“Diversity,” MIT Style

A reader who has written about diversity in technology here and here has urged me to write something about this long article surveying the extensive “diversity”-building efforts and attitudes at MIT, including a determination to “double the percentage of minorities on its faculty and triple the percentage of minority graduate students” within a decade.

There are many obstacles to this worthy goal, not least of which is the fact that the “U.S. science and engineering workforce in 1999 was about 80 percent white and 75 percent male.” And then there’s the matter of Boston, which “is not always perceived as a welcoming city.” As Chris Jones, a new assistant dean hired to recruit minority students, has perceptively observed, “[i]t

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  1. Dummocrats.com April 11, 2005 at 10:29 am | | Reply

    Diversity: M.I.T. Style

    Diversity: M.I.T. Style

  2. nobody important April 11, 2005 at 11:36 am | | Reply

    Yes, one can see how racism stopped Prof. Bras from reaching the top of his profession. In a perfect world, a tanlented, dedicated scholar such as he might become faculty chair of a prestigious university regardless of his ethnicity.

    And it is very noble of the goodly professor to dedicate himself to ensuring that everyone has a chance to reach such heights.

  3. Will April 11, 2005 at 3:01 pm | | Reply

    Let’s take this guy’s words and change “minority” to “white” and you get:

    In 2003, a white person became chair of the MIT faculty, and this white person’s scope was now Institute-wide. He started meeting with other white faculty members for dinner about every six weeks. Out of those dinners came a resolution to significantly increase the number of white faculty and graduate students at MIT.

    If this was so, there’s no doubt that such a faculty chair would be labeled a racist and forced to resign. I hope this anti-white racism is not the usual outcome of giving minorites positions of power, that they use that power to favor their own group, but it seems to be. White people in power in universities don’t use their power to help white people – in fact almost nearly all of them support preferences for NON-white people. Apparently white people are less racist towards other groups than non-white people are. Can we really trust non-white people in positions in power to be fair to other groups? And it’s not just an anti-white issue. I’m sure a lot of qualified Asian-Americans will be rejected at MIT if this guy’s plan goes into effect.

  4. nobody important April 11, 2005 at 3:33 pm | | Reply

    I don’t think it’s the case that non-whites are more racist than whites. I think it is more the fact that racism has been increasingly defined as something whites do to other races.

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