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I think you should take the responses and general lack of sympathy here as a wake-up call about what exactly right-wing rule in the US means for you these days. I've found this forum to be a very good representation of the substantive ideas underlying what becomes right-wing politics/the mindset of people pushing those ideas.
In this case: anything, no matter the cost, as long as it hurts the woke! Scientific progress? I don't care about your fake tears and sad puppies.
I’ve come to realize this about this movement, yes.
Essentially, the US can’t be my home anymore if things go on like this for much longer.
The attitude that causes someone to shout at Zelenskyy, “why don’t you wear a suit? Do you even own a suit?”.. that’s what’s in charge and their ire extends to me.
The best historical analogy I know of is the cultural revolution in China where the intellectual class was persecuted.
They’re not that violent, of course, but I also don’t want to give them the chance to be.
You've looked at the past 10 years and stood by, and this is the moment that makes you say "this is just like the cultural revolution"?
A working class revolt against the educated class, yes
I can see why maybe you felt that previous years were like the cultural revolution, you probably felt censored and I can get that.
I never really had opinions I felt I had to censor that much under wokeness, but I am fresh off of scrubbing all mentions of “climate” from my research proposal and changing every instance of “diversity”, even though I was talking about the diversity of water availability among forests
Ah, struggle sessions are tolerable, as long they're led by the aristocracy, I guess.
Well then, if you did nothing all these years because you never felt censored, why exactly should anyone that did, show you any sympathy now?
Finding a synonym for "diversity" and doing a search and replace seems like a pretty low cost to me, compared to witch hunts that went off during the last decade. Dodging those was a lot harder than CTRL+H.
Despite what you think, the point is there weren't struggle sessions in math/hard-science departments. As the OP said, all you ever had to do was write in your grants about how things you liked anyways, like organizing events where older and younger graduate students could meet each other and become friends, also helped "underrepresented groups" sometimes. You could extremely easily just not be interested in politics and ignore everything outside of writing this paragraph.
Also, if you were upset about what was happening in humanities departments, you didn't really have any option except getting in bed with the creationists and Obama-birther conspiracy theorists.
The chaos and funding issues the administration is creating is not at all the same thing. Now you have to desperately scrub every appearance of links to crazies like Tema Okun and Robin DiAngelo just because they're associated with the same industry as you. It's not even clear which buzzword in which random context sets the censors off.
Is one of the fathers of DNA getting stripped of his awards not a struggle session, or is biology not a hard science? There was absolutely no affirmative action in maths departments, cross your heart and hope to die?
So all these people who totally were not in favor of DEI struggle session somehow couldn't be bothered to actually oppose it in any way, to the point where the only opposition were Obama-birther conspiracy theorists?
Was Sokal an Obama-birther conspiracy theorist, by the way?
I still want to know why I should be bothered by this, given that these people were unbothered by what was going on in the last 10 years.
I specifically mentioned math and hard sciences (excluding biology) because that's what I could speak about authoritatively. Maybe the Watson stuff really was a struggle session, or maybe there was some more stuff going on behind the scenes. In math, I've known of old professors who've said similar things without much consequence. Generally, the line is that political views are fine, but unambiguously treating colleagues and particularly younger students/postdocs badly because of these political views is not---when I say some stuff going on behind the scenes, maybe Watson was crossing the line. Yes, most will say that there should be censure for crossing the line and fine, if just wanting colorblind and gender-blind meritocracy is what you call hopelessly woke, then you win the argument. Many on this forum explicitly do not want colorblind and gender-blind meritocracy, so.....
The affirmative action point is similar. I've explained before what affirmative action I've seen in math departments: e.g. people would realize that graduate students in some group do disproportionately well post-graduation and conclude that the admissions process must be missing talent in that group. They then implement a brute-force hack to give people from that group an extra leg up in the admissions process and calibrate the magnitude until outcomes are around the same. You can argue that this clumsy shortcut isn't a good idea, but it's still for the sole purpose of achieving meritocracy.
and how the hell do you know that people weren't unbothered? It was so easy to get people to denounce Okun and DiAngelo by pointing out the right perspectives. I guess people didn't reorient their entire career towards nasty political fights in other departments instead of doing the science that they were much more interested in so screw them, right? You can't expect everyone to be willing to expose themselves to all the nastiness Sokal got. Unless you're doing that serious work to build your own groups, yes, your only choice is to join a coalition that's already there, with the creationists and birthers and all.
Well then, we're at a mutual disadvantage, because the fields I'm familiar with are one's you're not (or does IT count? I guess it doesn't matter because I'm not an academic and only know the corporate world), and vice-versa. At the end of the day my experiences left me with no reason to believe that any such reasonable spaces exist anywhere in the Western world. Maybe math departments managed to play the Kolmogorov Complicity game just right, but how am I supposed to verify that?
While I'm more traditionalist and believe we'd all be better off if we stopped pretending men and women are the same, gender- and color-blind mertiocracy are acceptable terms of a cease fire for me. I just don't know how you can claim they haven't been ruthlessly violated by progressives.
What I will argue is that by discussing entry criteria, and education outcomes, we've moved from the field of math and hard science, and firmly into social sciences, a field that you've conceded is ideologically compromised. I will also argue that I have no reason to trust either in the information provided - every single argument about systemic racism / sexism, like the "wage gap" or disproportionate arrest stemming from bias, turned out to be flawed and probably made disingenuously to begin with, so I have no inclination to give this argument any benefit of the doubt - or the intentions stated. And another argument that I'd like to make as well, is that even if you want to call this (aspirational) meritocracy, you cannot call it gender- or color-blind, if you're purposefully taking account of someone's race or gender!
Finally, I will ask if you are really sure you want to be making arguments like "You can argue that this clumsy shortcut isn't a good idea, but it's still for the sole purpose of achieving meritocracy" in the context of this conversation? Because there's something I'd like to apply it to, if you find it compelling.
Because I've been having conversations with people about this topic for years, and have seen scant few progressive-minded academia-inclined posters who expressed any sort of discomfort with them. Most you'd get from people pretending that the woke are powerless, marginal, and unrepresentative of the left, and I don't count that as being bothered by them.
No, but at some point it behooves you to say something. At the very least don't contribute to attacks on people who are saying something.
Do you think you may be contributing to the nastiness by calling anyone who wants to do something against the woke "creationists and birthers"?
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