Juno News - July 14, 2024


Lawrence Krauss explains academia’s self-destructive obsession with diversity


Episode Stats

Length

15 minutes

Words per Minute

187.00621

Word Count

2,864

Sentence Count

153


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 That is one thing that I am happy to always talk about on the show, the national sovereignty
00:00:15.240 discussion, because it's one that is never spoken about. No countries have ever existed for long
00:00:21.220 when they don't protect their own security and their own sovereignty. And we have increasingly
00:00:25.780 countries that are willing to abdicate that and individuals that don't seem to care about it.
00:00:30.060 But I want to return to that aspect we were talking about with Corporate Canada and Corporate
00:00:35.100 Canada abdicating its responsibility. One of the things you also see is the immersion of these
00:00:41.460 companies in the DEI world. And this is something that we see even more than in Corporate Canada in
00:00:47.200 academic settings. Academic institutions have dropped even the pretense that they hire based
00:00:52.980 on merit with more positions that are earmarked, not even just preferential hiring for DEI applicants,
00:00:59.580 but positions that are only available to applicants that check off some box of being a member of some
00:01:06.420 so-called marginalized group. Now, interestingly enough, when we're talking about candidates,
00:01:11.920 say, with PhDs, we're not talking about people who have been truly marginalized in their lives.
00:01:16.500 We're talking about the academic elites, regardless of whether you're trans or cis or black or white or
00:01:23.440 anything. Now, it was quite interesting. There was a piece in Nature, which used to be an esteemed
00:01:28.640 journal published in the United States, a piece in Nature that was celebrating the rise of diversity
00:01:35.900 hiring, which comes obviously at the expense of merit-based hiring. Why can we not just return to the
00:01:42.320 basics, return to allowing merit to govern who were hiring, especially when, as was noted in a column in
00:01:48.760 the National Post by Professor Lawrence Krauss? There wasn't really any defense of why these things are
00:01:54.460 working, or if they were. Professor Krauss joins us now. It's good to talk to you, Professor. Thanks for coming on today.
00:02:01.200 It's good to be back with you. It was nice to see Bruce Partey on earlier. He's actually, I'm editing a book and he's
00:02:06.380 got a chapter in it, so it's nice to...
00:02:08.640 Oh, wonderful. Well, I look forward to seeing that when it comes out here. This is, I mean, Science Magazine has, of course,
00:02:15.400 published some of the most, you know, rigorously vetted, peer-reviewed scientific research in the
00:02:21.000 past, and now there's not even a pretense of scientific basis for this. Explain what they're
00:02:27.040 passing off here as justification for DEI over merit. Yeah. First, we should correct. You earlier
00:02:33.160 said nature. Sorry, science. But it's all right. Nature's not equally bad. We could have an...
00:02:38.140 Yeah, fair enough. Nature and the ridiculous editorials that have appeared there.
00:02:41.680 Well, Nature and Science, which are two of the preeminent science journals in the
00:02:45.400 world, or have been, and I have to say I've published in both, they're both coming out
00:02:55.840 and not talking about science. And in particular, you'd think a science journal, when they talked
00:03:00.120 about whether some action took place, they first talked about what the empirical evidence
00:03:07.540 would be to support the action and what the consequences of the action are. But they didn't
00:03:11.720 do any of those things. It was just a remarkable statement that suddenly, and it was like celebrating
00:03:18.420 this remarkable fact that this university in Denmark had announced a policy where for the first six
00:03:24.840 months of every year, they would only hire women. And they announced that, guess what? The number of
00:03:31.540 women increased. Isn't that amazing? And again, what's also equally amazing, there was no discussion
00:03:41.180 in the article about merit or about qualifications, except to say two things, that many of the women
00:03:48.320 who were headhunted, they went out and sought women. This is an engineering school. Let's make that
00:03:53.020 clear. So it has a low proportion of women. One of the reasons was that women don't seem to want to go
00:03:57.980 into engineering. But that is never, ever discussed in this kind of article. The assumption is that somehow
00:04:02.680 they're being kept out. So the school went out and headhunted women. And the only statement that was made,
00:04:08.920 which kind of almost humorous, was that a number of the women who were headhunted said they were amazed to be
00:04:14.500 headhunted because they didn't think they were qualified for the job. And, and then the president of the of the
00:04:21.060 university said, you know what, women are just like that, you know, and so we have to take that into account. And you know what,
00:04:27.120 women are less likely to apply for a job if they don't have all the qualifications. But so we're
00:04:32.780 really happy that they're coming in. And when you read that, you think, okay, so we really want to
00:04:37.160 take people who don't have qualifications for the job. And, and that's a good thing. And it also is
00:04:42.260 sexist, because it's just, I mean, it's assuming that, you know, there aren't men in the world who
00:04:46.020 say, well, maybe I really aren't qualified for this, or I shouldn't do this. And, but, and, and,
00:04:51.380 and ultimately, the final question, which is, you know, what were the qualifications? What were the, the, was the bar
00:05:00.520 lowered for these people? And, and how, how pervasive this is in academia was really put home for me with a colleague of
00:05:08.540 mine, who's a professor at USC in California, pointed out that a colleague of hers who's Dutch, said to her, well, there's no, there's no
00:05:17.260 discrimination here. Because, you know, we're, we're not keeping men out, we're just creating
00:05:23.360 position for women. And, and, and it's like, that you could say that, without realizing what you're
00:05:29.800 saying, and being academic in an institution, it's kind of remarkable.
00:05:33.320 Let's assume for a moment that male and female engineers are both equally good, that there's no
00:05:39.500 distinction between the two. So in any group of 100 male engineers, 100 female engineers, let's say that
00:05:45.100 there are the same number that are qualified and the same number that are unqualified. But let's now
00:05:49.660 say that there are 10% of the engineers who are women, and 90% are men, which is not actually that
00:05:56.100 far off. So if you're hiring 50% of the positions being women, that means you're necessarily elevating
00:06:02.600 people who are unqualified. And they're not unqualified because they're women, they're unqualified
00:06:06.920 because you're manipulating your talent pool in a way that you wouldn't if you were just hiring
00:06:11.980 the aptitudes. I mean, this is not, I'm not a, I'm not an eminent physicist like yourself. I'm not
00:06:16.620 a scientist. I get foggy with numbers, but I don't think I'm missing anything here, but these people
00:06:21.420 who are longer educated than I am seem to be. Well, you're taking the numbers as indeed correct
00:06:26.000 in general. I mean, you know, there can always be exceptions, but it is a problem when, and actually
00:06:33.080 this has happened in Canada in a number of cases, both in the number of people in the cabinet of the,
00:06:37.540 of the current prime minister, but also in, in, in what the Canadian government is doing regarding
00:06:42.180 the most prestigious chairs in, in academia, the Canada research council of Canada research,
00:06:47.620 Canada research chairs. Yeah. And, and they're requiring that to match the demographics of the
00:06:53.280 background society. Exactly. And therefore requiring among other things that only women can be offered
00:06:58.580 these positions. And the real question is, and in order to do the statistics properly for what you said,
00:07:04.260 your presumption is perfectly reasonable. A priori, if you don't know any of the numbers,
00:07:07.400 it's more reasonable to assume what you assumed than to assume the opposite, but better still is
00:07:12.480 to look at the pool of applicants, the pool of people who are, who are applying. If, if 90% of the
00:07:19.580 people who are applying for positions are male and you take 50% of the positions and give them to
00:07:26.980 females say, then clearly, then clearly you're doing something wrong. I mean, if there's equal
00:07:31.980 application, if they're equal pools, that's one thing, but you have to look at the pools of the
00:07:36.320 applicants. And there's lots of studies that suggest, and every time people have tried to enforce these
00:07:43.200 demographic rules and say engineering, that they find that, that generally they attract less, fewer women,
00:07:49.120 even, even if you try and do these things, there are other fields like, by the way, education, which are 80 or 90%
00:07:54.600 women in, in, at universities and, and, and, and, and, in, in, in colleges. And, but no one tries to turn
00:08:01.620 it around the other way. So the point is that there are predilections. And in fact, there have been
00:08:06.020 studies of, you know, there's some societies, you might say that are more egalitarian, like ones in,
00:08:10.660 in, in, in, in Scandinavia. And interestingly enough, those which seem to have fewer barriers for women
00:08:17.420 doing things have even a larger gap between, in, in certain STEM fields, like engineering than,
00:08:23.000 in, than in, in, in, in the West. So there are many people, what reasons why people may not choose
00:08:28.320 to go into a field and to say that, to assume it's always sexism or racism is clearly to make an
00:08:33.600 assumption that you, you have an obligation to show, first of all. But secondly, you're, you're, you know,
00:08:39.980 you're, you're ultimately doing a disservice to everyone. If you, because you're also suggesting
00:08:46.040 that you're being patronizing to women, you're suggesting that they, they can't compete, first
00:08:51.360 of all, you know, in an open playing field. And, and it's also arguing that there are only certain
00:08:58.460 fields that you want to put women in, and there, and there are other fields, you don't care that
00:09:02.620 there are no men in. The whole thing is patronizing women, discriminating against men, and anti-merit.
00:09:08.180 There's, on the surface, it makes no sense. Now I'm a scientist, and I'm, I'm perfectly happy to be
00:09:15.240 proved wrong by data and evidence, but there's no such data and evidence applied here, or it's in
00:09:20.880 fact, every bit of evidence I've ever seen suggests the opposite. That first of all, these kind of
00:09:25.400 brute force affirmative action techniques don't work in general to affect the field. They also stigmatize
00:09:32.980 the, the people who, who do get the jobs, because, you know, if they get a job because it's a women
00:09:38.320 only job, then they're, your presumption is that's why they got the job, not because of their
00:09:43.960 qualifications. And the last thing is, you're generally not doing what, I mean, all these things
00:09:49.860 are well-motivated to try and, you know, increase the opportunities for people. But what, especially
00:09:56.360 people who are really marginalized, but what you're doing when you're hiring faculty is you're not dealing
00:10:00.600 with people who are marginalized. You're dealing with the elites, generally. You're dealing with
00:10:04.000 people who've gone to get a PhD at a reasonable university. They were, and so you're not, you're
00:10:08.800 not digging into the people who are really, you know, the, I used to live in Cleveland,
00:10:13.020 the people, the kids in the public schools there who don't have textbooks because the schools are
00:10:17.020 run down. And, and, you know, those are the people you want to try and give a leg up to. You want
00:10:21.340 to provide opportunities, but at the highest end of academia, you're generally not.
00:10:25.140 Oh yeah. Yeah. Diversity is all about.
00:10:27.720 The idea that a Harvard educated black woman is more marginalized than a, you know, a white
00:10:32.460 working class guy from rural Ohio or something is just not at all.
00:10:36.680 It's discriminatory and it's, it's exactly the right. I mean, you're, so it's doing none of the
00:10:41.060 things that, these are all well-motivated in principle, but it's not doing what you want.
00:10:45.860 And then it's ill, ill, ill brought about. And the, and, and the net consequence hurt, as far as I can
00:10:54.340 see, generally hurts everyone. The people who get the jobs are stigmatized. People who don't get the
00:10:58.620 jobs, the men who don't get the jobs are, are hurt. If you're hiring people who aren't qualified or as
00:11:03.260 qualified, you're fine. Your merit is going down. So what's the, what's the, the upside except for
00:11:08.660 virtue signaling. That's what this is all about.
00:11:10.820 Do the proponents of this in your experience argue that diversity is just in and of itself,
00:11:16.340 the goal diversity is an established as a first principle positive, and therefore a more diverse
00:11:21.780 faculty is better. Or do they argue that diversity inherently increases something else that it makes
00:11:29.300 for a better education or a better faculty?
00:11:31.320 The claim, the claim is that diversity improves quality. Now, look, I can understand, look,
00:11:36.820 the statement is always made that, you know, if you're, if you're a, let's say a woman and all
00:11:41.220 your professors are male, maybe you, you, you feel, you don't feel as attached to the field and it's
00:11:45.500 nice to have a role model. I understand all of that argument.
00:11:48.780 It's a bit more esoteric, but there's a logic to it. Yes.
00:11:51.420 Yeah. Yeah. But the notion that diversity somehow increases, improves the field is,
00:11:56.320 as far as I can see, without evidence. And, and the, and, and the whole point is that you,
00:12:03.260 it's what we really want is equality of the opportunity. It's not equality of outcomes.
00:12:07.660 And I'm, and I'm all in favor and I'm, you know, I, my politics have, I'm sure to the left of yours
00:12:12.900 or have been, but, but I really do think that we really need to work to try and ensure, you know,
00:12:19.680 a poor working class single mother or a single father has opportunities and, you know, they got
00:12:26.180 bigger challenges, but, and, and so we want to try and provide equal equality of opportunity,
00:12:30.940 but that's different than equality of outcome. And that's what this kind of ridiculous policy
00:12:35.900 is all about. And again, in academia, which is the last possible place, you know, the faculty,
00:12:41.580 if you're hiring faculty at university, you've already taken a very select hand, hand-picked
00:12:46.340 subset of the population who've gone to get a degree, gone to get a PhD, many of them at,
00:12:51.440 at first rate colleges, they've already, they're, if you like, I hate to use the word,
00:12:55.760 but they're already privileged in that sense. And, and, and, and so you, I don't like anything
00:13:01.540 that's sacred that you can't question. And the claim that diversity improves quality
00:13:06.220 and, and diversity, meaning diversity of identity. If we label these people and give them identities,
00:13:12.100 either being female or trans or, or indigenous or black or, or whatever, if you label them by that,
00:13:20.280 that somehow having enough labels makes it better. It's, it's demeaning, I think, to people and, and,
00:13:26.920 and, and, you know, you need to see data and that's, what's, what it's all about. I think it's,
00:13:31.480 yeah. And I mean, I, I would use, I used to, you know, years ago when I had this conversation with
00:13:36.260 someone, I said, well, if you're, you know, going in for surgery, do you want the most diverse
00:13:39.540 operating room or do you want the best? Now I would hesitate to even ask that question because I'm
00:13:43.600 terrified of what some people would answer. Yeah. And that's, and, and, you know, that's the real
00:13:48.140 problem, which is one of the reasons actually I'm editing this book specifically at universities
00:13:53.680 is that nothing, I'm, I'm well known as someone who's not particularly religious and quite the
00:13:59.700 opposite. And one of the things that I don't like about sacredness is that you can't ask questions
00:14:03.600 that nothing is sacred. Everything should be subject to question, especially in science.
00:14:08.440 And what's scary is you can't ask the question. Even the question is, is a more diverse operating
00:14:14.480 room better for patients? I mean, maybe it is, but you can't even ask the question or raise a doubt
00:14:19.760 without expecting to be ostracized or sometimes removed. And, and that's scary because not only
00:14:26.420 are these policies taking place, but if faculty oppose these policies, then they're subject to real
00:14:32.340 problems at universities. So people, so I suspect that many of these universities, faculty roll their
00:14:37.820 eyes and say, look, we just want to get on what we're doing. We want to stay below the radar.
00:14:42.020 And if we speak out, we're going to be, it's, it's going to end up causing us grief. And I want
00:14:47.840 to just do my own thing. And I just, you know, let them do what they want. And that's fine. And,
00:14:53.120 and unfortunately that's the way it is. I've, you know, professor for 40 years, and that's generally
00:14:58.140 the faculty's attitude about almost anything.
00:15:00.300 Yeah. Just get by. Uh, professor Lawrence Kress, president of the Origins Project Foundation,
00:15:05.080 also host of the Origins Podcast. Thank you so much for coming on, professor. Good to talk to you.
00:15:08.840 It's been, it's been a pleasure. You take care. Thanks for listening to the Andrew Lawton Show.
00:15:13.420 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.