>You are simply defining intellectual as “whatever universities do and say
Definition of anti-intellectual
"a person who scorns intellectuals and their views and methods" from oxford
Intellectual
"of or relating to the intellect or its use", "given to study, reflection, and speculation", and ": engaged in activity requiring the creative use of the intellect" from MW.
I didn't define anything. If I said the administration was anti-education would that be better?
> the University must adopt and implement merit-based hiring policies, and cease all preferences based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin throughout its hiring, promotion, compensation, and related practices among
faculty, staff, and leadership.
> the University must adopt and implement merit-based admissions policies and cease all preferences based on race, color, national origin, or proxies thereof, throughout its undergraduate program, each graduate program individually, each of its professional schools, and other programs.
In what way is hiring faculty and and admitting students based on merit instead of their identity anti-education? Is your position that you get a better education from a professor who was hired because of their race instead of the quality of their scholarly work?
>In what way is hiring faculty and and admitting students based on merit instead of their identity anti-education?
It's not. Calling universities and professors the enemy is. The government taking away funding because you want international students to adhere to an ideology is wrong.
>is your position that you get a better education from a professor who was hired because of their race instead of the quality of their scholarly work?
You ask other scholars in the field to read it and give their opinion on it. It’s this thing called “peer review” that is kind of the basis of all modern academic inquiry.
In the case of hiring, typically a committee of other professors in the department would evaluate candidates, not a bunch of DEI bureaucrats. They would read what the candidates have published and see if the arguments they make are sound, and look at things like # of citations that indicate how prominent the work is in the field.
I don’t know if you’ve ever met any academics, but I promise you they have no problems forming opinions about the quality of work of other people in their field.
Sure. Research by definition deals with areas that are not settled, so different people can have different theories, and they might disregard scholars who don't like their preferred theory. On the other hand, some academics welcome debate and differing viewpoints more than most people.
Like, if you were a physics professor and you were applying to a department where everyone was a string theorist, and your position was that string theory is a bunch of bullshit, you might not get that job. Or you might, if your work is otherwise solid, you never know.
But that's a disagreement about physics, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to evaluate a physics professor on. It's not about how enthusiastically they endorse some ideological dogma that has nothing to do with physics.
If people can be ranked differently as candidates by different universities and the people at them how can you ever be sure that a person who got the job because of DEI was the worse candidate?
There are objective measures like quantity of publications, quality of the journals published in, # of citations, awards won, books published, things like that. Every academic could tell you the top 5 journals in their field that are the most competitive to get published in and are the most respected, someone with a lot of publications in those journals would be objectively better than someone with no publications or with publications in crappy no-name journals that claim they are "peer-reviewed" but basically publish anything that gets submitted.
We're not talking about roughly equal candidates with similar qualifications and one getting the edge because of race. I'm telling you there are cases where PhD candidates with zero publications, people who have not even finished and defended their dissertation yet, are hired for tenure-track positions over other candidates who have had their degree for several years, published in top journals, won highly competitive fellowships, etc, because universities want someone of a particular race. It's not subtle.
You may not be able to say that one candidate is the unequivocal best when there are many qualified candidates, but you can definitely say that a particular candidate is unqualified or not even close to other candidates when, for example, they have not published at all.
>There are objective measures like quantity of publications, quality of the journals published in, # of citations, awards won, books published, things like that
None of these are objective measures of quality.
1. The more papers you write the more likely you'll be published more. This is connected to time and desire.
2. Judging yhe quality of a journal is subjective therefore can't be used as an objective measurement for something else
3. If you write a paper that more people have access to, is about a more popular subject, is the only paper for a subject, or is published in more popular journals it would increase your citations outside of the paper quality.
4. Awards are a subjective judgement
Of course all of these increase the probability of quality but it's not a guarantee.
> for example, they have not published at all.
I don't think anyone going for a position as a professor hasn't published since most PHds require it. This point probably adds more weight but I think it would be rare between candidates for job.
Reading more carefully, you're just making nonsensical statements that have no connection to reality. Yes, many of these absolutely are objective.
> The more papers you write the more likely you'll be published more. This is connected to time and desire.
Yes, someone who writes more and spends more time doing research and has more desire to do research is objectively better at research than someone who produces less. There is a possibility that one person writes lots of low quality papers and another person writes a few high quality papers, but in asserting this you are admitting that there is some objective measure of the quality of a paper (which there is). Since the reviewers would be reading the papers, they could also objectively assess the quality of the papers too.
> 2. Judging yhe quality of a journal is subjective therefore can't be used as an objective measurement for something else
No, the quality of the journal is not subjective. If journal A publishes anything they are sent without review and journal B rigorously reviews everything by sending it to other experts in the field, then journal B is objectively higher quality than journal A.
> If you write a paper that more people have access to, is about a more popular subject, is the only paper for a subject, or is published in more popular journals it would increase your citations outside of the paper quality.
If you write the only published paper on a subject, then you are objectively the world's leading expert on that subject. If the university wants someone who knows that subject, the only person in the world who has published on it is objectively the best choice.
Part of a professor's job might be to communicate about their research and bring it to a wider audience, and convince e.g. grant committees that it is important and deserves funding. Someone savvy enough to get published in popular journal is objectively more qualified to do this than someone who hasn't been able to accomplish that.
> Awards are a subjective judgement
The awards can be subjective, but whether you have won an award or not is an objective fact. If the job involves doing the kinds of thing that impress the people who give the award, then someone who has achieved that is objectively better than someone who has not.
Sure, it’s not infallible, but having other experts in the field read and judge a candidate’s work is at least an honest attempt at assessing merit.
Whereas going by who can write the most enthusiastic essay about diversity, as judged by the blue-haired gender studies major in the diversity center, is a system that will only select for rabid ideologues and disingenuous bullshitters.
Pretend you are an investment banker. You've spent the last 10 years living and breathing investment banking. You've worked 100 hour weeks. You can point to a long list of successful deals you've done. You have glowing references from every client and colleague that has ever worked with you.
Now, you're applying for a job at a major investment bank, but before your resume is reviewed by any of the investment bankers, you have to write an essay about how much you love baseball. This essay will be reviewed by a panel of baseball superfans. They will judge it on how much you know about baseball and how much you love baseball. If they feel you know enough about baseball and you sufficiently express your love for it, they will then pass your resume on to be reviewed by the investment bankers.
Now, maybe you like baseball, maybe you don't. Maybe you have no particular strong feelings about it. Mostly, you didn't have time to think much about baseball because you have spent your time obsessed with investment banking.
Do you think this is a good system to hire investment bankers? If someone said "hey, we should hire investment bankers based on their track record in investment banking and not how much they love baseball or if they are baseball players", would you call them "anti-investment banking"?
>I'm telling you there are cases where PhD candidates with zero publications, people who have not even finished and defended their dissertation yet, are hired for tenure-track positions over other candidates who have had their degree for several years, published in top journals, won highly competitive fellowships, etc, because universities want someone of a particular race. It's not subtle.
Give me examples then because how could you know this?
I've worked in academic publishing for a long while, and I can tell you from experience that:
- "quantity of publications" is a problem and directly leads to bad science, so is on aggregate a measure of anti-quality
- "quality of the journals published in" is all in the mind; prestigious journals with high impact factor have been repeatedly found not to have the best research. The rigour of the editing process is more important, but few researchers know that, and importantly they are heavily incentivised by funders to go for high impact factor, completely muddying the waters of who's a good researcher by that metric.
- number of citations would be a better measure, but unfortunately is directly linked to impact factor, in practice and in perception.
- awards won, books published - too niche and random to matter much.
- "every academic could tell you the top 5 journals in their field" haha, no, you'd be as surprised as I was when doing that research.
Academic publishers have been considering the measuring problem for decades, and no one has found a solution yet.
There is no good measure of the quality of a paper until many years after publication. It's easy to identify some true positives (high impact, no retraction), it's quasi-impossible by definition to identify false negatives (unfairly ignored papers), and most importantly this emphasis on prestige research is terribly harmful to Science. Science needs researchers who are happy to replicate studies, people who publish disappointing results, and people who study otherwise unglamorous topics, otherwise Science fails.
TLDR: measuring how 'good' a researcher is by their prestige is extremely destructive to Science. You can't do that.
I'm not saying it's only prestige, but to a first approximation, a researcher who has an article published in Nature is highly likely to be better than one who has only published in no-name garbage journal that publishes whatever they are sent. Of course, nothing is certain, but we're talking about probabilities here.
And, as I'm saying, prestige, or probable future prestige, isn't a good proxy for a researcher's value or future value, even if it could be fairly guessed, which it can't. Nature is exhibit A, B and C, as it's the most prestigious journal, but not the most rigorous in any field, and its very existence damages Science by overvaluing the research it publishes, reducing the impact of better journals and the research they publish, and wasting the time, quality of life, and quality of research of scientists who feel like they must do anything they have to to publish in it, or are pressured by funders and/or academic institutions to do so.
But you are talking certainty when you claim DEI hires means that it's possible the lesser person is hired. If you have no objective system to measure merit then it's possible to ever know this
How does anyone know anything? Why even vet candidates at all? Let’s just assign professorships completely randomly then. We’ll have high school dropouts who can’t explain the quadratic formula teach differential equations at Harvard.
I’m sure they would do just as good of a job. Because nobody could ever possibly objectively tell whether someone with a PhD in math is going to be better at teaching and researching math than a high school dropout, right?
The administration is saying “hire and promote faculty and admit students based on scholarly merit, not ideology and activism”. Universities are saying “no, we want to keep doing the ideology stuff”. That is anti-intellectual.
The people in the administration were not admitted to their universities based on merits, they paid to get in and they paid for their degree. This is especially true for POTUS who holds an entirely fake degree bought and paid for by his father.
The administration wants to revoke visas for non-US citizens who come here under the pretense of education and then instead advocate for terrorist groups that are hostile to the interests of the US and its allies. No, that isn't the same. Why is the US government expected to fund people who want to destroy the US government? Should you be required to pay people who want to kill you?
>The administration wants to revoke visas for non-US citizens who come here under the pretense of education and instead advocate for terrorist groups.
1. You can get an education while advocating for causes
2. The letter doesn't only say advocating for a terrorist group.
From the gov demand letter:
"International Admissions Reform. By August 2025, the University must reform its recruitment, screening, and admissions of international students to prevent admitting students hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, including students supportive of terrorism or anti-Semitism."
>Why is the US government expected to fund people who want to destroy the US government?
1. They aren't, Harvard does
2. Federal grants aren't targeted to specific students so revoking them isn't a targetted punishment
3. Harvard can still operate without these grants, including bringing in international students who the current admin might disagree with.
4. The US government gives money to people who want to destroy it all the time. Welfare, social security, etc is given to anti-gov US citizens with no restrictions based on those views.
5. Although only proposed Trump wanted to set up a fund for January 6th protestors who he pardoned. Some of whom attacked the US capital to disrupt a Democratic election process.
>Should you be required to pay people who want to kill you?
No. How is that related to this? You just overly generalized the entire situation in order to produce a question where I'd mostly likely to say "no" as a argument manipulation tactic.
> 2. Federal grants aren't targeted to specific students so revoking them isn't a targetted punishment
> 3. Harvard can still operate without these grants, including bringing in international students who the current admin might disagree with.
Harvard funds them with the money it gets from grants. If Harvard wants to fund activist students with their own money out of their endowment, nobody is stopping them from doing that.
No, they can't unilaterally import foreign students though, the government has to grant them a visa to come here, and it really doesn't seem prudent to grant visas to people who hate our country and everything it stands for. If they believe the US is so evil and awful, they should be quite relieved that they won't need to come here. Maybe Harvard can open a satellite campus in Gaza if they really feel that these are the best students who are most deserving of a Harvard education.
>Harvard funds them with the money it gets from grants.
The grants fund students regardless of views. Yes they can use their endowment (I think) it's quite massive but the point is the government attacking universities for what a small amount of students say which is wrong.
It's also quite hypocritical considering views on free speech and "big government"
"Shutting down free speech will destroy our civilization." - JD Vance
>it really doesn't seem prudent to grant visas to people who hate our country and everything it stands for.
Why? In the case of attacking Israel that's not even our country?
What if they hate the current government?
What is "our country" to you because most probably hate the government, a very common attitude for many inside the country.
If they hate our values of freedom then punishing them only says that those freedoms aren't that dear to us because we're willing to compromise.
The rest of your comment is Facebook level of like "If you don't like it leave". I do think your other comments are professional so I hope we can move back
>they should be quite relieved that they won't need to come here
> If they hate our values of freedom then punishing them only says that those freedoms aren't that dear to us because we're willing to compromise.
How is it a punishment to send someone away from a place they hate?
For all the people chanting “from the river to the sea” and then crying about their free speech when their visas are revoked, where is their passion for free speech when someone draws a cartoon of Mohammad?
These are not people who care about the ideals of freedom. They only want to use our indulgence as a wedge to promulgate their own, much less free ideology.
Or to put things in maybe more HN-friendly terms - suppose you have a public facing service that you intend to be very liberal and accepting of any inputs. Does that mean you need to allow SQL injection attacks? Cross-site scripting? Spam? Not all actors are acting in good faith. Some are deliberately trying to harm you.
They are the ones asking to live in a different country. The burden is on them to demonstrate why they should be allowed to live here, not on us to prove why they shouldn’t.
Let’s say I want to come live in your house. Do you need to prove to me why I shouldn’t be allowed to do that, or do I need to prove to you why I should? If I make speeches and write articles about how you’re an evil person and we should burn your house down, does that make you think it’s a good idea for me to live with you?
No, that's a lie and you know it's a lie. The administration specifically demanded that Harvard must submit to viewpoint diversity audits, hiring faculty and admitting students as necessary to make sure that every department has a balance of viewpoints the government finds acceptable.
No, that wasn't sufficient. The government specifically demanded that Harvard must commission a government-approved external party to audit viewpoint diversity, and must promise in advance to follow its recommendations, for each of the next three years.
No, it's not a lie that the administration said universities should hire and admit students based on merit. The administration's letter is linked from the university's statement. You can go read it. It's the very first two points.
It's true they also said they want viewpoint diversity quotas and audits. I agree that goes too far. I think they would probably give that up if the university pushed back. This is what Trump does every time - make outlandish demands so you have something to give up in negotiation. He even wrote an entire book telling you exactly that's what he does, yet somehow the "intellectual elite" cannot wrap their heads around a very simple negotiating tactic. Every plumber, electrician, and carpenter that ever worked with Trump figured this out decades ago.
> somehow the "intellectual elite" cannot wrap their heads around a very simple negotiating tactic
This is extremely disingenous. Throughout this thread you've been arguing on the basis that hiring people simply to fit a political viewoint is wrong, but when it's pointed out that that's exactly what your team wants as well you fall back to name-calling.
>This is what Trump does every time - make outlandish demands so you have something to give up in negotiation
Harvard rejected the demands and Trump pulled funding. What negotiation happened?
Also, if everyone knows you're just demanding more than you'd accept what's the value of the negotiation tactic? Everyone would just reject demands initially knowing this
Yes, you reject the first offer and make a counter offer. That is how negotiating works. You ask for more than you expect to get to find out what the limit is that the other party will go up to. How else would you find the limit? You don't know what the other party is thinking or what all of their priorities are. You can't just magically intuit it a priori.
If that's how negotiating works, and Trump cancelled the funding instead of delivering a counteroffer, shouldn't we conclude that Trump is not in fact negotiating? It seems like your vision of negotiation is that Trump does whatever he wants and everyone else politely begs him to be gracious in victory.
Trump made the initial offer. It was up to the university to make a counteroffer and try to meet in the middle. Instead they flatly refused everything. When one party rejects an offer in a negotiation, the other party often walks away. That’s what Trump did. If you aren’t willing and able to walk away, you’re begging, not negotiating.
No, they had issues with some of the demands and wanted to open a dialog.
Harvard's response says they changed policies to protect Jewish students, made other changes to related to the protests, etc.
It also states
"It is unfortunate, then, that your letter disregards Harvard’s efforts and instead presents demands that, in contravention of the First Amendment, invade university freedoms ..."
#-----------------------------
Finally they said:
"Harvard remains open to dialogue about what the university has done, and is planning to do, to improve the experience of every member of its community. But Harvard is not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration. "
I find I'm willing and able to walk away from this discussion. I'll keep your strategic advice in mind the next time a Trump supporter tries to explain why I should not shun them or organize a boycott of their business.
What he explained in his book is that he's an evil, dishonest person, who routinely lies and harms people in negotiations in order to get his way. I agree that being evil and dishonest is often quite effective - if you came up to me with a knife and an outlandish demand that I should give you my wallet, I'd probably concede the negotiation. But I don't at all understand the idea that I have to respect this as some kind of clever negotiating strategy. The innocent researchers whose grants he's cancelled are real people suffering real harm, and they don't become transmuted to a mere negotiating tactic just because Donald Trump doesn't care about them.
Applicants for faculty positions are required to submit "diversity statements" expressing their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. This statement is evaluated before any of their other qualifications, like their standing in the field, number and quality of publications, teaching experience, you know, the intellectual quality of their work. If they are judged to be insufficiently committed to the DEI ideology, then their application is rejected without further review, regardless of how qualified they might otherwise be. That is anti-intellectual.
That is before we even get into the explicitly racist hiring and admissions policies.
> growing number of states and schools have also begun eliminating requirements that job applicants furnish “diversity statements” — written commitments to particular ideas about diversity and how to achieve it that, at some institutions, have functionally served as litmus tests in hiring.
> Chavous and her colleagues did not collect demographic information from applicants. Instead, they were asked to submit statements addressing how they would advance D.E.I. goals, whether through research into “race, gender, diversity, equity and inclusion,” “significant academic achievement in the face of barriers” or “commitment to allyhood through learning about structural inequities.” Departments were invited to nominate candidates from an application pool created by the diversity center, which then oversaw further vetting.
I don't agree with Ohio's diversity statements being used as part of the selection criteria. It's wrong.
What about every other university though? JD Vance's statement called universities the enemy. Most universities aren't connected to each other, they aren't a single organization and aren't responsible for what each does.
1. If only a few were using diversity statements as a part of the hiring process, which is wrong, what's the justification in calling all of them the enemy?
2. What about the professors? Most aren't responsible for setting hiring practices. Why are they the enemy?
> That is before we even get into the explicitly racist hiring and admissions policies. [ from your original comment ]
Same as the above for this. A University is a large insinuation of students, teachers, researchers, and various employees. Harvard employs 19k people and has 23k students.
#----------------
My opinion is that Vance is attacking universities not because he cares about merit based hiring or the quality of students but for selfish political reasons.
Why I think this:
1. As previously stated not all universities are doing what you claimed. Ohio for one, and the first link says "some" but there are thousands.
2. There are private schools that receive public money but discriminate against LGBQT [1] However nothing has been said or done about this by Trump in the past or now. These religious schools are more conservative and attacks would likely anger the base.
> 1. As previously stated not all universities are doing what you claimed. Ohio for one, and the first link says "some" but there are thousands.
Not all, but most. It may have decreased as some universities have started to abandon it now that it is falling out of fashion, but it was a large percentage, I'd estimate 90% offhand, but it's not like there's a lot of sources on this. It is a movement led by an aggressive and militant minority who silences and drives out anyone who disagrees. Most professors, who just want to do their research on 19th century French poetry or the mating habits of dung beetles or whatever they care about just shut up and try to keep their heads down so they don't get denied tenure or have students protesting at their office because they said the wrong pronoun. If you know people in academia and they trust you they will tell you off the record that it is nearly universal and so, so much worse than what is publicly reported. Sorry, I can't provide sources for this. You can trust me or not, but I know what I've seen and what people have told me.
> There are private schools that receive public money but discriminate against LGBQT [1] However nothing has been said or done about this by Trump in the past or now. These religious schools are more conservative and attacks would likely anger the base.
There is a religious freedom issue, because religion is also a protected class. I don't know, religious schools are not that many and they are not a big factor in academia. If you really care about that religion, then you go there, if not there are lots of other places. I don't know why an LGBQT person would want to force their way into going to a school where everyone thinks they're sinful and destined for hell. Seems like masochism to me.
> My opinion is that Vance is attacking universities not because he cares about merit based hiring or the quality of students but for selfish political reasons.
Well, neither of us can read his mind, but he benefited from a system that espoused meritocracy and used it to improve his life from growing up very poor to becoming vice president of the United States. I think it's reasonable that he would want to preserve that so other people could also have that opportunity and not get denied because they were the wrong race.
The administration defines what ideology is and given the current administration claims it’s based on merit and given the nonsense they do economically, scientifically and militarily they are the ideological activists.
Not to mention that they are clearly hired based on gender and skin color.
[flagged]
>You are simply defining intellectual as “whatever universities do and say
Definition of anti-intellectual
"a person who scorns intellectuals and their views and methods" from oxford
Intellectual
"of or relating to the intellect or its use", "given to study, reflection, and speculation", and ": engaged in activity requiring the creative use of the intellect" from MW.
I didn't define anything. If I said the administration was anti-education would that be better?
> the University must adopt and implement merit-based hiring policies, and cease all preferences based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin throughout its hiring, promotion, compensation, and related practices among faculty, staff, and leadership.
> the University must adopt and implement merit-based admissions policies and cease all preferences based on race, color, national origin, or proxies thereof, throughout its undergraduate program, each graduate program individually, each of its professional schools, and other programs.
In what way is hiring faculty and and admitting students based on merit instead of their identity anti-education? Is your position that you get a better education from a professor who was hired because of their race instead of the quality of their scholarly work?
>In what way is hiring faculty and and admitting students based on merit instead of their identity anti-education?
It's not. Calling universities and professors the enemy is. The government taking away funding because you want international students to adhere to an ideology is wrong.
>is your position that you get a better education from a professor who was hired because of their race instead of the quality of their scholarly work?
How do you rank the quality of scholarly work?
You ask other scholars in the field to read it and give their opinion on it. It’s this thing called “peer review” that is kind of the basis of all modern academic inquiry.
In the case of hiring, typically a committee of other professors in the department would evaluate candidates, not a bunch of DEI bureaucrats. They would read what the candidates have published and see if the arguments they make are sound, and look at things like # of citations that indicate how prominent the work is in the field.
I don’t know if you’ve ever met any academics, but I promise you they have no problems forming opinions about the quality of work of other people in their field.
Could different scholars from different universities rank people differently?
Sure. Research by definition deals with areas that are not settled, so different people can have different theories, and they might disregard scholars who don't like their preferred theory. On the other hand, some academics welcome debate and differing viewpoints more than most people.
Like, if you were a physics professor and you were applying to a department where everyone was a string theorist, and your position was that string theory is a bunch of bullshit, you might not get that job. Or you might, if your work is otherwise solid, you never know.
But that's a disagreement about physics, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to evaluate a physics professor on. It's not about how enthusiastically they endorse some ideological dogma that has nothing to do with physics.
If people can be ranked differently as candidates by different universities and the people at them how can you ever be sure that a person who got the job because of DEI was the worse candidate?
There are objective measures like quantity of publications, quality of the journals published in, # of citations, awards won, books published, things like that. Every academic could tell you the top 5 journals in their field that are the most competitive to get published in and are the most respected, someone with a lot of publications in those journals would be objectively better than someone with no publications or with publications in crappy no-name journals that claim they are "peer-reviewed" but basically publish anything that gets submitted.
We're not talking about roughly equal candidates with similar qualifications and one getting the edge because of race. I'm telling you there are cases where PhD candidates with zero publications, people who have not even finished and defended their dissertation yet, are hired for tenure-track positions over other candidates who have had their degree for several years, published in top journals, won highly competitive fellowships, etc, because universities want someone of a particular race. It's not subtle.
You may not be able to say that one candidate is the unequivocal best when there are many qualified candidates, but you can definitely say that a particular candidate is unqualified or not even close to other candidates when, for example, they have not published at all.
>There are objective measures like quantity of publications, quality of the journals published in, # of citations, awards won, books published, things like that
None of these are objective measures of quality.
1. The more papers you write the more likely you'll be published more. This is connected to time and desire.
2. Judging yhe quality of a journal is subjective therefore can't be used as an objective measurement for something else
3. If you write a paper that more people have access to, is about a more popular subject, is the only paper for a subject, or is published in more popular journals it would increase your citations outside of the paper quality.
4. Awards are a subjective judgement
Of course all of these increase the probability of quality but it's not a guarantee.
> for example, they have not published at all.
I don't think anyone going for a position as a professor hasn't published since most PHds require it. This point probably adds more weight but I think it would be rare between candidates for job.
Reading more carefully, you're just making nonsensical statements that have no connection to reality. Yes, many of these absolutely are objective.
> The more papers you write the more likely you'll be published more. This is connected to time and desire.
Yes, someone who writes more and spends more time doing research and has more desire to do research is objectively better at research than someone who produces less. There is a possibility that one person writes lots of low quality papers and another person writes a few high quality papers, but in asserting this you are admitting that there is some objective measure of the quality of a paper (which there is). Since the reviewers would be reading the papers, they could also objectively assess the quality of the papers too.
> 2. Judging yhe quality of a journal is subjective therefore can't be used as an objective measurement for something else
No, the quality of the journal is not subjective. If journal A publishes anything they are sent without review and journal B rigorously reviews everything by sending it to other experts in the field, then journal B is objectively higher quality than journal A.
> If you write a paper that more people have access to, is about a more popular subject, is the only paper for a subject, or is published in more popular journals it would increase your citations outside of the paper quality.
If you write the only published paper on a subject, then you are objectively the world's leading expert on that subject. If the university wants someone who knows that subject, the only person in the world who has published on it is objectively the best choice.
Part of a professor's job might be to communicate about their research and bring it to a wider audience, and convince e.g. grant committees that it is important and deserves funding. Someone savvy enough to get published in popular journal is objectively more qualified to do this than someone who hasn't been able to accomplish that.
> Awards are a subjective judgement
The awards can be subjective, but whether you have won an award or not is an objective fact. If the job involves doing the kinds of thing that impress the people who give the award, then someone who has achieved that is objectively better than someone who has not.
Sure, it’s not infallible, but having other experts in the field read and judge a candidate’s work is at least an honest attempt at assessing merit.
Whereas going by who can write the most enthusiastic essay about diversity, as judged by the blue-haired gender studies major in the diversity center, is a system that will only select for rabid ideologues and disingenuous bullshitters.
> blue-haired
Why does this matter?
What does gender studies have to do with this situation or DEI ?
> is a system that will only select for rabid ideologues and disingenuous bullshitters.
Why?
> Why?
Pretend you are an investment banker. You've spent the last 10 years living and breathing investment banking. You've worked 100 hour weeks. You can point to a long list of successful deals you've done. You have glowing references from every client and colleague that has ever worked with you.
Now, you're applying for a job at a major investment bank, but before your resume is reviewed by any of the investment bankers, you have to write an essay about how much you love baseball. This essay will be reviewed by a panel of baseball superfans. They will judge it on how much you know about baseball and how much you love baseball. If they feel you know enough about baseball and you sufficiently express your love for it, they will then pass your resume on to be reviewed by the investment bankers.
Now, maybe you like baseball, maybe you don't. Maybe you have no particular strong feelings about it. Mostly, you didn't have time to think much about baseball because you have spent your time obsessed with investment banking.
Do you think this is a good system to hire investment bankers? If someone said "hey, we should hire investment bankers based on their track record in investment banking and not how much they love baseball or if they are baseball players", would you call them "anti-investment banking"?
>I'm telling you there are cases where PhD candidates with zero publications, people who have not even finished and defended their dissertation yet, are hired for tenure-track positions over other candidates who have had their degree for several years, published in top journals, won highly competitive fellowships, etc, because universities want someone of a particular race. It's not subtle.
Give me examples then because how could you know this?
I've worked in academic publishing for a long while, and I can tell you from experience that:
- "quantity of publications" is a problem and directly leads to bad science, so is on aggregate a measure of anti-quality
- "quality of the journals published in" is all in the mind; prestigious journals with high impact factor have been repeatedly found not to have the best research. The rigour of the editing process is more important, but few researchers know that, and importantly they are heavily incentivised by funders to go for high impact factor, completely muddying the waters of who's a good researcher by that metric.
- number of citations would be a better measure, but unfortunately is directly linked to impact factor, in practice and in perception.
- awards won, books published - too niche and random to matter much.
- "every academic could tell you the top 5 journals in their field" haha, no, you'd be as surprised as I was when doing that research.
Academic publishers have been considering the measuring problem for decades, and no one has found a solution yet.
There is no good measure of the quality of a paper until many years after publication. It's easy to identify some true positives (high impact, no retraction), it's quasi-impossible by definition to identify false negatives (unfairly ignored papers), and most importantly this emphasis on prestige research is terribly harmful to Science. Science needs researchers who are happy to replicate studies, people who publish disappointing results, and people who study otherwise unglamorous topics, otherwise Science fails.
TLDR: measuring how 'good' a researcher is by their prestige is extremely destructive to Science. You can't do that.
I'm not saying it's only prestige, but to a first approximation, a researcher who has an article published in Nature is highly likely to be better than one who has only published in no-name garbage journal that publishes whatever they are sent. Of course, nothing is certain, but we're talking about probabilities here.
And, as I'm saying, prestige, or probable future prestige, isn't a good proxy for a researcher's value or future value, even if it could be fairly guessed, which it can't. Nature is exhibit A, B and C, as it's the most prestigious journal, but not the most rigorous in any field, and its very existence damages Science by overvaluing the research it publishes, reducing the impact of better journals and the research they publish, and wasting the time, quality of life, and quality of research of scientists who feel like they must do anything they have to to publish in it, or are pressured by funders and/or academic institutions to do so.
But you are talking certainty when you claim DEI hires means that it's possible the lesser person is hired. If you have no objective system to measure merit then it's possible to ever know this
How does anyone know anything? Why even vet candidates at all? Let’s just assign professorships completely randomly then. We’ll have high school dropouts who can’t explain the quadratic formula teach differential equations at Harvard.
I’m sure they would do just as good of a job. Because nobody could ever possibly objectively tell whether someone with a PhD in math is going to be better at teaching and researching math than a high school dropout, right?
Just want to note that I didn't downvote (I can't yet) or flag your comments. I don't think your comments should be flagged either.
Could you perhaps spell out your definition of anti-intellectual for us then?
> Current universities are openly anti intellectual.
The administration is saying “hire and promote faculty and admit students based on scholarly merit, not ideology and activism”. Universities are saying “no, we want to keep doing the ideology stuff”. That is anti-intellectual.
The people in the administration were not admitted to their universities based on merits, they paid to get in and they paid for their degree. This is especially true for POTUS who holds an entirely fake degree bought and paid for by his father.
And you’re taking words of this administration at face value, correct?
Unless you have evidence Vance is lying why wouldn't I?
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What words? What university? Who at the university?
Edit: My comment was that the admin is anti intellectual and I provided quotes from JD Vance on all universities and professors.
Gosh, I don't know. If only there were a link to a statement by a university somewhere here.
But the Trump administration wants to punish students who don't conform to pro Israel views/ideology.
The administration wants to revoke visas for non-US citizens who come here under the pretense of education and then instead advocate for terrorist groups that are hostile to the interests of the US and its allies. No, that isn't the same. Why is the US government expected to fund people who want to destroy the US government? Should you be required to pay people who want to kill you?
>The administration wants to revoke visas for non-US citizens who come here under the pretense of education and instead advocate for terrorist groups.
1. You can get an education while advocating for causes
2. The letter doesn't only say advocating for a terrorist group.
From the gov demand letter:
"International Admissions Reform. By August 2025, the University must reform its recruitment, screening, and admissions of international students to prevent admitting students hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, including students supportive of terrorism or anti-Semitism."
>Why is the US government expected to fund people who want to destroy the US government?
1. They aren't, Harvard does
2. Federal grants aren't targeted to specific students so revoking them isn't a targetted punishment
3. Harvard can still operate without these grants, including bringing in international students who the current admin might disagree with.
4. The US government gives money to people who want to destroy it all the time. Welfare, social security, etc is given to anti-gov US citizens with no restrictions based on those views.
5. Although only proposed Trump wanted to set up a fund for January 6th protestors who he pardoned. Some of whom attacked the US capital to disrupt a Democratic election process.
>Should you be required to pay people who want to kill you?
No. How is that related to this? You just overly generalized the entire situation in order to produce a question where I'd mostly likely to say "no" as a argument manipulation tactic.
> 1. They aren't, Harvard does
> 2. Federal grants aren't targeted to specific students so revoking them isn't a targetted punishment
> 3. Harvard can still operate without these grants, including bringing in international students who the current admin might disagree with.
Harvard funds them with the money it gets from grants. If Harvard wants to fund activist students with their own money out of their endowment, nobody is stopping them from doing that.
No, they can't unilaterally import foreign students though, the government has to grant them a visa to come here, and it really doesn't seem prudent to grant visas to people who hate our country and everything it stands for. If they believe the US is so evil and awful, they should be quite relieved that they won't need to come here. Maybe Harvard can open a satellite campus in Gaza if they really feel that these are the best students who are most deserving of a Harvard education.
>Harvard funds them with the money it gets from grants.
The grants fund students regardless of views. Yes they can use their endowment (I think) it's quite massive but the point is the government attacking universities for what a small amount of students say which is wrong.
It's also quite hypocritical considering views on free speech and "big government"
"Shutting down free speech will destroy our civilization." - JD Vance
>it really doesn't seem prudent to grant visas to people who hate our country and everything it stands for.
Why? In the case of attacking Israel that's not even our country? What if they hate the current government?
What is "our country" to you because most probably hate the government, a very common attitude for many inside the country.
If they hate our values of freedom then punishing them only says that those freedoms aren't that dear to us because we're willing to compromise.
The rest of your comment is Facebook level of like "If you don't like it leave". I do think your other comments are professional so I hope we can move back
>they should be quite relieved that they won't need to come here
> If they hate our values of freedom then punishing them only says that those freedoms aren't that dear to us because we're willing to compromise.
How is it a punishment to send someone away from a place they hate?
For all the people chanting “from the river to the sea” and then crying about their free speech when their visas are revoked, where is their passion for free speech when someone draws a cartoon of Mohammad?
These are not people who care about the ideals of freedom. They only want to use our indulgence as a wedge to promulgate their own, much less free ideology.
Or to put things in maybe more HN-friendly terms - suppose you have a public facing service that you intend to be very liberal and accepting of any inputs. Does that mean you need to allow SQL injection attacks? Cross-site scripting? Spam? Not all actors are acting in good faith. Some are deliberately trying to harm you.
>How is it a punishment to send someone away from a place they hate
Name a student who was deported that hated America and provide evidence.
They are the ones asking to live in a different country. The burden is on them to demonstrate why they should be allowed to live here, not on us to prove why they shouldn’t.
Let’s say I want to come live in your house. Do you need to prove to me why I shouldn’t be allowed to do that, or do I need to prove to you why I should? If I make speeches and write articles about how you’re an evil person and we should burn your house down, does that make you think it’s a good idea for me to live with you?
No, that's a lie and you know it's a lie. The administration specifically demanded that Harvard must submit to viewpoint diversity audits, hiring faculty and admitting students as necessary to make sure that every department has a balance of viewpoints the government finds acceptable.
So they need to have a department to ensure a diversity of views are included?
No, that wasn't sufficient. The government specifically demanded that Harvard must commission a government-approved external party to audit viewpoint diversity, and must promise in advance to follow its recommendations, for each of the next three years.
So a government run DEI department? You're aren't the original person but that's my gotcha
No, it's not a lie that the administration said universities should hire and admit students based on merit. The administration's letter is linked from the university's statement. You can go read it. It's the very first two points.
It's true they also said they want viewpoint diversity quotas and audits. I agree that goes too far. I think they would probably give that up if the university pushed back. This is what Trump does every time - make outlandish demands so you have something to give up in negotiation. He even wrote an entire book telling you exactly that's what he does, yet somehow the "intellectual elite" cannot wrap their heads around a very simple negotiating tactic. Every plumber, electrician, and carpenter that ever worked with Trump figured this out decades ago.
> somehow the "intellectual elite" cannot wrap their heads around a very simple negotiating tactic
This is extremely disingenous. Throughout this thread you've been arguing on the basis that hiring people simply to fit a political viewoint is wrong, but when it's pointed out that that's exactly what your team wants as well you fall back to name-calling.
What they want is to hire people based on merit, first and foremost. They say that explicitly several times.
That's not the only demand in the letter.
>This is what Trump does every time - make outlandish demands so you have something to give up in negotiation
Harvard rejected the demands and Trump pulled funding. What negotiation happened?
Also, if everyone knows you're just demanding more than you'd accept what's the value of the negotiation tactic? Everyone would just reject demands initially knowing this
Yes, you reject the first offer and make a counter offer. That is how negotiating works. You ask for more than you expect to get to find out what the limit is that the other party will go up to. How else would you find the limit? You don't know what the other party is thinking or what all of their priorities are. You can't just magically intuit it a priori.
If that's how negotiating works, and Trump cancelled the funding instead of delivering a counteroffer, shouldn't we conclude that Trump is not in fact negotiating? It seems like your vision of negotiation is that Trump does whatever he wants and everyone else politely begs him to be gracious in victory.
Trump made the initial offer. It was up to the university to make a counteroffer and try to meet in the middle. Instead they flatly refused everything. When one party rejects an offer in a negotiation, the other party often walks away. That’s what Trump did. If you aren’t willing and able to walk away, you’re begging, not negotiating.
>Instead they flatly refused everything
No, they had issues with some of the demands and wanted to open a dialog.
Harvard's response says they changed policies to protect Jewish students, made other changes to related to the protests, etc.
It also states
"It is unfortunate, then, that your letter disregards Harvard’s efforts and instead presents demands that, in contravention of the First Amendment, invade university freedoms ..."
#----------------------------- Finally they said:
"Harvard remains open to dialogue about what the university has done, and is planning to do, to improve the experience of every member of its community. But Harvard is not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration. "
I find I'm willing and able to walk away from this discussion. I'll keep your strategic advice in mind the next time a Trump supporter tries to explain why I should not shun them or organize a boycott of their business.
What he explained in his book is that he's an evil, dishonest person, who routinely lies and harms people in negotiations in order to get his way. I agree that being evil and dishonest is often quite effective - if you came up to me with a knife and an outlandish demand that I should give you my wallet, I'd probably concede the negotiation. But I don't at all understand the idea that I have to respect this as some kind of clever negotiating strategy. The innocent researchers whose grants he's cancelled are real people suffering real harm, and they don't become transmuted to a mere negotiating tactic just because Donald Trump doesn't care about them.
If a dishonest person tells you he's dishonest, doesn't that mean he's actually honest?
No because a person isn't "honest" because they make one honest statement.
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>no, we want to keep doing the ideology stuff
How is this anti-intellectual?
Applicants for faculty positions are required to submit "diversity statements" expressing their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. This statement is evaluated before any of their other qualifications, like their standing in the field, number and quality of publications, teaching experience, you know, the intellectual quality of their work. If they are judged to be insufficiently committed to the DEI ideology, then their application is rejected without further review, regardless of how qualified they might otherwise be. That is anti-intellectual.
That is before we even get into the explicitly racist hiring and admissions policies.
>If they are judged to be insufficiently committed to the DEI ideology, then their application is rejected without further review,
Evidence
> growing number of states and schools have also begun eliminating requirements that job applicants furnish “diversity statements” — written commitments to particular ideas about diversity and how to achieve it that, at some institutions, have functionally served as litmus tests in hiring.
https://archive.is/UeZ2A#selection-5289.442-5297.27
> Chavous and her colleagues did not collect demographic information from applicants. Instead, they were asked to submit statements addressing how they would advance D.E.I. goals, whether through research into “race, gender, diversity, equity and inclusion,” “significant academic achievement in the face of barriers” or “commitment to allyhood through learning about structural inequities.” Departments were invited to nominate candidates from an application pool created by the diversity center, which then oversaw further vetting.
https://archive.is/i6Gv9#selection-1183.358-1187.413
Ohio State Reports: DEI Litmus Test
https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/ohio-state-reports-dei-lit...
Thank you for providing a source.
I don't agree with Ohio's diversity statements being used as part of the selection criteria. It's wrong.
What about every other university though? JD Vance's statement called universities the enemy. Most universities aren't connected to each other, they aren't a single organization and aren't responsible for what each does.
1. If only a few were using diversity statements as a part of the hiring process, which is wrong, what's the justification in calling all of them the enemy?
2. What about the professors? Most aren't responsible for setting hiring practices. Why are they the enemy?
> That is before we even get into the explicitly racist hiring and admissions policies. [ from your original comment ]
Same as the above for this. A University is a large insinuation of students, teachers, researchers, and various employees. Harvard employs 19k people and has 23k students.
#----------------
My opinion is that Vance is attacking universities not because he cares about merit based hiring or the quality of students but for selfish political reasons.
Why I think this:
1. As previously stated not all universities are doing what you claimed. Ohio for one, and the first link says "some" but there are thousands.
2. There are private schools that receive public money but discriminate against LGBQT [1] However nothing has been said or done about this by Trump in the past or now. These religious schools are more conservative and attacks would likely anger the base.
3. Republicans perform better with non-college educated voters [2] 2024 election:
No college 36% D , 62% R
Some college or 2yr degree: ~44% D, ~53% R
4-year degree: 53% D, 45% R
Graduate school+: 59% D , 38% R
Therefore reducing the number of people who go to higher education could benefit Republicans in elections.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-09-01/when-p... [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-elections/exit-polls
> 1. As previously stated not all universities are doing what you claimed. Ohio for one, and the first link says "some" but there are thousands.
Not all, but most. It may have decreased as some universities have started to abandon it now that it is falling out of fashion, but it was a large percentage, I'd estimate 90% offhand, but it's not like there's a lot of sources on this. It is a movement led by an aggressive and militant minority who silences and drives out anyone who disagrees. Most professors, who just want to do their research on 19th century French poetry or the mating habits of dung beetles or whatever they care about just shut up and try to keep their heads down so they don't get denied tenure or have students protesting at their office because they said the wrong pronoun. If you know people in academia and they trust you they will tell you off the record that it is nearly universal and so, so much worse than what is publicly reported. Sorry, I can't provide sources for this. You can trust me or not, but I know what I've seen and what people have told me.
> There are private schools that receive public money but discriminate against LGBQT [1] However nothing has been said or done about this by Trump in the past or now. These religious schools are more conservative and attacks would likely anger the base.
There is a religious freedom issue, because religion is also a protected class. I don't know, religious schools are not that many and they are not a big factor in academia. If you really care about that religion, then you go there, if not there are lots of other places. I don't know why an LGBQT person would want to force their way into going to a school where everyone thinks they're sinful and destined for hell. Seems like masochism to me.
> My opinion is that Vance is attacking universities not because he cares about merit based hiring or the quality of students but for selfish political reasons.
Well, neither of us can read his mind, but he benefited from a system that espoused meritocracy and used it to improve his life from growing up very poor to becoming vice president of the United States. I think it's reasonable that he would want to preserve that so other people could also have that opportunity and not get denied because they were the wrong race.
>Not all, but most.
>I'd estimate 90% offhand, but it's not like there's a lot of sources on this.
What is your estimate based on and what is your basis for claiming "most"?
It would be pretty bad to hire someone who doesn't respect their colleagues, without even knowing them.
Yes, universities have hired a lot of DEI ideologues who don’t respect their colleagues without even knowing them and it is indeed very bad.
Well, if that's the case one of the parties didn't meet the inclusivity criteria, seemingly the DEI ideologues.
>Yes, universities have hired a lot of DEI ideologues who don’t respect their colleagues
How do you know this happens?
The administration defines what ideology is and given the current administration claims it’s based on merit and given the nonsense they do economically, scientifically and militarily they are the ideological activists. Not to mention that they are clearly hired based on gender and skin color.
RFK jr., really?