhere, as institutions aren't looking to add more academics with his profile.
Academia is massively competitive and there's an over-abundance of qualified staff chasing every role, so it's not surprising that faced with multiple candidates with equivalent levels of qualification universities seek to go with the candidate who will diversify their own departments, with all the benefits - intellectual, economic and otherwise - that that brings.
First of all I personally wouldn't use a newspaper like that as a source - it's so rare that anything a right wing newspaper prints about universities and identity issues isn't distorted or worse (we had an example of that the other day from the Daily Telegraph falsely claiming that a Scottish university was refusing to teach Jane Austen) and it takes so much labour to check out for distortions, especially when it's not my country and I'm not familiar with it, that I just wouldn't start discussing this from such a source from the get go.
Universities and students have been a subject of right-wing moral panic for decades in the US, Canada and the UK so it's necessary to be extremely wary of such pieces.
The academic job market at the moment is incredibly tough - certainly where I am and many many eminently suitable candidates don't get jobs and leave academia for many many reasons. ( I've been on the academic job market myself and so speak from experience)
Where are the actual figures for diversity in universities and how their hiring is going? What do the actual statistics as opposed to anecdotes say about what their composition looks like and who is most likely to get a job? I somehow very much doubt that it will turn out that white males as a group are disadvantaged relative to other groups - what might be happening though is that some not-so-ideal white male candidates are sometimes no longer quite so able to snap up jobs that they once might have got instead of far better female or indigenous candidates etc.
This is from the LSE Business review on political quotas and the interesting way they ended up working:
Our main finding is that gender quotas increase the competence of the political class in general, and among men in particular. Moreover, quotas are indeed bad news for mediocre male leaders who tend to be forced out
....
On average, the proportion of elected women increased by 10 percentage points. But the starting point differed a great deal. Some localities were already near gender parity and not much affected by the reform. Others had low shares of women and saw a dramatic effect.
Italics mine
There's a big difference between starting to lose an unfair advantage and actually being discriminated against.
Where are the actual figures for diversity in universities and how their hiring is going? What do the actual statistics as opposed to anecdotes say about what their composition looks like and who is most likely to get a job?
And academia is definitely VERY white, with especially few women of colour and particularly Black women in senior roles. Women in academia are still overwhelmingly white. I think it's important not to just look at the gender ratios here.
And academia is definitely VERY white, with especially few women of colour and particularly Black women in senior roles. Women in academia are still overwhelmingly white. I think it's important not to just look at the gender ratios here.
Yes. Though, as per the second article, at the time there appears to have been little attention paid to collating those other ratios.
Our Equality & Diversity team organised a seminar earlier this year on how our university is doing in regard to diversity in appointments. In particular relating to appointments of Black British staff (who are especially under-represented in the stats - many colleges within the university have quite reasonable figures for employment of Black staff at entry and intermediate grades, but an examination of those figures shows that it's mostly by appointing staff from overseas who spend a few years in the university gaining experience before taking up senior appointments in their home nations). Top grades of staff are woefully lacking diversity, in both gender and ethnicity. I assume most universities (and other large employers) have a lot of data on the diversity of applicants and appointments - it's what the diversity monitoring forms that have been collected for decades are supposed to monitor.
The efforts in the university are aimed at recruiting staff from under-represented groups at entry levels, because if you don't get people in at those levels then they're simply not there to take up positions at higher grades. Including PhD scholarships specifically set up for black British students in recognition of the funds from the slave trade that helped establish the university. Also schemes to provide additional mentoring for under represented groups (so, for example, successful women within the upper grades of the university mentoring younger women nearer the start of their careers). And, training of those who sit on appointment panels to address their unconscious biases (and, exclude anyone with such biases from the appointment process). There aren't quotas that need to be filled by appointment panels (the process is supposed to be done irrespective of gender and ethnicity ... though, in practice that's not the case, hence the training), and it would be illegal to offer jobs without advertising or to advertise for particular gender or ethnic groups (unless there's a particular reason for that). But, yes mediocre white men shouldn't have an advantage over better applicants. To realise that usually requires some form of positive discrimination - eg: making sure the short list includes a higher proportion of usually disadvantaged applicants. Universities would still want to appoint the best people, but appointment panels often need to widen their views of who the best person would be (often not the upper/middle class white man).
Our main finding is that gender quotas increase the competence of the political class in general, and among men in particular. Moreover, quotas are indeed bad news for mediocre male leaders who tend to be forced out
Mediocre white men not being employed when there are better women, or minority candidates available, is an unequivocally good thing.
I think that's not quite what this complaint is, though. It is certainly the case that institution after institution is looking at their assemblage of white men and thinking "we need more diversity in here". And they do. Which means that in order to do that (because they're not going through their existing faculty and firing the marginal people), they really need to disproportionately over-hire minority candidates in order to help correct the previous imbalance.
Anecdotally, my own instructions from my employer are to try hard to hire candidates from groups that are currently underrepresented. What this means in practice is that if we interview a group of candidates and want to hire the white or Asian man, we need to give very clear reasons why he is significantly better than the other candidates, whereas if we want to hire a woman (of any racial background) or a Black, Hispanic, or Native American man, we don't. If there are a couple of candidates who rank roughly equal, we are expected to hire the one that increases our diversity.
So yes, that means that mediocre* white men are currently disadvantaged compared to mediocre women or Black men. But it's really not a very big effect. It won't affect very many men - but there are a small number of men who won't get hired, or won't get offered tenure, who lose out to someone very marginally worse, but who ticks better diversity boxes. But it's hard for me to get too excited about that, because they're losing out to people who are really quite similar in ability. If you're the marginal candidate at the pass/fail boundary, then it sucks for you personally if you just fail rather than just pass, but it's hard for me to see that you've been done a massive injustice.
*mediocre here is weighted by the competitiveness of the job market. "Mediocre" candidates are really quite good.
Also, if I lose a promotion to candidate who is more of a minority than I am but is otherwise about equal, this person has already proved they were better than I am. Because they had fewer advantages than I do but did as well.
Also, if I lose a promotion to candidate who is more of a minority than I am but is otherwise about equal, this person has already proved they were better than I am. Because they had fewer advantages than I do but did as well.
Yes this would be my response too and given the way unconscious prejudice works at interviews it could easily take a better candidate than me from a minority group down to being scored the same as me. So it probably works to help correct unconscious bias.
First of all I personally wouldn't use a newspaper like that as a source - it's so rare that anything a right wing newspaper prints about universities and identity issues isn't distorted or worse (we had an example of that the other day from the Daily Telegraph falsely claiming that a Scottish university was refusing to teach Jane Austen) and it takes so much labour to check out for distortions, especially when it's not my country and I'm not familiar with it, that I just wouldn't start discussing this from such a source from the get go.
Fair. In the case of this article, I think the facts of the hiring specs are correct but the editorial conclusions are, at best, questionable.
I do think my acquaintance is experiencing discrimination in hiring. His credentials are impeccable, but he doesn't even get interviews. He does not embody the diversity that institutions are seeking (and are right to seek, IMO).
On the scale of problems in the universe, this isn't the biggest one, but it's a problem for him. The kind of institutions willing to hire him are tiny evangelical Christian colleges, who are not put off by the optics of hiring yet another SWM. He is extremely over-qualified for such positions, and horrified by the cultural conditions and assumptions accompanying them. That's how it is.
@Leaf but you also said that he's not a nice person. I'm not sure why you assume it's because he's a cishet white man and not because he's an unpleasant person. Maybe he should try working on that?
I've got gigs in the past not because I'm necessarily the best qualified person in the room, but because I've a reputation for turning up, on time, doing the work and not being a dick to those either above or below me. That counts for an awful lot when handing out the jobs.
@Leaf but you also said that he's not a nice person. I'm not sure why you assume it's because he's a cishet white man and not because he's an unpleasant person. Maybe he should try working on that?
Did Leaf say they thought it was because he was cishet? I went back and read her posts and missed that.
@Leaf but you also said that he's not a nice person. I'm not sure why you assume it's because he's a cishet white man and not because he's an unpleasant person. Maybe he should try working on that?
Did Leaf say they thought it was because he was cishet? I went back and read her posts and missed that.
Well the post said:
He identifies as a straight cisgender white male with no identified disabilities. He can't get hired by any faculty anywhere, as institutions aren't looking to add more academics with his profile.
Which to me indicates that Leaf felt it was the whole combination of identities.
Leaf doesn't draw any link between that and his being obnoxious, other than that the latter certainly doesn't help him any. At no point does Leaf say the latter is caused by the former. You're reaching.
Leaf doesn't draw any link between that and his being obnoxious, other than that the latter certainly doesn't help him any. At no point does Leaf say the latter is caused by the former. You're reaching.
I think there are perhaps some crossed wires here - I wasn't trying to say that he's a douche because of being a straight white man, just that being a douche is probably the main thing making it harder to find a position.
I believe that the academic in question is not being considered for academic employment based on his being a straight cisgender white male with no identified disabilities. It's all the more credible to me that he himself does not make this claim.
In his friend group, of which I am a distant satellite and includes some currently employed academics, it's just accepted as how things now are for hiring. Nor are any of these people folks whom I would consider to be right-wing; they are varying degrees and intensity of left-wing. So it's all the more surprising to me that they consider this academic's lack of employment a pragmatic matter of how things are in the academic employment market.
I think they would not shy away from the idea that 'academia is a small world' and ascribe his lack of employment to word getting out about his occasionally less-than-charming personality. It would be far more comforting to pin it on him, to be honest, than to consider that he is now not considered a viable candidate for reasons not in his control.
@Leaf but what are the departments that he's applying to actually saying to him? And what kind of area is his field in - is it in a field which historically has been very dominated by cishet white men and so has a more urgent need to recruit from outside those groups?
Academia may be a small world but it isn't *that* small a world, particularly in the US - and there is of course also the possibility of taking a position in another country. I'm really curious about his field given that you say he could only find work in tiny evangelical Christian colleges. No employer employs someone based on credentials alone, surely? I also find it hard to believe that tiny evangelical Christian colleges would be willing to hire someone who doesn't have beliefs in line with theirs.
Also that the other academics in the friend group are left-wing frankly makes no difference to whether or not their viewpoint is prejudiced in some way - left-wing academia is no stranger to institutional racism for instance. I'm not saying that they're racist, but I have a hard time believing that my academic friends who aren't cishet white men would say what they're saying. Are these other academics also white cishet people? Because that makes more of a difference than being left-wing, particularly given how not-left-wing the American left tends to be in reality.
Let's redirect from whether a particular guy deserved to get jobs or not. Most of us here are not academics, and none of us here (with the possible exception of Leaf) have read this man's resume to assess him compared to his peers.
Can we make this more general? If we're discussing white men's job prospects versus inclusion, let's not discuss it re one person.
@Leaf but what are the departments that he's applying to actually saying to him? And what kind of area is his field in - is it in a field which historically has been very dominated by cishet white men and so has a more urgent need to recruit from outside those groups?
This is exactly a statement that current straight white men are disadvantaged with respect to equally-able candidates from other groups, isn't it?
If, in order to rectify a previous imbalance, a particular field has "a more urgent need" to recruit people who aren't straight white men, then people who are straight white men will need to be exceptional to be hired first, and slightly worse "other" candidates will be hired in preference to slightly better white men. That doesn't seem like a controversial statement.
No employer will ever tell a candidate "you were the best applicant, but we're going to hire our second pick instead, because they increase our group's diversity and you don't." That's just begging for a lawsuit. Sometimes you'll get actual advice along the lines of "your experience wasn't a good fit for this position / we think you'd be a better fit for this other kind of job / come back and talk to us when you have more experience", but more often it's an anodyne statement thanking you for your interest and saying that we won't be pursuing your application any further.
Academia may be a small world but it isn't *that* small a world, particularly in the US - and there is of course also the possibility of taking a position in another country. I'm really curious about his field given that you say he could only find work in tiny evangelical Christian colleges.
Big research universities have prestigious research jobs. Small (often evangelical Christian) colleges have lower-status jobs with a higher teaching load. If the more prestigious jobs are trying to preferentially select candidates from underrepresented groups in order to correct their historic imbalance, the second tranche of candidates (who you would expect to fill the less prestigious jobs) will be overweight in straight white men.
It's probably also true that small employers care less about diversity, because it's not so obvious. If your department has more than a dozen faculty members, and they're all white men, then your lack of diversity rather stands out. If you've got two people, and they're both white men, it's much more statistically reasonable.
No employer will ever tell a candidate "you were the best applicant, but we're going to hire our second pick instead, because they increase our group's diversity and you don't." That's just begging for a lawsuit.
Though, in the UK at least, I suspect that using increasing the diversity of your workforce as one of your criterion for assessing candidates for employment would be legal (a "proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim"), but I'm not sure whether you'd have to announce it in advance that it would be part of the process.
@Leaf but what are the departments that he's applying to actually saying to him? And what kind of area is his field in - is it in a field which historically has been very dominated by cishet white men and so has a more urgent need to recruit from outside those groups?
This is exactly a statement that current straight white men are disadvantaged with respect to equally-able candidates from other groups, isn't it?
I can accept there there could be a world where so many people are trying to rectify a bias toward cis white guys that it is a disadvantage to be a cis white guy. But we are not remotely there. Look at the number of people being hired in any field that is generally considered appealing or well-paid and you will see how many white guys are being hired.
Black tenured professors are rare. Data from a 2007 report by The Journal of Black in Education indicated they represented less than 5 percent of all tenured professors in the country.
FiveThirtyEighthas a whole article about lack of diversity in academia. In that article I see that 74% of tenured faculty were white in the U.S. in 2019. Which doesn't sound terrible until you note that less than 5% were Black although Black people are over 13% of the population. Similarly, Latino people are not even 6% of tenured professors although they are over 18% of the population. Since tenure by gender is relatively even, I conclude that being a white guy does not, by itself, hurt one's chances of being tenured at all.
On a whole-population level that's no doubt true. I'm not sure that looking at the proportions in the whole population is necessarily helpful as it may hide the fact that the problem is way further up river than who gets tenure. I'd be willing to bet that Black and Latinx folk are underrepresented at every level from high school graduation all the way up to the pool of candidates for tenure. Given the way junior academics tend to get treated like shit for years before getting a permanent job, let alone tenure, I can see that it's going to feel a lot like being disadvantaged if you're left in that situation.
@Leorning Cniht but there are colleges other than big research institutions and small private Christian colleges. This is especially the case in the US due to the number of private universities, which is not a widespread phenomenon elsewhere. I find it pretty hard to believe that there are *no* colleges in the middle of that spectrum that would employ a sufficiently-qualified white cis man. Even accounting for women's colleges (which do iirc have some male teaching staff) and HBCUs [Historically Black Colleges and Universities] (which do accept white students so not sure of their staff policy there), there are still literally hundreds of middle-tier generic colleges in generic college towns out there.
Private Christian colleges - and notoriously some of the evangelical ones - usually have strict conduct policies for staff and students, including separate pathways for men and women. Was it Bob Jones or Oral Roberts that until recently forbade interracial relationships?
FiveThirtyEighthas a whole article about lack of diversity in academia. In that article I see that 74% of tenured faculty were white in the U.S. in 2019. Which doesn't sound terrible until you note that less than 5% were Black although Black people are over 13% of the population. Similarly, Latino people are not even 6% of tenured professors although they are over 18% of the population. Since tenure by gender is relatively even, I conclude that being a white guy does not, by itself, hurt one's chances of being tenured at all.
This is comparing the wrong things. If you want to look at the prognosis for current applicants for tenured positions, you have to look at the numbers for people who got tenure in the last few years, and not the total ensemble of tenured professors.
Not that those numbers are particularly great either.
But if you're looking at tenure, then your applicant pool is more or less the set of people who currently hold tenure-track posts at universities, so if we're talking about the odds of our white guy (or anyone else) getting tenure, then it's the makeup of those getting tenure vs those in the tenure-track pool which is relevant.
From your link, the current tenure track pool (across all disciplines and establishments) is 60% white, and 6.5% black, although I suspect that when you look at different disciplines individually, the picture is somewhat lumpier. So the question is how does the breakdown of people who got tenure in the last few years compare to that?
I think for academia, though, the interesting question isn't how many people on the tenure track get tenure, but rather the rate at which people move from postdocs or short-term posts to the tenure track. That's where the biggest winnowing happens.
(In 2019, 7.1% of PhD recipients were Black, so the share of tenure track positions looks roughly in line with that, which suggests that in aggregate, white men aren't in a worse position than anyone else. But aggregates hide a lot of details, and it could be that diversity efforts in one particular subfield might mean that a white man is at a disadvantage.)
Particularly in fields which are dominated by white men, there's a big comparator effect, though.
Suppose you're looking at an environment where 20% of postdocs get a tenure track position, and suppose 10% of your postdocs are from some minority groups that are being targeted for increased representation.
You would expect, on average, a blind meritocracy to select 20% of the people from each group. 100 postdocs, 18 jobs go to majority candidates and 2 go to minority candidates.
Suppose we choose to double the number of minority hires. There are now 4 minority hires and 16 majority hires. The odds of a majority member getting a job has reduced from 20% to 18%. That's not a very dramatic change. However, the odds of a minority member getting a job have increased from 20% to 40%. So if our white guy compares himself to his minority colleagues, he's going to see them getting hired at more than twice the rate that he is, even though his odds of success haven't been reduced by very much by the diversity drive.
@Leorning Cniht The main issue is that you have provided no evidence that there is enough affirmative action to be affecting anything. I would suggest there is are very few professor jobs that do take PoC above white men in the U.S., and what does exist is cancelled out by the Trump-stirred racism.
What gets me most is my own hypocrisy and struggle about, in this case, representation when it comes to academia. I feel some version of Groucho Marx: I wouldn't attend a school that would hire someone like me as faculty. On the other hand, I think it's unfair that the academic I know is unlikely to get hired for precisely the same reason. Argh.
But that seems like a strange response - nobody is suggesting that white cis faculty should be banned, just that faculty should be more representative of the students they teach and the population at large.
But that seems like a strange response - nobody is suggesting that white cis faculty should be banned, just that faculty should be more representative of the students they teach and the population at large.
But if you want to get from a situation where your faculty is all white men to one where your faculty is "more representative of the students they teach and the population at large" in less than 40-50 years or so, then you need to do some preferential hiring. Otherwise natural attrition will take you 50 years to get there, and that assumes that your applicant pool today matches your population. And we know that it doesn't - the pool of applicants for faculty jobs is still quite a lot whiter than the pool of students.
That’s a very good point about applicants. Positive discrimination is generally unlawful in the UK; you are not allowed to recruitment people solely on the basis of protected characteristics (though you are expected to make reasonable adjustments for disabilities). However, you are allowed to make positive action to encourage and support applicants from diverse backgrounds. My husband’s tech business encourages applicants from female backgrounds by offering family friendly hours and using inclusive advertising, for instance.
That’s a very good point about applicants. Positive discrimination is generally unlawful in the UK; you are not allowed to recruitment people solely on the basis of protected characteristics (though you are expected to make reasonable adjustments for disabilities). However, you are allowed to make positive action to encourage and support applicants from diverse backgrounds. My husband’s tech business encourages applicants from female backgrounds by offering family friendly hours and using inclusive advertising, for instance.
Is it not possible however that the reason that there is a relative dearth of non-white-cis-het-male applicants for university posts is because there is a dearth of same in these positions as young people are coming up through uni?
Comments
To be fair, the famous "EE" offer from Oxford was made after performance in the entrance exam. Essentially, Oxford was saying "we don't actually care about your A-levels because we think our exam is better at distinguishing the best candidates". (And yes, the entrance exam was scrapped as being a significant barrier to entry for non-traditional candidates.)
@Nick Tamen
The US uses a very similar A-E letter grade system for school and college courses, so I'm sure you can work that bit out. A-levels are the public exams covering the final two years of schooling in England & Wales*. Most kids who take A-levels will study 3 subjects, and university offers are typically made contingent on the results they obtain. A relatively modern wrinkle in the UK exam system is the creation of an "A*" grade above an A, as sort of an attempt to combat the increasing number of pupils who were awarded A grades (if lots of people get the top grade, then your exam has no distinguishing power at the upper end of the ability range).
So a university might give you an offer of "A*AA" to study medicine, meaning that you will need to achieve an A* grade on one of your A-levels and at least an A on the other two.
*I'm not going to attempt to explain Scotland's education system, because I'll probably get it wrong.
[Crossposted with everyone.]
E is a pass in A Level. You're thinking of the old O levels
That's GCSEs - was C, now a grade 4 being the "Old O Level pass". For A Level the red brick/Russell Group universities generally want As and Bs; the ex-polys anything down to two Es depending on course and how desperate they are for students.
Hence the old Oxbridge 2Es offer - to enter university at all you had to matriculate- the old matriculation requirement was 5 O Level passes and 2 A Level passes.
I wasn’t looking for an explanation of how the UK system works. Yes, I can generally work out that As are better than Cs. And yes, the US uses a similar A–D and F system (no Es here), though the US doesn’t have a similar qualification in a particular subject, like an A-Level in Math. The determinative thing in the US system is usually the grade point average in all subjects.
But my point was this: In a thread on inclusion, the discussion had taken a turn that used lots of what is essentially local jargon, resting upon assumed shared knowledge and experience—if not directly, than indirectly (i.e., I know how you do it is different but it’s close enough that you should be able to translate it.) From my perspective and in my experience as one who ticks pretty much every box on privilege in America, it’s fundamental to a discussion about inclusion and exclusion to understand that what I take as given to be common knowledge or experience very well may not actually be common knowledge or experience; it’s just the common knowledge and experience of people like me. And to treat it as universal knowledge and experience excludes people not like me, and makes it harder for me to hear what they are saying.
The Ship often tends to be a very British-centric vessel, where a British (and maybe Anglican) norm can be taken to be the norm. Given the history of the Ship and the makeup of those onboard, that’s not surprising. The result is that there can be times that those of us who aren’t British can be bewildered and may need to ask for clarification, or maybe just shrug and move on.
To be very clear, I’m not saying anyone here is trying to exclude, that it’s unreasonable given circumstances for the Ship to list to British-centric, or that this is really a problem. It just struck me as worth noting that in this thread on inclusion, we have a completely low-stakes, almost trivial example of how a discussion can exclude without any intent to do so, and without any awareness on the part of those participating of it doing so.
Please stop with the explaining of the British school system. That goes into another thread, probably in Purg.
Gwai,
Epiphanies Host
Edited to add: Please get back to own voice examples and such instead.
Couldn't agree more, at least in this context.
Is there an English translation of this please?
Not without getting a detention from the hosts, no.
Anecdotally, I know an academic to whom this applies. He identifies as a straight cisgender white male with no identified disabilities. He can't get hired by any faculty anywhere, as institutions aren't looking to add more academics with his profile. (He's also kind of a douche, so his personality may be a barrier too. He does not identify as having, nor in my non-expert opinion does he have, a diagnosis relating to neurodiversity or mental illness. Just garden-variety douchiness.)
This isn't fair to him. It is an accident of history that his incarnation coincides with non-preferred categories.
If I were looking for a place to study, and the faculty were all straight cisgender white males with no identified disabilities, I would not choose to study there. Even if the faculty were Einstein-level geniuses and superb educators, I would not choose it.
I recognize and wrestle with my own hypocrisy about this. I don't think it was fair when accidents of history meant that people with non-preferred categories of different eras were discriminated against. I've decided that God is responsible for creating the space-time parameters in which we live.
Academia is massively competitive and there's an over-abundance of qualified staff chasing every role, so it's not surprising that faced with multiple candidates with equivalent levels of qualification universities seek to go with the candidate who will diversify their own departments, with all the benefits - intellectual, economic and otherwise - that that brings.
Universities and students have been a subject of right-wing moral panic for decades in the US, Canada and the UK so it's necessary to be extremely wary of such pieces.
The academic job market at the moment is incredibly tough - certainly where I am and many many eminently suitable candidates don't get jobs and leave academia for many many reasons. ( I've been on the academic job market myself and so speak from experience)
Where are the actual figures for diversity in universities and how their hiring is going? What do the actual statistics as opposed to anecdotes say about what their composition looks like and who is most likely to get a job? I somehow very much doubt that it will turn out that white males as a group are disadvantaged relative to other groups - what might be happening though is that some not-so-ideal white male candidates are sometimes no longer quite so able to snap up jobs that they once might have got instead of far better female or indigenous candidates etc.
This is from the LSE Business review on political quotas and the interesting way they ended up working:
Gender quotas and the crisis of the mediocre man
Some snippets - Italics mine
There's a big difference between starting to lose an unfair advantage and actually being discriminated against.
Yes, it's worth asking what the picture looked like prior to this program being announced. It looks like prior to this diversity initiative CRC chairs were frequently appointed without advertisement: https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20210408151948785 and a only small minority (15% in 2001) were women: https://uofaawa.wordpress.com/2019/05/02/towards-closing-the-diversity-gap-in-research-chairs/
Yes. Though, as per the second article, at the time there appears to have been little attention paid to collating those other ratios.
The efforts in the university are aimed at recruiting staff from under-represented groups at entry levels, because if you don't get people in at those levels then they're simply not there to take up positions at higher grades. Including PhD scholarships specifically set up for black British students in recognition of the funds from the slave trade that helped establish the university. Also schemes to provide additional mentoring for under represented groups (so, for example, successful women within the upper grades of the university mentoring younger women nearer the start of their careers). And, training of those who sit on appointment panels to address their unconscious biases (and, exclude anyone with such biases from the appointment process). There aren't quotas that need to be filled by appointment panels (the process is supposed to be done irrespective of gender and ethnicity ... though, in practice that's not the case, hence the training), and it would be illegal to offer jobs without advertising or to advertise for particular gender or ethnic groups (unless there's a particular reason for that). But, yes mediocre white men shouldn't have an advantage over better applicants. To realise that usually requires some form of positive discrimination - eg: making sure the short list includes a higher proportion of usually disadvantaged applicants. Universities would still want to appoint the best people, but appointment panels often need to widen their views of who the best person would be (often not the upper/middle class white man).
Mediocre white men not being employed when there are better women, or minority candidates available, is an unequivocally good thing.
I think that's not quite what this complaint is, though. It is certainly the case that institution after institution is looking at their assemblage of white men and thinking "we need more diversity in here". And they do. Which means that in order to do that (because they're not going through their existing faculty and firing the marginal people), they really need to disproportionately over-hire minority candidates in order to help correct the previous imbalance.
Anecdotally, my own instructions from my employer are to try hard to hire candidates from groups that are currently underrepresented. What this means in practice is that if we interview a group of candidates and want to hire the white or Asian man, we need to give very clear reasons why he is significantly better than the other candidates, whereas if we want to hire a woman (of any racial background) or a Black, Hispanic, or Native American man, we don't. If there are a couple of candidates who rank roughly equal, we are expected to hire the one that increases our diversity.
So yes, that means that mediocre* white men are currently disadvantaged compared to mediocre women or Black men. But it's really not a very big effect. It won't affect very many men - but there are a small number of men who won't get hired, or won't get offered tenure, who lose out to someone very marginally worse, but who ticks better diversity boxes. But it's hard for me to get too excited about that, because they're losing out to people who are really quite similar in ability. If you're the marginal candidate at the pass/fail boundary, then it sucks for you personally if you just fail rather than just pass, but it's hard for me to see that you've been done a massive injustice.
*mediocre here is weighted by the competitiveness of the job market. "Mediocre" candidates are really quite good.
Yes this would be my response too and given the way unconscious prejudice works at interviews it could easily take a better candidate than me from a minority group down to being scored the same as me. So it probably works to help correct unconscious bias.
Fair. In the case of this article, I think the facts of the hiring specs are correct but the editorial conclusions are, at best, questionable.
I do think my acquaintance is experiencing discrimination in hiring. His credentials are impeccable, but he doesn't even get interviews. He does not embody the diversity that institutions are seeking (and are right to seek, IMO).
On the scale of problems in the universe, this isn't the biggest one, but it's a problem for him. The kind of institutions willing to hire him are tiny evangelical Christian colleges, who are not put off by the optics of hiring yet another SWM. He is extremely over-qualified for such positions, and horrified by the cultural conditions and assumptions accompanying them. That's how it is.
Did Leaf say they thought it was because he was cishet? I went back and read her posts and missed that.
Well the post said:
Which to me indicates that Leaf felt it was the whole combination of identities.
I think there are perhaps some crossed wires here - I wasn't trying to say that he's a douche because of being a straight white man, just that being a douche is probably the main thing making it harder to find a position.
I believe that the academic in question is not being considered for academic employment based on his being a straight cisgender white male with no identified disabilities. It's all the more credible to me that he himself does not make this claim.
In his friend group, of which I am a distant satellite and includes some currently employed academics, it's just accepted as how things now are for hiring. Nor are any of these people folks whom I would consider to be right-wing; they are varying degrees and intensity of left-wing. So it's all the more surprising to me that they consider this academic's lack of employment a pragmatic matter of how things are in the academic employment market.
I think they would not shy away from the idea that 'academia is a small world' and ascribe his lack of employment to word getting out about his occasionally less-than-charming personality. It would be far more comforting to pin it on him, to be honest, than to consider that he is now not considered a viable candidate for reasons not in his control.
Academia may be a small world but it isn't *that* small a world, particularly in the US - and there is of course also the possibility of taking a position in another country. I'm really curious about his field given that you say he could only find work in tiny evangelical Christian colleges. No employer employs someone based on credentials alone, surely? I also find it hard to believe that tiny evangelical Christian colleges would be willing to hire someone who doesn't have beliefs in line with theirs.
Also that the other academics in the friend group are left-wing frankly makes no difference to whether or not their viewpoint is prejudiced in some way - left-wing academia is no stranger to institutional racism for instance. I'm not saying that they're racist, but I have a hard time believing that my academic friends who aren't cishet white men would say what they're saying. Are these other academics also white cishet people? Because that makes more of a difference than being left-wing, particularly given how not-left-wing the American left tends to be in reality.
Can we make this more general? If we're discussing white men's job prospects versus inclusion, let's not discuss it re one person.
Gwai,
Epiphanies Host
This is exactly a statement that current straight white men are disadvantaged with respect to equally-able candidates from other groups, isn't it?
If, in order to rectify a previous imbalance, a particular field has "a more urgent need" to recruit people who aren't straight white men, then people who are straight white men will need to be exceptional to be hired first, and slightly worse "other" candidates will be hired in preference to slightly better white men. That doesn't seem like a controversial statement.
No employer will ever tell a candidate "you were the best applicant, but we're going to hire our second pick instead, because they increase our group's diversity and you don't." That's just begging for a lawsuit. Sometimes you'll get actual advice along the lines of "your experience wasn't a good fit for this position / we think you'd be a better fit for this other kind of job / come back and talk to us when you have more experience", but more often it's an anodyne statement thanking you for your interest and saying that we won't be pursuing your application any further.
Big research universities have prestigious research jobs. Small (often evangelical Christian) colleges have lower-status jobs with a higher teaching load. If the more prestigious jobs are trying to preferentially select candidates from underrepresented groups in order to correct their historic imbalance, the second tranche of candidates (who you would expect to fill the less prestigious jobs) will be overweight in straight white men.
It's probably also true that small employers care less about diversity, because it's not so obvious. If your department has more than a dozen faculty members, and they're all white men, then your lack of diversity rather stands out. If you've got two people, and they're both white men, it's much more statistically reasonable.
Though, in the UK at least, I suspect that using increasing the diversity of your workforce as one of your criterion for assessing candidates for employment would be legal (a "proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim"), but I'm not sure whether you'd have to announce it in advance that it would be part of the process.
I can accept there there could be a world where so many people are trying to rectify a bias toward cis white guys that it is a disadvantage to be a cis white guy. But we are not remotely there. Look at the number of people being hired in any field that is generally considered appealing or well-paid and you will see how many white guys are being hired.
From NBC quoting The Journal of Black in Education
FiveThirtyEighthas a whole article about lack of diversity in academia. In that article I see that 74% of tenured faculty were white in the U.S. in 2019. Which doesn't sound terrible until you note that less than 5% were Black although Black people are over 13% of the population. Similarly, Latino people are not even 6% of tenured professors although they are over 18% of the population. Since tenure by gender is relatively even, I conclude that being a white guy does not, by itself, hurt one's chances of being tenured at all.
Private Christian colleges - and notoriously some of the evangelical ones - usually have strict conduct policies for staff and students, including separate pathways for men and women. Was it Bob Jones or Oral Roberts that until recently forbade interracial relationships?
This is comparing the wrong things. If you want to look at the prognosis for current applicants for tenured positions, you have to look at the numbers for people who got tenure in the last few years, and not the total ensemble of tenured professors.
Not that those numbers are particularly great either.
But if you're looking at tenure, then your applicant pool is more or less the set of people who currently hold tenure-track posts at universities, so if we're talking about the odds of our white guy (or anyone else) getting tenure, then it's the makeup of those getting tenure vs those in the tenure-track pool which is relevant.
From your link, the current tenure track pool (across all disciplines and establishments) is 60% white, and 6.5% black, although I suspect that when you look at different disciplines individually, the picture is somewhat lumpier. So the question is how does the breakdown of people who got tenure in the last few years compare to that?
I think for academia, though, the interesting question isn't how many people on the tenure track get tenure, but rather the rate at which people move from postdocs or short-term posts to the tenure track. That's where the biggest winnowing happens.
(In 2019, 7.1% of PhD recipients were Black, so the share of tenure track positions looks roughly in line with that, which suggests that in aggregate, white men aren't in a worse position than anyone else. But aggregates hide a lot of details, and it could be that diversity efforts in one particular subfield might mean that a white man is at a disadvantage.)
Particularly in fields which are dominated by white men, there's a big comparator effect, though.
Suppose you're looking at an environment where 20% of postdocs get a tenure track position, and suppose 10% of your postdocs are from some minority groups that are being targeted for increased representation.
You would expect, on average, a blind meritocracy to select 20% of the people from each group. 100 postdocs, 18 jobs go to majority candidates and 2 go to minority candidates.
Suppose we choose to double the number of minority hires. There are now 4 minority hires and 16 majority hires. The odds of a majority member getting a job has reduced from 20% to 18%. That's not a very dramatic change. However, the odds of a minority member getting a job have increased from 20% to 40%. So if our white guy compares himself to his minority colleagues, he's going to see them getting hired at more than twice the rate that he is, even though his odds of success haven't been reduced by very much by the diversity drive.
None of the people involved are American.
Apologies - but equally, academia elsewhere in the Anglosphere isn't *that* different.
But if you want to get from a situation where your faculty is all white men to one where your faculty is "more representative of the students they teach and the population at large" in less than 40-50 years or so, then you need to do some preferential hiring. Otherwise natural attrition will take you 50 years to get there, and that assumes that your applicant pool today matches your population. And we know that it doesn't - the pool of applicants for faculty jobs is still quite a lot whiter than the pool of students.
Is it not possible however that the reason that there is a relative dearth of non-white-cis-het-male applicants for university posts is because there is a dearth of same in these positions as young people are coming up through uni?